Gabriel Diaz’ 14 Exhibits

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As I noted here, in a telephone hearing yesterday, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick ordered the government to provide him with the grand jury transcripts in the Jim Comey case, which he will review after reading an ex parte filing from Comey’s team laying out the unlawful evidence they suspect got presented to the grand jury.

Loaner AUSA Gabriel Diaz may have helped them write that memo by confirming there were 14 exhibits presented to the grand jury.

His claim — that there were 14 exhibits — may not be entirely true.

I say that because that number — 14 — matches the number of exhibits included in last week’s response to Comey’s vindictive prosecution claim (the reply to which Comey submitted yesterday, which I’ll return to). The exhibits posted to docket last week, which all include exhibit tags, consist of the following:

This order would suggest they laid out the evidence that Comey lied, focusing heavily on the 2016 exchange (the only one from when Richman was at the FBI), and presenting Comey’s April 23, 2017 thank you email to Richman ahead of Richman’s February 11, 2017 recruitment of Chuck Rosenberg, possibly creating the misimpression that Comey asked for Richman to weigh in on what became the April 2017 story.

Then they presented the Comey memo exchange (Exhibits 10 and 11), and the “Clinton Plan” (Exhibits 12-14). As presented, they did not present the “Clinton plan” referral itself to the grand jury (which might have made it even more apparent that Lindsey was not asking about what Comey’s notes laid out).

There must be at least one more exhibit as presented for the indictment the grand jury approved. As laid out here, the grand jury was not shown how Comey responded to Ted Cruz’ question (to say nothing of Chuck Grassley’s question on which Cruz’ question was based). That is, as laid out here, prosecutors did not include the exhibit that laid out the one lie actually charged.

There must be a video or something — though I find it interesting that they didn’t provide a transcript of Cruz’ question (if they didn’t), since he garbled it about ten different ways.

There are three other questions this exhibit list raises for me.

First, one concern Comey’s attorneys have is the treatment of the materials obtained with a second warrant for Dan Richman’s Columbia emails  — presumably the source of Exhibits 4-9.

What’s interesting is the Bates stamps for those are inconsistent. The earlier set are marked with a Richman Bates stamp.

The two later ones, including the one from the same Jim Comey ReinholdNiebuhr7 alias Gmail, have COLUM Bates stamps.

That suggests those two sets of communications were treated differently. Possibly, the earlier one was part of Richman’s privilege log.

The Bates stamps on the texts between Richman and Mike Schmidt also raise questions, because there’s no source of any kind noted (or if there is, it is redacted), just a series starting with 4801.

Given some of the other details we’ve learned: that all the Feebs involved in this report directly to Kash Patel, that the agent who read the attorney-client privileged text was reading the entire Cellebrite extraction of Richman’s phone — that is, without privileged texts removed — it raises real questions about whether some other team provided them, a team with its own (obscured) Bates stamp.

Worse still, the one of the two agents who read the privileged text attested that he only handed Miles Starr two pages of texts, all dated May 11.

SA Warren provided the indictment preparation team a two-page document containing limited text message content only from May 11, 2017, predating the reference to potential future legal representation.

But the exhibit is eight pages long!

Having been told there was privileged communication there and shielded from it, someone went back to those texts to get more of them, to present them to the grand jury. And that same someone led the Loaner AUSAs to believe that sharing the Comey memos after consulting with attorneys was a crime.

Effectively, SA Warren has reported a crime committed by his superiors, the willful violation of Jim Comey’s privilege.

Which is undoubtedly why James Hayes is so intent on letting the FBI lead a privilege review.

Finally, one more thing. Remember how weird the no-billed indictment is, which I laid out here?

The indictment the grand jury approved charged Comey with lying to Ted Cruz (as Diaz would have it, without being shown what that lie is), and obstructing a Congressional proceeding, “by making false and misleading statements before that committee.”

The exhibit list makes clear that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer did shoehorn the no-billed charge into the obstruction charge, presumably treating questions about the Comey memos and “Clinton plan” — the only things in the indictment that were material to the scope of the hearing — as “misleading” rather than “false” statements. Last week, Pat Fitzgerald had said they were going to raise concerns about that this week, but they may be waiting to get that grand jury transcript.

Now go back and look at how that obstruction charges looks in the no-billed (top) and approved (bottom) indictment.

Update: As Amicus12 points out below, sometime within a day or so of the indictment, this error got fixed. Here’s what the fixed document looks like:

It is increasingly clear that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer literally replaced what would have been Count Three of the no-billed indictment with Count Two of the approved indictment. That explains why that page has:

  • Staple and scan marks matching the real indictment
  • The numbering from the second indictment (these paragraphs should be numbered 7 and 8 in the no-billed indictment)
  • Both the signature of the foreperson (note the part of a signature that crosses into the “U” of the True Bill line) and Lindsey herself on that page

She simply swapped the page.

There’s good reason to ask whether she wasn’t just being dumb and inexperienced (which is what it looked like in the 7-minute hearing with the judge), but was also being deceitful.

For example, it’s possible that the original indictment charged Comey with obstructing the Senate’s investigation only by making false statements, but in a bid to get the material things in there pertinent to the larger investigation, the “Clinton plan” and the Comey memos, Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer added the word “misleading” to lower the bar to get a vote from the grand jurors.

It’s unclear whether Fitzpatrick will or can review some of these issues. He’s scrutinizing the indictment for unlawful and privileged exhibits. That also might explain why Diaz tried hard to prevent Comey from providing a list of things to look for.

The unlawful exhibits are bad enough. But there seems to be worse still.

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Kash Patel’s Plot Against Jim Comey Thickens!

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The two sides have submitted additional filings in advance of a hearing about the attorney-client and Fourth Amendment violations in the Jim Comey case:

 

The government claims that Comey hasn’t demonstrated a need to see what happened in the grand jury because there’s no way any privileged or Fourth Amendment violative material was presented, and even if it were, that would be insufficient to dismiss the indictment, which is the standard.

Even assuming the defendant could prove that the government violated the Fourth Amendment or attorney-client privilege in its grand jury presentation (and to be clear, he cannot), the remedy would be to suppress that evidence at trial—not to dismiss the indictment. So, the defendant has not shown that “a ground may exist to dismiss the indictment because of a matter that occurred before the grand jury.” Fed. R. Crim. P. 6(e)(3)(E)(ii). He is not entitled to access grand jury material.

There are problems with both these claims.

First, Miles Starr was briefed orally on the comms between Dan Richman and Mike Schmidt and Jim Comey the morning of the grand jury presentment. Then, the FBI Agent who was tainted provided a written document that only covered stuff on May 11.

