Civil Discourse – What Happens When The Government Loses Its Credibility – The Comey Prosecution – Joyce Vance

What Happens When The Government Loses Its Credibility – The Comey Prosecution

By Joyce Vance, Nov 17, 2025

This is one of those long posts we occasionally have when a judge files a highly significant order. My apologies for starting the week off like this, but it’s a significant decision in a very important case. Understanding the details is critical to seeing the significance of a matter like this. Thanks for being here with me and understanding that.

It’s been a day of ping-pong in court in the Comey case, with pleadings and rulings volleying back and forth all day long concerning whether the government is required to turn over transcripts from grand jury proceedings. Grand jury transcripts are sealed to protect the integrity of investigations, and it’s extremely rare for a judge to make them available to a defendant. But that’s exactly what’s happening in the prosecution of the former FBI director. That’s because there are credible allegations of misconduct before the grand jury.

Misconduct is a word that can cover a lot of ground. We’ve been discussing some of it, like vindictive or selective prosecutions, which violate constitutional guarantees of due process. Prosecutors possess enormous power over people’s lives, and that power is too great to allow abuse of it to go unaddressed. People’s lives hang in the balance—if prosecutors can abuse their powers, innocent people can go to prison. Now, amplify the idea of abuse of power with a president who is directing the Justice Department to punish his enemies and reward his friends, and you have a sense of just how serious this moment is.

So, the issues involved here are incredibly important for the future of our democracy, but it becomes something of a muddle when the news reports you see are about dueling pleadings. A critically significant situation starts to feel picayune. We can’t afford to let that happen, so tonight, we’ll spend our time together dissecting what’s happening and its meaning. Last week I wrote to you that “there are strict rules governing prosecutors’ interactions with grand jurors and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that someone with no prosecutorial experience could have transgressed them.” That turns out to have been on point.

The verdict is in on the maiden grand jury performance of Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer Trump picked to replace an experienced prosecutor who refused to indict the Comey case because there wasn’t evidence to support it. The Judge found plenty to find fault with.

To understand what happened today, we need to know how we got here. The government wanted to use evidence from another proceeding in this case, but some of that evidence was protected by the attorney-client privilege. The government asked the Judge to permit them to use a “filter team” to evaluate the evidence to decide what the prosecutors in this case could use without violating the privilege. There are two judges involved: District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, who is hearing the case, and Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, who is hearing some of the discovery disputes. In the course of the proceedings before Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick, problems came to light involving Halligan’s presentation to the grand jury and Comey’s lawyers filed a motion asking for disclosure of the grand jury minutes, in part because “the agent who served as a witness in the proceedings may have been exposed to Mr. Comey’s privileged communications with his attorneys and thus may have conveyed that information to the grand jury.” (If you want to know more about the filter team dispute after you’ve read tonight’s post, the dense procedural history of the case is laid out here).

Editor’s Note: Featured image at top is from WP AI.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: What Happens When The Government Loses Its Credibility: The Comey Prosecution