Legal expert says Trump prosecutor 'going to need a presidential pardon'

Court room reporters on Wednesday stunned political observers with the revelation that a grand jury convened to consider charges against former FBI Director James Comey was not shown the final indictment by U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan.

As Lawfare's Roger Parloff explained, the "foreman told [the] grand jury coordinator that [grand jury] rejected count 1 but approved counts 2 [and] 3 of 1st indictment. So the government drafted 2-count indictment, which the foreman signed. But 2-count indictment — the operational one — was never shown to full grand jury."

It prompted a startling silence from a packed courtroom of spectators, a CNN justice correspondent reported.

AlterNet asked legal analysts whether this is something significant enough that Halligan could get disbarred over.

National security lawyer Bradley P. Moss answered "yes," but added, "don’t expect it any time soon."

He later added, "It’s taken years to go after Rudy Giuliani and others from 2020."

New Mexico civil litigator Owen Barcala disagreed, however.

"I think it would be technically possible, depending on her knowledge and state of mind, but very very unlikely. She'll say she didn't know the proper procedure, didn't intend to defraud the court, etc.," he told AlterNet on BlueSky.

Two bar complaints have already been filed by the progressive watchdog group Campaign for Accountability against Halligan in Florida and Virginia, ABC News reported last week. Those are the only two states in which she is barred.

"Lindsey Halligan is also going to need a presidential pardon," said Georgia constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis.

Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman, who attended the trial, noted that this appeared to all be "directly on Halligan's responsibility."

"They then go to court and present, actually, a complete nonsense indictment that says, 'no true bill.' Even though they meant it to say there was one on two and three," explained Litman. According to the Office of the Miami-Dade State Attorney website, a "no true bill" is a decision by a grand jury "that on a given charge no indictment should be filed."

" ... In the U.S. Attorney's Office, after this happened, [they] crossed things out and made a new one that the grand jury never saw and just told Halligan to sign it there. So, they went into the grand jury and served this up with Halligan's signature and the foreperson there, but nobody else from the grand jury there," Litman reported.

Litman said Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff called Halligan up to the podium to explain. Ultimately, the government conceded that the actual indictment was "literally never seen by the grand jury."

Litman said he'd never seen it before. The revelations caused "a gasp in the courtroom."

Nachmanoff didn't rule from the bench; he said he wanted to think about it more. Litman said he thinks the incident will probably be "fatal" to the case and it will likely be dismissed.