On the morning of September 25, 2025, the team was preparing for an indictment of James Comey, to occur later that afternoon. SA Warren provided case agent SA Miles Starr and an FBI Office of General Counsel (OGC) attorney a limited overview of the text message communications to and from “Michael Garcia” (now understood to be Daniel Richman). SA Warren advised SA Starr and the FBI OGC attorney that some of the messages appeared to reference potential future legal representation. The FBI OGC attorney immediately advised that any of the text message communications referencing potential future legal representation should not be part of the indictment preparation. SA Warren provided the indictment preparation team a two-page document containing limited text message content only from May 11, 2017, predating the reference to potential future legal representation.

But DOJ itself recognizes that anything after May 9, the day Comey was fired, may be privileged.

4 The defendant was removed as FBI Director on May 9, 2017. He told the Office of Inspector General that “the day after his removal, or ‘very shortly thereafter,’ he retained attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald, David Kelley, and Daniel Richman.” Dkt. No. 138-11 at 33 (Aug. 2019 Office of the Inspector General Report). Any claim of privilege involving those attorneys would necessarily arise after May 9, 2017.

So they took insufficient steps to prevent taint of the grand jury, because materials between Richman and Comey from May 9 and 10 may well be privileged.

Even if that were sufficient, there’s no reason why communications between Comey and Richman in May could be deemed relevant to the grand jury. That’s because he admitted sharing information with Richman back in 2017. He didn’t hide it from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Meanwhile, the government has no fucking clue whether it presented other Fourth Amendment violative content to the Grand Jury. They confessed last night, days after telling Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick they had complied with his order to provide this information, that they had no fucking clue whether they were looking at data that included both scoped and unscoped content (though this passage suggests that the materials obtained from Columbia, which includes the only material that remotely matches the first charge, with the second warrant were scoped).

5 The Order also required the government to provide, in writing, by the same deadline: “Confirmation of whether the Government has divided the materials searched pursuant to the four 2019 and 2020 warrants at issue into materials that are responsive and non-responsive to those warrants, and, if so, a detailed explanation of the methodology used to make that determination; A detailed explanation of whether, and for what period of time, the Government has preserved any materials identified as non-responsive to the four search warrants; A description identifying which materials have been identified as responsive, if any; and A description identifying which materials have previously been designated as privileged.” ECF No. 161 at 1-2.

Despite certifying on November 6 that it had complied with the Court’s Order, ECF No. 163, the government did not provide this information until the evening of November 9, 2025, in response to a defense inquiry. The government told the defense that it “does not know” whether there are responsive sets for the first, third, and fourth warrants, or whether it has produced those to the defense, and said that in that regard, “we are still pulling prior emails” and the “agent reviewed the filtered material through relativity but there appears to be a loss of data that we are currently trying to restore.”

Remember, this entire investigation started when Kash discovered documents that had been handled improperly. And now, because these documents have been handled improperly, his own team has been violating Jim Comey’s Fourth Amendment rights.

There are several more alarming details in today’s filings. First, both FBI agents exposed to tainted information (in addition to Miles Starr, from whom DOJ didn’t bother to obtain an affidavit, and who has not been withdrawn from this or any other investigative teams) are part of the Director’s Advisory Team, meaning they work directly for Kash Patel.

The agent who first saw the privileged material claims:

  • They didn’t know who Michael Garcia was (a pseudonym Richman used for these communications), but nevertheless reviewed them as part of a search for communications between Comey and Richman
  • They were handed the entire extraction of Dan Richman’s devices, suggesting it did not extract the privilege reviewed content

Indeed, the materials DOJ provided Comey — the ones they had been accessing — had not been filtered for privilege or responsiveness.

4 On November 6, 2025, the government produced various copies of what appear to be the raw returns for the search warrants at issue, unscoped for responsiveness and filtered for Mr. Richman’s privileges. But the government provided incorrect passwords to large subsets of those materials. The defense engaged a vendor who worked throughout the weekend to load and process those materials; the government provided the correct passwords on November 9, 2025.

Effectively, Kash has been investigating Comey using a general warrant on his friend Dan Richman.

It’s not just Kash and his personal squad of Jim Comey hunters who’ve violated Comey’s Fourth Amendment rights, Comey’s filing suggests.

Pam Bondi’s imagined “ratification” of the grand jury proceedings — the ones based on incomplete records — would have exposed her, too, to unlawful material.

2 Concerns about taint arising from the improper use of potentially privileged and unconstitutionally-obtained materials are heightened because of the government’s continued use of the materials obtained pursuant to the warrants and grand jury transcripts. On October 31, 2025, the Attorney General purported to ratify the indictment based on her review of the grand jury proceedings. ECF No. 137-1 at 2-3. If that review entailed further improper use of privileged or unconstitutionally-obtained materials insofar as they were presented to the grand jury, it casts further doubt on the propriety of the government’s conduct of this case. The government produced the grand jury materials on November 5, 2025 to Judge Currie for in camera review, and thus could quickly produce the same materials to the defense. See ECF No. 158.

The Loaner AUSAs are trying to cut their losses, by asking Fitzpatrick to conduct a review of the grand jury materials himself — no doubt to prevent Comey from using grand jury material in his challenge of these warrants, which is currently due on November 19.

But there’s virtually no way he would be able to figure out if Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer presented material that violated Comey’s Fourth Amendment rights.

This should all be sorted out at a hearing at 4PM ET.

Update: Fitzpatrick came in ready to accept the government’s request he review this in camera. But after it became clear he would not budge on that, Rebekah Donaleski asked to submit something ex parte tomorrow to lay out where they believe the violations are.

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An awkward picture of Eagle Ed Martin and Lindsey Halligan posing in his office.

Letitia James Highlights Eagle Ed Martin Just Before He Goes on a Conspiratorial Rant

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Vindictive and selective prosecution cases are always nearly impossible to win, because of how narrowly the precedent draws the analysis. To prove vindictive prosecution, the defendant has to prove that the prosecutor who made a charging decision harbored animus to the defendant.

But of course, in Jim Comey and Letitia James’ case, the playacting prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, is just doing what her boss installed her to do. She didn’t act out of animus towards Comey and James, except insofar as such animus is a litmus test for belonging in Trump’s tribe (though her brief stint at the Smithsonian also exposed her as a dumb bigot, which could be relevant in James’ case). She acted out of a corrupt willingness to do anything her boss tells her to do.

