Lindsey Halligan Lectures Someone ELSE about Conflicts

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A filing in the Jim Comey case bearing the name of Lindsey Halligan claims that it is very important to disclose conflicts as early as possible.

1 “[Bo]th the Sixth Amendment and the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct invite, indeed compel, prosecutors to alert a trial court to a defense attorney’s potential or actual conflict.” United States v. Cortez, 205 F. Supp. 3d 768, 775 (E.D. Va. 2016) (emphasis added) (Ellis, J.); see also United States v. Howard, 115 F.3d 1151, 1155 (4th Cir. 1997) (Wilkinson, C.J.) (noting that a district court “has an obligation to foresee problems over representation that might arise at trial and head them off beforehand”).

Only, the filing is not disclosing conflicts that Halligan, the Trump personal defense attorney turned unlawfully appointed US Attorney who didn’t identify her client at the arraignment, might have.

Rather, in a bid to accelerate consideration of the loaner prosecutors’ filter request (which I wrote about here), it insinuates that Pat Fitzgerald has a possible conflict on this case. As it describes, some of the communications that (it all but confirms) Dan Richman designated as privileged back in 2019 include Fitzgerald.

Relevant to this motion, the attorney has informed the government that the quarantined evidence contains communications between the defendant and several attorneys. The current lead defense counsel appears to be a party to some of these communications.

To turn that into a potential conflict, the loaner prosecutors (and probably also James Hayes, who again shows as the author of the document, but who has not filed a notice of appearance in the case) wildly misrepresent the DOJ IG Report on Jim Comey’s retention of the memos he wrote memorializing his conversations with Trump.

[T]he defendant used current lead defense counsel to improperly disclose classified information.2

2 See U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Report of Investigation of Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s Disclosure of Sensitive Investigative Information and Handling of Certain Memoranda, Oversight and Review Division Report 19-02, (August 2019), (located at https://web.archive.org/web/20250818022240/https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o1902.pdf, last accessed October 19, 2025).

(They provide a Wayback Machine link, because Trump killed the DOJ IG site in his bid to kill the main Inspector General organization.)

While the IG Report describes that Comey sent Fitzgerald four of the memos — which Comey believed to be unclassified — he sent the memo that Richman shared for this NYT story separately, meaning the report does not substantiate the claim that Fitzgerald was in the loop on that story.

May 14, 2017

Comey sends scanned copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 from his personal email account to the personal email account of one of his attorneys, Patrick Fitzgerald. Before sending, Comey redacts the second paragraph from Memo 7 involving foreign affairs because Comey deems it irrelevant. On May 17 Fitzgerald forwards these four Memos to Comey’s other attorneys, David Kelley and Richman.

May 16, 2017

Comey sends a digital photograph of Memo 4 (describing the meeting in which Comey wrote that President Trump made the statement about “letting Flynn go”) to Richman via text message from Comey’s personal phone. Comey asks Richman to share the contents, but not the Memo itself, with a specific reporter for The New York Times. Comey’s stated purpose is to cause the appointment of a Special Counsel to ensure that any tape recordings that may exist of his conversations with President Trump are not destroyed. Richman conveys the substance of Memo 4 to the reporter. The New York Times publishes an article entitled “Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation.”

[snip]

As described in this section, on May 14, 2017, Comey transmitted copies of Memos 2, 4, and 6, and a partially redacted copy of Memo 7 to Fitzgerald, who was one of Comey’s personal attorneys. Comey told the OIG he thought of these Memos as his “recollection recorded,” like a diary or personal notes. Comey also said he believed “there’s nothing classified in here,” and so he thought he could share them with his personal attorneys.

And even using the FBI classification review of the memos he shared rather than Comey’s own review (he was an Original Classification Authority), he shared just six words, classified “Confidential” with his attorneys, and Richman didn’t share that information with Mike Schmidt.

FBI conducts a classification review of Comey’s Memos. The FBI determines that Comey correctly classified Memo 1 (which Comey did not share with anyone outside the FBI); that Memos 4, 5, and 6 are unclassified but “FOUO”; and that portions of Memos 2, 3, and 7 are classified, as follows:

Memo 2: Six words from a statement by President Trump comparing the relative importance of returning telephone calls from three countries, one of which the Memo notes the President mentioned twice, are classified as “CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN.” Comey did not redact this information before sharing Memo 2 with his attorneys.

Memo 3: Information about sources, methods, investigative activity, and foreign relations is classified as “SECRET//NOFORN.” Comey did not share Memo 3 with anyone outside the FBI.

Memo 7: An assessment of a foreign leader by President Trump and discussion of foreign relations is classified as “CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN.” Comey redacted this paragraph before he sent Memo 7 to his attorneys.

As Comey’s response notes, in a subsequent FOIA, a judge determined just one word was Confidential.

6 The portion of the memorandum the review team determined should be classified as “Confidential” concerned the President’s reference to then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s questionable judgment in not having notified the President sooner of a call from the leader of a particular country. (Report at 44). In that context, President Trump compared certain countries to a smaller country and the upclassification treated the name of a smaller country as classified for fear of offending that country. (Id. at 44-45). Mr. Comey’s reaction to the upclassification was: “Are you guys kidding me?” (Id. at 47). A federal court in unrelated litigation brought under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) ultimately rejected all but one of the subsequent classifications. (Id. at 3 n.4; 47 n.78; 58 n.100 (citing Cable News Network, Inc., v. FBI, 384 F. Supp. 3d 19, 25-26, 36, 38 (D.D.C. 2019))). The classification of the memorandum has been addressed in subsequent litigation and the single word that remains “CONFIDENTIAL” is the name of a single country.

That is, even Richman didn’t release classified information here. There’s even less to suggest Fitzgerald did.

The loaner prosecutors (and James Hayes) just made that up. Which is what Comey noted in a response.

