(In 4th paragraph corrects to say the ruling was on Monday, not Tuesday)
By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday denied that President Donald Trump’s appointed prosecutor who secured an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey engaged in any misconduct, and asked a federal judge not to force prosecutors to turn over secret grand jury materials to Comey’s defense team.
In court filings and in statements to the media, the department defended Lindsey Halligan, who was hand-picked by Trump to serve as the interim U.S. Attorney for Virginia’s Eastern District after her predecessor was forced out after expressing concerns about the strength of the evidence in the case.
“The US Attorney and grand jury in this case operated exactly as the law requires,” a Justice Department official said in a statement. “Nothing in the record suggests misconduct, irregularity, or confusion. Claims to the contrary are simply unsupported.”
The Justice Department’s defense of the handling of the case came after U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled on Monday that Halligan may have made significant legal errors in presenting evidence and instructing grand jurors who were weighing whether to charge Comey. Fitzpatrick ordered prosecutors to turn over the grand jury materials to Comey’s lawyers.
Comey is among three prominent critics of the Republican president who have been hit with criminal charges by the Justice Department in recent months. Earlier on Wednesday, Comey’s attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff to dismiss the case, arguing that Comey is the target of an improper “vindictive” prosecution brought solely to punish him for his criticism of the president.
Comey has pleaded not guilty after being charged in September with making false statements and obstructing a congressional investigation.
Fitzpatrick, who was tasked with deciding certain pretrial issues in Comey’s case, highlighted a variety of procedural errors that could endanger the case.
Among the blunders he cited were prosecutors’ decision to review evidence the FBI seized years earlier without securing a new warrant and allowing an FBI agent to testify to the grand jury even though the agent may have been exposed to material shielded by attorney-client privilege, a legal doctrine that protects legal advice between lawyers and their clients.
Fitzpatrick also found that Halligan made statements to grand jurors harmful to Comey’s legal rights, and questioned whether she presented the current version of the indictment Comey is facing to the grand jury, after it rejected a criminal count in a prior version.
At Wednesday’s hearing before Nachmanoff, prosecutors acknowledged that the current version of the indictment was not presented to the entire grand jury, but was signed by the jury foreperson – an admission that raises questions about the validity of the case.
Grand jury materials are secret and rarely shared with defense lawyers in criminal cases, and in ordering that the material be turned over to the defense, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that it was an “extraordinary remedy.”
Nachmanoff temporarily paused Fitzpatrick’s order asking prosecutors to hand over grand jury materials to the defense, after the Justice Department objected.
“The magistrate judge’s recommendation is grounded in misreadings of the transcript, incorrect legal conclusions, and factual assumptions that the record directly disproves,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing on Wednesday.
“None of the rationales offered for disclosure withstands examination. The U.S. Attorney did not misstate the law, the grand jury was not misled, and the transcript shows a routine, regular presentation of the indictment.”
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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