Here’s how Lindsey’s Loaner AUSAs argued that Comey had not met that standard in their response to his vindictive and selective prosecution motion.

To start, the relevant analysis is whether the “prosecutor charging” the offense “harbored vindictive animus.” Wilson, 262 F.3d at 316; see United States v. Gomez-Lopez, 62 F.3d 304, 306 (9th Cir. 1995) (noting that the focus “is on the ultimate decision-maker”). Here, that prosecutor is the U.S. Attorney. Yet the defendant doesn’t present any evidence that she harbors animus against him. Instead, he says that he doesn’t need any such evidence because his claim “turns on the animus harbored by the official who prompted the prosecution.” See Def. Mem., Dkt. No. 59 at 21. And, according to him, that is the President. See id. As discussed below, the President does not harbor vindictive animus against the defendant in the relevant sense. Before reaching that issue, however, the Court should determine whether the defendant has offered sufficient evidence to find that the President displaced the U.S. Attorney as “the ultimate decision-maker” in bringing this prosecution. See Gomez-Lopez, 62 F.3d at 304. The only “direct evidence” on the issue says otherwise. See Wilson, 262 F.3d at 314.

The defendant’s argument relies on the imputed-animus theory. The Fourth Circuit has never adopted that theory. In fact, when a defendant asked the Fourth Circuit to impute animus from investigating law-enforcement agents, the Fourth Circuit categorically rejected the theory. See United States v. Hastings, 126 F.3d 310, 314 (4th Cir. 1997) (“We will not impute the unlawful biases of the investigating agents to the persons ultimately responsible for the prosecution.”); see also United States v. Cooper, 617 F. App’x 249, 251 (4th Cir. 2015). That is consistent with other circuits’ application of the theory in that context. See, e.g., United States v. Gilbert, 266 F.3d 1180, 1187 (9th Cir. 2001) (“In all but the most extreme cases, it is only the biases and motivations of the prosecutor that are relevant.”); United States v. Spears, 159 F.3d 1081, 1087 (7th Cir. 1998).

When courts have entertained the imputed-animus theory in other contexts, they have required a significant evidentiary showing: there must be “evidence that the federal prosecutor did not make the ultimate decision to bring the indictment.” Spears, 159 F.3d at 1087.

It is true that Comey and James (in a filing submitted Friday) both did ultimately say Trump ordered up their prosecutions, relying heavily on his tweet ordering Pam Bondi to install Lindsey Halligan to do so.

But they took a different approach in laying out the weaponization of DOJ. Comey, relying on a 60-page exhibit of Trump tweets to demonstrate the President’s animus, focused relentlessly on Trump. He didn’t even mention the now-FBI Director’s equally rabid animus.

Tish James had her exhibit showing how obsessively Trump hates her too; it includes not just tweets, but also speeches, and at 113 pages is almost twice as long as Comey’s exhibit.

But James also focused on the way the Trump Administration, more generally, has been (literally) stalking her, notably in the form of Eagle Ed Martin, as well as Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, and Bill Pulte (this section is where James includes the Reuters report about firing the FHFA IG to prevent him from sharing information with prosecutors; that footnote and others are at the bottom of this page).

AG Bondi took the President’s mission to heart, and on the first day of her appointment, established DOJ’s “Weaponization Working Group,” with the stated objective to examine “[f]ederal cooperation with the weaponization” by “New York Attorney General Letitia James” to “target President Trump, his family and his businesses,” among other top priorities. 15 Ex. C. The goal was to retaliate against the President’s perceived political enemies, including AG James.

In March, President Trump also issued a Presidential Memorandum, “Rescinding Security Clearances and Access to Classified Information from Specified Individuals,” specifically calling out AG James, claiming “it is no longer in the national interest” for her, along with fourteen of his other perceived political opponents, to have a security clearance or access classified information. Ex. D.

The retribution campaign against AG James had only just begun. Around the same time, another federal agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), led by Director William Pulte, was also looking for dirt to use against AG James. By April 14, they had concocted it. Mr. Pulte delivered a criminal referral “[b]ased on media reports” to DOJ against AG James, claiming she had “in multiple instances, falsified bank documents and property records to acquire government backed assistance and loans and more favorable loan terms.” Ex. F at 1. The criminal referral cherry-picked documents to claim fraud over three properties—one even going back to 1983—none of which was the Peronne Property at issue in the indictment.16 The referral asked DOJ to open a criminal investigation into AG James. See Ex. F at 1. Mr. Pulte also coordinated with Edward Martin—the self-described “captain” of DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group who is President Trump’s close confidante and would later also be named a Special Attorney.17 Reporting even indicates that President Trump had been bypassing his senior DOJ lead regularly telephoning Martin for updates on his work, leaving [DAG Todd] Blanche ‘frustrated and annoyed,’” according to sources.18

Standing outside the White House on the day the referral was released, one of the President’s aides, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, told reporters AG James “is one of the most corrupt, shameless individuals ever to hold public office” and “is guilty of multiple, significant, serial criminal violations” for having “persecute[d] an innocent man,” referring to President Trump.19 President Trump also did not withhold his views about FHFA’s criminal referral to DOJ, attacking AG James directly in several social media posts discussing the referral:

Turns out you can’t have your principal residence in Virginia and be AG of New York. You can’t say your dad’s your husband. Or claim a five-unit is a four. But that’s what Letitia James did—while going after Trump for the same thing. You’ve got to be kidding me

Ex. A. at No. 334;

Letitia James, a totally corrupt politician, should resign from her position as New York State Attorney General, IMMEDIATELY. Everyone is trying to MAKE NEW YORK GREAT AGAIN, and it can never be done with this wacky crook in office.

Id. at No. 333.

On the heels of the referral to DOJ, in May, Mr. Martin admitted that he planned to use his authority to expose and discredit opponents of the President whom he believes to be guilty. 20 He made plain that it did not matter if there were no facts to back up President Trump’s accusations or even if a charge had no merit: “If they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, there should be people that are shamed.”21 Discussing targets for criminal investigation, Martin stated that the Weaponization Working Group’s prerogative included “Letitia James.”22

And to support this additional prong of animus, James included a second, 12-page exhibit, which includes (among other things), all the creepy pictures Eagle Ed has posted of himself stalking James, including pictures showing him reviewing files with Halligan just before she indicted James or just randomly chatting up someone at FHFA.

It also documents Eagle Ed’s juvenile trolling on Xitter.

It may be an awkward time, for Eagle Ed, to have such a focus on his trollish obsessions.

