Bondi and Halligan’s Spectacularly Bad Lawyering for Trump
The Department of Justice’s inappropriate, unethical, and incompetent actions in the case against James Comey are veering toward “uncharted legal territory.”
BEFORE JANUARY 20, positions with the Department of Justice, despite their relatively paltry pay, were among the most coveted, competitive, and prestigious attorney jobs in the American legal world. In a famous 1940 address, “The Federal Prosecutor,” Attorney General (and future Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson explained the high stakes of working at DOJ: “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.” And all that power can be used for good or for ill: “While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society,” Jackson wrote, “when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”
To see examples of the latter ilk, look no further than Pam Bondi and Lindsey Halligan. The attorney general and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia are precipitously taking down the department’s reputation (and that’s not even counting the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein files coverup). On November 11, a formal ethics complaint was filed against Halligan with both the Florida and Virginia state bars, declaring that her actions in pursuing criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James “appear to constitute an abuse of power and serve to undermine the integrity of the Department of Justice and erode public confidence in the legal profession and the fair administration of justice.”
In the days since that complaint was filed, the evidence of malice, incompetence, and professional misconduct—on the part of both Halligan and Bondi—has only continued to mount.
Let’s start with some background on Halligan: She is a former Miss Colorado USA pageant contestant and Florida insurance defense lawyer who, after meeting Donald Trump in November 2021 at his West Palm Beach golf course, was hired to help respond to the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified records. Halligan’s name was on the lawsuit filed by Trump asking U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to appoint a special master to oversee the FBI’s review of the retrieved documents. Cannon granted that request and was later slapped down by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. But along the way, even Cannon, a shameless Trump loyalist, rejected motions filed by Halligan due to basic procedural mistakes, instructing her to peruse the local rules and a “sample motion” on the court’s website.
When Trump came back to office in January, he put Halligan on his White House staff—just one of the many of his personal lawyers he brought into his administration. He reportedly tasked her with leading his assault on the Smithsonian Institution—but by September, he had found another use for the eager-to-please lawyer.
It’s no secret that Halligan’s under-the-wire indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, just days before the statute of limitations was due to expire, did not derive from an honest assessment of evidence indicating that Comey committed a federal crime. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert, was pushed out after resisting indicting Comey and James. In a hearing on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff heard arguments on Comey’s motion to have the indictment tossed out on grounds of vindictive prosecution, citing Trump’s September 20 Truth Social post that Comey and two others were “all guilty as hell.” Nachmanoff also questioned the government’s claim that Halligan thoroughly reviewed the case in the three days before she presented it to the grand jury for indictment: “What independent evaluation could she have done in that time period?”
Separately, Comey’s lawyers have challenged the legality of Halligan’s appointment as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia because the job has not been occupied by a Senate-confirmed individual since January, and the law lays out very specific procedures for how the position is to be filled—procedures that have not been followed here. That motion is being heard by a federal court in South Carolina. At a hearing, U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie questioned Bondi’s claim that she ratified Halligan’s actions retroactively on October 31, so it doesn’t matter if Halligan was unlawfully appointed. Prosecutors did not even have a complete transcript of the grand jury session until November 5, so Bondi couldn’t have reviewed it to ratify what Halligan did.
BEFORE GETTING INTO some of the most explosive developments from this week, let’s turn for a moment to the substance, such as it is, of Halligan and Bondi’s case against Comey. In a two-count indictment above Halligan’s lone signature, Comey is accused of skimpy perjury and obstruction charges that the government later revealed as stemming from Comey’s enlisting a “good friend” and Columbia law school professor, Daniel Richman, to help him deal with reporters in the wake of Comey’s having made public just days before the 2016 election the FBI’s reopening of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of sensitive materials back when she had been secretary of state. Halligan claims that Comey subsequently lied about having hired Richman when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee—on May 3, 2017, a week before Trump fired him, and again on September 30, 2020—by answering “no” when asked if he had “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” about the Clinton probe.
The FBI conducted searches of Richman’s hard drives and emails in 2019 and 2020 under warrants that were very specific about the kind of information the agents were authorized to seize. And this past summer, the FBI and DOJ initiated an investigation into Comey, combing through the same materials without first obtaining a new warrant, which the Fourth Amendment required to the extent “the 2025 investigation . . . focused on a different person, was exploring a fundamentally different legal theory, and was predicated on an entirely different set of criminal offenses.” The FBI also failed to properly segregate attorney-client privileged information.
In a 24-page ruling handed down on Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick ordered that Halligan turn over grand jury materials to Comey’s lawyers, which he admits “is an extraordinary remedy.” The “prospect that government misconduct may have tainted the grand jury proceedings,” Fitzpatrick reasoned, makes the disclosure to Comey “necessary to fully protect the rights of the accused.”
It turns out, according to Judge Fitzpatrick’s analysis, that when Halligan presented the case to the grand jury on September 25, only one FBI agent was called to testify in support of the indictment. That person “was exposed to potentially privileged information”—which was “highly irregular and a radical departure from past DOJ practice.” Only after securing the indictment did Halligan try to get the court to approve “a filter protocol” to protect Comey’s attorney-client privilege.
In response to questions by the grand jurors, Halligan also said two things that (according to Judge Fitzpatrick) “on their face appear to be fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process.” First, Fitzpatrick says she suggested to the grand jury “that Mr. Comey does not have a Fifth Amendment right not to testify at trial.” Second, she “suggested to the grand jury that they did not have to rely only on the record before them to determine probable cause but could be assured the government had more evidence—perhaps better evidence—that would be presented at trial.” In other words, she apparently admitted that she did not have the evidence to indict Comey—but no worries, she’d dig it up before trial.
Next, Halligan presented “two facially inconsistent indictments” to the magistrate judge—both of which were signed by the grand jury foreperson and Halligan. “The first indictment indicated that the grand jury failed to find probable cause as to any count,” wrote Fitzpatrick. The second one found probable cause as two of the three counts. The judge accepted the second one on the belief that it was newer and that the grand jury fully considered it. But, he wrote, “It now appears that may not have happened.”
When Fitzpatrick asked about the discrepancy, Halligan filed an affidavit saying that she presented the first indictment but “had no further contact with the grand jury” until she learned that it had agreed to only two counts. The judge mused that either Halligan’s memory is mistaken or “the Court is in uncharted legal territory in that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.”
When pressed about this further, Halligan told Judge Nachmanoff at the hearing on Wednesday that only two grand jurors were in the room when the revised indictment against Comey was signed by the foreperson. That presents another problem: Rule 6(f) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure states that “[a] grand jury may indict only if at least 12 jurors concur.”
If this were not so gravely serious, it would be a complete joke. But individual liberty is on the line. Comey has able lawyers representing him and will in all likelihood manage to end what Trump started when in 2018 he called Comey an “untruthful slime ball” and “a proven LEAKER & LIAR” who “leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH.”
These days, it’s DOJ that seems to be doing the lying. And when the dust settles it may be that instead of Comey being punished, it will be Halligan and Bondi facing consequences for their unethical, unprofessional actions in service of their master in the White House.
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