A new federal prosecutor handpicked by President Trump is reportedly moving quickly to secure an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey on charges of lying to Congress.
According to multiple reports, Lindsey Halligan — who was sworn in Monday as U.S attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — is preparing to ask a grand jury to indict Comey just days after Trump publicly urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute him and other perceived political adversaries, including Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“We can’t delay any longer,” Trump wrote in a Sept. 20 social media post addressed to “Pam.” “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Asked later about his message for Bondi, Trump said, “They have to act. They have to act fast.”
Trump’s appeal came after Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert, resigned in response to pressure from the president to bring charges against Comey and James. Trump then nominated Halligan, a White House aide who had served as his personal lawyer and has no prosecutorial experience, to replace Siebert.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Halligan is now “racing to present a case” against Comey “even though career prosecutors determined there was insufficient evidence to indict” him.
If Halligan’s indictment goes forward, it will reportedly accuse Comey of lying to Congress on Sept. 30, 2020 — the day he denied, under oath, that he was involved in leaking information from the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. The five-year statute of limitations on that charge will lapse on Tuesday.
Why does Trump want to prosecute Comey?
Trump has long framed his contentious relationship with the former FBI director as a one-sided affair. But it’s far more complicated than that.
A lifelong Republican turned independent, Comey was tapped in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama to lead the FBI. He upset Democrats in 2016 by reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails two weeks before Election Day — and upset Republicans in early 2017 for leading an investigation to determine whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia during the previous year’s campaign.
Neither investigation led to charges.
President Trump and James Comey in 2017. (Andrew Harrer, Pool/Getty Images)
Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017. In leaked memos and in his testimony before Congress, Comey alleged that Trump had pressured him to end investigations, which some interpreted as obstruction of justice. An FBI inspector general eventually criticized how Comey had handled these controversies but also found that neither Comey nor the broader FBI harbored a political bias against Trump. In 2019, Trump’s Justice Department declined to prosecute Comey.
Regardless, Trump has long referred to Comey on social media as a “DIRTY COP” and “Leakin’ Lyin’ James B. Comey.”
In 2019, the president went so far as to accuse Comey of treason — a crime punishable by death in the United States.
In May of this year, Trump and other administration figures alleged, without evidence, that Comey was threatening the president’s life with an Instagram photo of seashells.
The shells, which Comey spotted during a walk on the beach, spelled out “86 47” — online slang for opposition to Trump.
“He did it for a reason,” Trump claimed at the time. “He’s calling for the assassination of the president.”
Trump then said it was “going to be up to Pam” — his attorney general — to decide whether to prosecute Comey for the photo. No charges were ever brought.
Two months later, Comey’s daughter Maurene Comey was abruptly fired from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York. She’s now suing the Justice Department.
What happened with the alleged leaks?
On Sept. 30, 2020, Comey testified before Congress that he did not leak classified information about Russian election interference to the New York Times in 2016 or 2017. He also denied authorizing such leaks.
When asked by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the panel chairman, whether he had been aware of an investigative referral that went to FBI leaders on Sept. 7, 2016, “regarding U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections,” Comey responded that the referral “doesn’t ring any bells with me.”
Later in the same hearing, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas asked Comey whether he had ever authorized leaks regarding the Trump-Russia investigation or the Clinton email probe. Comey stood by congressional testimony from 2017 in which he stated that he had not.
But last month, current FBI Director Kash Patel claimed on X that “newly declassified memos reveal former FBI leadership authorized classified leaks while misleading Congress” when he shared a link to a related story on the right-leaning website Just the News.
The story quoted previously redacted portions of the memos alleging that a lawyer working under Comey at the time “disclosed USG [U.S. government] classified information to the NYT under the belief he was ultimately instructed and authorized to do so by then FBI Director James Comey” via an intermediary.
“The cover-up is finally being exposed,” Patel declared. “Accountability must follow.”
But Just the News also reported that the memos in question were previously “investigated by multiple prosecutors, including the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., under Trump’s first administration and by future special prosecutor John Durham, and all declined to bring criminal charges.”
In recent weeks, career prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office again examined the memos — and they were again “unable to find evidence to prove that Comey likely committed either perjury or obstruction during his testimony,” sources told ABC News.
Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to the president, outside the White House. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
In a memo provided to Halligan, these prosecutors argued that charging Comey with lying to Congress would not only “fail in securing a conviction, which requires proving the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt,” but “also fall short of the much lower probable cause standard for an indictment.”
They ultimately told Halligan that “seeking the charges would violate DOJ policy, raise serious ethical issues and risk being rejected by the grand jury,” according to ABC.
But Halligan is reportedly pursuing the indictment anyway.
A broader pressure campaign
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has also “pushed Bondi repeatedly in private in recent days to bring charges against Comey, even as she has expressed reservations about the case.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is now moving forward with the mortgage fraud case against James that Siebert declined to pursue, according to Bloomberg.
The New York Times reports that “administration officials have also ramped up pressure” on Kelly Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, who is leading inquiries into two other vocal Trump critics: Schiff, who has been accused of mortgage fraud by the president’s allies, and John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, who has been accused of mishandling classified information.
In addition, more than a half dozen U.S. attorneys’ offices are reportedly drafting plans to investigate a group funded by George Soros — the billionaire Democratic donor — in response to a new directive from the office of the deputy attorney general, according to the Times.
Taken as a whole, Trump’s public push to indict his perceived enemies amounts to an “extraordinary breach of prosecutorial protocols that reach back to the days following the Watergate scandal,” as the Times recently put it — and a departure from the “traditional norms” that seek to prevent the White House from weaponizing the Justice Department for political purposes.
“We’ve never seen anything even approaching this level of interference with the day-to-day job of prosecutors,” Carol Lam, a former U.S. attorney in California who served during the administration of President George W. Bush, told the Washington Post. “Having personal vindictiveness steer prosecutions — you see that seeping down the ranks [of the Justice Department]. And there appears to be no bottom.”