That’s because he is currently involved in equally pathetic troll campaign targeting a woman that right wing nutjobs have decided must be the Pipe Bomber based off gait analysis — I guess they’ll get around to using phrenology? — and their dislike of how she testified against Guy Reffitt, the first Jan6er to go to trial.

Anna Bower has been spending her weekend documenting how Eagle Ed first posts, then deletes, tweets trying to gin up the frothy mob. In the first such instance, someone — maybe Todd Blanche — made Eagle Ed affirmatively deny the gait-analysis claims as a “fake.”

These tweets show not just that a key cog in the James prosecution — the guy who accepted allegations from Bill Pulte and then ferried them to the woman playacting as US Attorney — is a wild conspiracy theorist happy to magnify any kind of bullshit he gets from frothy right wingers, but also that some babysitter at DOJ knows he is, and is attempting to rein him in.

I’m not sure whether Comey’s more focused approach or James’ wholistic one works better. Given that prosecutors dismissed Comey’s comparators because none had precisely the same role he once did, he certainly has an opportunity to use the opening memo that Tyler Lemons submitted last week which led to these charges to show that the current FBI Director lied his ass off to the Senate Judiciary Committee when he told Mazie Hirono that he had no intention of revisiting history to prosecute Comey.

Senator Hirono (02:18:49):

Do you plan to investigate James Comey, who’s on your list?

Kash Patel (02:18:54):

I have no intentions of going backwards-

The opening memo shows that Kash wasted no time in doing just that — not just chasing the John Durham prosecution predicated of Russian disinformation, but putting Durham’s wildly-conflicted lead investigator in charge, literally finding a lame excuse to revisit the Durham investigation.

The broad or narrow scope may not matter. Indeed, unless the cases get dismissed because Lindsey was just playacting as US Attorney, there’s a non-zero chance these arguments will be appealed through the Fourth Circuit together, which is presumably why Comey had loaded his team with appellate lawyers and scores of people are submitting amicus briefs.

These vindictive and selective prosecution arguments may make new precedent, about whether the President can repurpose the Department of Justice to prioritize jailing his political adversaries.

But Eagle Ed has now made clear that one element of that repurposed DOJ is seizing and stoking baseless conspiracy theories to rile up the base.

15 Ryan Lucas, New attorney general moves to align Justice Department with Trump’s priorities, NPR (Feb. 5, 2025), https://perma.cc/WLU8-FPBL.

16 Mr. Pulte’s conduct demonstrates how far allies of the President would go to carry out his “get James” orders. Public reports indicate that Mr. Pulte “skipped over his agency’s inspector general when making criminal referrals” against President Trump’s political enemies. Reports also indicate he may have bypassed ethics rules in doing so. Marisa Taylor & Chris Prentice, Exclusive: Trump official bypassed ethics rules in criminal referrals of Fed governor and other foes, sources say, Reuters (Oct. 6, 2025), https://perma.cc/HK6Y-LJVR. The FHFA has no generalized crimefighting or anti-fraud authority. It does not even have an express authority to make criminal referrals besides those granted to the FHFA’s Inspector General under the Inspector General Act of 1978. In addition to violations of the act itself, Mr. Pulte may have failed to comply with the FHFA’s own Privacy Act regulations, which require FHFA to “ensure” that records containing personally identifiable information are “protected from public view.” Domenic Powell, Are Pulte’s “Mortgage Fraud” Investigations Legal?, Yale J. Reg.: Notice and Comment (Nov. 1, 2025), https://perma.cc/2U6G-S46X.

17 Alan Feuer et al., Trump Demands That Bondi Move ‘Now’ to Prosecute Foes, N.Y. Times (Sept. 20, 2025), https://perma.cc/FC9R-U8TK.

18 Andrew Feinberg, Trump ally probing rivals’ ‘mortgage fraud’ speaks directly with the president – and skips typical DOJ hierarchy, The Independent (Aug. 29, 2025), https://perma.cc/4LXUUUAC.

19 Statement of Stephen Miller, White House Homeland Security Adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, to Reporters outside the White House (Apr. 18, 2025), https://perma.cc/9X5GX7YB (emphasis added).

20 U.S. Attorney Ed Martin Holds News Conference, C-SPAN (May 13, 2025), https://www.cspan.org/program/news-conference/us-attorney-ed-martin-holds-news-conference/659817.

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Spill! The EDVA Case against Jim Comey Could Well Harm the Even More Corrupt SDFL Case

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It looks increasingly likely that because someone snuck a peek into Jim Comey’s privileged communications — or, because Tyler Lemons cares enough about his bar license that he disclosed that someone snuck a peek into Comey’s privileged communications — Comey may get a ruling that the government violated his Fourth Amendment rights, throwing out some of the material used in the government’s filing laying out the theory of their case.

The exhibits to that filing which were seized from Dan Richman include a bunch of communications sent from two different Columbia University emails, as well as texts sent on Richman’s phone.

  • January 2, 2015: Letter stating that Richman would not comment on matters he “work[s] on for the Bureau” [1st Columbia email]
  • October 29, 2016: Text saying, “The country can’t seem to handle your finding stuff” [2nd Columbia email]
  • October 30, 2016: Richman offering to write an op-ed for NYT [2nd Columbia email]
  • November 1-2, 2016: Comey suggests perhaps Richman can make Mike Schmidt smarter [2nd Columbia email]
  • November 2, 2016: Richman noting story about Hillary [2nd Columbia email]
  • February 11, 2017: Richman recruiting Chuck Rosenberg for article [1st Columbia email]
  • April 23, 2017: Email to Richman thanking him [Columbia email]
  • May 2017: Texts between Schmidt and Richman [Dan Richman’s phone]

As Rebekah Donaleski described the warrants in Wednesday’s hearing, the Columbia emails likely came from a warrant served on the university in October 2019, whereas the texts should have only been available via the fourth warrant on Richman’s phone, but as I’ll show, may have instead come from unlawful searches from the hard drive seized with the first warrant in August 2019.

  • August 29, 2019: FBI seizes Richman’s hard drive. The government does a privilege review of that, not Richman.
  • October 2019: FBI obtains emails from Columbia. Richman withheld privileged or sensitive (from students), but conducted no responsiveness review.
  • January 2020: FBI obtains Richman’s iCloud. His attorney did a privilege review. The warrant specifically said it could not seize privileged material.
  • June 4, 2020: FBI gets warrants to access iPhone and iCloud back-ups on the original hard drive.

