Trump’s DOJ Turned the Grand Jury Into a Puppet Show
A blistering judicial order reveals how Bondi and Halligan botched the Comey prosecution with political stunts, legal errors, and MAGA theater.
By David Shuster
A federal judge recently laid into Donald Trump’s Justice Department with all the subtlety of a bulldozer, calling Pam Bondi’s DOJ’s work in the James Comey indictment a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps.”
Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick ordered federal prosecutors to hand over all the grand jury materials to Comey’s defense.
Why? Because the judge writes there were “fundamental misstatements of the law” made to the grand jurors — by a prosecutor who appears to have treated her audience as children too dull to grasp the most basic constitutional principles.
Worse, the judge found “irregularities” in the grand jury transcript and evidence that prosecutor Lindsey Halligan used attorney-client communications that are privileged and off limits. In short, the grand jury process was so flawed that Halligan may have tainted and poisoned the entire case.
You may recall that Halligan, a former Trump White House aide, with no prior prosecutorial experience, was plucked and installed just days before Comey’s indictment. Halligan’s predecessor as U.S. attorney felt the Comey case was so weak that he quit rather than pursue the charges. And no lawyers who stayed in the 100 person U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia were willing to join Halligan in seeking the indictment or in signing it.
Comey’s team is now urging that the case be dismissed, partly on the grounds that Halligan’s elevation to U.S. Attorney was not only legally dubious but also political motivated.
Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick seems open to that argument.
He just warned that the procedural and substantive irregularities involving Halligan may have “undermined the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.” The judge said it is not simply a technicality, it is in his judgment, a possible case of government misconduct, one that prejudices Comey.
In other words, the Department of Justice has taken a hallowed instrument of our court system, the grand jury, and used it as a toy, spinning a grotesque claim about James Comey for the edification of no one but Lindsey Halligan, Pam Bondi, and Donald Trump.
Halligan and her bosses are defending her actions with the bureaucratic equivalent of a magician’s flourish. They say that Halligan’s appointment was a “retroactive designation” from the Attorney General, as if a piece of paper could transform incompetence into authority. Clever? Perhaps. Legal? Possibly. Ethical? Not in the least. And the audacity is off the charts. The U.S. Department of Justice is supposed to uphold the law, not engage in god-awful abuses of grand jury protocols and federal rules of criminal procedure.
Meanwhile, James Comey faces charges of lying to Congress — a charge that may or may not hold water, depending entirely on one’s interpretation of the labyrinthine questions asked and the obscure answers given. But the real story is not Comey’s alleged lie; it is the horrific machinery of justice turned inside out, the Trumpian goons prosecution blunders elevated to the level of policy, the grand jury treated like a children’s puppet theater.
Under Trump, one begins to suspect his DOJ views the Constitution, with its ponderous clauses and arcane restrictions, not as a manual to protect liberty, but as a document that provides endless opportunities for MAGA power grabs and self-parody.
As Judge Fitzpatrick has noted, the prosecution blunders in the Comey case do not appear to be mere technical errors. They are a series of intentional political spectacles, demonstrating how power may be dressed in the robes of justice and paraded as virtue, while corrupt practitioners like Bondi and Halligan tumble and bumble with unholy glee. The American people, with our admirable if often misplaced faith in institutions, are expected to sit politely, applaud when told to do so, and ignore the Trump clowns tossing legal briefs like water balloons.
In the end, what we have under Trump is a Department of Justice that has forgotten what it is supposed to be. It is neither impartial nor dignified; it is mischievous, erratic, and frequently malicious. The Trump DOJ treats the law as a toy, the courts as a stage, and the public as an audience to be manipulated and misled.
If there is one lesson we can draw from this sad spectacle, it is that justice, in Trump’s America, is no longer a principle. It is a performance. And in this theater, the joke is not on the prosecutors, the judges, the grand juries or the defendants. The joke is on the nation itself.
Thankfully, a federal judge is not laughing. He is sounding the alarm.
Great job, as usual, with this story laying out all the facts then clarifying it all. Thank you. And truly, thank you Judge William Fitzpatrick. A judge who is man enough to actually do his job despite the risks, and those risks are very real. Sad and frightening how the branch of our government we trusted to defend us has turned into a weapon of vengeance so corrupt we don't recognize it. Shame on those entrusted with protecting justice and the Constitution sold their souls to the devil for job security and a sense of power. Every time we hear of a judge standing up for justice, it is encouraging and gives us hope. We have to be grateful to them, and we have to hold onto hope.
It is believed that the same blunder will doom the case against Tish James, the excellent AG for New York.