Judge Berates Justice Dept. in Its Prosecution of Comey

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The federal judge in the Trump administration’s prosecution of James Comey, the former FBI director, on Wednesday blasted President Donald Trump’s hand-picked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, for taking an “indict first, investigate later” approach to the case.

The magistrate judge, William Fitzpatrick, repeatedly expressed his frustration with Halligan during an otherwise procedural hearing in which he ordered the Justice Department to produce records from its investigation. Halligan was hastily installed as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in September after her predecessor refused to indict Comey on charges that he lied to Congress.

The flashpoint was the Justice Department’s failure to turn over communications it had seized from a confidant of Comey, Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, as part of an internal investigation of leaks in the Russia case during the first Trump administration. The government claims he served as a conduit between the director and the news media for passing along information about the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016.

As part of their defense, Comey’s lawyers have accused the Justice Department of vindictive prosecution and challenged the legality of Halligan’s appointment. They have argued that they have been unable to adequately defend their client without access to emails and other communications obtained by the government from Richman’s electronic devices in 2019 and 2020.

Fitzpatrick’s decision to force the government to hand over grand jury material to Comey’s lawyers was a significant development. The move will allow the defense to scrutinize exactly how Halligan characterized the evidence against Comey when she showed up for what was her first-ever appearance in front of a grand jury.

Fitzpatrick, who seemed exasperated with the government’s approach, described the case as “unusual,” adding, “We are in a little bit of a posture of indict first, investigate second.”

Comey, who attended the hearing but remained silent, is accused of lying to and obstructing Congress in testimony on the investigation into Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, during which he was asked whether he had authorized anyone at the FBI “to be an anonymous source in news reports.”

Current and former prosecutors have described the case as deeply problematic, motivated less by legitimate law enforcement goals than by Trump’s public demand that Attorney General Pam Bondi immediately prosecute Comey and several other people he has targeted.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.