Now that Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick has ordered that prosecutors provide Jim Comey with the grand jury transcripts along with all the evidence they used in their latest filing (which they had not provided to Comey beforehand), let’s return to the saga of the missing grand jury transcripts, shall we? Because they get closer to implicating Pam Bondi in misleading the court.
As I laid out here, on October 28, Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ordered prosecutors to give her all the transcripts of Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s actions in the grand jury. On October 31, DOJ delivered a package to her. Yesterday, Judge Currie ordered prosecutors to deliver what she had actually asked for: “remarks made by the indictment signer both before and after the testimony of the sole witness” during the presentment of the indictment the jury accepted, as well as “transcripts regarding the presentation of the three-count indictment” that the grand jury no-billed.
“Upon receiving this order” (which would have been yesterday, November 4), according to a new filing from Tyler Lemons, “the government immediately contacted the transcription service and requested the complete recording.” And then “the government requested that the transcription service transcribe the entire recording, which had not been done previously.” It provided those materials, for the first time recording the things Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer had done in the grand jury — both during the presentment where the grand jury rejected one of the counts, and before and after the presentment where they approved the indictment — today.
But that means that when Attorney General Pam Bondi ratified what Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer had done on October 31 …
In addition, based on my review of the grand jury proceedings in United States v. Corney and United States v. James, I hereby exercise the authority vested in the Attorney General by law, including 28 U.S.C. § 509, 510, and 515, to ratify Ms. Halligan’s actions before the grand jury and her signature on the indictments by the grand jury in each case.
… (using the same transcripts that were delivered to Judge Currie), those transcripts didn’t reveal what Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer had done.
At all!
This means two things:
First, that Pam Bondi in fact has not ratified anything Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer did, because she could not have reviewed any of it. DOJ did not yet have the recording, much less a transcript.
And it means that Pam Bondi ratified what Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer did, seemingly seeing precisely what Judge Currie did: the transcripts actually excluded everything Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer had done.
Update: An interesting wrinkle. Normally it’d take a long time to drag someone in the AG’s vicinity to answer for these irregularities. But not so here. Henry Charles Whitaker has filed notices of appearances in both the Comey and James cases in advance of next week’s hearing on these challenges. He’s the former FL Solicitor General, now serving as Bondi’s Counselor. That may backfire.
Update: Journalists who were in Currie’s hearing today report that DOJ still didn’t give Judge Currie the entire transcripts. There was a several minute section missing!