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Did the Comey Dismissal Render Kash Patel’s Grand Conspiracy “Just Someone Else’s Fantasy”?

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There’s something missing from all the analysis (and this, from Politico, is quite good) of what might happen in the wake of Judge Cameron Currie’s dismissal of at least the Jim Comey indictment, and possibly even the Letitia James one: the way the dismissal might help or hurt Trump’s plans to charge a Grand Conspiracy in Florida.

[I regret to inform all of you, especially Savage Librarian, that in thinking about this during a bout of insomnia on Sunday I set all my thinking about the Grand Conspiracy to the tune of Styx’ The Grand Illusion.]

After all, if the ultimate goal was always to charge Jim Comey as part of some 20-person conspiracy indictment claiming a bunch of people arranged to have Donald Trump investigated as a ploy to undercut his first term and damage his 2024 election chances (yeah, seriously, that is the theory!), then the statute of limitations expiration was always a mere speed bump.

And in the same way that the dismissal without prejudice leaves unresolved the larger issue of illegal weaponization of DOJ, it also leaves a number of things the Loaner AUSAs might have wanted resolved unresolved.

Understand, two things that had no business being in the Comey indictment are absolutely critical to the Grand Conspiracy theory.

The Grand Conspiracy would start at least by August 9, 2016, when Peter Strzok responded to Lisa Page’s question, “He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” by saying, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

From there, Kash Patel’s conspiracy theory about the “Clinton Plan” CIOL would take over.

The Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory is that the “Clinton Plan” was real, and that it should have given the FBI notice that Hillary had a plan to frame Donald Trump. [I should emphasize, not only don’t I endorse this theory, much of it is false and even more of it is batshit insane, but it nevertheless is being pursued by a Senate confirmed US Attorney in SDFL, Jason Reding Quiñones.] But, the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory goes, when Peter Strzok got notice of the Clinton Plan on September 7, he made sure it never got shared with the people beginning to investigate why George Papadopoulos knew of Russia’s plan to help Trump in advance because, the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy goes, it would have led him to open an investigation into Hillary rather than Trump.

Again, not true, insane, but nevertheless what has everyone from the Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director on down to the people unlawfully accessing raw data collected years ago aroused.

Fast forward to 2020. According to the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory, when Jim Comey told Lindsey Graham the “Clinton Plan” — as misleadingly described in a John Ratcliffe letter no doubt drafted with Kash’s help — didn’t ring a bell for him, he was lying to cover up how the FBI ignored warning signs about leads from Hillary.

Fast forward even further to 2025. When Kash found a burn bag of materials that had not been destroyed, including the “Clinton Plan” CIOL that might have been brought to the FBI Director’s Office with a bunch of other Durham investigation materials, he and Jack Eckenrode instead assumed that Comey partisans were trying to protect Comey and Strzok’s devious plot to ignore the CIOL back in 2016.

You need the “Clinton Plan” CIOL for the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory because that’s what makes their wildly misleading claims about the treatment of the Steele dossier in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment damning. The Steele dossier should never have been used at all, the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory says, because the FBI had notice that Clinton wanted to frame Trump, but instead Comey, with Brennan’s involvement (the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory claims), demanded its inclusion and based (the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory claims) the judgement that Russia wanted Trump to win on it, and when Brennan lied about all that in 2023 (the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory claims), he was trying to cover up this devious plot.

You also need Comey’s decision to release the memo he wrote up memorializing Trump’s corrupt attempt to shut down the Mike Flynn investigation and with it the communications with Dan Richman. You need that, plus Comey’s overt wish that by releasing the memo a Special Counsel might be (and was) appointed, because it ties (the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory claims) Strzok’s stated intent to “stop” Trump from becoming President to the investigation that dominated his first term. The Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theory turns the very legal release of a memo demonstrating Trump’s corruption into the crime of depriving Donald Trump of his right to fully exploit the presidency the Russian government gave him.

Now consider how charging Jim Comey with lying and obstructing fucked the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy plans.

First, the “Clinton Plan” CIOL.

EDVA successfully prevented Comey from explaining the problem with the “Clinton Plan” CIOL before attempting to charge him for lying about it. In his first discovery letter, Pat Fitzgerald noted that he had offered to meet with prosecutors on September 17.

In that regard, on September 17, 2025, I wrote the DOJ to ask for a meeting to discuss why the case should not be brought but never received a substantive response, much less a meeting.

And his motion to dismiss because Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer failed to actually get an indictment revealed that EDVA even refused to engage with the offer to toll the statute of limitations.

In fact, Mr. Comey’s counsel requested a meeting with the U.S. Attorney’s Office the week before the indictment was obtained and offered to toll the statute of limitations to allow for that meeting. A prosecutor in the Office told Mr. Comey’s counsel that the Office had been directed not to engage with defense counsel.

Prosecutors at EDVA — supposedly the good guys who got fired — didn’t want any truths Fitzgerald might share to fuck up their larger Grand Conspiracy conspiracy.

In one of his two replies for release of grand jury materials, Comey laid out how stupid all this is.

On September 30, 2020, Mr. Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into alleged links between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government. See Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation: Day 3, Hearing Before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 116th Cong. (Sept. 30, 2020), http://bit.ly/4o2ekHb. The night before, he was sent a copy of the Ratcliffe Letter, described above, which purported to summarize the September 7, 2016 CIOL in one sentence. Mr. Comey was not provided an opportunity to review the September 7, 2016 CIOL at issue prior to his testimony.

[snip]

There is no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Comey received the CIOL at issue, much less that he reviewed it. The materials in discovery make clear that every day, numerous CIOLs come to the FBI addressed to the Director—from a variety of federal agencies in a variety of formats—and are routed to employees other than the Director. Because the Midyear Exam investigation had been closed for more than two months, there is no reason to believe that any CIOL related to Ms. Clinton would have been sent to Mr. Comey (and the government has produced no proof that it was). There is no electronic trail showing that Mr. Comey received the CIOL at issue. There is no paper trail showing that he received it. And there is no witness who says that Mr. Comey either received it or discussed it with him. Full stop.

This total lack of evidence is extremely troubling in light of credible press reporting that not only does a declination memorandum exist in this case,11 but it made clear that with respect to the CIOL in particular, a prior investigation found that Mr. Comey’s statement could not support a false-statement charge because there was insufficient evidence Mr. Comey had ever seen the CIOL.12 Ms. Halligan was also reported to have been advised by career prosecutors in that declination memorandum that “seeking the charges would violate DOJ policy, raise serious ethics issues, and risk being rejected by the grand jury.” Id.

In a footnote, he noted that this is all based on Russian disinformation.

10 Indeed, it appears this information was created by Russian intelligence, and did not accurately reflect particular emails. See Charlie Savage & Adam Goldman, ‘Clinton Plan’ Emails Were Likely Made by Russian Spies, Declassified Report Shows, N.Y. Times (July 31, 2025), https://perma.cc/F8AF-TLAF.

Worse still, a grand jury determined there was not probable cause that Comey lied about the “Clinton Plan” CIOL (though the Loaner AUSAs were trying to backdoor that as a crime in the obstruction charge).

Todd Blanche whisked the criminal investigation into whether Brennan lied in 2023 about his enthusiasm for the Steele dossier away to SDFL before a prosecutor wrote up a declination memo. Having arrived in Florida, US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones sent out a bunch of subpoenas that everyone recognizes to be entirely performative (because they ask for highly classified things none of the subpoena recipients would have in their private possession).

But Blanche didn’t whisk this “Clinton Plan” CIOL off to Florida (which might have happened had Trump not demanded Pam Bondi intervene) before Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer did real damage to it.

And by bringing in Loaner AUSAs who actually care about their bar licenses, Blanche also did grave damage to their plan to use the Comey memos in the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy. The Loaner AUSAs attempted (or rather, fronted for James Hayes’ attempt) to use this investigation to get a filter team approved to turn the clearly privileged materials Miles Starr and Jack Eckenrode could have read because Kash Patel’s FBI turned off the filters applied under Bill Barr into crime-fraud excepted communications, at least ostensibly because they reflected a conspiracy to leak classified materials but in reality to serve their larger Grand Conspiracy conspiracy.

But instead of getting their filter protocol, the EDVA effort resulted in an order from William Fitzpatrick prohibiting the government from reviewing those privileged materials.

ORDERED that the Government, including any of its agents or employees, shall not review any of the materials seized pursuant to the four 2019 and 2020 search warrants at issue until further order of the Court;

And then Fitzpatrick issued an opinion effectively holding that DOJ violated Comey’s attorney-client privilege in 2020 by not permitting him to assert privilege.

However, the government never engaged Mr. Comey in this process even though it knew that Mr. Richman represented Mr. Comey as his attorney as of May 9, 2017, and three of the four Richman Warrants authorized the government to search Mr. Richman’s devices through May 30, 2017, 21 days after an attorney-client relationship had been formed. ECF Nos. 38 at 2 and 138-11 at 33 (Aug. 2019 Office of the Inspector General Report) (noting that Mr. Comey informed the Office of Inspector General that “the day after his removal, or ‘very shortly thereafter,’ he retained attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald, David Kelley, and Daniel Richman.”).

[snip]

At the time the Richman Warrants were executed, the government was aware not only that Mr. Richman represented Mr. Comey, but also that he maintained ongoing attorney-client relationships with other individuals, as the FBI materials regarding his resignation from Special Government Employee status noted his intention to represent a defendant in a federal criminal prosecution. Id. As a result, when the government obtained the first Richman Warrant in 2019, it was clearly foreseeable that Mr. Richman’s devices contained potentially privileged communications with numerous third parties, including Mr. Comey. Nevertheless, in 2019 and 2020, the government made a conscious decision to exclude Mr. Comey from the filter process, even though Mr. Comey, as the client, is the privilege holder, not Mr. Richman. The government’s claim at the November 5, 2025 hearing that Mr. Richman, at the time himself the subject of a criminal investigation and represented by separate counsel, was in a position to effectively assert Mr. Comey’s privilege is entirely unreasonable.

Fitzpatrick noted that had prosecutors obtained a new warrant to investigate Comey’s alleged leaks, it would be narrowly scoped. (He doesn’t say this, but it is the case that a new warrant would have prohibited any searches after February 7, 2017, the day Richman left the FBI, and therefore prohibited the review of the Comey memo exchanges even on the Richman side.)

If a new warrant had been sought by the government and issued by the Court, the Fourth Amendment would have required it to be narrowly tailored, authorizing access only to materials within a limited time frame and relevant to the new offenses under investigation. See Williams, 592 F.3d at 519. In addition, any new warrant would have imposed strict procedural safeguards to ensure privileged information was not reviewed by the prosecution team. As a result, the parameters of the 2025 search would inevitably have had a different and much narrower scope than the Richman Warrants. Faced with this prospect, the government chose to unilaterally search materials that were (1) seized five years earlier; (2) seized in a separate and since closed investigation; (3) that were never reviewed to determine whether the seized information was responsive to the original warrants; (4) that were likely improperly held by the government for a prolonged period of time; (5) that included potentially privileged communications; (6) did so without ever engaging the privilege holders; and (7) did so without seeking any new judicial authority.

And he described that DOJ had permitted Miles Starr to remain on the investigative team even after having been tainted by privileged communications.

Agent-3, rather than remove himself from the investigative team until the taint issue was resolved, proceeded into the grand jury undeterred and testified in support of the pending indictment. ECF 179. In fact, Agent-3 was the only witness to testify before the grand jury in support of the pending indictment. Id. The government’s decision to allow an agent who was exposed to potentially privileged information to testify before a grand jury is highly irregular and a radical departure from past DOJ practice.

The Fitzpatrick opinion was absolutely devastating for the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy, because it rendered Comey’s side of the Comey memo exchanges unlawfully seized.

And then Donald Trump DOJ responded the way Trump always does, by claiming bias. The Loaner AUSAs made a specious claim that Fitzpatrick’s comments about Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s misstatements to the jury reflected bias.

Federal courts have an affirmative obligation to ensure that judicial findings accurately reflect the evidence. Canon 2(A) of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges requires every judge to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary” and to avoid orders that “misstate or distort the record.” Canon 3(A)(4) requires courts to ensure that factual determinations are based on the actual record, not assumptions or misrepresentations. Measured against these obligations and the rule of law, the magistrate’s reading of the transcript cannot stand.