The arguably legal emails don’t prove DOJ’s case

Aside from the fact that the FBI accessed them without a warrant tailored to the current investigation, the two bolded emails were clearly responsive to the investigation into whether Richman leaked the SVR materials in advance of the April 22, 2017 story about them. But as I noted here, they don’t help the government prove that Comey lied to Ted Cruz about authorizing Richman, while he was at FBI, to be an anonymous source for a story about the Hillary investigation because:

  • There’s no evidence of Comey’s involvement in the story in advance
  • The emails unquestionably post-date Richman’s departure from FBI (Anna Bower expanded on the work I did to show that Richman was arguably never formally “at FBI” in this period)
  • Richman was a named source in the story

The January 2, 2015 email might be legal, but who cares? It doesn’t help the government’s case at all (and most likely was used to mislead grand jurors about the time frame of Richman’s relationship with the FBI).

The emails that come closest to proving the government’s case may be out of scope

It’s less clear whether the emails from fall 2016 — the ones that best match the theory of the case — should have been accessible to investigators for the investigation into whether Comey lied to Ted Cruz. That’s because — at least per a November 22, 2019 interview — Richman didn’t learn about the SVR emails until January 2017.

According to Richman, he and Comey had a private conversation in Comey’s office in January 2017. The conversation pertained to Comey’s decision to make a public statement on the Midyear Exam investigation. Comey told Richman the tarmac meeting between Lynch and Clinton was not the only reason which played into Comey’s statement on the Midyear Exam investigation. According to Richman, Comey told Richman of Lynch’s characterization of the investigation as a “matter” and not that of an investigation. Richman recalled Comey told him there was some weird classified material related to Lynch which came to the FBI’s attention. Comey did not fully explain the details of the information. Comey told Richman about the Classified Information, including the source of the information. Richman understood the information could be used to suggest Lynch might not be impartial with regards of the conclusion of the Midyear Exam investigation. Richman understood the information about Lynch was highly classified and it should be protected. Richman was an SGE at the time of the meeting.

Nothing in the hearing on Wednesday describes the date scope of the warrants. But immediately after she described this warrant, Doneleski raised doubts about whether the Columbia emails had been reviewed for responsiveness, with non-responsive emails sealed.

As Your Honor is aware, each of these warrants require the government to conduct a responsiveness review and then seal and not review the nonresponsive set. I don’t know if that happened here, and Mr. Lemons didn’t describe whether the government created a responsive set.

[snip]

MS. DONALESKI: Judge, the government provided us with affidavits describing what happened; and from the affidavits, it sounds like the agents accessed the filtered returns, meaning both the nonresponsive and responsive set, because Mr. Richman’s counsel and Columbia did not conduct a responsiveness review. If that is indeed what they accessed, for the reasons we set forward in our papers, that clearly violates the Fourth Amendment because the government cannot then go back into a nonresponsive set that has not been identified responsive and continue searching pursuant to stale warrants for separate offenses.

If these emails were out of scope according to the 2019 warrants, then they should be sealed, inaccessible to anyone.

The privileged material was prohibited under the previous warrants

Tyler Lemons tried to excuse an agent for having read privileged communications by explaining that in those communications, Dan Richman used the name Michael Garcia.

MR. LEMONS: I don’t know the status — I don’t know if the team knew the status of their relationship. The other complicating factor, Your Honor — and we have two affidavits here that we’ve provided to the defense, and we have copies for the Court as well if you’d like to review it — one of the issues was the conversation that was being reviewed, the telephone name associated with one of the participants was Michael Garcia. And so it wasn’t as if the agent went in reviewing a conversation between James — the defendant and Daniel Richman; it was a conversation between the defendant and Michael Garcia. And so at a certain point, the agent began to understand the topics and the kind of factual — the history of the case; came to the conclusion that Michael Garcia looks like it’s actually Daniel Richman under a pseudonym or whatever it is. And at that point, it kind of brought into focus what, potentially, the conversations that the agent was looking at could be pertaining to.

That’s the name Richman used in texts exchanged with Mike Schmidt about the memo Comey had documenting Trump asking to let the Mike Flynn case go and because of timing — Richman only formally represented Comey after he was fired on May 9 — it’s likely the privileged stuff is the counterpart to this discussion.

It’s unclear whether these texts would have been in scope for the Arctic Haze investigation. In addition to the leak crime, 18 USC 793, the government also investigated using government materials, 18 USC 641, converting government records for personal use. In an interrupted comment, Lemons claimed it was responsive, which it might have been to that second crime. Donaleski wondered how the government filed them if they paused all review.

The government filed, on Monday, text message chats that came from the Arctic Haze warrants.

The question is how privileged texts between Richman and Comey were available in the first place. Lemons blamed the review Richman did.

MR. LEMONS: It would appear that he was — I don’t know for sure, Your Honor, but my assumption and based on him raising his hand on this, is that he was reviewing material that had not been filtered by Daniel Richman or his attorneys.

But given Donaleski’s mention of that original warrant, the one for which Richman did not do a filter, I wonder if DOJ got unfiltered content by accessing the unfiltered backup (which is effectively how prosecutors got the most damning texts used against Hunter Biden at his trial).

However investigators got to the privileged texts, it doesn’t fix the problem because they still accessed stuff from Comey before he had had an ability to make privilege determinations. And Donaleski argued anything privilege was not permitted to be seized, so anything reviewed now would be unlawful.

the warrants themselves specify that the government could only seize non-privileged materials

[snip]

MS. DONALESKI: And so to the extent the government now wants to look at materials that Mr. Richman’s counsel identified as privileged, those were never within the scope of the warrants, so they were never properly seized by the government, so no one can look at those materials. They weren’t seized five years ago. The government’s filter team didn’t challenge those designations, so no one can look at them. There’s no case law that says the government can go back five years later under stale warrants for separate offenses to look at things that were not seized five years ago.

Here’s where things get interesting, though.

The Comey memos are unresponsive to this investigation

Comey’s team has until the 19th to submit a Fourth Amendment challenge to this material. I imagine their argument may include the privilege problem and the responsiveness problem.

But then there’s the issue of proving that these texts are relevant to this investigation.

The Comey memos are undoubtedly responsive to the conspiracy conspiracy Trump is attempting to put together in Florida. This entire privilege effort seems to be an effort to clean up the material for the other investigation, not this one (which may be why James Hayes is on all the most important filings in this fight). The Florida case seems focused on claiming that by releasing the memo with the intent of precipitating a Special Counsel investigation, Comey unfairly harmed Trump.

