Former attorney blasts Trump attorney’s 'completely botched' Comey prosecution

President Donald Trump’s efforts to prosecute his perceived enemies hit a major roadblock on Wednesday as revelations emerged about his handpicked legal team’s mistakes in the case against former FBI Director James Comey.

While the ultimate fate of the case is still up in the air, these revelations brought a landslide of condemnations from lawyers. Writing for the New York Times on Thursday, former attorney and anti-Trump conservative commentator David French lambasted the Comey prosecution as a “comedy of errors” and Trump’s handpicked prosecutor for “misstating one of the basic elements of constitutional law.”

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice admitted in court that it had never presented the two-count indictment it claimed to have secured against Comey to a grand jury. The attorney running the case, Lindsey Halligan, attempted to secure a three-count indictment, but the grand jury only approved two of the counts. Instead of presenting a new indictment for approval, Halligan moved forward with a new indictment document without showing it to the full grand jury.

It was a move so out of line with legal requirements, that a magistrate said the court was in “uncharted legal territory.”

“Halligan also appears to have completely botched the process of securing the indictment,” French wrote of the incident on Thursday. "She sought a three-count indictment, but the grand jury indicted only on two counts. Yet, through a mysterious series of events, she signed two different indictments.”

French also highlighted other flubs on the part of the prosecution that emerged this week. Alongside the indictment snafu, it also emerged that Halligan wrongly instructed the grand jury that Comey had the responsibility to disprove the allegations against him, not that the prosecution had the burden of proof.

She also seemed to suggest that the jurors did have to use the information presented to them to determine probable cause against Comey, claiming that strong enough evidence for it would be presented at trial.

“We do not yet know if Halligan’s procedural irregularities will be fatal to the case, but I do know that if I’d committed that level of malpractice when I was litigating, it would have been instantly fatal to my continued employment,” French wrote.

Prior to Trump appointing her U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Halligan had never prosecuted a criminal case and had mostly worked in insurance law.

Speaking about the matter on Wednesday, Ty Cobb, a former first term Trump White House attorney, said that these missteps should all but certainly kill the Comey case.

“You couldn't find a high school stockboy at Home Depot who could have handled this more ineptly than Lindsey Halligan did,” Cobb said.