[T]he government’s effort to defame lead defense counsel provides no basis to grant the motion.

[snip]

[T]here is no good faith basis for attributing criminal conduct to either Mr. Comey or his lead defense counsel. Similarly, there is no good faith basis to claim a “conflict” between Mr. Comey and his counsel, much less a basis to move to disqualify lead defense counsel.

Their goal in doing so is now clear: They want to get details of what Richman said while representing Comey after Richman had left and Comey was fired from the FBIm a time period that is irrelevant to charges pertaining to what Richman did as an FBI employee.

And to do that, they’re treating the Comey Memos as akin to some kind of grand insurance fraud (the common crime behind the precedent they’re invoking to conduct a highly invasive privilege review), when it was quite legitimately something you would do — sharing your own memorialization of sensitive events — with a lawyer. Which is probably why, per the original filing, Comey plans to challenge the warrant to get to that material.

Their filing is at least disingenuous about something else. They claim they need Judge Nachmanoff to make a decision about this quickly so that they can meet their trial deadlines.

Prompt implementation of the filter protocol is necessary in this case so the current trial milestones are maintained and met. This has been a point of emphasis from the Court. This desire is also shared by the government.

Here, the potentially protected material could contain exculpatory or inculpatory evidence relevant to the defense and the government. Currently, the government is not aware of the contents of the potentially protected material. As a party to some of the communications contained in the potentially protected material, the defense necessarily has awareness.

But this bid for a filter team already necessarily disrupts the trial deadlines.

As I pointed out here, the current schedule — especially the “the fastest CIPA process you have ever seen in your lives” that Judge Nachmanoff ordered at the arraignment — presumes that Fitzgerald will get clearance quickly.

The schedule proposed by the parties assumes that attorney Patrick Fitzgerald receives his security clearance, or interim clearance, within a reasonable time, and that all the classified materials to be reviewed are made available to the defense within a reasonable time.

You don’t agree to that CIPA schedule and then decide you want to kick Fitzgerald off the case. At that point, you’re effectively fucking with Comey’s Speedy Trial right. If you, as prosecutors, are compelled to identify conflicts, you’re compelled to do so before you build an entire trial schedule around there not being one.

And you especially don’t get to do that when this material has been in DOJ custody since 2019.

If there were reason to believe the discussions that Comey memorialized about Trump’s attempt to kill the Russian investigation included evidence of a crime, Bill Barr would have pursued it back in 2020. He didn’t.

And yet now the loaner prosecutors want to delay Comey’s trial so they can make a mad bid to get material that was clearly privileged.

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Shit-Posting All the Way to SCOTUS

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I was going to write about how important today’s filing in Illinois’ challenge to Trump’s invasion is.

Thankfully, Steve Vladeck did that so I don’t have to.

As for why it’s this application that presents the Court with a make-or-break moment, it’s worth reflecting on what it would mean if the full Court grants the Trump administration’s request.

First, and immediately, it will mean that the Trump administration is allowed to deploy troops onto the streets of Chicago (and Broadview) to effectively militarize the enforcement of our immigration laws. Although the application to the Supreme Court is replete with references to protecting federal property, the federal government doesn’t need the authorities that are currently blocked to do that; it can use regular troops, almost certainly without invoking 10 U.S.C. § 12406 or any other statute. (This is the “protective” power.) The power the Trump administration is seeking here is much broader—and would almost certainly mean that federalized National Guard troops would start accompanying ICE officers on immigration raids and other operations—even if they’re not making the arrests themselves. That would be a … dramatic … escalation relative to where we are today.

[snip]

Third, and most importantly, it would allow the federal government to obtain emergency relief based upon either (1) a limitless view of what it means to be “unable to execute the laws of the United States”; or (2) an incredibly one-sided factual narrative that was expressly rejected by the district judge, and that the unanimous court of appeals panel refused to disturb. The justices aren’t factfinders, and absent some “clear” reason to believe that the lower courts erred in discrediting the Trump administration’s factual claims (when, in fact, there are lots of reasons to believe that the district court was right), to grant relief in the face of those findings is to not just show stunning disrespect to both the lower courts and the appropriate standard of review; it’s to send the message that the facts just don’t matter—so long as five or more justices personally believe whatever the federal government is telling them.

That would be a big enough problem in other contexts (I’ve already written about the casual relationship Justice Kavanaugh’s Vasquez Perdomo concurrence has with the facts), but it would be utterly catastrophic here. After all, armed with a grant of emergency relief on this application, what is to stop the Trump administration from making comparably inflated and/or invented claims about the situations on the ground in other American cities as a pretextual basis for deploying troops? And what’s to stop it from making those claims not (just) tomorrow, but next November—on the eve of the midterm elections?

Having outsourced that gloomy contemplation to him, I want to point to several things that might lead SCOTUS to exercise some sanity.

First, Vladeck cited from Judge April Perry’s ruling on the lack of credibility of the affiants that the Administration submitted. But he didn’t note the paragraph following the general credibility assessment, in which Judge Perry described how the government threatened to invade the courthouse itself.

Finally, the Court notes its concern about a third declaration submitted by Defendants, in which the declarant asserted that the FPS “requested federalized National Guard personnel to support protection of the Federal District Court on Friday, October 10, 2025.” Doc. 62-3. This purported fact was incendiary and seized upon by both parties at oral argument. It was also inaccurate, as the Court noted on the record. To their credit, Defendants have since submitted a corrected declaration, and the affiant has declared that they did not make the error willfully. Doc. 65-1. All of the parties have been moving quickly to compile factual records and legal arguments, and mistakes in such a context are inevitable. That said, Defendants only presented declarations from three affiants with first-hand knowledge of events in Illinois. And, as described above, all three contain unreliable information. [links added]

Over the weekend, in response to a question about the Insurrection Act, Trump noted that one benefit (to him) of invoking it would be to shut down the courts.