But to argue these texts are responsive to this investigation, prosecutors would have to claim that they’re still relevant even after Comey admitted he had shared the memo via Richman, way back in 2017. Republicans have known that detail for years. His public admission of that fact is central to their claim that Trump had legitimate cause to worry about Comey leaking.

But to make that claim, they have to rely on the same false claim prosecutors (one of the filings that metadata attributes to James Hayes) made last month: that the act of sharing a memo that Comey understood to be unclassified was a criminal leak. (Starting in 2020, the government began to have problems charging 18 USC 641 in this context and precedent may rule it out any longer.)

That is, if prosecutors have to get a warrant for this material, it’s not clear they could get one for the EDVA case. If they tried for the Florida case, it could well blow up that case.

This whole effort started when, in the wake of the taint, prosecutors decided to use this case to quickly force though access to the privileged texts they saw. But thus far, the effort may make it harder to access material for both this case and that one.

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As Spacemen Stalk Jim Comey, Loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons Doxed Him

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On October 20, in response to a Gateway Pundit article reporting on Judge Michael Nachmanoff’s decision not to accelerate the government’s bid for a privilege review, a guy writing under the moniker Spaceman Chuck claimed “we already have a team on” making sure that Comey “go[es] down” if he is not convicted.

A month earlier, in response to John Brennan’s criticism of the Comey indictment, Spaceman Chuck commented that their safety is not guaranteed.

As CourtWatch reported, Spaceman Chuck, AKA Greg Formicone, was arrested Wednesday for these threats, as well as others targeting Letitia James (also in response to a Judge’s decision) and Hunter Biden.

That very same day, in a hearing regarding the very same topic as that Gateway Pundit article — that is, the government’s bid to breach Jim Comey’s privileged communications — there was an exchange that hinted at how Loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons had made it easier for nutjobs like Spaceman Chuck.

Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick started the hearing by discussing warrants used to seize material from Dan Richman over five years ago. He asked whether the original warrants could be unsealed.

Rebekah Donaleski, representing Comey, asked to be able to propose redactions before the warrants are unsealed. She explained they were primarily hoping to seal things like email addresses.

THE COURT: Are your redactions simply limited to PII information or are they substantive in nature?

MS. DONALESKI: We expect that it will be primarily PII information or things of that nature, so email addresses, ID numbers, things —

But those kinds of things, Fitzpatrick noted, are already required to be sealed under court rules.

THE COURT: Anything like that, under court rules, are already going to be sealed. So anything having to do with emails, phone numbers, anything like that is never going to be unsealed with respect to this. But with respect to any of the substantive information, the more factual information, do you still want a chance to review that?

In a follow-up, Donaleski suggested that “the government has a different position” on whether those things are PII.

MS. DONALESKI: We would appreciate that. And, Your Honor, with respect to the PII, I understand the government has a different position on what is PII, so I appreciate Your Honor’s view that email addresses and phone numbers should be redacted as PII.

Lemons responded by suggesting that phone numbers and email addresses are not PII under Local Rules (which will surely go over well with Fitzpatrick).

There was basically a discussion between Defense and the government as exactly what is required to be redact — what is considered PII under Local Rule 47 and then the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 49, and telephone numbers and email addresses are not considered that, but per the Defense’s request, when they requested us to redact that information, we did make that redaction, and we think that is the appropriate way to proceed going forward to make sure both parties are having a collegial conversation and redacting what needs to be redacted; and if there are any lingering issues that remain after that, it’s something appropriately brought to the Court prior to anything being filed on the docket.

Neither Donaleski nor Lemons mentioned what this discussion about PII referenced. But it is undoubtedly a reference to the way Lemons released exhibits in support of a filing earlier that week, leaving email addresses and phone numbers unredacted. Even after the first round of redactions, a phone number for Comey remained unredacted (it has since been redacted), though well before Comey and Richman’s PII was redacted, prosecutors had redacted an FBI email.

I’m fairly certain the threats from Forticone were nowhere near the first credible threats targeting Comey. Yet instead of minimizing such a threat, Lemons fueled it.

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May This Week Be a Pivot

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I just wanted to share three lists I’ve made about this week so far.

Wednesday’s hearings

The first was about the range and magnitude of hearings on Wednesday.

4 court hearings today:

1) Review of Trump’s tariffs in SCOTUS

2) Hearing on FBI’s review of Jim Comey material w/o new warrant

3) Closing arguments and deliberation for sandwich guy in DC

4) Preliminary injunction hearing for CBP/ICE invasion of Chicago, featuring Greg Bovino vids

As I noted here, not only did it sound like there are at least five votes to throw out Trump’s tariffs, Neil Gorsuch also said some important things about whether Congress can abdicate its power to declare war.

The Comey hearing did not go well for the government. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick ordered the government to hand over everything by end of day yesterday, to load up the grand jury transcripts to the docket, and to answer a bunch of questions.

ORDERED that, by 5:00 p.m. on November 6, 2025, the Government shall produce to Defendant, in writing, the following information:

  • Confirmation of whether the Government has divided the materials searched pursuant to the four 2019 and 2020 warrants at issue into materials that are responsive and non-responsive to those warrants, and, if so, a detailed explanation of the methodology used to make that determination;
  • A detailed explanation of whether, and for what period of time, the Government has preserved any materials identified as non-responsive to the four search warrants;
  • A description identifying which materials have been identified as responsive, if any; and
  • A description identifying which materials have previously been designated as privileged; and it is further

Fitzpatrick also forbade the government — which should apply both to this investigative team and the one trying to do the conspiracy against rights case in Florida — from searching the materials.

The government filed a notice of compliance, noting Fitzpatrick’s written order was filed just after noon, confirming it had handed him the materials, but not confirming that they had explained the scope and filter questions.

1 The Order at D.E. 161 was received via CM/ECF at 12:13 p.m. on November 6, 2025.

But after that, they filed an appeal of Fitzpatrick’s order to load the grand jury transcript that claimed Fitzpatrick had not filed a written order they noted in their earlier docketed filing.

1 A written order pursuant to the Magistrate Judge’s oral order at the November 5 hearing has not been entered on the docket.

They didn’t say whether they had answered Fitzpatrick’s questions (which, in any case, don’t reveal whether the investigative team had access). Fitzpatrick could simply file a response saying that Comey has an indvidualized need to figure out if Miles Starr relied on privileged information to get the indictment before he moves to suppress these warrants; in any case, stay tuned.

As you’ve no doubt heard, sandwich guy Sean Dunn was acquitted. Kudos to Sabrina Shroff, who is one of the most ferocious defense attorneys in the country.

