Judge Says Hasty Push to Indict James Comey Led to DOJ Misconduct

U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick sharply criticized the Justice Department's handling of the case against former FBI director James Comey, finding that investigative shortcuts and procedural errors grew out of a rushed effort to secure an indictment.

The judge focused on government misconduct rather than the merits of the underlying perjury and obstruction allegations. Fitzpatrick tied many of the missteps to intense political pressure after President Donald Trump urged swift action on Sept. 20, warning that "justice must be served" as the five-year statute of limitations for Comey's September 30, 2020, congressional testimony neared expiration.

According to the findings, the case nearly missed the statute-of-limitations deadline because Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia until Sept. 19, did not believe the evidence supported prosecution — a view shared by career prosecutors in his office. After Siebert declined to pursue the matter, he was replaced by Lindsey Halligan, a former defense lawyer with no prior prosecutorial experience. Halligan was sworn in two days after the president's message and obtained an indictment three days later.

Halligan alone signed the two-page indictment, which Fitzpatrick described as vague and thin; key details remained unclear for more than a month. The charges allege Comey tried to conceal his public-relations coordination with Columbia Law professor Daniel Richman, a longtime friend who publicly defended Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe.

Prosecutors assert that Richman qualified as "someone else at the FBI" because he briefly served as an unpaid "special government employee" while also working at Columbia. To win a conviction, the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Comey understood that phrasing to include Richman and that he intentionally misled senators about their relationship and any communications with reporters.

Key procedural problems identified by the judge:

• Investigators relied on communications obtained during an earlier, unrelated inquiry into Richman that had been closed without charges, rather than obtaining a new, case-specific warrant that would have limited and filtered the evidence.
• The FBI failed to adequately screen potentially privileged material before investigators reviewed the files.
• Halligan submitted two inconsistent versions of the indictment and, according to Fitzpatrick, misstated the law to grand jurors by suggesting they could assume probable cause from evidence she had not presented and implying the defendant bore the burden of proof.

Fitzpatrick warned these errors could be serious enough to require dismissal of the indictment. He framed the procedural and investigative failures not as isolated mistakes but as the foreseeable consequences of a politically driven effort to meet an urgent deadline.

The judge's findings raise questions about prosecutorial independence and adherence to ordinary investigative safeguards, and they underscore the risk that political pressure can undermine criminal procedures and defendants' rights.