This is not just a threat to the sovereignty of states. It is, explicitly, a threat to the coequal status of the courts, up to and including SCOTUS. That may make them view this threat differently.

And Trump hasn’t helped his credibility since then.

Perhaps most spectacularly, the details regarding a number of “Kavanaugh stops” have come out since Judge Perry ruled for Chicago, not least the case of a teenaged girl who was violently detained in Hoffman Estates.

A teen in Hoffman Estates was thrown to the ground by what appeared to be a federal agent this past weekend, and the teen and two of her friends were detained for hours before they were released.

Her parents spoke out Monday after they say their daughter, 18-year-old Evelyn, is still shaken from the experience.

Evelyn’s parents said her boyfriend got a call that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were in his neighborhood. They went to warn people who live there and recorded the officers. This led to a violent arrest, in which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it did not take part.

Video from the Friday incident shows sirens and undercover law enforcement cars flooding the Hoffman Estates neighborhood where the arrest happened.

The video shows Evelyn getting pulled out of the passenger seat. She is then thrown to the ground, all while saying she is not resisting arrest, as the officer handcuffed her and appeared to put a knee on her back.

[snip]

In a post on X, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin commented on Evelyn’s arrest video, saying, “Imagine being so desperate to demonize law enforcement you post a video from a burglary arrest Chicago police made over a year ago. This isn’t even ICE.”

Hoffman Estates police, however, said ICE was in the area on Friday.

Her treatment not only debunks Justice Kavanaugh’s claim that the impact of racial profiling on US citizens is minimal, but it exposes Tricia McLaughlin as a fabricator.

Meanwhile, even as Trump is claiming a rebellion in Chicago, as many as 250,000 people showed up for the No Kings protest in Chicago on Saturday. While there were clashes at Broadview, where the ICE facility is, I’ve seen no reports of disturbances at the protest itself. Chicago can rightly point to the peaceful protest as a counter to the inflated claims from the government.

Then there’s Trump’s childish tantrums this weekend.

Chicago is arguing that Trump is invading not for any reason tied to law enforcement, but out of animus. It’s hard to imagine any more succinct expression of such animus than Trump’s shit post responding to the protests.

And finally, the fiasco at Camp Pendleton — where Trump whined after Gavin Newsom shut down the freeway during Trump’s live ammunition display at the base, only to be vindicated when shrapnel from the event hit JD Vance’s motorcade.

Vladeck is right: If SCOTUS grants Trump relief here, it will be far worse than any of their earlier shadow docket interventions. Let’s hope that Trump’s weekend tantrums will finally convince the court that he can no longer be indulged.

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Stephen Miller’s Trains Don’t Run on Time

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I was going to write a piece anticipating the showdown at SCOTUS over Stephen Miller’s invasion of Chicago, which may well determine the future of democracy in the US.

But as I was contemplating all the lies that Miller and his henchman have been caught telling in Chicago and Portland, two other stories came out that highlight how bad Miller is at execution. Both pertain to his effort, built on a edifice of lies, to rationalize a war in Venezuela based off a largely manufactured claim that Tren de Aragua is “invading the US” on behalf of Nicolás Maduro.

Chronologically, WaPo provides new details about the quid pro quo behind Marco Rubio’s deal to send planeloads of Venezuelans to a concentration camp in El Salvador: The US would have to send the people who had cooperated with DOJ to expose Nayib Bukele’s ties to MS-13, a gang that Trump purported to treat as a terrorist organization.

In the days before the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the president of that country demanded something for himself: the return of nine MS-13 gang leaders in U.S. custody.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13 phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation. But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.

To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.

[snip]

The deal would give Bukele possession of individuals who threatened to expose the alleged deals his government made with MS-13 to help achieve El Salvador’s historic drop in violence, officials said. For the Salvadoran president, a return of the informants was viewed as critical to preserving his tough-on-crime reputation. It was also a key step in hindering an ongoing U.S. investigation into his government’s relationship with MS-13, a gang famous for displays of excessive violence in the United States and elsewhere.

We’ve known from earlier reporting that Bukele’s ask was top level MS-13 members in US custody. We didn’t know they were informing against Bukele.

Note that this reported conversation with Bukele on March 13 was two days before the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and three before the men — most guilty of nothing more than sporting less incriminating tattoos than the Secretary of Defense — got shipped away in a rush.

One of the many things that remains unexplained about the story is the reason for the rush — the rush to get an agreement, the rush to put men on planes.

Even given the rush (and the narrowly averted government shutdown), that’s when things started falling apart, when the ACLU got notice of the deportations, got an order from James Boasberg enjoining the deportations, and so set Erez Reuveni on a path that would get him fired. Not long after, one of the Salvadorans that Rubio intended to deal to Bukele, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez (who is mentioned in the WaPo story, started challenging the dismissal of his case and subsequent deportation, ultimately leading Judge Joan Azrack to order parts of the docket unsealed.

Then there are the murderboats in the Caribbean — a series of wildly illegal strikes lacking any recognizable legal justification. The murderboats appear to be an attempt to draw Nicolás Maduro into a war — though the Atlantic describes the underlying motivation as something far more craven, little more than an attempt to “paint immigrants as a dangerous menace.”

Then there are the senior officials who see Venezuela as a means to project a tough-guy, defender-of-the-homeland image. Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace, according to one of the White House officials. Vice President J. D. Vance, though often inclined toward isolationism, has pushed the necessity of defending U.S. borders. And Hegseth, who prefers to be known as the war secretary, is seeking a means of projecting military strength in a region where Defense Department planners hope to reassert American primacy.

Donald Trump’s top aides have all decided to murder people in cold blood as a propaganda stunt.