In Chicago, Judge Sara Ellis enjoined CBP and ICE from continuing to abuse the First and Fourth Amendments of people in the city. Here’s Chicago Sun Times’ report on the hearing.

After Wednesday, we got two horrible decisions — one at SCOTUS, one in the Sixth Circuit — for trans people. All was not good. But there was important movement in some places.

Will Millennials finally lead us beyond the War on Terror?

The second list marked four things that suggest we could move out of the world Dick Cheney significantly created.

  • Monday: Dick Cheney kicks it
  • Tuesday: 34-yo Muslim becomes mayor of NYC
  • Wednesday: Gorsuch raises grave concerns abt Congress abdicating the power to declare war
  • Thursday: Pelosi announces retirement

Even assuming SCOTUS will throw out Trump’s tariffs, I’m sure we’ll be disappointed by whatever opinion they release doing so. Nevertheless I have hopes that this kind of language from Gorsuch makes it into that opinion.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: — we shouldn’t be concerned with — I want you to explain to me how you draw the line, because you say we shouldn’t be concerned because this is foreign affairs, the President has inherent authority, and so delegation off the books more or less.

GENERAL SAUER: Or at least —

JUSTICE GORSUCH: And if that’s true, what would — what would prohibit Congress from just abdicating all responsibility to regulate foreign commerce, for that matter, declare war to the President?

[snip]

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Can you give me a reason to accept it, though? That’s what I’m struggling and waiting for. What’s the reason to accept the notion that Congress can hand off the power to declare war to the President?

GENERAL SAUER: Well, we don’t contend that. Again, that would be —

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, you do. You say it’s unreviewable, that there’s no manageable standard, nothing to be done. And now you’re — I think you — tell me if I’m wrong. You’ve backed off that position

How to pay for free buses

Finally, there’s this observation.

Wednesday: The incoming Mayor of NYC names Lina Khan a key advisor

Thursday: Corrupt shareholders of Tesla create the Trillion dollar Keta-Man

When Jerry Nadler announced his retirement, Lina Khan was one of the first people mentioned as a worthy replacement. She almost immediately said she was not interested.

I’m wondering if she was already thinking about what more she can accomplish as an advisor to Mamdani.

This sure feels like a week that — if we survive long enough to look back at it — was a pivotal one.

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Tyler Lemons Narcs out Pam Bondi: She Couldn’t Have Ratified Lindsey Halligan’s Actions

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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!

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Pam Bondi’s DOJ Gets Admonished a Second Time for Indict[ing] First, Investigat[ing] Second

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Remember how, 72-hours ago, I wrote an interminable post about how this Comey case may be about more than just two charges filed back in September?

I argued, among other things, that Comey may have asked for grand jury transcripts not (just) because getting them in December would help him win a vindictive prosecution claim that’ll be heard a month earlier, but because one of the now-three judges involved in the case might see the validity of his argument, and order the government to provide him those transcripts now.

[W]hat these filings may do — especially the grand jury one — is affect several things going on, starting this week.

As noted, Judge Cameron McGowen Currie has ordered the government to give her the transcripts from both grand juries by tomorrow.

The undersigned has been appointed to hear this motion and finds it necessary to determine the extent of the indictment signer’s involvement in the gra.nd jury proceedings. Accordingly, the Government is directed to submit, no later than Monday, November 3, 2025, at 5:00 pm, for in camera review, all documents relating to the indictment signer’s participation in the grand jury proceedings, along with complete grand jury transcripts.

It’s genuinely unclear why she needs them, but it’s possible that by laying out Comey’s concern about privileged material in the grand jury, that will affect Judge Currie’s review.

Comey noted that Currie had already asked for these transcripts (which Nachmanoff surely noticed, since she did so in his docket).

Indeed, Judge Currie has already ordered the government to produce for in camera review “all documents relating to the indictment signer’s participation in the grand jury proceedings, along with complete grand jury transcripts.” ECF No. 95. Mr. Comey has argued that if Ms. Halligan alone secured and signed the indictment, dismissal would be required because she was unlawfully appointed.

Comey will not prevail on his motion for the grand jury transcripts until after the vindictive prosecution motion is briefed. But there’s nothing to stop Nachmanoff from making the same request that Currie did, to receive the transcripts for in chambers review. Similarly, there’s nothing to prevent William Fitzpatrick, the Magistrate Judge who’ll hold a hearing on the privilege question this Wednesday, to do the same.

Today, William Fitzpatrick did just that. (ABC; Politico; CNN; WaPo)

By Politico’s description, loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons’ explanation of the potential spill in September appears to have been no more convincing today than it was in his reply brief, which I wrote about here.

Tyler Lemons, an assistant U.S. attorney brought in from North Carolina to assist Halligan with the case, responded to the judge. He said investigators reviewing the search warrant materials anew just days before Comey’s indictment halted the process after stumbling upon information they thought might have been subject to Comey’s attorney-client privilege with Richman. He said the materials are now “isolated on a desk in FBI headquarters.”

Lemons added, “We’re not going to touch this evidence until the court approves it.”

The magistrate judge said prosecutors are not permitted to look at the material themselves until the court has resolved any potential privilege claims. He said that prosecutors could continue to use evidence it believes is not privileged in court filings, but that they do so “at their own risk.” If they inadvertently use privileged material in their filings, he said, it could lead to consequences for the entire case.

ABC’s story suggests more concerns over the access itself being a Fourth Amendment violation, regardless of whether it was privileged or not. That seems to be why he ordered the government to share — by close of business tomorrow — not just the grand jury transcripts, but the material seized from Dan Richman five years ago, which the government has inexplicably not yet turned over.

But Comey’s attorneys raised separate concerns that by using those materials at all, the government may have violated Comey’s rights — not just by reviewing potentially privileged information, but also by revisiting evidence obtained by warrants that would now be considered stale.

Judge Fitzpatrick appeared to agree with those concerns during Wednesday’s hearing, as he repeatedly pressed Assistant U.S. Attorney Tyler Lemons over what materials the government had reviewed and why the disputes over privilege were not settled during the more than five years that the government had those communications in its possession

Fitzpatrick, citing what he described as “unusual” behavior by the Justice Department and the quickly approaching January trial date, ordered the government to hand over “all grand jury materials” related to its investigations of Comey by Thursday at 5 p.m. ET — an urgent deadline that reflected Fitzpatrick’s concern over the government’s conduct.

The big underlying issue though — the request that first precipitated this proceeding — was their demand for quick review of potentially privileged material that likely dates from the period after Donald Trump fired Jim Comey. DOJ has had this material for years, at least six months of which came when Bill Barr was aggressively pushing this investigation, yet they’ve never asked to breach these privilege claims before.

