{"id":581417,"date":"2025-11-20T00:09:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T00:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/581417\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T00:09:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T00:09:13","slug":"full-grand-jury-didnt-see-final-comey-indictment-prosecutors-admit-james-comey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/581417\/","title":{"rendered":"Full grand jury didn\u2019t see final Comey indictment, prosecutors admit | James Comey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday said<\/a> they had never presented the final version of the indictment filed against James Comey<\/a> to a full federal grand jury, a concession that adds to mounting challenges in their effort to prosecute the former FBI director.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors acknowledged the omission during a Wednesday hearing in which Comey\u2019s lawyers argued the case against him should be dismissed because it was a selective and vindictive prosecution.<\/p>\n

Comey was indicted<\/a> on 26 September on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding in connection with testimony he gave in 2020 in which he said he had not \u201cauthorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports\u201d regarding Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

Court documents<\/a> from September show that Lindsey Halligan, a Trump ally installed as a top prosecutor in the case, had sought an additional false statement charge against Comey, but that grand jurors had rejected it.<\/p>\n

Once the grand jury rejected the charge, Halligan could have had the full grand jury vote again on a copy of the indictment that only included the two charges they voted to indict on, or presented the judge with a three-count indictment crossing out the count on which the grand jury had chosen not to indict on. But, pressed on Wednesday by Michael Nachmanoff, the US district judge overseeing the case, Halligan confirmed that only the foreperson and another grand juror had seen the revised indictment that had only the two charges the grand jury had voted to indict on, CNN and Lawfare reported on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Comey\u2019s team therefore views the indictment as null. \u201cThere is no indictment Mr Comey is facing,\u201d Michael Dreeben, one of Comey\u2019s lawyers said in court on Wednesday. N Tyler Lemons, an assistant US attorney handling the case, argued that there wasn\u2019t a problem because the final version of the indictment merely removed a charge rejected by the grand jury. \u201cThe new indictment wasn\u2019t a new indictment,\u201d he said, according to the Washington Post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Andrew Tessman, a former federal prosecutor in West Virginia and Washington DC, said he saw the issue as \u201chighly problematic\u201d and a \u201cfatal flaw\u201d. \u201cThis is just not how grand jury operates,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan, said it was unclear how the development could affect the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t ever recall a situation where I did not show the entire indictment to the grand jury so that they could review it and approve it,\u201d she said. \u201cHowever, I am not sure what the remedy is in this situation. It appears that they did review and vote on a prior version of the indictment. If the two counts included in the replacement indictment were identical to the two counts they approved, the error may be harmless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Halligan is a former insurance lawyer who presented the case to the grand jury herself despite never having previously handled a criminal case.<\/p>\n

A transcript of the hearing in which the indictment was returned in Comey\u2019s case obtained by CBS News<\/a> shows some confusion over the indictment. The magistrate judge overseeing it said she had been given two versions of the indictment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason we want to cross all of our Ts and dot all of our Is in these situations is because the court is also going to take it very seriously for the same reasons. And if you screw up one step in this process, then you\u2019re risking the whole case going away in an embarrassing fashion,\u201d Tessman said. \u201cThe US attorney\u2019s office is going to take this whole process very seriously, but the court is going to take it even more seriously. And if they see one thing wrong with how the case was presented to the grand jury, they\u2019re going to err on the side of protecting people\u2019s constitutional rights.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s understandable. You pulled a random insurance lawyer off the street and you put her into the grand jury with no training and no other experienced attorney there,\u201d he added. \u201cIt\u2019s not surprising at all that some big mistake was made.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a filing<\/a> on Wednesday evening, Lemons said the issue did not doom the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe two charges contained in that indictment are identical to the second and third charges that were included in the proposed indictment that was provided to the grand jury,\u201d he wrote. \u201cOnly the numbering of the counts (ie, proposed Count Two became Count One, and proposed Count Three became Count Two) and the paragraphs differ. Given that the grand jury was presented with the two counts on which it voted to return an indictment and in fact voted upon those counts\u201d, he said, dismissal of the case was not required.<\/p>\n

Before Trump installed Halligan, it was widely reported that career prosecutors believed<\/a> there was not sufficient evidence to charge Comey with a crime. On Wednesday, Lemons said the deputy attorney general\u2019s office had instructed him not to disclose whether a memo outlining the reasons for not prosecuting the case existed.<\/p>\n

Wednesday\u2019s hearing came days after a magistrate judge handling the case<\/a> said there may have been \u201cgovernment misconduct\u201d and that Halligan made at least two \u201cfundamental and highly prejudicial\u201d misstatements of law to the grand jury. The magistrate judge ordered the prosecutors to take the highly unusual step of turning over grand jury materials to Comey\u2019s team. That order is on hold while an appeal is pending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federal prosecutors on Wednesday said they had never presented the final version of the indictment filed against James…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-581417","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115579123573544670","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}