Left: Lindsey Halligan speaks as President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, Jan. 31, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci). Center: Former FBI director James Comey gestures while speaking at Harvard University”s Institute of Politics’ JFK Jr. Forum in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File). Right: Patrick Fitzgerald, then U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois gestures during a news conference at the federal building in Chicago, Thursday, May 24, 2012, a day after he announced in a written statement he was resigning from the post he held for more than a decade. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato).
As James Comey prepared to file a motion to remove an interim U.S. attorney from prosecuting him, Lindsey Halligan, who previously represented President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, launched a counterattack against Comey’s defense team. Halligan is reportedly planning to file a complaint regarding the mishandling of classified information against Comey’s lead defense attorney.
In a court document submitted on Sunday in Virginia, Halligan targeted Patrick Fitzgerald, a former federal prosecutor and long-time friend of Comey. She referenced a section from a 2019 Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (OIG) report, alleging that Comey improperly disclosed classified information with Fitzgerald’s involvement.
Halligan accused Fitzgerald of being complicit in Comey’s actions, quoting a part of the OIG report that criticized Comey for not fulfilling his duty to protect sensitive information. This accusation raised questions about whether Fitzgerald should face disqualification from representing Comey.
The court filing argued that Fitzgerald’s potential conflict of interest warranted a review. It suggested that communications related to the OIG report could impact ongoing legal proceedings. The document, submitted to U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, emphasized the need for access to all relevant, non-privileged information to resolve the conflict issue swiftly.
In response, Comey’s legal team pushed back on Monday, dismissing the allegations against Fitzgerald as “provably false” in their latest filing to the court.
On Monday, Comey’s lawyers responded to the government by saying their contentions about Fitzgerald should fail as “provably false.”
“The government’s assertion that Mr. Comey ‘used current lead defense counsel to improperly disclose classified information,’ and the implicit assertion lead defense counsel and Mr. Comey engaged in criminal activity by doing so, is provably false,” the defense filing said, adding that the OIG report showed there was “no ‘leaking’ of classified information to the press by either Mr. Comey or his counsel. Full stop.”
“After Mr. Comey was fired on May 9, 2017, he sought legal advice with respect to his termination and with regard to having witnessed behavior by the President that he considered unlawful. Mr. Comey had written seven contemporaneous memoranda about his troubling interactions with President Trump,” the defense explained. “The memoranda were unclassified at the time they were shared with counsel–Mr. Comey both authored the memos and was an Original Classification Authority. Mr. Comey did not share the classified memoranda with counsel.”
Fitzgerald and fellow defense counsel Jessica Carmichael previously told the judge that Comey can, in fact, be trusted with reviewing his own discovery in the false statement and obstruction case given his former status as head of the FBI.
“To assert now, that he cannot be trusted with receiving discovery in his case controverts his long career of distinguished government service at the highest levels. Moreover, no one knows the facts of this case better than Mr. Comey himself,” the filing said. “It places his defense at a severe and unnecessary disadvantage to insist that he be prohibited from possessing Protected Material to be able to review and refer to whenever necessary throughout preparation of his defense.”
Thereafter, the judge ended up siding with Comey’s lawyers by finding the government’s proposed discovery restrictions would “unnecessarily” hinder and delay his “ability to defend himself” and prepare for trial.
Comey’s team is expected to argue that Halligan was unlawfully appointed, just like acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba in New Jersey, but all indications suggest that Halligan won’t go without a fight.