And, that very same day, Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer lied to the NYPost in a bid to claim that Michael Nachmanoff himself is biased.

Interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan suggested Wednesday that the Biden-appointed judge overseeing the criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey violated judicial conduct rules by asking if she was a “puppet” of President Trump.

District Judge Michael Nachmanoff asked Comey’s defense lawyer if he thought Halligan, the prosecutor who brought the indictment against the former FBI boss, was acting as a “puppet” or “stalking horse” of the commander in chief, during a hearing in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom.

“Personal attacks — like Judge Nachmanoff referring to me as a ‘puppet’ — don’t change the facts or the law,” Halligan exclusively told The Post.

By November 19, the day of these twin bullshit claims of judicial misconduct, the Comey prosecution in EDVA had done grave damage to the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy. But the plan was to discredit everything the judges did.

Except for Cameron Currie. They forgot to include Judge Currie, and her order dismissing the indictment without prejudice — making the indictment and everything that happened after that a legal nullity — left all of this wildly unresolved.

DOJ is on notice that they broke the law and that their Grand Conspiracy conspiracy theories are bullshit. But that notice has become a legal nullity, with no way for them to rebut it in EDVA.

I can tell you what the plan was. It was (as Charlie Savage recently laid out) to whisk this all away to Aileen Cannnon’s courthouse to make the crimes FBI committed go away.

I have no fucking clue what the plan is now, because I have no idea what the legal import is of these legal statements that have been rendered a legal nullity by the Currie order.

I do know, however, that when imagining what might come next, you have to consider that SDFL investigation, which may be why Comey’s statement predicted that, “I know that Donald Trump will probably come after me again.”

Update: In somewhat related news, the 11th Circuit has upheld the judgment and sanctions against Trump and Alina Habba for their frivolous lawsuit very much paralleling the Grand Conspiracy theory.

Meaning, Jim Comey has beaten Trump in court twice in a holiday-shortened week.

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The Graymail Cometh

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I’ve written extensively about how Kash Patel and John Durham chased a particular intelligence report — one we now know to have been based on Russian fabrications — for four years.

Kash, John Ratcliffe, Durham, his lead investigator Jack Eckenrode (who leads this investigation), Bill Barr — all of them! — believed that because the FBI received a single intelligence report repeating a Russian claim that Hillary planned to hold Trump accountable for his ties to Russia, it was proof that Hillary had intentionally fabricated the Steele dossier (disinformation into which was probably injected by Paul Manafort buddy Oleg Deripaska) and the Alfa Bank anomalies.

The case against Jim Comey renews that goose chase, perhaps (because Durham concluded it was likely fabricated) criminally so.

In his bid to obtain the grand jury transcripts submitted yesterday, Comey laid out how important it was for him to see how Lindsey Halligan instructed the jury on this matter, especially given that the grand jury rejected the charge specifically pertaining to that intelligence, but Loaner AUSAs plan to use it to prove Count Two of the existing indictment. As part of that discussion, he lays out how obscene it was to even charge him for not remembering something simply because Kash and Ratcliffe had developed an obsession over it.

Note, I have generally referred to that intelligence report as the “Clinton Plan,” which is how Durham referred to it, though without the scare quotes making clear that Durham himself fabricated parts of this theory. Comey, in his filings, uses the FBI term for all such referrals, CIOL (Counterintelligence Operational Lead).

Comey’s description starts with a detail I should have known, but did not: When Comey was asked, three times during the September 30, 2020 hearing, about the “Clinton Plan” CIOL, he had not been shown it.

On September 30, 2020, Mr. Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into alleged links between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government. See Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation: Day 3, Hearing Before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 116th Cong. (Sept. 30, 2020), http://bit.ly/4o2ekHb. The night before, he was sent a copy of the Ratcliffe Letter, described above, which purported to summarize the September 7, 2016 CIOL in one sentence. Mr. Comey was not provided an opportunity to review the September 7, 2016 CIOL at issue prior to his testimony.

Ratcliffe had sent Lindsey Graham a misleading letter about it the night before the hearing, but he didn’t release the memo itself (which was itself redacted in a misleading way, and then shared with the Federalist) for another week. I first posted about it on October 11 of that year.

Nevertheless, Lindsey Graham highlighted it in the hearing and then Josh Hawley followed up. The focus on the referral was an ambush, probably intended to support the Durham investigation. And that’s what Kash is trying to criminalize, because doing so sustains his batshit insane theory that Hillary was treated better than Trump in the 2016 election when two criminal investigations into her dominated and the investigation into Trump’s aides remained secret.

To make things worse, Trump is trying to criminalize something which there’s no evidence Comey ever saw (Comey lays this out without even mentioning that Durham couldn’t find any proof that anyone else had seen it, either).

There is no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Comey received the CIOL at issue, much less that he reviewed it. The materials in discovery make clear that every day, numerous CIOLs come to the FBI addressed to the Director—from a variety of federal agencies in a variety of formats—and are routed to employees other than the Director. Because the Midyear Exam investigation had been closed for more than two months, there is no reason to believe that any CIOL related to Ms. Clinton would have been sent to Mr. Comey (and the government has produced no proof that it was). There is no electronic trail showing that Mr. Comey received the CIOL at issue. There is no paper trail showing that he received it. And there is no witness who says that Mr. Comey either received it or discussed it with him. Full stop.

This total lack of evidence is extremely troubling in light of credible press reporting that not only does a declination memorandum exist in this case,11 but it made clear that with respect to the CIOL in particular, a prior investigation found that Mr. Comey’s statement could not support a false-statement charge because there was insufficient evidence Mr. Comey had ever seen the CIOL.12 Ms. Halligan was also reported to have been advised by career prosecutors in that declination memorandum that “seeking the charges would violate DOJ policy, raise serious ethics issues, and risk being rejected by the grand jury.” Id. 13

11 The government’s refusal to answer basic questions about the existence of this declination memorandum and decision to hide behind a flimsy claim of privilege to stonewall the Court’s inquiries, see ECF No. 207, should be taken as confirmation that such a memorandum exists. See ECF No. 174 at 21.

12Katherine Faulders, et al., Ex-special counsel John Durham undercut case against James Comey in interview with prosecutors: Sources, ABC News (Oct. 6, 2025), https://perma.cc/M2JC-CQGQ.

13 Katherine Faulders, et al., Prosecutors’ memo to new US attorney found no probable cause to charge James Comey: Sources (Sept. 25, 2025), https://perma.cc/8KT5-LHAG.

As noted, this was a key part of Comey’s bid to get the grand jury transcripts, something that goes to the heart of the problem with simply cut-and-pasting the two true billed charges into a new indictment.

But as part of his (far less interesting) reply motion for a Bill of Particulars, he also includes all the discovery requests he has submitted (October 2, October 29, November 12, November 19). They hint at another way this prosecution might go away (and Comey’s post-exoneration retaliation might flourish), on top of the 14 ways we’ve already talked about: with discovery requests with which prosecutors will really not want to comply, or cannot, either because of bulk, classification, or destruction.

In the latter category, for example, Comey reveals an October 12 FBI 302 describing that DC USAO destroyed records relating to journalists when the Arctic Haze investigation was closed.

An FBI 302 Report, dated October 12, 2025, reports that “the District of Columbia United States Attorneys Office [was] ‘freaking out’ when the [Arctic Haze] case was declined for prosecution and in the process of being closed, with an Assistant United States Attorney telling [the lead agent in the Arctic Haze investigation] to ensure that any grand jury materials relating to members of the media were destroyed.” See FD-302 Report Serial 110 at -26505.

Lindsey’s Loaner AUSAs say that’s not true.

In an email on November 20, 2025 at 10:29 AM ET, the government represented that the 302 was inaccurate and the records had not, in fact, been destroyed. Mr. Comey reserves his rights with respect to the government’s potential spoliation of exculpatory evidence and will further investigate the government’s claim.

Comey also, just Wednesday, asked for the complete case file for the Arctic Haze, Durham, and this investigation (why he doesn’t have the latter two months after indictment I don’t know).

The Arctic Haze case file will lay out not just how Bill Barr focused exclusively on Comey (which I noted here) as opposed to others who might have been trying to damage him, but would name the Republican(s) who would have been the focus if he had not done so.

The Durham case file would explain why Andrew DeFilippis left DOJ quickly and quietly in the middle of the investigation. It would show that Durham lied in his report about how many FBI sources he had asked about the “Clinton Plan” CIOL, partly in an attempt to hide how clear it was that no one had seen this. It might show which Ukrainian Russian agents Durham and Barr and Jack Eckenrode consulted during the investigation and whether they also consulted Oleg Deripaska. It would either reveal the nature of the tip about Trump corruption that Italy gave to Durham or make clear that Durham hadn’t actually chased it down.

Importantly, it would also include all the evidence that shows Durham and Durham’s lead investigator turned Kash’s senior advisor, Jack Eckenrode, saw confirming that he had been chasing Russian disinformation for years, even while failing to establish any proof that FBI had actually received it. That evidence would be important to lay out how the continued pursuit of this by Kash and Eckenrode is a crime, at least according to Durham’s logic.

Holy hell I’d love to see the full Durham case file.

But the request that might really sink this prosecution, if 14 other things don’t first, is Jim Comey’s request for (1) all the CIOLs he received between January 1, 2016 (when the first SVR reports pertinent to the Clinton email investigation came in) and September 30, 2016, (2) all the intelligence he received pertaining to the Clinton email investigation or Crossfire Hurricane in that same period, and (3) all communications he received for a narrower period, July 1, 2016 to September 30, 2016.

If the government intends to present evidence as part of its case in chief at trial regarding the CIOL dated September 7, 2016 that Mr. Comey was questioned about in the September 30, 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Comey is entitled to any and all documents that would rebut the inference that this CIOL was memorable to him as of September 30, 2020. Therefore, to the extent Count Two (or any other aspect of the government’s case in chief) is premised on the September 7, 2016 CIOL, in addition to the standard Rule 16 discovery that we are entitled to receive promptly, we are entitled to receive the following categories of documents pursuant to Rule 16 and Brady and its progeny, all of which are material to Mr. Comey’s ability to defend this case in pretrial motion practice and/or at trial:

(1) Any and all documents reflecting Mr. Comey’s receipt or review of CIOLs concerning the Midyear Exam investigation, Hillary Clinton, or the Crossfire Hurricane investigation between January 1, 2016 and September 30, 2016, including but not limited to:

(a) The CIOLs themselves; and

(b) Documentation reflecting Mr. Comey’s receipt or review thereof;

(2) Any and all documents reflecting Mr. Comey’s receipt or review of classified information concerning the Midyear Exam investigation, Hillary Clinton, or the Crossfire Hurricane investigation between January 1, 2016 and September 30, 2016;

(3) Any and all documents reflecting discussion involving Mr. Comey of CIOLs concerning the Midyear Exam investigation, Hillary Clinton, or the Crossfire Hurricane investigation between January 1, 2016 and September 30, 2016;

(4) Any and all documents reflecting discussion involving Mr. Comey of classified information concerning the Midyear Exam investigation, Hillary Clinton, or the Crossfire Hurricane investigation between January 1, 2016 and September 30, 2016; and

(5) Any and all communications or documents received by Mr. Comey in his capacity as Director of the FBI between July 1, 2016 and September 30, 2016. “Communications” as used in this subrequest five includes, but is not limited to:

(a) Emails;

(b) Phone calls;

(c) Text messages;

(d) Records of oral communications;

(e) Meeting invitations and calendar entries; and

(f) Hard copies of written communications delivered to Mr. Comey or his staff.

This is, on one hand, totally justifiable, because it would show just how unremarkable the CIOL that the current FBI Director has obsessed about for six years is as compared to everything else that Comey saw in that period. It would show why it made sense that, in 2020, when sandbagged by a misleading letter, it was unsurprising that the “Clinton Plan” CIOL would not ring a bell, as Comey responded in the hearing.

On the other hand, it is classic graymail, the very defense strategy used by Scooter Libby a hundred (well, just twenty) years ago: a request for documents so sensitive and so voluminous that prosecutors would have an exceedingly difficult time complying.

