Mini-Post: Bottom Of The Barrel

You know when you're scaping the bottom of the barrel for a prosecutor to go after your enemies and no one wants the case so all you are left with is the dross.

Comey’s challenge of Lindsey Halligan is the latest bid to derail Trump’s top prosecutors

CNN

By Katelyn Polantz & Kara Scannell

October 9, 2025

Before FBI Director James Comey heads to trial in January over charges of lying to Congress, his team plans to put the prosecutors — and specifically President Donald Trump’s handpicked interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan — on the defensive.

Comey’s strategy, as outlined in court on Wednesday, will focus on attacking Halligan’s authority as the US Attorney of the Eastern District of Virginia as part of efforts to convince the court to dismiss the charges against him.

The coming challenge to remove Halligan from the case is just one in a wave of recent criminal defense lawyers around the country calling into question Trump’s use of top prosecutors who haven’t been confirmed by the Senate. Some of those challenges have been successful.

Halligan may make the Comey case especially vulnerable, in that she was the only prosecutor to take the indictment through a grand jury, and was sworn in by the administration to lead her office just days before.

There is a simple legal term for it... "Standing" 

If you want to adjudicate a case before a court, you need legal standing. When I filed an Amicus Brief before a federal court on trans athletes I first had to have "permission" to do so. You just can't walk in and be heard. So it appears that little miss Halligan thinks otherwise.

Before I filed the brief, I had to get permission from the courts, and the Harvard Law Schools did all that... getting permission from the courts. Now these were law students who were learning about the law and they knew you needed standing. The Attorney General of the United States didn't. What does that say about the AG's qualifications in not knowing about standing?

Comey’s defense attorneys are likely to argue that Halligan can’t serve as interim US attorney because that position hit its 120 day limit. Also, they may say Halligan’s new role does not appear to fit two exceptions for appointments to such vacancies under the law: She is not Senate confirmed nor is she someone who has been employed in Justice Department for at least 90 days.

Halligan was serving in the White House and has never been a prosecutor.

Does this whole case against them seem like retribution to you? I bet so does the judge,

Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commenter, has been writing in the National Review about why he thinks Halligan, who signed off on Comey’s indictment, doesn’t have prosecutorial authority.

“It seems highly doubtful that Lindsey Halligan has been validly appointed as United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia,” Whelan wrote in the National Review recently. “If her appointment is invalid, so is her indictment of Comey.”

It sounds like a clown car to me doing a fire drill at a red light by a whole mess of clowns!

Cue the carnival music.