Updated: Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, is an insurance attorney with no experience prosecuting federal criminal cases. 

Earlier this week, a federal magistrate eviscerated Halligan’s behavior from September, when she convinced a grand jury convened in Alexandria to indict former FBI Director James Comey on criminal charges. Former federal prosecutors  agree that a series of mistakes were made that may have tainted the case beyond repair.

“Halligan’s missteps smack of inexperience,” says Libbey Van Pelt, a former federal prosecutor and owner of Libbey Van Pelt Law in Arlington, Virginia. The timing of the indictment “led one to believe that this case was hastily brought by a rookie, and so far, the facts to be gleaned about Halligan’s grand jury presentation support that.”

Halligan, who previously served as a White House aide, graduated from the University of Miami School of Law in 2013 and was a partner at Cole, Scott & Kissane, where she did insurance work. She waited only a few days after her appointment to convince the grand jury to indict Comey.

The indictment contains two felony charges accusing him of lying to and obstructing Congress in 2020 testimony. The grand jury rejected a third charge pertaining to the testimony. 

On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick released a 24-page opinion with a laundry list of Halligan’s mistakes. And, in a hearing held Wednesday in the case before U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, the Justice Department admitted the final indictment was never reviewed by the full grand jury, the Washington Post reports. Comey is seeking to have the indictment dismissed as a product of vindictive prosecution.

Comey’s defense lawyers had asked Fitzpatrick to have the typically secret grand jury records handed over to the defense as they pursue a motion to dismiss. 

In his ruling, Fitzpatrick pointed to a “disturbing pattern” of “profound” missteps by both the FBI and Halligan, leading him to rule that grand jury proceeding records needed to be turned over to Comey’s defense lawyers. 

“The court is finding that the government’s actions in this case—whether purposeful, reckless or negligent—raise genuine issues of misconduct, are inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation and deserve to be fully explored by the defense,” Fitzpatrick wrote.

Mary Graw Leary is a professor at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. A former federal prosecutor, she says the legal system operates on the assumption that prosecutors will be “ethical, just and professional” when they present “the facts dispassionately and fairly” to the grand jury. 

“When the prosecutor fails to meet that standard, she undermines the entire grand jury process,” she says.

According to Van Pelt, “because of their secrecy, grand jury proceedings aren’t often scrutinized by judges.” And, even when they are, “it’s exceedingly rare” for a judge to raise concerns that a prosecutor potentially misled the grand jury, she says. 

She adds that sometimes in state court, “you can fly by the seat of your pants and get by or even stand out.”

But in federal court, “the rules are relentless, the details matter, and you must be prepared,” Van Pelt says.

Jeffrey Bellin is a law professor specializing in criminal procedure and evidence at Vanderbilt University Law School. The judge’s opinion “is just the beginning of a long process," he says.

“But it is a bad beginning for the government and foreshadows bigger problems to come,” he adds.

“The real question is whether the DOJ will at some point cut its losses by dismissing the case or keep pushing forward in the face of mounting legal obstacles and the prospect of almost certain defeat,” Bellin says.

As FBI director, Comey ignited passion on both the political left and the right for his handling of the investigation into presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. The next year, he was fired by President Donald Trump.

Trump repeatedly called for Comey’s indictment before the previous U.S. attorney left office, and Halligan, who had served for several years as Trump’s personal attorney, was installed.

The website for the U.S. Attorney’s office emphasizes Halligan’s experience interning as a law student with the Innocence Project and the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office.

The U.S. Attorney’s office did not return a request for comment. On Thursday the office filed a motion to correct the record, writing that any claim the grand jury did not vote on the two-count indictment was “contradicted by the official transcript.”  

That follows Halligan on Wednesday testifying that when jurors voted to indict Comey on two out of three counts in the original indictment, only the jury foreperson and a grand juror, not the full grand jury, reviewed the revised document detailing the charges, NBC News reports. 

In his opinion, Fitzpatrick wrote that it appeared that the FBI used evidence obtained previously from one of Comey’s personal attorneys without seeking a new search warrant. In addition, Halligan appears to have relied on testimony from an FBI agent who may have reviewed material subject to attorney-client privilege, he wrote. 

Ty Cobb, a former assistant U.S. attorney and partner at Hogan Lovells, served as White House special counsel during the first Trump administration. Cobb says that Halligan “really blew it big time.”

“No state court insurance lawyer could ever master the rules and ethics [of grand jury practice] in 72 hours and perform flawlessly first time in—even in an ordinary case and certainly not in a high-profile case,” he says. In addition, Cobb says, the “intentional use of privileged information almost certainly gathered illegally would never happen with an experienced prosecutor.”  

In his opinion, Fitzpatrick focused on two statements in which Halligan may have misled the grand jury. Halligan, he wrote, appeared to have misrepresented the law by suggesting to grand jurors that Comey might have to testify at trial to prove himself innocent, a mischaracterization and improper shifting of the burden of proof.

Adam R. Banner is founder and lead attorney of the Oklahoma Legal Group, a criminal defense law firm in Oklahoma City. He “would never expect a federal prosecutor to tell a grand jury that any questions they had regarding the evidence should be answered by the defendant,” Banner says.

“I feel very confident in standing by my assertion that the presumption of innocence in sacrosanct,” Banner says. 

Halligan also suggested to grand jurors that that they didn’t have to just rely on the evidence before them but instead “could be assured that the government had more evidence—perhaps better evidence—that would be presented at trial,” the judge wrote.

James P. Gillis, a former Eastern District of Virginia assistant U.S. attorney, says that the grand jury hearing, as described by the judge, appears to have been a “clown show.”

“To suggest that the grand jury should rely upon evidence that you know about but that you are not showing them is not only plain prosecutorial error, but it completely misapprehends the grand jury’s function,” he says.

The grand jury, Gillis says, decides “if there is enough evidence, not the prosecutor.”

Updated  Nov. 21, at 3 p.m. to note that the U.S. attorney’s office filed a motion to correct the record.