Libby’s request was more frivolous than this one. He asked for PDBs, among the most sensitive intelligence documents out there, covering the period when he was targeting Valerie Plame through the period when he lied to Patrick Fitzgerald about doing so. Fitzgerald managed not just to get the discovery to Libby, but to get substitutions approved so Libby’s team could walk through how insignificant exposing a CIA officer was to him, given the issues he was dealing with at the time.

By comparison, Comey’s is totally reasonable, given what prosecutors are preparing to argue, that he should have remembered, in September 2020, either the CIOL he didn’t receive or a briefing, possibly from John Brennan, that mentioned it in passing weeks later.

But Comey’s request will be just as difficult to comply with (and will also flip the logic of the dumb burn bag investigation back onto investigators). Plus, Kash Patel won’t want to comply with this, because it would involve giving Jim Comey a ton of information about how real and pressing the Russian attack was in 2016, the one Kash’s entire career is built on diminishing.

It seems that Lindsey’s Loaner AUSAs are already trying to dodge this request. The most recent discovery letter, sent Tuesday, reveals that prosecutors are struggling to come with even the number of CIOLs Comey saw.

With respect to defense Category Twelve, which we understand from our November 12, 2025 meet and confer that you are working to provide relevant numbers with respect to, we seek to review the underlying CIOLs for 2016 in their entirety, and reserve our right to seek declassification of those CIOLs.

Tough shit, this letter says. We not only want the number, we want to see them, all of them, and we may demand you declassify them.

In October, ABC reported that one of the things in the declination memo — one of the reasons why career prosecutors said they could not charge this — was the difficulty in even identifying the number of things they’d have to show Comey.

Prosecutors further expressed concerns about the department’s ability to take the case to trial quickly due to problems identifying all the relevant materials that would need to be handed over to Comey’s lawyers, sources said.

This is what that concern looks like in real life.

And if Lindsey’s unlawful appointment or Trump’s clear malice or Lindsey’s suspected misconduct in the grand jury or her failure to actually get an indictment or Miles Starr’s breach of Comey’s privilege or their unwarranted searches or Ted Cruz’ prevarications and stupid questions or the destruction of exculpatory evidence or something else doesn’t make this prosecution go away beforehand, Lindsey’s Loaner AUSAs may one day give up.

Update: In a new filing, Comey asks for a delay of his deadline for identifying what classified information he’ll need to defend himself. Among the problems is DOJ has still not declassified the CIOL John Ratcliffe partly declassified 5 years ago.

First, the government must produce the classified discovery at issue. On October 29, 2025, and November 19, 2025, the defense made discovery and Brady requests to the government that called for the production of additional classified information and the declassification of certain materials. See ECF No. 204-2 (Requests Eleven and Twelve) and 204-4 (Request Fourteen). With respect to the defense’s requests, the government reported today, November 21, 2025, that they had requested authorization for the defense to have access to certain counterintelligence operational leads (“CIOLs”), but that they were held at high classification levels. Needless to say, to the extent Count Two relates to a CIOL, and Mr. Comey’s purported memory of a CIOL, it is necessary for the defense to review the CIOL and any other relevant CIOLs. That has not happened.

Discovery requests

Category One: Lindsey Halligan’s unlawful appointment (expanded to include WDVA)

Category Two: Lack of probable cause (expanded to include more prosecutors)

Category Three: Presentation to grand jury

Category Four: Vindictive prosecution (expanded to include comparators)

Category Five: Trump’s hostility to Jim Comey

Category Six: Prejudicial statements from Trump

Category Seven: Prior inconsistent statements from Andy McCabe

Category Eight: Other Rule 16 and Brady

[There’s no identifiable Category Nine]

Category Ten: Potential sources identified in leak investigations

Category Eleven: Privilege taint

Category Twelve: All CIOLs and communications

Category Thirteen: All evidence destroyed in Arctic Haze investigation

Category Fourteen: Full case files for Arctic Haze, Durham investigation, Jim Comey

 

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Kash Patel’s Taint

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In advance of today’s hearing (at 10AM ET) on Jim Comey’s vindictive prosecution claim, I want to lay out two aspects of the Comey prosecution that likely doom it, and may doom the larger fever dream of a grand conspiracy case.

Both arise out of the way that Lindsey Halligan was prepped not by prosecutors, but by FBI agents working on the “Director’s Task Force” we know to be led by Jack Eckenrode, the guy who chased Russian disinformation for years based off Kash Patel’s misleading packaging of classified documents back in 2020.

This post will argue that likely all of them, possibly up to and including Kash himself, have tainted themselves by snooping in Jim Comey’s privileged communications. A follow-up will lay out the increasing evidence that Jim Comey’s grand jury presentment is a crime scene.

On September 12, FBI agents working on the Director’s Task Force were prepping for EDVA’s September 16 interview with Dan Richman, then led by Erik Siebert. They were searching the full Cellebrite extraction from Richman’s phone, and stumbled on communications Richman conducted using a pseudonym. They didn’t use those communications for the Richman interview, almost certainly because that interview would have been focused on actual suspected crimes rather than the fever dreams of conspiracists. But after that interview led prosecutors to conclude there was no crime that could be charged, Trump removed Siebert, leading Pam Bondi to appoint overt partisan Maggie Cleary, on September 20 (Cleary becomes important for the follow-up). But that wasn’t good enough. Then Trump publicly demanded Bondi install Lindsey Halligan, which Bondi did on September 22. That week, Cleary reportedly heeded prosecutors’ view the case could not — should not — be charged.

But Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer instead prepped with FBI agents working on the Director’s Task Force. Importantly, because DOJ wouldn’t provide Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer with outside help, those FBI agents prepped Lindsey, who knew nothing about how to prosecute a case, themselves.

DOJ headquarters declined to provide lawyers to assist Halligan, and FBI agents and lawyers working to prepare her were denied their request for a para-legal professional to assist in the presentation, according to two people familiar with the matter.

[snip]

Last Tuesday [September 23], Halligan began a crash course to prepare. Justice officials told her that the deputy attorney general’s office didn’t have lawyers to help her, and that it was against federal rules of criminal procedure for one of the attorneys from Justice headquarters to be in the grand jury room, one source familiar with the discussions said.

There’s a natural tension between FBI agents and prosecutors. The former get really invested in their targets, leading them to believe their case is stronger than it is. The latter, traditionally, have focused on how to sustain DOJ’s prior near-perfect record of convictions, all while keeping their bar licenses, and so they focus on what will be admissible and credible at trial, not their emotional belief they’ve caught a baddy.

Just as one example of how this pressure works, Jack Eckenrode — the head of this effort! — may well be the guy who tried to force Patrick Fitzgerald to indict Karl Rove two decades ago by telling journalists Rove was going to be indicted. Someone wanted Rove indicted (so did I!), but Fitz presumably believed that Robert Luskin had nudged Rove through serial admissions successfully enough to avoid perjuring himself too badly, and also that Rove would be useful at Scooter Libby’s trial, which he was.

But with the FBI agents prepping Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, that moderating influence of a prosecutor didn’t exist. It was Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, being led by the nose by hyper-partisan FBI guys performing for their hyper-partisan boss hunting the baddy that Kash had targeted even before getting the job.

And that’s important, because when Special Agent Spenser Warren describes “team” in this affidavit about the breach of Jim Comey’s privileged texts, it likely includes Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer.

On the morning of September 25, 2025, the team was preparing for an indictment of James Comey, to occur later that afternoon. SA Warren provided case agent SA Miles Starr and an FBI Office of General Counsel (OGC) attorney a limited overview of the text message communications to and from “Michael Garcia” (now understood to be Daniel Richman). SA Warren advised SA Starr and the FBI OGC attorney that some of the messages appeared to reference potential future legal representation. The FBI OGC attorney immediately advised that any of the text message communications referencing potential future legal representation should not be part of the indictment preparation. SA Warren provided the indictment preparation team a two-page document containing limited text message content only from May 11, 2017, predating the reference to potential future legal representation.

Take a step back though. This conversation should never have happened! That’s because the imagined crime these FBI agents were presenting was that Comey had lied when he told Ted Cruz he had never told anyone at FBI to act as an anonymous source. These texts post-dated Richman’s departure from the FBI by over three months. Even if they hadn’t accessed these texts illegally, they don’t help you prove your case (unless you neglect to tell grand jurors and judges when Richman left FBI, as this prosecution team persists in doing).

But because there was no grown-up in the room, they accessed the texts.

There are three pieces of evidence that the entire group — Miles Starr, Eckenrode, but also Lindsey Halligan, and with her, her Loaner AUSAs — all were tainted by the privileged communications, and along with it the grand jury.

First, Warren described that he shielded Starr from the taint of the privileged comms by isolating two pages of texts, “only from May 11, 2017, predating the reference to potential future legal representation.” But Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer likely presented eight pages of those texts, marked as Government Exhibit 10, on the fourth page of which Richman says, “just got goahead,” like he had just spoken to Comey, and the fifth through eighth pages of which post-date May 11 entirely. Someone went back into evidence they had been told included privileged texts and got an extra six pages of evidence.

And if Lindsey was already presenting texts well beyond the time that Comey retained Richman, that makes it more likely that when Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer told the grand jury there was better evidence they would get for trial, she was thinking of the other side of Richman’s communications, the communications between Comey and Richman.

But if that’s what she was thinking, the only way she would say that would be if she knew of the privileged comms — the comms an FBI lawyer specifically advised not to include in grand jury prep. That doesn’t mean she looked at them. It means she knew they were there and intended to go get them. When Miles Starr or whoever went back to get 8 pages of texts, he likely searched only the ones that included Mike Schmidt, thereby avoiding seeing any communications between Comey and Richman, but he did so because he knew those privileged communications were there.

Classic taint.

Also note, in the transcript, this comment appeared just one page after the other misinstruction on the law that (per Judge William Fitzpatrick) Lindsey gave, suggesting that Comey would have to take the stand. I’m sure the FBI agents who prepped her have the fever dream that they’ll see Comey on the stand, but no prosecutor would even silently imagine she could get a well-lawyered defendant to take the stand, much less blurt it out in front of a grand jury.

The other piece of evidence that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer was tainted by that privileged communication is the way that, even before sharing any of this discovery with Comey, she and the Loaner AUSAs set out to breach Comey’s privilege. They filed a motion to do so as one of their first filings (perhaps not coincidentally on the day Maggie Cleary was fired). And then, a week later, when they tried to rush Michael Nachmanoff into granting that motion, they invented a new theory of crime to get access to these communications: that Jim Comey lawyered up with Dan Richman and Pat Fitzgerald (and David Kelley) on May 11, 2017 in order to leak classified memos showing Donald Trump’s corruption.

Additionally, based on publicly disclosed information, the defendant used current lead defense counsel to improperly disclose classified information.

[snip]

This fact raises a question of conflict and disqualification for current lead defense counsel. Some of the communications in the potentially protected material are from the same time as the focus of the DOJ OIG report. Before litigating any issue of conflict or disqualification, the parties should have access to all relevant and non-privileged information. The sooner that the potentially protected information is reviewed and filtered, the sooner the parties can make any appropriate filings with the Court.

The imagined crime here is a leak of classified information, not a lie in response to a question from Ted Cruz, and so irrelevant to this prosecution.

In real time, Comey dismissed this claim as the bullshit fever dream it was: Comey was an Original Classification Authority and didn’t believe anything in his memos was classified, and the specific memo shared with Mike Schmidt had no classified information in it by any measure.

But consider how abusive the claim looks now. To get these texts, FBI agents working on the Director’s Task Force had gone back into material seized from Richman obtained more than five years earlier, they did so without a fresh warrant specific to either this prosecution or the fever dreams the FBI agents are really pursuing, rather than accessing the stuff that excluded the stuff Richman had said was privileged, they accessed the raw data and ostensibly did so for communications that could not have been responsive to their intended purpose (that is, to find out what, if anything, Richman shared anonymously while still at the FBI). And their interim claim they invoked to breach privilege, that this was a conspiracy to leak classified information, had nothing to do with this case, or even the larger fever dream conspiracy — the one they’re pursuing in Florida — that this was a conspiracy to be mean to Donald Trump.

A classic fishing expedition.

Betcha some money the Loaner AUSAs are delaying here so someone can try to get a warrant in Florida invoking a crime-fraud exception based on the well-known crime of being mean to Donald Trump.

