Lindsay Halligan. Image: X
Lindsay Halligan. Image: X
Comey will walk free one day soon, and he will be able to sit back and watch Donald Trump try to lie his way out of a whole bunch of evidence that shows his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is the one corrupt thing he won’t get away with.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
James B. Comey is going to sleep well tonight. His lawyer, Michael R. Dreeben, spent the morning in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, appearing at a hearing ordered by U.S. District Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff on the subject of the validity of the indictment Comey faces for lying to the Senate and obstructing Congress.
Oh, boy, now comes that classic phrase, “not to put too fine a point on it.” The day did not go well for either the Department of Justice, which following the orders of Donald Trump, arranged to have Comey indicted, or for Lindsay Halligan, allegedly the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who appears to have fucked up the Comey indictment in every possible way that an inexperienced lawyer could.
The hearing was on Comey’s motion to dismiss the indictment on the basis that it was brought on Trump’s orders to retaliate against him for critical interviews he has given and what he has written about Trump since 2017, when he was fired by Trump. Halligan sat at the table for the government, alongside two Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) from the state of North Carolina, to whom she was forced to turn when none of the experienced AUSAs in her own office would consent to become involved in the indictment of Comey, which had already been rejected by the U.S. Attorney whom Halligan had replaced, Erik S. Siebert.
The hearing quickly devolved into another issue entirely: whether the indictment against Comey had been brought properly at all. Judge Nachmanoff was understandably curious about why former U.S. Attorney Siebert had found insufficient cause to indict Comey when that decision was up to him. The judge asked one of Halligan’s hired-from-out-of-state assistants, N. Tyler Lemons, for the declination memo that is typically written when a U.S. Attorney declines to indict a suspect who has been under investigation for committing a crime. Lemons was, shall we say, not forthcoming, telling the judge, incredibly, “I don’t know the world of documents that exist.”
The judge stiffly reminded Assistant U.S. Attorney Lemons, “You are counsel of record in this case,” and asked him if he had been inclined to “seek out a declination memo.” I wasn’t present for the hearing, and there were no cameras or recordings of what happened, but I would take a wild guess that Lemons did some hemming and hawing as he attempted to answer the judge’s question, finally admitting that on the orders of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, he had been told not to even talk about the existence of any purported declination memo, because the Department of Justice was “studying” whether they could make a case that they were legally justified in refusing to disclose it.
Oh, boy, that must have made Judge Nachmanoff happy, to have this deputy assistant U.S. attorney imported from another state standing there and telling him that the rather notorious Deputy Attorney General, who had been Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and conducted the sham-at-all-costs interview with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, was interfering with the proper functioning of his courtroom from across the Potomac River. The Washington Post had already reported that two sources in the DOJ had told them that the declination memo indeed exists. It’s likely that Judge Nachmanoff, situated in Northern Virginia, reads the Washington Post, so he was probably already aware that the memo exists. And yet this pipsqueak purporting to be an assistant U.S. attorney was telling him that he couldn’t talk about it because Todd “I’m covering Trump’s ass as fast as I can” Blanche had told him not to talk about it.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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