Even before the most powerful military in the history of the world failed to fully execute its murderboat mission days ago, there were cracks in Miller’s murderboat propaganda campaign — not just the increasing demands for some kind of credible legal explanation, but also the resignation of SouthCom Commander Alvin Holsey. And even before all that, it became clear that Miller’s murderboat targets were not what he claimed they were: Venezuelans bringing fentanyl to the United States. The boats were too small. That’s not how fentanyl is trafficked to the US, most importantly, they weren’t all Venezuelans. Two were Trinis. Weeks ago, Colombian President Gustavo Petro started complaining that Colombians were being targeted.

And then the most powerful military in the history of the world failed its mission, operating in uncontested waters, to completely destroy a submersible it claims was shipping drugs to the United States.

The most powerful military in the history of the world failed to destroy a boat and as a result two very awkward targets — neither Venezuelan — survived.

And now, because of the slovenly execution of Miller’s attempt to gin up a war with Venezuela, Petro and Trump are ratcheting up a war of words over the earlier targeting of what Petro claims was a fishing boat in distress inside Colombian waters.

The slovenliness is so ingrained that the people writing Trump’s tweets can’t even spell Colombia properly.

Stephen Miller is incredibly powerful and so fascistic that Trump even hesitates to describe his ambition.

But he is also downright slovenly.

Stephen Miller is attempting to start a war to rationalize his domestic war. And he can’t even be fucked to dot his I-s and cross his T-s.

Update: We have always been at war against Eastasia.

The U.S. military has killed three men and destroyed another boat it suspected of running drugs in the Caribbean Sea, this one alleged to have been affiliated with a Colombian insurgency group, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Sunday.

It was the seventh boat known to have been attacked since early September as part of the Trump administration’s use of the military to kill people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were enemy soldiers in a war, rather than arresting them as criminals. The latest strike took place on Friday, and Mr. Hegseth said in a social media post on Sunday that it had targeted a vessel associated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group known as the E.L.N.

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No Kings Thread

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When I told my taxi driver I was in Dublin to go to a No Kings rally at the American Embassy, we had quite the chat. He came from a big Republican family, he explained, before he went on to catalogue how many of his relatives had been shot during the Easter Rising in 1916 and at which of the locations we were driving by.

No Kings rings a bit different here in Dublin.

According to the organizer, we had about 400 people — 100 more than they had in the summer — representing almost every state. Some of us live here, some just showed up to protest in the middle of vacations of varying lengths.

We were right on a main road, with lots of people honking in solidarity.

We had maybe 6 frogs, one dancing dinosaur, and one chicken over the course of the protest, including a frog from Portland.

There were Epstein signs and LGBTQ flags and one Good Trouble sign and some fancy artwork.

The signs that really got me were held by kids, like these siblings who scolded, “Masked warrantless ICE agents are not American” and demanded, “stop holding back my future.”

Another sign read, in Irish, “Freedom for Palestine, Freedom for America.”

I’m used to seeing the Gaelige used to support Palestine. I had not seen the US lumped in alongside before.

I posted a few more pictures in this thread.

Over a century after Ireland itself declared No Kings once and for all, this was safe and easy. May your No Kings rally today be as safe!

Tell us about it in the thread.

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Eagle Ed Martin and George Santos Just Proved Tish James’ Vindictive Prosecution Claim

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Donald Trump’s weaponization of government against his adversaries is a catastrophic assault on rule of law.

But in those efforts, he continues to do things that may backfire. I’ve noted repeatedly how poorly he chooses the political martyrs he creates. Just the other day, for example, Tish James got rock star treatment when she introduced and endorsed Zohran Mamdani.

In addition, Trump is conducting his vengeance tour in such a ham-handed fashion that that one after another after another after another after another after another after another prosecutor quit or resigned to much notice. Each will be available as witness to the politicization of DOJ.

Aside from LaMonica McIver (whose arrest the chattering class seem to have forgotten), Trump bolloxed the timing — the sequencing of his attacks — as well.

He indicted the well-lawyered Jim Comey, thus far the shoddiest case, first, and did so in EDVA’s rocket docket. That means that those who follow will benefit from the work — and possibly even precedents — Comey obtains. By the time Attorney General James is arraigned on October 24, for example, both Comey’s motion to disqualify Lindsey Halligan and his motion for selective and vindictive prosecution will be public.

And yesterday, with Trump’s commutation of George Santos’ prison sentence, he botched the timing again.

Trump’s clemency has already featured in motions for selective and vindictive prosecution. Both McIver and Sean Dunn (the sandwich guy) have invoked the Jan6ers that Trump pardoned as people who viciously assaulted cops but were freed. But in McIver’s case, as I laid out here, the government claimed — partly by placing an auto-pen in Trump’s hand — that prosecutors who dismissed the pending cases were left with no discretion after Trump issued his order.

McIver’s claim faces a threshold, insurmountable defect: the January 6 Defendants cannot be considered similarly situated because they all were pardoned. As a consequence, their ongoing prosecutions had to be dismissed without regard to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, and they could not be prosecuted for January 6th related crimes thereafter. Because a similarly situated individual is someone that “could have been prosecuted for the offenses for which [the defendant was] charged, but were not prosecuted,” and the January 6 Defendants on their face do not meet those basic criteria, McIver’s motion must fail. See Hedaithy, 392 F.3d at 607 (quoting Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 470); see also Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 469.

But in Tish James’ case, the guy most responsible for her charges — the guy who has been literally stalking her in a dirty old man trench coat — also happens to be the guy who exercised discretion in the commutation of George Santos. Indeed, Eagle Ed Martin, who in addition to serving as Trump’s weaponization czar, also serves as Pardon Attorney, boasted of his role in the commutation.

