Ex-FBI Director James Comey claims President Trump’s perjury case against him should be tossed because the prosecutor is a joke — and was the only government lawyer willing to take him on in court.
Comey, 64, argued in new court papers Monday that green interim US attorney of the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan’s oversight of the case helps prove it is nothing more than a politically motivated prosecution in retaliation for the FBI’s “Russiagate” investigation during Trump’s first term in office.
“No career prosecutor was willing to bring the case; the President nevertheless publicly demanded prosecution; and at the last minute, he installed a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience to deliver the desired result,” Comey’s lawyers wrote in a bid to have the case tossed.
Halligan — a 36-year-old former Colorado beauty queen and Florida insurance lawyer — joined Trump’s team in 2021 as a personal lawyer and went on to become a White House senior associate staff secretary in his current administration.
Despite the fact that Halligan lacks any prior prosecutorial experience and had only ever worked on three federal cases, she was installed in the prestigious public-office federal seat Sept. 22.
Comey is fighting charges tied to his testimony before Congress in 2020 claiming he didn’t authorize leaks to the media about 2016 Trump foe Hillary Clinton’s use of her private email server for government business while she was secretary of state. The leaks to reporters about the case were pro-Clinton.
Comey claims he is being targeted by Trump over the alleged perjury because of the FBI’s separate probe into Trump’s reputed 2016 presidential campaign’s ties to Russian officials but also since Comey remained an outspoken critic of the president.
The Russia probe eventually found there was no evidence that Trump conspired with Moscow to win the White House.
“The record reveals that President Trump’s calls to prosecute directly respond to Mr. Comey’s public
critiques,” Comey’s lawyers claimed in the latest court papers.
The former FBI boss is set to go on trial Jan. 5, but he’s seeking to get the charges dismissed on multiple grounds before then. The case is being tried in the Virginia court district that includes FBI headquarters in Quantico, Va.
Halligan secured a grand-jury indictment against Comey just three days after she became boss of the federal prosecutor’s office — and mere days before the statute of limitations ran out on the former FBI chief’s Sept. 30, 2020, Senate Judiciary Committee testimony at the center of his indictment.
Halligan’s appointment to her post came after her predecessor, Erik Siebert, resigned as interim US attorney Sept. 19 when Trump accused him of refusing to bring a case against another of Trump’s political enemies, New York Attorney General Letitia James.
James is also seeking to get the since-filed bank-fraud charges against her dismissed on the basis that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful.
The Empire State’s top lawyer stands accused of lying on mortgage documents when she bought a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Virginia on Aug. 17, 2020, using a $109,600 loan. The feds say she claimed she would be the “sole borrower to occupy and use the property” — when her grandniece actually lived there and paid rent.
James has pleaded not guilty and is also trying to get the case thrown out before her Jan. 26, 2026, trial.
Read the full article here