Indeed, in Loaner AUSA Gabriel Diaz’ emergency motion for a delay (authored, as so many of these abusive filings are, by James Hayes), he doesn’t even argue this is about taint. He’s arguing (in a sentence fragment) only about whether Miles Starr read the actual texts in question, not whether he went back and searched for their counterpart texts to put together an 8-page exhibit for Lindsey to use.

Indeed, the government believes the Magistrate Judge may have misinterpreted some facts he found when issuing the latest order to release the grand jury materials to the defendant. For instance, whether the defendant has any standing to challenge the Richman materials, the full context of the statements made by the prosecutor to the grand jury, that Agent-3 was exposed to potentially privileged material, and that two indictments were presented to the grand jury.

Much of what the prosecutors have done since that day is a frantic bid to get those privileged texts, texts that could in no way serve to help prove this case as charged.

It’s sunny (and very cold by Irish standards), so I’m going to go take a walk before I map out the team — like James Hayes and OGC lawyer Gabriel Cohen — that’s lurking behind the foolish Loaner AUSAs fronting for all of this. But there’s a very good chance all of them are driven by taint, the taint of a fishing expedition into Jim Comey’s privileged communications.

This prosecution appears to have become more focused on finding some way out of that taint than on actually winning this particular prosecution against Kash Patel’s nemesis.

Cast of characters

Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer

Tyler Lemons: On loan from EDNC

Gabriel Diaz: On loan from EDNC

James Hayes: Litigation Attorney at Main Justice, he is listed as author of the following:

Gabriel Cohen: Metadata lists him as OGC, possibly in Detroit, he is the author of:

Henry Whitaker: The former Solicitor General of Florida and currently Pam Bondi’s counselor, he is the signed author of:

Kathleen Stoughton: An AUSA in South Carolina with solid appellate experience, she is listed as author of:

Michael Shedd: A newish AUSA in South Carolin, he is listed as author of:

lheim: Metadata lists as author of:

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Kash Patel’s Plot Against Jim Comey Thickens!

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The two sides have submitted additional filings in advance of a hearing about the attorney-client and Fourth Amendment violations in the Jim Comey case:

 

The government claims that Comey hasn’t demonstrated a need to see what happened in the grand jury because there’s no way any privileged or Fourth Amendment violative material was presented, and even if it were, that would be insufficient to dismiss the indictment, which is the standard.

Even assuming the defendant could prove that the government violated the Fourth Amendment or attorney-client privilege in its grand jury presentation (and to be clear, he cannot), the remedy would be to suppress that evidence at trial—not to dismiss the indictment. So, the defendant has not shown that “a ground may exist to dismiss the indictment because of a matter that occurred before the grand jury.” Fed. R. Crim. P. 6(e)(3)(E)(ii). He is not entitled to access grand jury material.

There are problems with both these claims.

First, Miles Starr was briefed orally on the comms between Dan Richman and Mike Schmidt and Jim Comey the morning of the grand jury presentment. Then, the FBI Agent who was tainted provided a written document that only covered stuff on May 11.

On the morning of September 25, 2025, the team was preparing for an indictment of James Comey, to occur later that afternoon. SA Warren provided case agent SA Miles Starr and an FBI Office of General Counsel (OGC) attorney a limited overview of the text message communications to and from “Michael Garcia” (now understood to be Daniel Richman). SA Warren advised SA Starr and the FBI OGC attorney that some of the messages appeared to reference potential future legal representation. The FBI OGC attorney immediately advised that any of the text message communications referencing potential future legal representation should not be part of the indictment preparation. SA Warren provided the indictment preparation team a two-page document containing limited text message content only from May 11, 2017, predating the reference to potential future legal representation.

But DOJ itself recognizes that anything after May 9, the day Comey was fired, may be privileged.

4 The defendant was removed as FBI Director on May 9, 2017. He told the Office of Inspector General that “the day after his removal, or ‘very shortly thereafter,’ he retained attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald, David Kelley, and Daniel Richman.” Dkt. No. 138-11 at 33 (Aug. 2019 Office of the Inspector General Report). Any claim of privilege involving those attorneys would necessarily arise after May 9, 2017.

So they took insufficient steps to prevent taint of the grand jury, because materials between Richman and Comey from May 9 and 10 may well be privileged.

Even if that were sufficient, there’s no reason why communications between Comey and Richman in May could be deemed relevant to the grand jury. That’s because he admitted sharing information with Richman back in 2017. He didn’t hide it from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Meanwhile, the government has no fucking clue whether it presented other Fourth Amendment violative content to the Grand Jury. They confessed last night, days after telling Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick they had complied with his order to provide this information, that they had no fucking clue whether they were looking at data that included both scoped and unscoped content (though this passage suggests that the materials obtained from Columbia, which includes the only material that remotely matches the first charge, with the second warrant were scoped).

5 The Order also required the government to provide, in writing, by the same deadline: “Confirmation of whether the Government has divided the materials searched pursuant to the four 2019 and 2020 warrants at issue into materials that are responsive and non-responsive to those warrants, and, if so, a detailed explanation of the methodology used to make that determination; A detailed explanation of whether, and for what period of time, the Government has preserved any materials identified as non-responsive to the four search warrants; A description identifying which materials have been identified as responsive, if any; and A description identifying which materials have previously been designated as privileged.” ECF No. 161 at 1-2.

Despite certifying on November 6 that it had complied with the Court’s Order, ECF No. 163, the government did not provide this information until the evening of November 9, 2025, in response to a defense inquiry. The government told the defense that it “does not know” whether there are responsive sets for the first, third, and fourth warrants, or whether it has produced those to the defense, and said that in that regard, “we are still pulling prior emails” and the “agent reviewed the filtered material through relativity but there appears to be a loss of data that we are currently trying to restore.”

Remember, this entire investigation started when Kash discovered documents that had been handled improperly. And now, because these documents have been handled improperly, his own team has been violating Jim Comey’s Fourth Amendment rights.

There are several more alarming details in today’s filings. First, both FBI agents exposed to tainted information (in addition to Miles Starr, from whom DOJ didn’t bother to obtain an affidavit, and who has not been withdrawn from this or any other investigative teams) are part of the Director’s Advisory Team, meaning they work directly for Kash Patel.

The agent who first saw the privileged material claims:

  • They didn’t know who Michael Garcia was (a pseudonym Richman used for these communications), but nevertheless reviewed them as part of a search for communications between Comey and Richman
  • They were handed the entire extraction of Dan Richman’s devices, suggesting it did not extract the privilege reviewed content

Indeed, the materials DOJ provided Comey — the ones they had been accessing — had not been filtered for privilege or responsiveness.

4 On November 6, 2025, the government produced various copies of what appear to be the raw returns for the search warrants at issue, unscoped for responsiveness and filtered for Mr. Richman’s privileges. But the government provided incorrect passwords to large subsets of those materials. The defense engaged a vendor who worked throughout the weekend to load and process those materials; the government provided the correct passwords on November 9, 2025.

Effectively, Kash has been investigating Comey using a general warrant on his friend Dan Richman.

It’s not just Kash and his personal squad of Jim Comey hunters who’ve violated Comey’s Fourth Amendment rights, Comey’s filing suggests.

Pam Bondi’s imagined “ratification” of the grand jury proceedings — the ones based on incomplete records — would have exposed her, too, to unlawful material.

2 Concerns about taint arising from the improper use of potentially privileged and unconstitutionally-obtained materials are heightened because of the government’s continued use of the materials obtained pursuant to the warrants and grand jury transcripts. On October 31, 2025, the Attorney General purported to ratify the indictment based on her review of the grand jury proceedings. ECF No. 137-1 at 2-3. If that review entailed further improper use of privileged or unconstitutionally-obtained materials insofar as they were presented to the grand jury, it casts further doubt on the propriety of the government’s conduct of this case. The government produced the grand jury materials on November 5, 2025 to Judge Currie for in camera review, and thus could quickly produce the same materials to the defense. See ECF No. 158.

The Loaner AUSAs are trying to cut their losses, by asking Fitzpatrick to conduct a review of the grand jury materials himself — no doubt to prevent Comey from using grand jury material in his challenge of these warrants, which is currently due on November 19.

But there’s virtually no way he would be able to figure out if Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer presented material that violated Comey’s Fourth Amendment rights.

This should all be sorted out at a hearing at 4PM ET.

Update: Fitzpatrick came in ready to accept the government’s request he review this in camera. But after it became clear he would not budge on that, Rebekah Donaleski asked to submit something ex parte tomorrow to lay out where they believe the violations are.

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Tyler Lemons Caught Jack Eckenrode Committing a Capstone Crime

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Back in July, in the wake of Trump’s struggles to distract from his own Epstein cover-up and as if in response to Tulsi Gabbard’s wild rants about the Intelligence Community Assessment, the FBI Director posted this tweet, RTing an inflammatory tweet from a propagandist who has been central to Kash’s disinformation about the Russian investigation.

Buried in a back room at the FBI, Kash claimed, was what John Solomon called “the smoking gun evidence … [i]f it is authenticated.”

Days later, Kash referenced these files again, explicitly tying his campaign to supplant the Steele dossier for the actual Russian investigation with his role, as FBI Director, now focusing on “uncovered burn bags/room filled with hidden Russia Gate files, including the Durham annex.”

It took just a matter of days for me and Charlie Savage to figure out that four years earlier, John Durham had not just not authenticated John Solomon’s “smoking gun,” but he had in fact concluded that the very email Solomon called a smoking gun was instead, “a composite of several emails.”

That is — a fabrication.

After the release of the Durham annex revealed that Kash — and John Durham and John Durham’s lead investigator Jack Eckenrode, along with John Ratcliffe — had been chasing Russian disinformation, Kash got even more desperate, clinging to Sean Davis propaganda in an attempt to rebut a plain reading of the Durham annex.

The FBI Director just endorsed the ignorant ravings of a long-discredited propagandist, Sean Davis, attempting to debunk the NYT’s factual reporting that the letters on which the entire conspiracy the frothy right has been chasing for years “were probably manufactured.”

Kash needs Davis to be right, because if he’s not, it exposes Kash as someone too stupid to understand he has been chasing Russian disinformation for years. Kash needs Davis to be right, because Kash just declassified this annex thinking it would help his boss distract from the Epstein scandal that him himself stoked, when in fact it shows that Russian spies have been laughing their ass off at everyone involved for nine years (which I’ll come back to).

The truth is, Kash has been chasing documents as self-evidently problematic as the Steele dossier all that time.

He has proven an easy mark.

That’s what we saw in real time. We also saw in the classified annex both that Durham, along with his chief investigator, Jack Eckenrode, tried to hide the evidence that they had been chasing Russian disinformation for years — indeed, continued to chase Russian disinformation for two years after obtaining confirmation they were doing that. Then Tulsi Gabbard and Chuck Grassley tried to hide that Durham had tried to hide that.

It became clear that John Durham and his lead investigator Jack Eckenrode had committed the very crime that Durham claimed he was investigating when he chased Russian disinformation for four years, which he described this way:

(i) knew the Clinton campaign intended to falsely accuse its opponent with specific information or allegations, (ii) intentionally disregarded a particular civil right of a particular person (such as the right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures), and (iii) then intentionally aided that effort by taking investigative steps based on those allegations while knowing that they were false.

From the moment John Durham and his lead investigator Jack Eckenrode persisted in falsely accusing Hillary of framing Donald Trump and used that false accusation to take investigative steps like obtaining warrants, they were (in their model) conspiring against rights under 18 USC 241.

18 USC 241 happens to be the crime that the frothers claim they are pursuing against Comey and everyone else right now.

About a month after Kash first rejoiced about the opportunity to commit the crime Durham had chased, we learned that Jack Eckenrode — shockingly!! — had been invited back to commit the same crime some more. NYT since updated on how, little more than a month after Todd Gilbert was confirmed as US Attorney in WDVA and asked to oversee this investigation, he left under pressure.

That’s background to these two exhibits that prosecutors included in the government’s response to Comey’s vindictive prosecution motion.

Start with the opening memo for an investigation into whether someone deliberately put a bunch of documents in burn bags but … didn’t burn them, the precipitating event that Kash boasted about on July 31. In fact, those burn bags were discovered in April, and they were discovered in FBI Headquarters, not WDVA, where Kash and Bondi stashed the investigation. And the likely explanation for the documents is that senior FBI people were clearing out their offices to make way for … Kash Patel.

