Legal experts and reporters reacted with shock on Wednesday after Trump-appointed interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan acknowledged that a grand jury never voted on the operative indictment filed against former FBI Director James Comey.
Politico reports that the admission appears to have put the Comey prosecution “in serious jeopardy,” as Halligan told US District Judge Michael Nachmanoff the grand jury never saw the final indictment that was handed down in September that charged Comey with one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding.
The final indictment was a revised version of an originally proposed three-count indictment that needed to be changed after the grand jury rejected one of the proposed charges against Comey.
Former federal prosecutor Ken White attempted to piece together exactly what Halligan did in a post on Bluesky.
“So here’s what apparently happened: they tried to indict Comey on the last day of the statute with a three-count indictment,” he explained. “The grand jury rejected one. Rather than cross it out or indicate on the indictment that only two of the three counts were voted upon, Halligan creates a new indictment, which shows only the two counts they true billed, and has the foreperson sign it without presenting it to the grand jury.”
Assistant US Attorney Tyler Lemons told Nachmanoff that it was necessary to revise the indictment on short notice after grand jurors no-billed one of the charges since the statute of limitations for Comey’s alleged crimes was set to expire within mere hours.
“They really had no other way to return it,” he told the court.
Nonetheless, many observers expressed shock that Halligan could make such an elementary error that could singlehandedly get the entire case against Comey dismissed.
“Lindsey Halligan should be immediately disbarred,” wrote Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at the Georgia State College School of Law, in a post on X.
Political and leadership consultant Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, a former human rights attorney, also believed that Hallingan should face severe consequences for pushing forward with an indictment that had not been voted on by a full grand jury.
“This should result in the interim US Attorney losing her bar license,” she wrote on Bluesky. “Never, in almost 30 years as an attorney, have I heard of this big of an intentional fuck up before a grand jury.”
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) argued that Halligan’s actions were enough to justify her termination as interim US attorney.
“In a normal Department of Justice not run by hacks and sycophants and malicious clowns,” he wrote, “Lindsey Halligan would resign and the indictment against James Comey would be dismissed.”
Quinta Jurecic, a longtime legal journalist who writes for The Atlantic, said that she found Halligan’s error to be “impressive” because “I honestly didn’t even know this was a mistake you could make.”
Anti-Trump attorney George Conway, meanwhile, encouraged his followers on X to “please remember to give thanks to the Lord that Trump and his people are so unbelievably incompetent.”
Maya Sen, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School, drew a line between the quality of legal competence in the Comey case and a three-judge panel in Texas shooting down the administration’s efforts to redraw Texas’ congressional map as part of a mid-decade gerrymandering scheme.
“High levels of incompetence between this and the DOJ-TX gerrymandering situation,” she wrote on X. “It’s hard to find people with high levels of competence and expertise when maximizing on ideological and personal loyalty, and this is a problem for [Republicans] in the age of educational polarization.”
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