Lindsey Halligan Humiliated In Court. Again.
Competence is woke!
Lindsey Halligan had another bad week at her pretend job as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
First Halligan got no-billed for the third time when she tried to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James. The week before, a grand jury in Norfolk bounced an attempt to charge James with mortgage fraud. This time around, a grand jury in Alexandria did the honors.
Then Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in DC reamed Halligan’s office out for its inexcusably shoddy — not to say unconstitutional! — work, before locking her out of the evidence she was relying on to re-indict former FBI Director James Comey.
It’s enough to make a fake prosecutor want to give up and go get a real job.
The case that won’t die
The Comey investigation was a Frankenstein’s monster of illegality which likely would have collapsed under its own weight even if Halligan had been lawfully appointed. One of the most glaring defects was its reliance on evidence seized from Comey’s friend and sometime lawyer, Daniel Richman.
In 2019 and 2020, the FBI executed four separate search warrants for his various email, hard drive, and iCloud accounts, essentially seizing Richman’s entire digital life. Failing to find evidence that Comey had leaked classified information to Richman back in 2017, the FBI closed that investigation in 2021. The data was then tossed in a locker, where it sat until 2025, when Halligan pulled it out and started rummaging through it in search of proof that Comey lied to Congress in 2020.
A competent prosecutor would have sought a new warrant before accessing the Richman materials. Judge Kollar-Kotelly and Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, who was tasked with adjudicating discovery disputes in the Comey case, both expressed astonishment that no one bothered to get a court to bless their use of evidence collected six years ago in an entirely different case. Whether this was due to incompetence or the need to indict Comey before the statute of limitations elapsed was never explained. But that procedural omission may turn out to be costly.
On November 26, Richman filed a motion for return of property under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(g). He argued that the government violated his Fourth Amendment rights by retaining non-responsive information from the original warrant, failing to destroy it when the leak investigation was closed in 2021, and re-using that dataset in 2025 without a warrant.
After nine days with no appearance by lawyers the government, Richman moved for a temporary restraining order. Noting that DOJ appeared to be playing games, avoiding assigning a lawyer to the case in an effort to keep using Richman’s files, Judge Kollar-Kotelly granted the TRO and ordered the DOJ to enter an appearance. After no small amount of rigamarole, Halligan and her deputy Robert McBride finally complied.
The best defense is a good … yeah, not that one either
Halligan signed the response to Richman’s motion as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, despite conceding in the filing that the Comey case was “dismissed after the court found that Lindsey Halligan, who presented the proposed indictment to the grand jury, had been improperly appointed as Interim U.S. Attorney in violation of the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution and 28 U.S.C. § 546.”
Halligan barely bothered to defend her office’s conduct, instead arguing that Judge Kollar-Kotelly should dismiss the case because of Richman’s improper motive.
“Petitioner’s motion is a collateral (and premature) motion to suppress evidence in another criminal proceeding, masquerading as a motion for return of property under Federal Rule 41(g),” she insisted. “It is impermissible for a court to enjoin a criminal investigation and potential prosecution in another district by restraining use of evidence to benefit a third party.”
Halligan argued that the government can retain and scrutinize Richman’s files forever — or at least until she manages to convince another grand jury to indict James Comey. At that point Comey — but not Richman! — can file a suppression motion. As for Richman’s interest in his own data, Halligan sneered in a footnote that he “plainly has an adequate remedy at law—he could bring a Bivens action.”
That’s a patently silly argument. Individuals can indeed file Bivens actions in limited circumstances when their rights have been violated by federal officers, but those actions are for damages — i.e., money — and not for the return of property.
This case was probably always going to be a loser for the government. But Halligan’s flippant brief almost certainly made it worse.
Give it up already
A few days later, on Friday, Judge Kollar-Kotelly granted Richman’s motion for the return of his property, ordering the Department of Justice to destroy the copies of his data in its possession.
“[T]his Court agrees with Petitioner Richman that the Government’s retention and use of his files has violated his Fourth Amendment rights,” she wrote, adding that Halligan’s decision to rummage through Richman’s files in 2025 without getting a new search warrant was “a remarkable breach of protocol” that clearly reflected a “callous disregard” for Richman’s constitutional rights.
As for the government’s insistent that Richman’s Rule 41(g) motion was actually an improper collateral motion to suppress evidence in Comey’s case, Judge Kollar-Kotelly brushed that aside in a little over two paragraphs, dryly noting that Halligan’s brief “misses the mark” by citing “inapposite” cases.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly did throw the government a bone of sorts by ordering it to deposit a single copy of the material seized from Richman with the district court in the Eastern District of Virginia. That preserves the materials in the event that Halligan’s office manages to (finally) play by the rules and seek a new search warrant in connection with its ongoing investigation of James Comey.
And although Judge Kollar-Kotelly was polite enough not to point out that Halligan is inappropriately trying to pass herself off as the US Attorney, her ruling nevertheless explicitly adopted Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick’s findings from the prior Comey litigation that exposed Halligan’s incompetence, including his conclusion that the unconstitutional search was performed “apparently with the concurrence of” the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
If Halligan were capable of shame, that would be humiliating. But it’ll probably take at least a couple more no-bills before she wanders back to Washington to de-woke-ify the Smithsonian.