As the Justice Department’s criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey appears increasingly threatened, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan and other Justice Department officials are launching unusually public attacks on the judge overseeing the case by mischaracterizing comments he made at a Wednesday hearing.
“Personal attacks, like Judge Nachmanoff referring to me as a ‘puppet,’ do not change the facts or the law,” Halligan said in an exclusive statement to the New York Post.
“A federal judge must be neutral and impartial. Instead, this judge launched an outrageous and unprofessional personal attack against US Attorney Lindsey Halligan in open court yesterday. “The Department of Justice will continue to follow the facts and the law,” Justice Department spokesman Chad Gilmartin said in a statement. posted in ‘X’ Thursday.
The statements refer to an exchange between U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff and Comey’s attorney, Michael Dreeben, in which Nachmanoff questioned whether his position was that Halligan was serving as a “puppet” or “stalking horse” for President Donald Trump in his retaliation orders against Comey.
But Nachmanoff never directly claimed that Halligan was a “stooge” and did not argue in court when Justice Department lawyer Tyler Lemons flatly rejected that characterization.
“So your opinion is that Ms. Halligan is a stalking horse or a puppet, for lack of a better word, doing the President’s bidding?” Judge Nachmanoff asked Dreeben during the exchange.
Former FBI Director James Comey speaks to the media after giving a private statement before the House Oversight and Government and House Judiciary committees on Capitol Hill in Washington, December 7, 2018.
Joshua Roberts/Reuters
“Well, I don’t want to use language about Ms. Halligan that suggests anything other than that she did what she was told to do,” Dreeben responded. “The president of the United States has the authority to direct prosecutions. She worked in the White House. She was surely aware of the president’s directive.”
Comey was accused in September of lying to Congress after Trump forced his resignation former federal prosecutor Erik Siebert and installed Halligan, a White House staffer with no prosecutorial experience, and then asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to act “NOW!!!” to prosecute Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Representative Adam Schiff. Comey has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
A lawyer for Comey argued during Wednesday’s hearing that by replacing Siebert with his former employee and attorney, and publicly calling for his political enemies to be impeached, Trump was “manipulating the prosecutorial machinery” and committing an “egregious violation of core constitutional values.”
Halligan also testified that the grand jury that indicted Comey voted to indict him on two of the three counts presented in the original indictment, but that the final revised indictment reflecting the two counts on which Comey was ultimately charged was not reviewed by the full grand jury, only by the jury foreman and another grand jury.