On or about April 15, 2025, the Director’s Advisory Team was informed of the unusual discovery of highly classified and sensitive documents found inside five “burn bags” located in Room 9582, a certified Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the FBI Headquarters building in Washington, DC.

A cursory inventory of the 9582 SCIF revealed the existence of classified documents, including documents believed to be official records, inside “burn bags” which appeared to have been placed in the SCIF around the timeframe of the 2025 presidential inauguration – Friday, January 17, 2025 through Wednesday, January 22, 2025. A brief review of the contents of the “burn bags” revealed that some of the documents left behind may have come from a collection of records held by certain unidentified senior government officials at FBI Headquarters.

What really set Kash off, it seems clear, is that — seemingly amid a bunch of files relating to the Special Counsel investigations that happened during the Biden Administration — was the document at the heart of Durham’s criminal investigation building on Russian disinformation, a document potentially referring to the fabrications Russian spies made.

Among the records found were many related to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search, the January 06 capitol breach, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, as well as a copy of the Classified Appendix to the John Durham Special Counsel investigation. Moreover, an additional record discovered as part of this management review process was an original referral by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to former FBI Director James Comey, known as a Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL). This CIOL, believed to have been missing for several years, was dated September 07, 2016 and contained certain intelligence related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. The CIOL was found in a storage closet adjacent to the Director’s office and was subsequently transported to the 9582 SCIF. Former Director Comey previously testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was unfamiliar with this CIOL as well as its related intelligence. [my emphasis]

Now, there are already several flashing lights here. 🚨🚨🚨 [Sorry Rayne!]

You cannot have Jack Eckenrode anywhere near the criminal investigation into a document he chased for years. He has more incentive to hide the Durham annex showing that he committed the very crime he was investigating than Comey (or anyone close to him) has to hide the CIOL. In any case, this still seems to fall well short of proof that the FBI actually received it. This opening memo describes that the people who are supposed to catalog such things did not, and if they found it after the fact, it would raise real questions if Eckenrode planted it.

Worse still, the opening memo for this investigation misrepresents Comey’s testimony from the hearing.

Lindsey: Do you recall getting an inquiry from the CI, excuse me, the intelligence community in September, 2016, about a concern that the Clinton campaign was going to create a scandal regarding Trump and Russia? Mr. Comey: I do not.

Senator Graham: You don’t remember getting a investigatory lead from the intelligence community, hang on a second … Let me find my document here.

Speaker 3: There it is.

Senator Graham: September the Seventh, 2016, the US intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server. You don’t remember getting that or being talk, that doesn’t …

Mr. Comey: That doesn’t ring any bells with me.

[snip]

Senator Graham: Did you have a duty to look at any allegations regarding Clinton in Russia?

Mr. Comey: I don’t know what you mean. Senator Graham: Well, you say you had a duty to look at allegations about the Trump campaign being involved with the Russians. You’ve got a letter now from Radcliffe saying that there was a, they intercepted information about an effort in July where Hillary Clinton approved an effort to link Trump to Russia or the mob. Did you have an investigation look and see if whether that was true?

Mr. Comey: I can’t answer that. I’ve read Mr. Radcliffe’s letter, which frankly I have trouble understanding.

That’s true, in part, because Graham misrepresented what the CIOL was. As it explains, the memo only served to provide the kinds of information that the CIA was finding in SVR documents obtained from the Dutch. It was not a request for the FBI to conduct an investigation, but right wingers have treated it as such for years.

The redaction in the pertinent paragraph, which seems to be a reference to Guccifer 2.0, likely obscures the entire meaning of the paragraph, to say nothing of the redaction of the other paragraphs. More importantly, there was no discussion at the hearing of what Comey would have understood this to belong to: the larger set of SVR documents that the FBI had deemed objectively false much earlier in the year.

In other words, that reference in the opening document shows that this entire investigation was predicated on a false claim about Comey — it represents Eckenrode’s false belief about Comey, not the actual transcript (remember, Loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons hid this transcript as an exhibit in his response to Comey’s selective prosecution bid).

And the Jim Comey notes that Lemons insinuates undercut Comey’s claims about receiving the CIOL on September 7, 2016 only serve to underscore this point.

The discovery of the handwritten notes is relevant considering the defendant’s prior testimony on September 30, 2020. Of note, during that hearing, the defendant was questioned by Senator Graham of South Carolina and Senator Hawley of Missouri. See Gov. Ex. 14. The questions focused on whether the defendant remembered “being taught” of “U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” See id. The defendant responded by stating that “it doesn’t ring any bells with me” and “I don’t know what that refers to” and “I don’t remember receiving anything that is described in that letter.” See id. at 1 and 5. Despite this testimony, the defendant’s handwritten notes dated September 26, 2016, read: “HRC plan to tie Trump.” See Gov. Ex. 13 (Defendant’s handwritten notes).

These notes are more consistent with the SVR files being disinformation, rather than the truth right wingers have adopted it as.

More importantly, there’s no reason for Comey to be briefed (possibly by John Brennan) on a topic on September 26 if he received information about it 19 days earlier.

That is, these notes appear to be Comey writing down the reference, understanding it to be part of an attack on Hillary, weeks after Republicans want to catch him receiving a memo.

The part about prosecutors and FBI agents reading these notes in the least sensical way possible is not a crime.

What is a crime, though, is using Russian disinformation you know to be Russian disinformation (and Comey appears to have believed was disinformation) to obtain a criminal indictment.

And it appears that Lindsey Halligan tried to do that — but got no-billed.

Further, according to the transcript from the hearing on Wednesday, Comey’s team read Tyler Lemons’ response to Comey’s vindictive prosecution claim the same way I did:

As for the 18 USC 1505 charge, prosecutors will need to prove that Comey told lies that were intentional that impeded that investigation. Because of the scope of the hearing (and therefore the investigation), they can’t argue the two Hillary stories are material. Comey was aware of the scope of the hearing and Hillary wasn’t part of it.

There’s no way they can argue that Comey should have admitted asking Richman to serve as an anonymous source for the May 2017 story impeded the Senate investigation, because he had admitted that years earlier!!

That leaves just the Lindsey Graham question, which was specifically about whether Comey remembered the CIA referral, dated September 7, that Kash Patel had recently released in redacted — and therefore likely hopelessly misleading — form. As the transcript Lemons buries in an exhibit makes clear, the question — the one the grand jury no-billed — was not whether Comey was briefed; it was whether he recalls getting the document itself (Lindsey misstates what this document even was).

On Wednesday, Pat Fitzgerald expressed serious concern that “the government is expanding its case, we believe, to include the conduct that was no true billed in Count One as part of its proof of Count Two.”

And on top of that, Your Honor, I think there’s another motion coming from us, in light of some disclosures that were made Monday, where we think that the government is expanding its case, we believe, to include the conduct that was no true billed in Count One as part of its proof of Count Two, which raises serious issues for us. So we’ll do everything we can, but to do all that while getting Mr. Comey access to materials…

As I’ve said, this is the founding document of their conspiracy theories.

On Wednesday, Lemons didn’t raise an objection when Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick first said he was going to order DOJ to turn over grand jury transcripts, suggesting Lemons may have no fear Miles Starr presented privileged information to the jury.

By the end of day yesterday, he did have an objection. Michael Nachmanoff has bumped the whole grand jury question back to Fitzpatrick, so I expect Patrick Fitz (sorry, bad joke!) will get to test this theory shortly.

But that — relying on a no-billed charge for the obstruction charge — is not the only problem with chasing the Clinton Plan disinformation that John Durham debunked.

The far graver problem is it means Miles Starr is a witness to, if not a co-conspirator to, Jack Eckenrode (and FBI Director Kash Patel) committing a crime, precisely the crime they’re chasing.

Four years ago, Jack Eckenrode concluded this stuff was a Russian fabrication, the very thing they claim about the Steele dossier.

And then, Jack Eckenrode got an indictment for it anyway.

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Kash’s “lockbox in a vault…in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files”

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There were two competing letters published yesterday designed to frame Kash Patel’s efforts to frame Democrats with being mean to Donald Trump, for which (the NYT reports) Trump wants to be paid $230 million. They are:

I’m a well-established critic of Lanny Breuer, but the letter is substantive and direct. After mocking Josh Hawley’s claim that he was “tapped,” the letter shows how toll records have been used in various other investigations:

  • The Robert Hur investigation of Joe Biden.
  • Charging documents in five different investigations charged since Kash has become FBI Director.
  • In leak investigations, targeting Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and staffers (including Kash Patel).
  • The Robert Menendez investigation.

But all that’s just set up for this passage, mocking Kash for his claim, made on Sean Hannity’s show while he was wearing a ridiculous jacket, that Jack Smith was trying to hide his use of toll records in a “lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.”

[T]here is simply no support for FBI Director Patel’s recent assertion that Mr. Smith hid the toll records information so that “no one would find it,” or that Mr. Smith put the toll records in a “lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.”9 It is not clear what cyber place in a vault in a lockbox Director Patel is describing, but Mr. Smith’s use of these records is inconsistent with someone who was trying to conceal them. Paragraph 119 of the August 1, 2023 indictment describes some of the calls that were made to U.S. Senators on January 6, 2021, and footnote 132 of Volume 1 of the Special Counsel Report refers to the use of toll records in the investigation. Moreover, the precise records at issue were produced in discovery to President Trump’s personal lawyers, some of whom now serve in senior positions within the Department of Justice.

9 HANNITY: Patel: “We’re Just Warming Up” in Investigation of Alleged Tracking of GOP Senators, Fox News (Oct. 7, 2025), https://www.foxnews.com/video/6382234662112.

Even without this letter, sentient beings were able to point to the place in the indictment and the Jack Smith report where these toll records were described. And, as the letter notes, Trump’s attorneys — including Todd Blanche — got discovery on those toll records years ago, but did not challenge their use in a criminal case.

All this was quite clear to sentient beings. But not the staffers exploiting Chuck Grassley’s diminished capacities to make a stink about something very ordinary.

By comparison, the Jordan letter is shoddy even by his standards.

The ostensible purpose is to refer John Brennan to DOJ (but, significantly, not FBI) for testimony Brennan gave — in a hearing about the letter truthfully saying a bunch of spooks thought the Hunter Biden laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian information op — that mentioned the Steele dossier in passing. This may be an effort to predicate a case in DC after the case in Philly has stalled, but anyone aware of the law would question how comments about the Steele dossier were material to a hearing about the Hunter Biden letter, a point that Brennan even made at the time: “I don’t see any relevance to the Hunter Biden laptop issue now,” as quoted in Jordan’s letter.

More importantly, the letter appears to be an effort to launder debunked propaganda Kash Patel did years ago through Congress back into an investigation led by Kash Patel, something I’ve addressed in the past.

The key paragraph makes a number of claims, some of which are fabrications (and therefore commit the crime that Jim Jordan is referring), others of which are misrepresentations of prior reports that were themselves propaganda.

On January 6, 2017, the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency published a declassified version of an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) titled Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. 3 The ICA stated, among other things, that Russia “developed a clear preference” for President Trump and “aspired to help” him win the election.4 This conclusion—now known to be false—was based in part on the Steele dossier, which “was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.”5 The Steele dossier was a series of reports containing baseless accusations concerning President Trump’s ties to Russia compiled and delivered to the FBI in 2016 by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.6 Subsequent investigations confirmed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid Steele via the law firm Perkins Coie and opposition research firm Fusion GPS to provide derogatory information about Trump’s purported ties to Russia, which resulted in the discredited dossier.7 In July 2025, the Trump Administration declassified numerous documents showing that the ICA’s main findings were false and that the Obama Administration knowingly fabricated the findings for the purpose of undermining the Trump Administration.8

3 OFF. OF THE DIR. OF NAT’L INTEL., ASSESSING RUSSIAN ACTIVITIES AND INTENTIONS IN RECENT US ELECTIONS (Jan. 6, 2017) [hereinafter “Russian Interference ICA”].

4 Id. at 1.

5 MAJORITY STAFF REPORT, H. PERM. SELECT COMM. ON INTEL., 116TH CONG., OVERSIGHT INVESTIGATION & REFERRAL: THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT (ICA) “RUSSIA’S INFLUENCE CAMPAIGN TARGETING THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” at 23 (2020) [hereinafter “HPSCI Report”].