To be sure, the kinds of fraud with which Eagle Ed charged Tish James are different than the kinds to which Santos pled guilty. Eagle Ed and Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer are effectively attempting to criminalize James’ generosity, her provision of a $137,000 home to her great niece. Even if she did what is alleged (and all the evidence suggests she did not), any benefit to James herself would be less than $19,000.

Meanwhile, Santos defrauded identified victims — some of them vulnerable seniors — of almost $375,000, along with $200,000 in ill-gotten gains himself. The victims include:

  • The Republican Party (which matched funds Santos hadn’t earned)
  • Donors whose credit cards he defrauded
  • Redstone Strategies investors
  • New York State’s Unemployment Insurance
  • Congress

Whereas Trump claims that the fraud for which James prosecuted him had no victims, because the banks ultimately got paid back (true of the loans James obtained as well), Santos’ crimes had a number of real victims, victims who have not yet been made whole.

And Donald Trump made no secret why he sprung Santos from prison: in crafting a false comparison with Richard Blumenthal, Trump declared that, “at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”

Alleged Democratic fraudsters get charges whereas far more dangerous Republican fraudsters win a Get Out of Jail Free card. It couldn’t be more clear.

It’s certainly possible that, if James used Santos as a comparator (along with other Republicans, like Ken Paxton, who haven’t been charged), DOJ would claim Trump may not have known about the various kinds of financial fraud Santos engaged in.

But if he doesn’t know that, it’s the fault of the Pardon Attorney.

The guy in the dirty old man trench coat, who has been stalking New York’s Attorney General all the while.

DOJ might claim that they can’t share any details of Santos’ commutation.

Too late!

In DOJ’s response to McIver, they already exhibited a willingness to share details of the treatment of specific pardons.

10 On September 2, 2025, the undersigned Assistant U.S. Attorneys spoke with the Deputy Pardon Attorney from the Office of the Pardon Attorney who confirmed that: (i) the January 6 Defendants with then-pending cases received pardons under the Pardon and were eligible to receive certificates of pardon, and (ii) that any January 6 Defendant was still considered pardoned even if a certificate of pardon was not requested. Additionally, the Deputy Pardon Attorney provided examples of certificates of pardon issued for January 6 Defendants with previously pending cases who requested a certificate.

I’m sure it seemed very clever, putting Eagle Ed in charge of both hunting Trump’s enemies and freeing his friends. But in this particular case it might get tricky.

At the very same time Eagle Ed was stalking Tish James up and down the Eastern Seaboard, desperately trying to find some crime to charge her with, he was also busy finding a way to free a much bigger, confessed fraudster from prison.

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Jim Comey Prepares to Prevail at SCOTUS

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On Nicole’s podcast today, I said that many of the criminal issues that will arise from Trump’s politicization of DOJ won’t be all that controversial at SCOTUS (and SCOTUS is least awful on criminal justice issues). But I said one area would likely break new ground: selective and vindictive prosecution.

Jim Comey’s prosecution — and that of everyone else Trump is pursuing — fits poorly in the existing precedents for selective and vindictive prosecution, even while they clearly are vindictive.

Plus, I noted, that Trump’s penchant for yapping about legal cases even as DOJ attempts to protect him from liability in them conflicts with the language of Trump v. USA that — recklessly — puts the President in a prosecutorial function.

And the Executive Branch has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including with respect to allegations of election crime. Nixon, 418 U. S., at 693; see United States v. Texas, 599 U. S. 670, 678–679 (2023) (“Under Article II, the Executive Branch possesses authority to decide ‘how to prioritize and how aggressively to pursue legal actions against defendants who violate the law.’” (quoting TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U. S. 413, 429 (2021))). The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Art. II, §3. And the Attorney General, as head of the Justice Department, acts as the President’s “chief law enforcement officer” who “provides vital assistance to [him] in the performance of [his] constitutional duty to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.’” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511, 520 (1985) (quoting Art. II, §1, cl. 8).

Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1. For that reason, Trump’s threatened removal of the Acting Attorney General likewise implicates “conclusive and preclusive” Presidential authority. As we have explained, the President’s power to remove “executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed” may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts. Myers, 272 U. S., at 106, 176; see supra, at 8. The President’s “management of the Executive Branch” requires him to have “unrestricted power to remove the most important of his subordinates”—such as the Attorney General—“in their most important duties.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 750 (internal quotation marks and alteration omitted).

Either Trump is properly in a prosecutorial role, in which case he needs to be at the center of these cases (and interventions like the Eric Adams bribery case), exposed to discovery. Or, his interventions are improper.

The current state of affairs, where DOJ claims the President is immune from discovery, permitted to speak endlessly about criminal cases, yet order up criminal prosecutions, is fundamentally inconsistent with rule of law.

Which is why I’m interested in four people Comey has added to his defense team (while also getting permission to submit a 45-page selective and vindictive prosecution brief, 15 pages extra).

Comey has added:

Donaleski is interesting enough, not least given the loaner AUSA bid to play games with filter teams. Plus, she would have overlapped with Maurene Comey at SDNY (and with some of Jim Comey’s old pals when she first got there, probably).

But the others, especially Dreeben, signal that Comey is going into this with a plan and the expectation that he will have to argue this case before SCOTUS.

This team is a signal that Comey intends to reverse some of the damage done by Trump v. USA.

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Fridays with Nicole Sandler

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Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

 

Link to Tim Miller interviewing Robby Roadsteamer

Link to ICE officer being an asshole to cops

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The Bolton Indictment

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The John Bolton indictment is a substantive document. If the claims about classification levels stand up, it is as substantive as the indictment against Trump (though with less sensitive documents and none of the obstruction).

For each of 8 charged documents (each was charged twice, once for transmission and once for retention) it describes Bolton sending the information to one of his family members via an AOL account that got hacked by Iran, then keeping it such that it was found when the FBI searched his house earlier this year.

