Lindsey Halligan seemed out of her depth on Thursday evening, when she presented a two-count indictment of former FBI Director James Comey to a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia. U.S. Magistrate Judge Lindsey Vaala was puzzled because she had received two versions of the indictment, both signed by the grand jury's foreperson, that seemed inconsistent with each other.
Halligan, a defense lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whom President Donald Trump had appointed as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia just a few days earlier, said she had "only reviewed" one of the indictments, "did not see the other one," and didn't "know where that came from." When Vaala pointed out that the document Halligan claimed she never saw "has your signature on it," the neophyte prosecutor was nonplussed. "OK," she said. "Well."
That embarrassing episode reinforced the impression that Trump, in his eagerness to pursue a personal vendetta against Comey, had settled on an agent who was manifestly unqualified to run one of the country's most prominent U.S. attorney's offices. Trump's desperate thirst for revenge, which was also evident in his public comments about the case, supports an argument that Comey's lawyers are apt to make in seeking dismissal of the charges against him: that he is a victim of selective or vindictive prosecution.