6 See JOHN H. DURHAM, U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF SPECIAL COUNS., REPORT ON MATTERS RELATED TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS ARISING OUT OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS, at 11-12, 109-117 (2023) [hereinafter “Durham Report”].

7 See id. at 109-117; HPSCI Report, supra note 5, at 22-32; U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF THE INSPECTOR GEN., REVIEW OF FOUR FISA APPLICATIONS AND OTHER ASPECTS OF THE FBI’S CROSSFIRE HURRICANE INVESTIGATION, at v-xii (2019); Memorandum from HPSCI Majority Staff to HPSCI Majority Members, Re: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Jan. 18, 2018).

8 Sarah Bedford & Kaelan Deese, Russiagate definitive timeline: How new intelligence documents fit in, WASH. EXAM’R (July 26, 2025). [my emphasis]

The key claim in here — that what Jordan falsely says is the key claim of 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which he describes as, “that Russia ‘developed a clear preference’ for President Trump and ‘aspired to help’ him win the election,” is based on the Steele dossier — is based off two reports Kash substantially wrote (marked in blue). Never mind that it is only the key claim of the Intelligence Community Assessment if you have the thin skin of a Narcissist, never mind that any dispute is about how much evidence there was before discovering the June 9 meetings or Paul Manafort’s sharing of campaign information with Russian spies. That key claim had nothing to do with the subsequent investigation of Trump, which investigation had already been set into motion by Mike Flynn’s shitty OpSec.

But as I wrote extensively,  the one dated 2020, showing that Congressional Republicans packaged up older claims and Russian spycraft after the Mueller Report definitively showed the Russia did prefer Trump and Trump did welcome that help, is an attempt to create a time machine to go back to the halcyon time before we knew all that.

Jordan, perhaps wisely, doesn’t try to lay out how all this fits together. He outsources it to a right wing propaganda outlet, outsourcing to them their credulity about the time machine effect going on.

Jim Jordan lied, shamelessly, when he alleged that that claim was shown to be false. And he lied, shamelessly, when he said that a report that affirmatively did not incorporate intelligence from the Steele dossier, choosing instead to only link it and specifically say it was not incorporated into analytical work (which backs Brennan, not Jordan), instead relied on the dossier.

This conclusion—now known to be false—was based in part on the Steele dossier, which “was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.”

If the intimation that Kash Patel’s hand-picked investigators breached Jim Comey’s attorney-client privilege in service of this conspiracy bears out, it only adds to the list of corrupt and possibly illegal things Kash has done in pursuit of this witch hunt. And that’s before you consider all the cops and prosecutors that get fired along the way.

Kash Patel may well be in a race against time. He needs to package up things before Comey gets them all thrown out before Andrew Bailey becomes eligible to act as FBI Director bypassing confirmation, in mid-December.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

 

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How Kash Patel and Pam Bondi became Slaves to Stephen Miller

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When Pam Bondi and Kash Patel had Jim Comey charged two weeks ago, they may have signed their own arrest warrants.

The media focus, since the indictment, has been on the ominous chilling effect this would have on Trump’s opponents — though as always, journalists ignored the politicized prosecutions that have gone before.

The damage done to rule of law by replacing career prosecutors with Trump defense attorneys for the sole purpose of charging a political target is enormous. No doubt about it.

But charging former FBI Director Jim Comey on flimsy false statements charges crosses a rubicon in a different way, one that may be just as disastrous for American democracy.

Charging made it easy to charge top law enforcement officials — any former law enforcement officers — whom Trump ousted for political reasons.

Indeed, almost immediately after the Comey indictment, Kash turned towards manufacturing the very same basis — alleged lies to Congress — to charge Chris Wray, his immediate predecessor.

Kash released after action reports from January 6 to HJC which in turn shared them, complete with warnings that the documents were not for external dissemination, with John Solomon, who turned complaints including a heavy handed focus from the US Attorney’s office on misdemeanors into a story about “274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns after the violence started but with no clear safety gear,” which in turn led to conspiracy theories about “Fedsurrection,” which Donald Trump blew up in a lie-ridden post on Truth Social that explicitly drew a connection between Comey and Chris Wray.

 

Even when Kash tried to tamp down the conspiracy theories he had sown and his boss had accelerated, he still included several lies: that Wray lied, that this was about crowd control, that running to the scene of a terrorist attack in progress would violate FBI rules.

The FBI responded on Saturday to a report that 274 plainclothes agents were at the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, clarifying the role of bureau personnel while still blasting former Director Christopher Wray.

While the agents were on hand, they were sent in after the riot had begun to try to control the unruly crowd, officials told Fox News Digital. That is not the proper role of FBI agents, and Wray was not forthcoming about what happened when he testified numerous times on Capitol Hill, Director Kash Patel said.

“Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” Patel told Fox News Digital. “This was the failure of a corrupt leadership that lied to Congress and to the American people about what really happened.”

And so Kash, in a desperate bid to feed conspiracies like those that got him where he is, colluded (heh) in the framing of charges against a second FBI Director.

He did so, as Pam Bondi did, under a great deal of pressure to deliver.

The pressure against Bondi erupted in public, in the post Trump sent addressing her directly.

Two things suggest the text was meant to be private. It had far fewer lies than Trump’s public posts. And he also alluded to the pressure he was under — the 30 statements and posts complaining about “all talk, no action” — a testament to the impatience of his own mob. Other reports describe the pressure applied to Bondi in private.

The pressure on Kash — and its source — has been just as real. The lawsuit filed by top FBI agents describes how Stephen Miller demanded politicization at FBI to match that Emil Bove was pursuing at DOJ.

On or about January 27, 2025, Bove requested that Driscoll and Kissane “stay behind” following their daily morning briefing. At that “stay behind” meeting, Bove stated that he was receiving pressure from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to see “symmetrical action at the FBI as had been happening at DOJ.” Bove made clear that he and Miller wanted to see personnel action like reassignment, removals, and terminations at the FBI, similar to the firings and reassignments of senior attorneys at DOJ that had occurred since January 20, 2025.

It tracks how Patel and Dan Bongino attempted to protect the plaintiffs (both, of course, desperately want to be accepted within the fraternity of FBI officers), even defending Steve Jensen on Maria Bartiromo’s show.

125. Both Patel and Bongino lamented to Jensen that they were spending “a lot of political capital” to keep him in the ADIC position, a position that Jensen had not sought in the first place.

[snip]

I want the American public to realize what we did. That man was in a position where he literally fought back against the machine who was saying, “we want to politicize this event, we want to politicize this event.” And at the end of the day, remember, Maria, there’s a chain of command here. So you can fight back your chain of command to a certain degree before they fire you. And Steven Jensen and other folks were promoted because they embody what the American public demands of FBI agents.

The whole time, FBI’s leaders were terrified the White House would learn Jensen still had power.

143. Approximately two days into his leave, on July 16, 2025, at approximately 7:20 a.m., Jensen received a call from Bongino. Bongino began the call by sternly telling Jensen that he had to “use better judgment,” explaining that the SAC of the Philadelphia Field Office had sent out an email to various other SACs about the SAC Advisory Committee indicating that Jensen would assume the vice chair position that had been left vacant by the recent departure of the Richmond SAC. The SAC Advisory Committee is an organizational structure within the FBI that SACs from across the country rely on to channel communication and concerns to FBI leadership. It is not a formal organization and is, in effect, an additional duty for those who volunteer for the position. The Philadelphia SAC had asked Jensen to fill the vacancy left by the Richmond SAC and, apparently, Bongino had learned of an email announcing this.

144. During this phone call, Bongino warned him that if the White House learned that Jensen was on an advisory committee, it would be “problem” for Jensen.

After months of refusing to fire the Agents, Kash ultimately did, in August, explaining that his own job depended on doing so.

Patel explained that there was nothing he or Driscoll could do to stop these or any other firings, because “the FBI tried to put the President in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.” Driscoll indicated his belief that Patel’s reference to his superiors meant DOJ and the White House, and Patel did not deny it.

More recently, a story about Signal texts sent between a top Pete Hegseth aide and Stephen Miller’s included the commentary of the latter, Miller deputy Anthony Salisbury, describing that Kash’s firing of FBI agents who had taken a knee to deescalate during the George Floyd protests was “how Kash survives.”

In a separate exchange, Salisbury celebrated FBI Director Kash Patel’s decision to fire several agents who were photographed kneeling during a 2020 protest. He suggested Trump would approve of the action, then insulted Patel.

“This is how Kash survives,” Salisbury wrote. “He will do this stuff for the man but day to day giant douche canoe.”

To survive, Kash the giant douche canoe has to “do this stuff for the man.”

The pressure on Kash is particularly intense. The indictment of Comey, Kash’s more aggressive purges, his effort to perp walk Comey — they all come in the wake of the installation of former Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as babysitter for Kash and Dan Bongino, a constant threat that he would be fired.

[A]llies of President Trump and Patel’s harshest critics have begun to circulate word that contingency plans for Patel’s ouster are forming. They also claim his hopeful successor, Andrew Bailey, made clear that he would not leave his post as Missouri’s AG – or abandon his aspirations to run for state governor – only to serve as Patel’s number two.

Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, Bailey, who starts at the bureau on September 15, would be eligible to fill the FBI director post – should it become vacant – after he has been employed by the FBI for at least 90 days.

Multiple sources close to Trump acknowledged the president was not thrilled with some past episodes of Patel’s performance – including a public feud with AG Bondi over the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. One senior White House official involved in personnel decisions also framed Patel’s botched communications during the manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s assassin as something Patel likely wished he could do differently, if he could do it all over again. Trump did not call for any action to be taken in response to it, the person said.

Patel’s purported off-ramp, which the White House denies, would not involve his firing but a reassignment to another administration role, according to multiple people who described it.

Sure, the plan now is to make Kash an ambassador to some faraway country once Bailey can become Director in December, as if he were Don Jr’s inconvenient ex. But the only thing that keeps Kash from becoming what Comey and Wray are — FBI Directors that Trump chose to put or retain at the Bureau but then fell out of favor and so were ousted — is his continued ability to feed the insatiable viciousness of Trump, the Wormtongue who increasingly controls access to him Stephen Miller, and Trump’s rabid mob.

And when that moment comes, it will be child’s play for the next guy to prove his loyalty by charging Kash and/or Bondi, citing the precedent of Comey (and Wray, if he’s indicted by then).

I’ve already noted that, by charging Comey, Kash provided evidence that this statement to Mazie Hirono was false.

Senator Hirono (02:18:49):

Do you plan to investigate James Comey, who’s on your list?

Kash Patel (02:18:54):

I have no intentions of going backwards-

Kash has been doing Trump’s dirty work for so long there are a slew of other potential charges, starting with both January 6 and the stolen documents case.

The same is true of Pam Bondi, who got her start with Trump by taking campaign donations and then shuttering an investigation into Trump’s fraudulent university.

But like Kash, her slavering performance in front of Senate Judiciary Committee also provided fodder for charges on the same standard as Comey. Not only did she tell gratuitous lies — such as that Alex Padilla had stormed Kristi Noem’s press conference — but she made more material statements, such as that the decisions on the Tom Homan bribery investigation (which she seemed to attribute to Todd Blanche, who was confirmed a month after she was) predated her confirmation.

That’s is the thing about corruption. It is the price of admission and the reward for loyalty.

But it also a double-edged sword when you fall out of favor.

I don’t know whether Kash and Bondi are kidding themselves about what a bad precedent this is for their own future. I don’t know whether they believe their past loyalty — something Comey and Wray never performed — will exempt them from the treatment to which they’re subjecting Comey. But the thing about irrational, increasingly unfit authoritarians guarded by an even more ruthless henchman is that demands for loyalty only keep going up.

Ah, but look on the bright side, Kash, Bondi!

Disfavored Trump aides have not — yet — started falling out of windows, like they do in Vladimir Putin’s Russia!

Update: Here’s how a WSJ story on the politicization of DOJ ends.

Privately, Trump has acknowledged that he believes Blanche is a solid lawyer and Bondi appears great on TV, but has continued to complain to aides about the pace of the cases, even after the Comey indictment. Aides have reminded him about work in progress.

“She’s moving too slow,” Trump has said about Bondi, according to administration officials.

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The Crime Wave Is Coming from Inside the [White] House

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As most of you have noticed, I’ve been trying to do videos summarizing more of my work, because it’s far more accessible than what I do here. As with the Ball of Thread podcast I did last year, I’ve been doing this work with LOLGOP.