Importantly, none of these are marked classified documents, like Trump’s stolen documents were. They are his excerpts. So there will be an enormous contest over the classification determinations, especially since Kash and John Ratcliffe were involved.

There are ten charged retained documents (that is, the same 8, plus two more). The latter two may be marked — they may be the old Iraq documents Bolton referred to.

The indictment describes someone — presumably from Iran — attempting to blackmail Bolton (at which point he told the FBI that he had been hacked).

It also quotes Bolton mocking Pete Hegseth for sharing classified information on Signal.

There are defenses to this case (including that Trump won’t prosecute Hegseth). But it is a solid case.

Update: Bolton is quoted referring to “diaries” throughout this indictment.

One of the FBI Agents on this case reportedly was involved in the Joe Biden case.

In that case, Biden fairly argued that DOJ was applying a different standard to him than DOJ had applied to Reagan in Iran-Contra.

It’s Hur’s analysis of Biden’s diaries that I find most interesting, and troubling. Hur’s approach to these diaries is one of the most obvious flags of political bias in a report full of them.

Take his use of language. The word “diaries” appears 103 times in the report [note: someone with interns should replicate this work, as it is inexact]. In about five of those instances, Hur quotes the people around Biden referring to these notebooks as diaries. Two instances discuss the Presidential Record Act’s language treating diaries as personal records, exempt from PRA. Maybe ten or so appear in a section where Hur envisions that Biden would describe these as diaries as a defense, but the word is always put in Biden’s mouth. Hur adheres to using “notebooks” here.

Mr. Biden will likely say, he never believed his notebooks, which he thought of as his personal diaries, fell within that arrangement. He treated the notebooks markedly differently from the rest of his notes and other presidential records throughout his vice presidency, for example, allowing staff to store and review his notecards, but not his notebooks. 914 This treatment, he will argue, and the extremely personal content of some of the notebooks, shows that he considered them to be his personal property. Mr. Biden’s notebooks included gut-wrenching passages about his son’s death and other highly personal material. 915 His claim that he believed he did not need to send what he considered to be his personal diary to be stored at a government facility will likely appeal to some jurors. 916

We expect Mr. Biden also to contend that the presence of classified information in what he viewed as his diary did not change his thinking. As a member of the exclusive club of former presidents and vice presidents, Mr. Biden will claim that he knew such officials kept diaries, and he knew or expected that those diaries-like Mr. Reagan’s-contained classified information. 917 He also understood that former presidents and vice presidents took their diaries home upon leaving office, without being investigated or prosecuted for it. [all emphasis mine]

But the overwhelming bulk of those remaining 85 or so uses of the word “diaries” describe Reagan’s (or in two cases, other Presidents’) diaries.

By contrast, there are 461 uses of the word “notebook” in Hur’s report. That’s the word Hur uses to refer to what he quotes people around Biden calling the President’s diaries.

Reagan had diaries. And as a result, when DOJ discovered them, they remained untouched.

Biden has notebooks. By calling these notebooks, Hur permitted himself to do with Biden’s most private thoughts what DOJ did not do with Reagan’s: review them all.

Mr. Biden’s notebooks, which contained, among other things, his handwritten notes taken during classified meetings as vice president, presented a challenge. None of the pages contained classification markings but investigators assessed some of the content was potentially classified. Classification review by intelligence agencies of unmarked information is more challenging and time-consuming than for marked documents. We therefore reviewed all of Mr. Biden’s handwritten notes and selected thirty-seven excerpts totaling 109 notebook pages to submit for classification review. Investigators selected entries they believed were most likely highly classified and that a jury of laypeople would find was national defense information under the Espionage Act. [my emphasis]

I assume Bolton will make a similar argument.

Update: Because people are asking, here’s a really rough comparison of Bolton’s indictment with Trump’s.

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Revenge of the “Lib Tard:” Jeanine Pirro Wins First Humiliating Acquittal

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Sydney Reid, who was arrested in July after a tussle as she was filming an ICE arrest, was just acquitted by a jury.

This was a case that should never have been charged, one of at least dozens just like it. Pirro and her prosecutors have been damaged over and over in trying to bring it to trial.

First, three grand juries no-billed the case. Pirro charged it as a misdemeanor Information anyway.

Then, the government unsuccessfully tried to exclude evidence that damaged their case and the credibility of their primary “victim,” FBI Agent Eugenia Bates.

  • That Bates called her “boo boos,” “boo boos”
  • That Bates twice complained that she had to turn this thing into an assault charge:
    • “I’m going to the attorneys [sic] office for a bystander that I tussled. Dinko arrested her for ‘assault’ ughhh”;
    • “Do you want the arrest EC separate from the ‘assault’ or am I good to put it in together in one 302”
  • That she called Reid a “lib tard”
  • That she declared “I sacrificed life and limb for the mission. I think it’s worth a trump coin,” after the incident

Then Reid presented evidence that prosecutors had not provided — or even collected — a video she believed would be exculpatory, an issue that Judge Sparkle Sooknanan spent several days last week considering, only to have the government’s story keep getting worse.

While I haven’t reviewed the trial transcript, in her instructions, Judge Sooknanan gave three adverse instructions against the government:

This is a case that DOJ should have given up when they were no-billed. But because Jeanine Pirro is a stubborn bully, she persisted, and now both the DC US Attorney’s Office (for the evidentiary fuck-ups) and Agent Bates (for the inconsistent testimony and bias) will be tainted by the process.

And most of all, it was an example of Federal Public Defenders — Eugene Ohm and Tezira Abe — doing superb work ensuring Reid had a vigorous defense.

We will see many more bullshit cases in months ahead. But this acquittal matters just as much as the flashier cases, because until the government stops trying to prosecute people because thuggish cops beat them up, this will keep happening.

