James Comey asks for his indictment be dismissed over Lindsey Halligan’s grand jury revelation
By Holmes Lybrand, Katelyn Polantz, CNN
(CNN) — Attorneys for former FBI Director James Comey are asking a federal judge to dismiss the charges against him because, they say, a grand jury never approved the final indictment in the case.
The motion to dismiss comes after prosecutors, including interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan, said in court this week that the indictment — which omitted a count that the grand jury rejected — was not seen in its final form by all grand jurors.
“The grand jury voted to reject the only indictment that the government presented to it,” Comey’s attorneys wrote in Friday’s filing. “Instead of presenting the grand jury with a revised indictment, Ms. Halligan signed a new two count indictment that the grand jury had never seen or voted on.”
Comey’s team is asking the judge to toss the case by as soon as Monday because of the “flagrant nature of the government’s misconduct during the grand jury process.”
“Because at least 12 jurors did not ‘approve the actual indictment,’ there is no valid indictment of Mr. Comey,” defense attorneys said in their filing Friday.
Halligan, the lead federal prosecutor in Comey’s criminal case said in court earlier this week that a full grand jury never reviewed the final indictment brought against him, but she reversed course in a brief filed Thursday saying there were no mistakes in how the indictment was handled in September. Halligan said part of the transcript from the September 25 hearing, when a magistrate judge in Alexandria, Virginia, was notified of the grand jury’s vote to approve charges against the ex-FBI director, “conclusively refutes” any suggestion that a problem exists with that part of the case.
Of the prosecutor’s efforts to revise their statements, Comey’s attorneys wrote their claims contradict “numerous other representations that the government has made to this Court.”
Their arguments, defense attorneys added, “rests on an erroneous overreading of an ambiguous exchange between the grand jury foreperson and the magistrate judge.”
This story is developing and will be updated.
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