Which elicited the comment from Fitzpatrick that has made all the coverage, here, from ABC.

“We’re in a bit of a feeling of indict first, investigate second,” Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick said in a motions hearing in Alexandria, Virginia.

It’s not dissimilar to what a different Magistrate Judge, André Espionosa, said less than six months ago, when dismissing the charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.

The hasty arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka , followed swiftly by the dismissal of these trespassing charges a mere 13 days later, suggests a worrisome misstep by your Office . An arrest , particularly of a public figure , is not a preliminary investigative tool . It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough , dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence .

It’s precisely that commitment to rigorous investigation and thoughtful prosecution that has 20 characterized the distinguished history of your Office, Mr. Demanovich [the AUSA whom Alina Habba sent in her stead], particularly over the last two decades. The bench and the bar have witnessed in that period, the diligence and care demonstrated by prior U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, whose leadership has consistently upheld the highest standards of prosecutorial ethics and professionalism Their legacy is one of careful deliberate action where charges were brought only after exhaustive evidence gathering and a thorough consideration of all facts That bedrock principle, consistently honored by your predecessors, is the foundation upon which the credibility and effectiveness of your Office rests.

So let this incident serve as an inflection point and a reminder to uphold your solemn oath to the people of this District and to your client, Justice itself, and ensure that every charge brought is the product of rigorous investigation and earned confidence in its merit, mirroring the exemplary conduct that has long defined your Office.

The apparent rush in this case, culminating today in the embarrassing retraction of charges, suggests a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power. Your Office must operate with higher standard than that.

To be sure, I don’t think they were reconsidering charging Comey.

Rather, I suspect they were hoping for a better theory of charges. I suspect they hope to bring follow-on charges to build their fever dream.

But they’ve been caught once again not doing the work of prosecutors.

Update: Holy hell. Per NYT, prosecutors hadn’t even turned over the stuff released in their Opposition to Comey’s vindictive and selective prosecution motion.

The judged grilled one of Ms. Halligan’s deputies, Nathaniel Lemons, over prosecutors’ release of material in recent days, including private text exchanges intended to cast Mr. Richman and Mr. Comey in unflattering light in an otherwise quotidian court filing. He asked whether prosecutors had given Mr. Comey an opportunity to review such material first to challenge their release.

When Mr. Lemons said he had not offered Mr. Comey’s lawyers access to the material, obtained in several search warrants as part of an internal investigation of leaks in the Russia case during the first Trump administration, the judge chided him for placing an “unfair” burden on the defense.

That would undoubtedly be a violation of the discovery order, which required everything material to be turned over by October 13.

Update: The timeline on this gets more damning.

September 22: Lindsey Halligan appointed.

Days before Comey’s indictment: Investigators review the materials anew.

September 25: Miles Starr presents to the grand jury and then files notice of exposure to Attorney-Client material.

October 7: Lemons files notice of appearance, but refuses to tell Comey who the people referred to in indictment are.

October 10: Lemons starts pressuring Comey to access privileged material.

October 13: Lemons files for access to privileged material.

October 15: Lemons finally tells Comey who the people in the indictment are.

October 19: In bid to accelerate access to privileged material, Lemons accuses Patrick Fitzgerald of being part of classified leak — a slanderous attempt to criminalize sharing details of Trump’s misconduct.

November 3: Lemons files response relying on discovery Comey hasn’t yet received.

 

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Cat Got the Indictment Singer’s [sic] Tongue?

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On October 28, Judge Cameron McGowan Currie — the senior South Carolina Judge who’ll preside over Jim Comey and Tish James’ challenges to Lindsey Halligan’s appointment — instructed the government to give her the grand jury transcripts.

The undersigned has been appointed to hear this motion and finds it necessary to determine the extent of the indictment signer’s involvement in the grand jury proceedings. Accordingly, the Government is directed to submit, no later than Monday, November 3, 2025, at 5:00 pm, for in camera review, all documents relating to the indictment signer’s participation in the grand jury proceedings, along with complete grand jury transcripts.

On October 30, Jim Comey submitted a motion describing all the reasons it might be useful for him to see those transcripts, too.

Although those motions must be decided on their own merits, the circumstances described in both motions raise a strong possibility that there were “irregularities in the grand jury proceedings” that would provide a “basis for dismissal of the indictment.” Nguyen, 314 F. Supp. 2d at 616 (citations omitted). Indeed, Judge Currie has already ordered the government to produce for in camera review “all documents relating to the indictment signer’s participation in the grand jury proceedings, along with complete grand jury transcripts.” ECF No. 95. Mr. Comey has argued that if Ms. Halligan alone secured and signed the indictment, dismissal would be required because she was unlawfully appointed.

[snip]

For similar reasons, disclosure of the grand jury materials is reasonably calculated to provide additional support for Mr. Comey’s argument that he would not have been prosecuted but for President Trump’s animus toward Mr. Comey, including because of his protected speech.

On October 31, the government delivered a package of grand jury transcripts to Judge Currie.

Only, they didn’t include “all documents relating to the indictment signer’s participation in the grand jury proceedings, along with complete grand jury transcripts.”

Judge Currie exhibited remarkable patience when instructing DOJ, for the second time, to give her all the transcripts.

On October 28, 2025, the undersigned entered an order directing the Government to submit, for in camera review, “all documents relating to the indictment signer’s participation in the grand jury proceedings, along with complete grand jury transcripts.” ECF No. 95. On Friday, October 31, 2025, the court received a package containing, inter alia, a “Transcript of Grand Jury proceedings on September 25, 2025.” This court has reviewed the transcript and finds it fails to include remarks made by the indictment signer both before and after the testimony of the sole witness, which remarks were referenced by the indictment signer during the witness’s testimony. In addition, the package contains no records or transcripts regarding the presentation of the three-count indictment referenced in the Transcript of the Return of Grand Jury Indictment Proceedings before the Magistrate Judge.

Did DOJ really think Currie is stupid enough for this to work?

What makes all of this exceptionally stupid, though, is that Pam Bondi described reading the transcripts before she ratified the prosecution back on October 31, the same day the transcripts mysteriously weren’t all delivered to Judge Currie.

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.

So whatever it is that led someone to withhold the most important parts of the Jim Comey transcript, Pam Bondi is now complicit in it.

And all of that will make it more likely that Judge Michael Nachmanoff will himself review the transcripts to see what all the fuss is about.

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