Update: CBS’ local affiliate appears to have been the only outlet that covered the trial. It describes that Bates didn’t even turn over all her text messages.

Bates was the sole witness called by prosecutors and spent more than five hours on the stand across two days. Much of the questioning centered on her text messages following the incident, where she downplayed it and disparaged Reid as a “libtard.” She didn’t turn over additional text message evidence until early Wednesday morning, and in the middle of cross examination, Abe discovered one message was missing.

“Conveniently, the most damning one wasn’t there,” Abe said. “… Agent Bates’ story is riddled with holes.”

 

Update: Reid’s comment is spectacular.

Reid, in a statement through her attorneys, said the verdict shows “that this administration and their peons are not able to invoke fear in all citizens.”

“I feel sorry for the prosecutors really, who must be burdened by Trump’s irrational and unfounded hatred for his fellow man,” she said. “Knowing that I can stand in front of 12 of my fellow citizens and be found not guilty for standing up for basic human rights makes me feel like, despite the scary times we live in, we have hope for the future.”

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Tick Tock, Tick Tock: Lindsey Halligan’s Filter Follies

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The court filings submitted since Jim Comey’s arraignment have set the stage for several possible prosecutorial disasters.

After loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons made a transparent bid at the arraignment to slow Eastern District of Virginia’s rocket docket with both discovery and the invocation of the CIPA (Classified Information Procedurs Act) process, Judge Michael Nachmanoff,

Meanwhile, Comey noticed his intent to challenge Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as US Attorney, so Judge Nachmanoff can refer the question to Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Albert Diaz, who will pick a District Judge from another District to preside over the challenge. Assuming Judge Diaz responds in timely fashion, Comey will submit that motion on Monday, along with his Selective and Vindictive prosecution claim, the latter of which is likely to be rather, um, illuminating.

There’s no sign, yet, that Halligan’s loaner AUSAs failed to meet Monday’s deadline, though they did file something under seal on Tuesday. If I had to guess, that might be the first bid to hide Trump’s role in the selective prosecution under claims of Executive Privilege, though I also imagine prosecutors may try to explicitly prevent the involvement of Maurene Comey (who is suing on closely related issues) or Troy Edwards (who presumably knows details of the turmoil at EDVA) on Comey’s defense team. Right wing propagandists are hinting that it might be a bid to claim Pat Fitzgerald has a conflict stemming from his past representation of Comey; but the CIPA filings, filed by prosecutors on October 13, are predicated on the assumption “that attorney Patrick Fitzgerald receives his security clearance, or interim clearance, within a reasonable time,” suggesting prosecutors have no complaint about Fitz’ involvement.

But there’s another filing that hints at far more turmoil ahead.

On Monday, after Judge Nachmanoff ordered prosecutors to turn over all discovery that day, prosecutors submitted a motion for a filter protocol. According to the filing, the government seized a whole bunch of computer devices — a hard drive, an iCloud account, an iPhone, and an iPad — from a lawyer in a past investigation, and they want to access it for this investigation.

Evidence in the government’s custody includes PPM because the evidence was obtained from an attorney. Currently, the quarantined evidence includes an image of a computer hard drive, an iCloud download, the backup of an iPhone, and the backup of an iPad (the “quarantined evidence”). The quarantined evidence was obtained through judicial warrants in a previous government investigation. After obtaining the quarantined evidence, and prior to any review, the attorney in question reviewed the quarantined evidence, withheld purported privileged material, and provided a privilege log to the government. However, the government is not aware of any involvement by the Defendant, or other putative privilege holders, in this prior review.

The devices are exceedingly likely to belong to Dan Richman, who is at least reported to be the person whom Comey is accused of authorizing to serve as an anonymous source in the indictment.

Indeed, the possibility that DOJ, under Bill Barr, seized a whole bunch of content from Richman explains something about the 2021 memo closing the investigation into Richman for leaking (which Comey likely received in unredacted form on Monday). One paragraph of the memo describes that Richman told the FBI that Comey had never asked him to talk to the media, followed by a two-paragraph redaction that must describe some reason why the FBI believed that to be false.

It was clear from the memo that the FBI obtained proof of what Richman said to Mike Schmidt, and while Barr tried to go after NYT directly for this investigation, they had limited success, so that evidence would have come from Richman. Plus, the closing memo is pretty clear that Richman was a confirming source for Schmidt (it says that the government has not previously charged people for being a confirming source, though I believe that’s inaccurate), which Richman admitted.

So if all those assumptions are correct, let’s consider what this motion for a filter protocol confesses.

First, prosecutors launched a bid to get access to this information to use at trial on the day that discovery was due, the day after Judge Nachmanoff ordered that all discovery be provided by October 13. They seem really unconcerned about how badly that will piss off Nachmanoff, which seems reckless.

The proposed filter itself is obnoxious in two ways. It proposes a team (which it says does not include EDVA or EDNC prosecutors, but does not address whether it includes prosecutors from WDVA or another of the far-flown parts of DOJ where Kash Patel has parked his witch hunt) will review the data for a set of narrow filter terms.

2 The Filter Team is comprised of Two Assistant United States Attorneys, and their support staff, from a separate federal district from the Eastern District of Virginia and the Eastern District of North Carolina. The Filter Team has a separate reporting and supervisory chain from the Prosecution Team and are not part of the Prosecution Team.

But aside from things explicitly marked privileged, they would get access to everything. Comey would only get a say over stuff triggered by those filter terms.

You can tell how unusual this protocol is for the citations — none of which is from EDVA, and only one of which is from the Fourth Circuit — the loaner AUSAs give to pretend it is not.

