General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Lindsey Halligan says full grand jury never saw final indictment it handed up against Comey [View all]Ocelot II
(128,473 posts)about the way she presented the indictment.
What happened is that the prosecutor had presented the grand jury with two inconsistent indictments, the first with three counts and the second removing the first count. Both indictments were fully executed by grand jury foreperson and the prosecutor. After questioning the GJ foreperson the magistrate judge accepted the return of the second signed indictment, which was a new indictment that would have been presented to the GJ before being returned in open court. It now appears that may not have happened. The prosecutor stated that after the grand jury was left to deliberate on the first indictment at approximately 4:28 p.m., she had no further contact with the grand jury, and that about two hours later the acting assistant USA notified her that the grand jury returned a true bill on only two of the three counts of the first indictment. The prosecutor then went to the courtroom for the return of the indictment. The hearing on the return of the indictment began only about 7 minutes later. From the court's memorandum:
If the Court is to read the prosecutors declaration as suggesting there was no contact between any government official and the grand jury after 4:28 p.m., then it begs the question of how the then-First Assistant learned that the grand jury had refused to indict on one count, and how the First Assistant knew which count had been rejected by the grand jury, all before the indictment was returned in open court.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.582135/gov.uscourts.vaed.582135.191.0.pdf
Maybe incompetent Insurance Lawyer Barbie didn't want to present an indictment that included a count as to which the GJ found no probable cause - she wanted to be able to say they'd indicted Comey on all counts. But, as the judge suspected, she never actually presented the second, two-count indictment at all. Either she was trying to pull a fast one, or else she just has no idea how to do any of this. In either event, her incompetence and/or duplicity has probably torpedoed the last shreds of what was a phony prosecution in the first place.