Washington Examiner Justice Department Reporter Kaelan Deese said Lindsey Halligan, the new U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, will rely on “lined” prosecutors in office when prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey’s case.
Comey was indicted on Thursday by a federal grand jury on two of the three counts sought by prosecutors — one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice. The case is based on his testimony in 2020 before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his role in the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation.
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Halligan, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, was sworn in earlier this week and replaced U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert after the Trump administration removed him from the position.
Deese said on LiveNow From Fox that it’s going to be “very interesting” to watch this case moving forward because “we’re looking at a new prosecutor’s office.”
Halligan is Trump’s former personal attorney and served as a White House aide before her new post in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Deese said Halligan recently “led the charge” to change information at the Smithsonian Museums, specifically regarding slavery.
Deese said Halligan doesn’t really have any experience working in a U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“She’s relying on lined prosecutors to help her out with this,” he said. “I think it is worth noting that because we know this grand jury has been in panels for a while, I do think a lot of this really does come down to this case being open for much longer than she has been inside this office now.”
Reports emerged before Comey’s indictment that career prosecutors in the Eastern District warned Halligan that the evidence in the case may not have established probable cause.
Deese said people were unsure if Comey would be indicted because the statute of limitations was almost up.
“It was very surprising to a bunch of people because over the weekend, there was that notion that Trump was urging his Justice Department publicly that this needed to happen, and the statute of limitations was running up on September 30th,” he said. “I think that toward the bare end, some people were thinking this isn’t actually going to happen, but it did.”
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Deese also highlighted reports that Siebert’s father-in-law is the godfather to one of Comey’s children.
“That raises some alarms about whether Siebert was really going to be up to the task,” Deese said. “Also, the fact that he didn’t really want to go forward on the Letitia James case, now we have somebody like Halligan who is inside this office, and she seems like she is ready to do anything that the main justice would like to see done.”