Another day, another grand jury refusing to reindict New York Attorney General Letitia James on the laughably thin mortgage fraud allegations manufactured by the Trump administration.
If you’re feeling like you’ve heard this one before, that’s because you have—last week, when a different grand jury also declined to reindict James.
All of this flailing, hoping to find some grand jury somewhere in Virginia that will bite at this rancid apple, is the fallout from President Donald Trump’s pet insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, being tossed from her role as acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Since Halligan was the only person to present the cases against James and against former FBI Director James Comey to the grand jury—and the only person to sign the indictments—they went out the door right along with Halligan.
Ever since then, the Trump administration has been trying to recapture that Halligan magic. How hard could it be to get an indictment, really?
Unfortunately for the administration, what this seems to reveal is that Halligan likely did not get those indictments in an entirely kosher fashion.
To be fair, even Halligan needed a few grand juries to truly get her mojo working. She initially put James’ niece before a Norfolk grand jury, where the niece promptly explained that she had lived in the house for years and did not pay rent. Unfortunately for Halligan, that seriously undercut any allegation that James was fraudulently using the home as an investment property.
Never one to be deterred, Halligan then went to a different grand jury in Alexandria and somehow just plumb forgot to have the niece provide testimony, but she did manage to net an indictment. Neat how that works.
But Halligan is nothing if not resourceful. In her attempt to indict Comey, she employed a cool move called “not having the full grand jury review the indictment you presented to the court”—a move that lawyers who value their bar license typically don’t attempt.
Still, Trump has another trick up his sleeve: putting Halligan before the Senate to be confirmed.
On Wednesday, Halligan sent her 28-page questionnaire to the Senate, which seems like a very long document for someone with literally zero relevant experience for the job she thinks she deserves.
To make this happen, Trump has to get GOP senators to agree to kill the tradition of home-state senators having the courtesy of approving a nominee to the federal bench in their state. And if they don’t approve it, the nomination doesn’t move forward.
But even those GOP senators otherwise willing to cede their power to Trump don’t seem inclined to go along with that. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that the majority of his GOP colleagues oppose ending the tradition. And since Virginia has two Democratic senators, the chance of getting Halligan through is pretty slim.
Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi can kick and scream about Democratic senators being obstructionist all they want, but both Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner approved of Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert, who was also nominated by Trump.
But Siebert proved unwilling to turn his office into a stop on the Trump Retribution Tour, which is how we got Halligan.
Just as a thought exercise, let’s say that the GOP upends the tradition and Halligan gets through the Senate. Let’s say that, somehow, she even manages to indict James on these incredibly thin charges. That just gets Halligan and the DOJ right back to the beginning, needing to get through an absolute blizzard of pretrial motions while preparing for trial.
And if they make it out of that alive, they’ve still got a trial. But since juries—grand and otherwise—are proving themselves remarkably resilient in the face of Trump’s lies, good luck ever getting a conviction.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