Of note, courts in the Fourth Circuit have entered similar protocols to the one proposed by the Filter Team in this case to handle the segregation and disclosure of PPM. See, e.g., United States v. Reifler, No. 1:20-cr-512-1, 2021 WL 2253134 (M.D.N.C. June 2, 2021).

Further, courts in other jurisdictions, including in the Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits, among others, have also entered similar protocols to the one proposed here. See, e.g., United States v. Farizani, No. 4:21-cr-62, ECF No. 153 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 16, 2024); United States v. Fletcher, No. 2:21-cr-64-DLB-CJS, 2022 WL 1118042 (E.D. Ky. Mar. 8, 2022); United States v. Siefert, No. 2:21-2-DLB-CJS, 2021 WL 3076940 (E.D. Ky. July 17, 2021); United States v. Salahaldeen, No. 3:20-cr-839, 2021 WL 2549197 (D.N.J. May 7, 2021); United States v. Lloyd and Strong, No. 9:25-cr-80015 (S.D. Fla.), United States v. Martinez and Vazquez, No. 24-cr20343, ECF No. 49 (S.D. Fla. Sep. 24, 2024); United States v. Blackman, No. 23-cr-20271, ECF No. 105 (S.D. Fla. Apr. 3, 2024); United States v. Waxman, No. 21-cr-60253, ECF No. 105 (Aug. 12, 2022).

These cases charged insurance fraud, healthcare fraud, distribution of controlled substances by a doctor, a combination of both fraud and controlled substance abuse, health care fraud, more healthcare fraud, and still more medicare fraud. They’re not only out of district, but inapt to this case.

They hide what prosecutors are probably attempting to do: to get to materials privileged to Richman in which he spoke about Comey.

This is something I predicted prosecutors would try to do in a post and video on the lessons from the Durham investigation. This is an attempt to use this proceeding to get to stuff privileged to Richman that they could use in their conspiracy fever dream.

The other reason this is wildly inappropriate goes to something Nachmanoff seems to be attentive to. As I noted, in his order approving Comey’s preferred protective order, Judge Nachmanoff noted that cases brought by Pat Fitzgerald, Robert Mueller, and under the supervision of Jack Smith did not adopt the punitive standard the Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s loaner AUSAs are attempting.

1 The Court observes that protective orders entered in numerous other high-profile false statements cases, within and outside of this judicial district, do not contain such limitations. See, e.g., Protective Order, United States v. McDonnell, et al., ECF 46, No. 3:14-cr-12-JRS (E.D. Va. Feb. 6, 2014); Protective Order, United States v. Kiriakou, ECF 32, No. 1:12-cr-127-LMB (E.D. Va. April 13, 2012); United States v. Libby, ECF 22, No. 1:05-cr-394-RBW (D.D.C. Nov. 23, 2005); Protective Order, United States v. Blagojevich, ECF 67, No. 1:08-cr-888-JBZ (N.D. Ill. April 14, 2009); Protective Order, United States v. Manafort, et al., ECF 46, No. 1:17-cr-201-ABJ (D.D.C. Nov. 15, 2017).

If one were to adopt the attorney-client review standards used in the Trump cases, the attorney in question — Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman, among others, in the Trump cases, and Richman here — would be involved to speak to their own privilege, a process which created months and months of delay. The loaner AUSAs are pretty transparently trying to find a way around that process.

For now, Comey is adopting a different approach. As prosecutors describe it, Comey plans to challenge the warrant accessing this data in the first place.

First, the defendant has not explicitly objected to the protocol. As the government understands it, the defense prefers to challenge the underlying search warrant first before any review takes place. This two-tiered process is unacceptable in the government’s view because it risks delay.

It makes sense. The closing document in the investigation into Richman found that there was not sufficient evidence to charge either Comey or Richman, including for the false statements with which Comey has now been charged.

The investigation has not yielded sufficient evidence to criminally charge any person, including Comey or Richman, with making false statements or with the substantive offenses under investigation.

Unlike grand juries (where we can assume Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer neglected to tell grand jurors about all the conclusions there was not evidence to charge this), affiants for warrants are required to tell judges of all material information, such as that prosecutors already decided there’s no crime here. This is what the entire stink about the Carter Page FISA warrants was about. And the only thing that has changed since FBI presumably obtained warrants for Richman’s devices in 2019 is that Richman testified, twice, that Comey didn’t order him to leak to the press, and also that three sets of prosecutors (including those who reviewed the material in 2019) concluded there was no crime they could charge.

So if whoever got a new warrant to access this material for use in this investigation failed to disclose the prior prosecutorial decisions, that would make for an easy Fourth Amendment challenge. (I would be unsurprised if agents in WDVA already accessed this material, using precisely this protocol, which is one reason I find the language excluding EDVA and EDNC from the filter team but not identifying who would conduct it suspect.)

But understand what else is going on. The loaner prosecutors say they need to use an inapt filter process that treats both Comey and Richman like fraudsters because allowing them to participate in the process — or even pausing for a Fourth Amendment challenge — “risks delay.” But this is EDVA, home of the rocket docket, and in EDVA, you don’t wait until after you’ve indicted to obtain material you think might be helpful to your case.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

As far as I understand the posture of this, unless Judge Nachmanoff orders differently, Comey will not have to respond to the October 13 request for two weeks — October 27, with a reply a week later, after all of Comey’s initial pretrial motions are submitted (he might file a Fourth Amendment challenge for the second deadline, October 30, or just file it on October 26).

Nachmanoff seems unimpressed by either this motion or the sealed filing.

Which is to say, unless something changes, this purported filter process wouldn’t even start for another month, resulting in the provision of any relevant materials to Comey months after the discovery deadline.

If this is a bid to access this material for this trial, it will likely fail. And, because this is EDVA, if that’s what prosecutors are trying, it may not work as well for investigators (including Jack Eckenrode, from John Durham’s team) as it did during the Michael Sussmann trial.

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