Judge ruled DoJ engaged in ‘profound investigative missteps’ on way to indicting the former FBI director

Judge ruled DoJ engaged in ‘profound investigative missteps’ on way to indicting the former FBI director

Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick ruled on Monday that the justice department engaged in a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” on its way to indicting Comey. The federal judge directed prosecutors to produce to defense lawyers all grand jury materials from the case.

Fitzpatrick wrote that problems include “fundamental misstatements of the law” by a prosecutor to a grand jury that indicted Comey in September, the use of potentially privileged communications in the investigation and unexplained irregularities in the transcript of the grand jury proceedings.

“The Court recognizes that the relief sought by the defense is rarely granted,” Fitzpatrick wrote, adding: “However, the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”

  • mkwt@lemmy.world
    9·
    4 hours ago

    Each one of those bullet points is potentially a way for Comey to get his whole case thrown out. In addition to that, Comey has 4 other motions to dismiss pending right now, and they’re pretty good arguments. At this point, Comey has so many different ways to win, that it is really hard to imagine that he won’t win on one of them. (In which case he still has an entire trial to defend himself on).

    The issue where there’s no case law is a pretty narrow one, I think: The grand jury voted to approve the words of the charges (except that the charge numbers were different), but not the specific piece of paper that the words ended up typed out on. Is that important for the formal charging process or not? Either way this gets decided, it won’t effect very many people, because any competent prosecutor will just re-run the new piece of paper past the jury to make sure. And it may not get decided at all if Comey’s case is dismissed on any of the other reasons.

    EDIT: If it’s not true. If it turns out that the grand jury no-billed all three counts, then we’d be looking at a forged indictment. And that would be a serious crime.