He and I are discussing how to keep this effort going long-term. So, in addition to sharing this latest video (which I think is one of our best), I wanted to set up a post for feedback on the videos and — just importantly — to put a tip jar for LOLGOP.

Please consider recognizing his work on these videos with a contribution here. 

Thank you! And thanks to LOLGOP for the hilarious editing of Jeanine Pirro boasting about the subway guy.

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Will Jim Comey’s Prosecution Prove Kash Patel Lied to Senate Judiciary Committee?

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As I mentioned here, ABC reported that the lie charged in the Jim Comey indictment pertains to whether he authorized Dan Richman to share information anonymously, not whether he authorized Andrew McCabe to do so.

Sources told ABC News that “PERSON 1” is Clinton and “PERSON 3” is Richman, a longtime law professor who — as ABC News previously reported — met with federal prosecutors last week after being subpoenaed in the matter.

Charlie Savage has the best piece on the likely theory of the indictment. I’d like to expand on that to explain why I think it more likely we’ll obtain proof that Kash Patel lied to Congress as a result of this prosecution than that Jim Comey did.

As you read the following remember that Kash assured the Senate Judiciary Committee — including in this exchange with Mazie Hirono — that he would not “go[] backwards” to investigate Jim Comey.

Senator Hirono (02:18:49):

Do you plan to investigate James Comey, who’s on your list?

Kash Patel (02:18:54):

I have no intentions of going backwards-

Except it appears that Kash did precisely that.

The indictment appears to accuse Comey of authorizing Dan Richman to serve as a source for this article on the Hillary and Trump investigations, especially this passage about the SVR document purporting to report that Loretta Lynch had told Amanda Renteria she would intervene to protect Hillary (the charge the grand jury rejected was also focused on these SVR documents, which I explained here).

During Russia’s hacking campaign against the United States, intelligence agencies could peer, at times, into Russian networks and see what had been taken. Early last year, F.B.I. agents received a batch of hacked documents, and one caught their attention.

The document, which has been described as both a memo and an email, was written by a Democratic operative who expressed confidence that Ms. Lynch would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far, according to several former officials familiar with the document.

Read one way, it was standard Washington political chatter. Read another way, it suggested that a political operative might have insight into Ms. Lynch’s thinking.

Normally, when the F.B.I. recommends closing a case, the Justice Department agrees and nobody says anything. The consensus in both places was that the typical procedure would not suffice in this instance, but who would be the spokesman?

The document complicated that calculation, according to officials. If Ms. Lynch announced that the case was closed, and Russia leaked the document, Mr. Comey believed it would raise doubts about the independence of the investigation.

[snip]

But some time after that meeting, Mr. Comey began talking to his advisers about announcing the end of the Clinton investigation himself, according to a former official.

“When you looked at the totality of the situation, we were leaning toward: This is something that makes sense to be done alone,” said Mr. Steinbach, who would not confirm the existence of the Russian document.

Former Justice Department officials are deeply skeptical of this account. If Mr. Comey believed that Ms. Lynch were compromised, they say, why did he not seek her recusal? Mr. Comey never raised this issue with Ms. Lynch or the deputy attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, former officials said.

Importantly, Richman was a named source for the story, which will make it hard to prove that Comey authorized Richman to serve as an anonymous source. (Hilariously, Pat Fitzgerald’s meticulous mapping during the Scooter Libby trial of the difference between an “anonymous” source and a “background” source might, by itself, defeat this case.)

As part of an investigation into the sources for this story (which targeted Jim Baker closely), John Durham seems to have discovered either details of how the FBI authorized people to weigh in on stories or that Dan Richman served as a cut-out for Comey, I’m not sure which.

The reopened Arctic Haze investigation was biased against Comey

That discovery led DOJ to reopen a bunch of investigations into 2017 stories pertaining to the Russian investigation, documented in these filings, which I wrote up here.

As part of that, DOJ investigated whether Richman was the source for the SVR details in the April 2017 NYT story. Before closing the investigation, DOJ asked Comey for the phone he used at the time, and found nothing relevant.

[redacted] on June 29, 2021, Comey provided consent, via his counsel, for the FBI to conduct a limited search of his Apple iPhone. The FBI conducted a forensic examination of the telephone. The examination indicated the telephone contained four voicemail messages, four instant messages, two email messages, and 51 images from December 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017. None of this material contained information relevant to this investigation.

They also interviewed Richman, who among other things, told the FBI that, “Comey never asked him to talk to the media” (though it appears earlier, as described in redacted passages, he may have said Comey did).

The substance of the November 2019 Richman interview confirmed that Comey had told Richman bits about the SVR documents, but that when Mike Schmidt came to Richman and asked him about it in January 2017, Schmidt already knew more about the documents than Richman did.

On November 22, 2019, the Arctic Haze investigative team interviewed Richman. According to Richman, Comey and Richman talked about the “hammering” Comey was taking from the media concerning his handling of the Midyear Exam investigation. Richman opined Comey took comfort in the fact Richman had talked to the press about his feelings regarding Comey’s handling and decision-making on the Midyear Exam investigation. Richman claimed Comey never asked him to talk to the media.

According to Richman, he and Comey had a private conversation in Comey’s office in January 2017. The conversation pertained to Comey’s decision to make a public statement on the Midyear Exam investigation. Comey told Richman the tarmac meeting between Lynch and Clinton was not the only reason which played into Comey’s statement on the Midyear Exam investigation. According to Richman, Comey told Richman of Lynch’s characterization of the investigation as a “matter” and not that of an investigation. Richman recalled Comey told him there was some weird classified material related to Lynch which came to the FBI’s attention. Comey did not fully explain the details of the information. Comey told Richman about the Classified Information, including the source of the information. Richman understood the information could be used to suggest Lynch might not be impartial with regards of the conclusion of the Midyear Exam investigation. Richman understood the information about Lynch was highly classified and it should be protected. Richman was an SGE at the time of the meeting.

According to Richman, he and Schmidt had a conversation shortly after the meeting with Comey in or around January 2017. Richman claimed Schmidt brought up the Classified Information and knew more about it than he did. Richman was pretty sure he did not confirm the Classified Information. However, Richman told the interviewing agents he was sure “with a discount” that he did not tell Schmidt about the Classified Information. Richman did not know who gave Schmidt the Classified Information. Richman acknowledged he had many discussions with Schmidt about the article as an SGE and even after he resigned as an SGE. Richman acknowledged he contributed more to the article than what was attributed to him by name. Richman also stated he knew Schmidt talked to numerous other government sources for information on the article. [my emphasis]

DOJ ultimately decided they couldn’t charge either Comey or Richman, because even if Richman were a source, he would be a confirmatory source, which DOJ had never charged (they claim, though I think that’s incorrect).

They did some more interviews but — and this may sink EDVA’s case even if everything else doesn’t — they only interviewed people who would have a motive to protect Comey, not those with a motive to slam him.

After discussing the status of investigative leads and resources available with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Department of Justice’s National Security Division (DOJ NSD), the FBI investigative team was directed to interview only those officials who might have had a motive to protect Comey. Therefore, the FBI only interviewed eight of these officials who consisted mainly of former FBI officials. All of these officials denied providing the Classified Information to the New York Times. [my emphasis]

At a time when they could have charged this, Bill Barr’s DOJ assumed that the original detailed sources for the SVR story must be Comey allies.

There are at least two reasons why that was a dumb theory.

First, as the DOJ IG Report on this that investigators read — but didn’t explain in the unredacted parts of the case file — Comey and people around him believed the claims in the document were “objectively false” Comey even alluded as such in his 2018 OGR testimony (also cited in this closing document) — which Kash Patel would know personally. “So far as I knew at the time, and still think, the material itself was genuine, which is a separate question, though, from whether it was what it said was accurate.”

This entire passage is premised on the document being true.

More importantly, the sources for it are pissed off that Jim Comey announced the end of the Hillary investigation himself.

Plus, there’s no mention that one of these two SVR documents said that Jim Comey was going to throw the election for the Republicans. If someone were really familiar with the documents themselves, rather than just discussions of them, you’d expect they would suggest that maybe Comey was overcompensating out of worry that he would be deemed partial to Republicans.

The blind spot about that part of the SVR documents, notably, is replicated in the HPSCI document on which Kash was the original author.

HPSCI simply leaves out the Jim Comey allegation in one of the SVR reports, which if true, would explain why Putin wouldn’t have to (and didn’t) dump damning intel close to the election: Because Putin believed that “Comey is leaning more to the [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections,” something that turned out to be true. In other words, they cherry pick which Russian spy products they choose to parrot, one of the sins they accuse the ICA team of, but they do so with years of hindsight that made clear how foolish that was.

The entire right wing, including the current FBI Director, have vast blindspots about these documents (Kash even seems to believe they’re not fabricated!!). And those blindspots appear to have been replicated in the investigative choices for that investigation. That means the selective prosecution of this prosecution is built on top of the selective investigation of the Richman investigation.

Nevertheless, the investigation was closed without charging Richman for confirming classified details.

Kash did look backward

Where this becomes proof that Kash lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee, claiming that “I have no intentions of going backwards” to investigate Comey is that there’s no reason to reexamine the issue (except that Comey answered a question focused on Andrew McCabe on which the statute of limitations has not yet expired).

The leak itself, if it could be pinned on Comey and Richman, could not be charged. Bill Barr did not reopen the investigation after seeing Comey’s September 2020 testimony, even though he remained busy trying to discredit Crossfire Hurricane.

While investigators this time around are chasing a parallel theory that the FBI covered up their focus on SVR documents that only exists in the fevered imaginations of people like Kash (that is, if Comey actually lied about any of this it would be material to their fevered conspiracy theories in the other part of the investigation), it would not have been material at the time, because Ted Cruz was seeking a gotcha about his fevered imagined conflict between McCabe and Comey’s testimony. The underlying 2017 question from Grassley incorporated Richman, but if Cruz’s did, there’s no hint of that. He explicitly focused on McCabe.

Nor would it be material to the Durham investigation. The Durham Report actually says that Comey refused to be interviewed, pointing instead to testimony just like this. So if there’s something in this exchange that would be usable, Durham didn’t do so.

Nevertheless, somehow, the FBI decided to go revisit this gotcha question from five years ago, which — even if Comey were lying — would not change the public understanding of Comey’s self-righteous justifications for his decisions in the Clinton investigation one bit. Outside the fevered imagination of people like Kash, or the decision to look backward to investigate a guy listed on your enemies list, there’s no reason you get to these files.

Now, Comey may have opportunity to ask Kash, under oath, how the FBI decided to go unpack the closing file for an investigation closed over three years earlier — which is why I say we may get proof that Kash lied to SJC.

But the only new information that I could conceive of that would lead the FBI to reconsider this is if the FBI spied on the NYT and found materials from Mike Schmidt saying that Richman was his source and Comey told him to leak it. Which, if it happened, would be a ten times bigger scandal than we’ve already got.

I would be shocked if Comey didn’t ask for some explanation — other than the revenge to which Trump confessed publicly — behind the predication of this investigation. I would be unsurprised if Judge Michael  Nachmanoff, who is presiding over the case, offered him that opportunity.

And if he does, Kash is going to be stuck trying to make up some excuse that doesn’t amount to a confession he lied, as a private citizen, to SJC as part of his effort to get the job he’s using to weaponize government against Trump’s enemies.

Kash Patel wrote a book in 2023 targeting Jim Comey.

When asked whether he intended to use the FBI Director position to investigate Jim Comey, Kash claimed, under oath, that he had no intentions of going backward to do so.

And then he proceeded to do just that.

The evidence that Comey lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee is paper thin.

The evidence that Kash lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee is abundant.

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Will Ted Cruz Go to Prison for the Lies He Told as Part of the Jim Comey Indictment?

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Let’s talk about all the lies that someone at EDVA would have to wade through to actually convict Jim Comey.

Lindsey Halligan’s disclaimer of signing the Comey indictment

First, there’s the weirdness with the indictment itself. As NBC and WaPo reported from the courtroom, Lindsey Halligan actually handed the magistrate judge, Lindsey Vaala, two charging documents. When Vaala asked what was going on, Halligan said she did not see the second one. Vaala noted that she had signed the document.

There was some confusion in the courtroom and from Judge Lindsey Vaala, who appeared puzzled by the multiple charging documents filed for one case. Vaala asked why there were two documents in the same case. Halligan told her, “I did not see,” to which Vaala replied, “It has your signature on it.”

Vaala then had Halligan make handwritten changes to one of the documents and said both documents would be uploaded to the docket for the record.

That may well lead to further scrutiny. One of the two charging documents is the indictment that includes the charge that grand jurors rejected.

But the only writing on either document that appears to have been added is where (marked with the red box) someone noted, “count 1 only” (which is, indeed, the charge that was dropped). But there’s another irregularity with the document. The rest of it (and the indictment that was filed) looks like it was scanned — with a line down the center and a shadow, as I’ve marked in red.

But the second page lacks both of those things.

And both the charge on page two and the one on page three are called, “COUNT TWO.” Which may suggest someone just put the second page of the failed indictment in between the two pages of the one approved by the grand jury.

All that’s enough that Comey might ask questions about the conduct of the grand jury — something he normally would not be able to do. Given Halligan’s claim she never saw the indictment, it also might raise questions about whether Halligan signed the indictment before or after the grand jury approved it.

And then Halligan would have to explain why she never saw the indictment that she herself signed. Because she’s the only attorney on this filing, she would have to explain the irregularities herself.

That’s not the only question Halligan will face.

It’s not entirely clear under what legal authority she is play-acting as US Attorney. But when Alina Habba was challenged for play-acting as US Attorney after her temporary period expired in New Jersey, a judge ruled that the interim appointment is per position, not per person, meaning that Erik Siebert — the guy Trump fired on Friday — would already have used up the possibility of such an interim appointment in May.

In other words, Halligan may not be US Attorney at all, and unless she fixed that problem by Tuesday, the entire thing might just disappear.

In any case, while EDVA has a rocket docket (meaning this would otherwise go to trial quickly), Halligan’s temporary status could become be a problem before this goes to trial if Comey mounts a vindictive prosecution challenge (LaMonica McIver’s vindictive prosecution challenge is only now fully briefed, three months after her indictment). Then EDVA could be left with an indictment charging Jim Comey but no one willing to stand in a courtroom to prosecute it.

The vindictive prosecution challenge

Even if Halligan survived that long, it is exceedingly likely that Comey would not just get to present a vindictive prosecution claim, which Trump has confessed to over and over, but also to ask for discovery on how that all came about. If granted, I’m sure he’d ask to:

  • Depose Kash Patel, both about his children’s book naming Jim Comey a “government gangster” but also his conduct in this and related Comey investigations.
  • Depose Siebert, who decided there wasn’t even probable cause to charge this, much less the ability to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
  • Depose Todd Blanche, who reportedly agreed with Siebert and advised Trump not to fire Siebert.
  • Depose Pam Bondi because why the fuck not??
  • Depose Halligan.

Just deposing Kash alone would be a huge problem, because he only got confirmed by lying to the Senate about prosecuting the people in his Government Gangster book.

This indictment proves Kash lied, not that Comey did.

It proves something else, too.

Halligan tried to charge Comey with two lies. I’ll come back to the one that survived — basically, the indictment accuses Comey of lying in 2017 when he said he had never authorized anyone to leak information anonymously to the press.

The Russian disinformation that Chuck Grassley falsely claimed was a Clinton plan

The one the grand jury rejected charged Comey with lying when he said he didn’t recall being told (which the indictment transcribes as “taught”) this memo.

There are multiple problems with the question — posed shortly after Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe released it in 2020.

First, we now know that the “plan” was in fact Russian disinformation sown by fabricating several emails. Investigating based off this document commits precisely the crime that John Durham investigated for years: investigating someone based on something you know to be false.

Worse still, according to every witness that Durham interviewed, no one remembered receiving this memo at all. It’s possible Kash thinks he has found a copy (that seems to be part of what he’s investigating in WDVA), but Durham never did.

Finally, and most insane of all, as I noted here, the redactions in this document and the representation Kash and Ratcliffe made about what it is appear to be badly misleading. That is, this referral appears to be a referral about the Russian plot targeting Hillary, not about Hillary. It is only right wing fever dreams and deceitful redactions that made it into something else.

If Comey had seen this document, he would not remember it in the way that he was asked about it.

So not only is it ridiculous to charge someone for not remembering something that wasn’t that big a deal, but it’s crazier still to charge someone for not remembering a document that you’ve redacted in misleading fashion and then described as the opposite of what most people understood it to be.

All that wasn’t charged, but nevertheless, according to John Durham’s logic at least, Kash committed several crimes by investigating this at all.

Jim Comey will get to expose Ted Cruz as a liar, again

Which finally brings us to what did get charged, part of the exchange above.

1. On or about September 30, 2020, in the Eastern District of Virginia, the defendant, JAMES B. COMEY JR., did willfully and knowingly make a materially false, Fictitious, and fraudulent statement in a matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch of the Government of the United Stales, by falsely stating to a U.S. Senator during a Senate Judiciaiy Committee hearing that he, JAMES B. COMEY JR., had not “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1.

2. That statement was false, because, as JAMES B. COMEY JR. then and there knew, he in fact had authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1.

Before Cruz asks the question that got charged, he asked one after another question based on false premises. Comey had to correct the following Cruz lies:

  • The FBI did not surveil the Trump campaign
  • The Carter Page IG Report did not show that FBI lied to the FISC 17 times
  • Cruz misrepresented the email that Kevin Clinesmith altered (it was not used in any submission and Cruz misstated the import of the change)
  • The FISC was alerted to the political source of the Steele dossier
  • Cruz falsely claimed that Comey stated that the FISC was informed that the DNC paid for the dossier
  • Cruz misstated what Comey said about his own knowledge about the funding

Cruz also misstated the facts about Igor Danchenko, but Comey didn’t know enough to correct those.

The actual charged lie starts after 6:30 in the video. Cruz reads Comey’s testimony from 2017, in which he responded to a question from Chuck Grassley whether he had “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?”

Cruz then made another misstatement — three actually, that Andrew McCabe, “has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it.”

Comey did not correct Cruz this time, but he said he stood by the testimony he gave in 2017.

Already, what Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer said in the indictment is a stretch. Comey did not say the words quoted in the indictment. He said only he stood by his earlier testimony. (Effectively, this is an attempt to charge Comey for something he said 8 years ago.)

If she’s thinking this is about McCabe, it also builds on Ted Cruz’s lie. First of all, the IG Report on McCabe (and his public comments) was about the Clinton Foundation — not Clinton, but the Foundation, not Person-1 but the foundation ran by her spouse.

Second, it was not a leak, anymore than Kash Patel’s non-stop frequently inaccurate blabbing on Xitter amount to leaks. It was an authorized conversation with the press.

Third of all, the specific authorization in this case was from McCabe to Lisa Page to serve as a source; it didn’t involve Comey.

McCabe thereafter authorized Special Counsel and AD/OPA to talk to Barrett about this follow-up story.

Where McCabe’s testimony differs from Comey’s is about what McCabe said to Comey after the fact. McCabe said that he told Comey and Comey thought it was a good idea.

McCabe said that he told Comey that he had “authorized AD/OPA and Special Counsel to disclose the account of the August 12th call” and did not say anything to suggest in any way that it was unauthorized. McCabe told us that Comey “did not react negatively, just kind of accepted it.” McCabe also told us Comey thought it was a “good” idea that they presented this information to rebut the inaccurate and one-sided narrative that the FBI was not doing its job and was subject to DOJ political pressure, but the Department and PADAG were likely to be angry that “this information made its way into the paper.” McCabe told us that he did not recall telling Comey prior to publication of the October 30 article that he intended to authorize or had authorized Special Counsel and AD/OPA to recount his August 12 call with PADAG to the WSJ, although he said it was possible he did.

Comey said when he spoke to McCabe about the story afterwards, McCabe denied knowing the source.

Comey told us that, prior to the article’s publication, he did not have any discussions with McCabe regarding disclosure of the August 12 PADAG call. According to Comey, he discussed the issue with McCabe after the article was published, and at that time McCabe “definitely did not tell me that he authorized” the disclosure of the PADAG call. Comey said that McCabe gave him the exact opposite impression:

I don’t remember exactly how, but I remember some form or fashion and it could have been like “can you believe this crap? How does this stuff get out” kind of thing? But I took from whatever communication we had that he wasn’t involved in it. . . . I have a strong impression he conveyed to me “it wasn’t me boss.”

Importantly, Comey disavowed any conversation with McCabe about this particular story before the fact.

Comey told us that, prior to the article’s publication, he did not have any discussions with McCabe regarding disclosure of the August 12 PADAG call.

That’s consistent with what McCabe said.

that he did not recall discussing the disclosure with Comey in advance of authorizing it, although it was possible that he did;

What McCabe has said elsewhere is that Comey had generally permitted just the two of them to speak with the press. But that was not specific to this story at all.

In other words, Ted Cruz got it wrong. Comey’s testimony to the Senate — which on follow-up was specifically about the WSJ story — was utterly consistent with McCabe’s.

Cruz lied. Comey didn’t.

Now it’s possible that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer is attempting a gimmick, by claiming that Comey authorized Dan Richman to share information about the Hillary investigation (we know this is about Hillary because she is Person-1 in the charge the grand jury rejected). That is, Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer may be trying to apply this Comey answer to Richman.

Except — even assuming he had spoken to Richman about Hillary (the right wing belief, until Richman’s testimony in the last few weeks, is that Comey authorized Richman to talk about the Trump investigation) — Comey could easily say his answer here was about the McCabe reference. [Update: ABC is reporting that it is Richman.]

But if this thing were ever to go to trial — if Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer is really the US Attorney, if the indictment really is what the grand jury approved, if this doesn’t get booted on a vindictive prosecution claim, if Pat Fitzgerald fails to argue that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer is confused about which FBI Director is a criminal — Comey can almost certainly call Teddy Cancun as a witness, at least to testify about materiality.

It would soon become clear that Comey’s answer, even if it were a lie, could never be material, because Ted Cruz was going to believe what he already believed. Cruz was committed to his false beliefs, no matter what Comey said in response.

But under questioning by a skilled attorney — and Fitz has questioned far bigger blowhards than Ted Cruz, if you can believe it — such testimony would force Cruz to either double down on his lies, or to confess he was the one lying all those years ago.

Right now, there’s not a shred of evidence that Comey lied in his statement.

There is, however, abundant evidence that Kash lied under oath and that Cruz lied in the same way he lies all the time. And if this were ever to go to trial, Cruz would, for once, have the opportunity to face consequences for any lies he told.

Update: CBS got the transcript of the exchange between Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer and Lindsey the Magistrate Judge. It seems clear that the Insurance Lawyer juggled her papers.

[T]wo versions of the indictment were published on the case docket: one with the dropped third count, and one without. The transcript reveals why this occurred.

“So this has never happened before. I’ve been handed two documents that are in the Mr. Comey case that are inconsistent with one another,” Vaala said to Halligan. “There seems to be a discrepancy. They’re both signed by the (grand jury) foreperson.”

And she noted that one document did not clearly indicate what the grand jury had decided.

“The one that says it’s a failure to concur in an indictment, it doesn’t say with respect to one count,” Vaala said. “It looks like they failed to concur across all three counts, so I’m a little confused as to why I was handed two things with the same case number that are inconsistent.”

Halligan initially responded that she hadn’t seen that version of the indictment.

“So I only reviewed the one with the two counts that our office redrafted when we found out about the two — two counts that were true billed, and I signed that one. I did not see the other one. I don’t know where that came from,” Halligan told the judge.

Vaala responded, “You didn’t see it?” And Halligan again told her, “I did not see that one.”

Vaala seemed surprised: “So your office didn’t prepare the indictment that they —”

Halligan then replied, “No, no, no — I — no, I prepared three counts. I only signed the one — the two-count (indictment). I don’t know which one with three counts you have in your hands.”

“Okay. It has your signature on it,” Vaala told Halligan, who responded, “Okay. Well.”

Probably, nothing will come of it. Probably, the only price Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer will pay for this is 1) disclosure of the no bill record 2) exposure of the charge grand jurors refused and 3) humiliation in her first big show.

But it creates surface area and, as I suggested, the possibility that Comey will use it to pierce the secrecy of everything else that went on in the grand jury, including why it took until 6:47 to indict this.

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