🤡🚕

Ryan Goodman has the receipts, too.

With ABC News reporting Count 1 in Comey Indictment is about Comey allegedly authorizing Daniel Richman (not McCabe) to be anonymous source to media.

A problem for DOJ is Comey can claim Senator Cruz's poorly worded question conflated it with McCabe, so he thought was answering about McCabe.

2/2 Based on the FBI Arctic Haze Investigation, will be important to see if DOJ has specific evidence that Comey authorized Richman to be anonymous source.

And how they deal with this: "Richman claimed Comey never asked him to talk to the media."

Politico points out several reasons why the case against Comey will probably fall apart. It’s not a legal analysis, but it’s interesting.

The first reason is a defense of vindictive prose:

In the days leading up to the indictment — with the statute of limitations looming — Trump engineered the ouster of the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, who is believed to have recommended against charging Comey. Trump then pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to install Halligan — Trump’s own former personal lawyer — in the job. And crucially, the president explicitly linked the moves to his desire to see Comey, and other adversaries, face criminal charges.

Then there’s the problem of the statute of limitations. The charge of perjury rests on testimony Comey gave in 2020, regarding his testimony in 2017. The statute of limitations allows five years to prosecute perjury to Congress; so the prosecutors have to use the 2020 testimony for this case. That’s the problem, though:

During the hearing in question, in a response to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Comey stated: “I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.” That was a reference to an earlier hearing, in which Comey told Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that he had not authorized anyone at the FBI to speak anonymously to the press about the Trump-Russia investigation or about a separate investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email for State Department business.

Some Trump supporters have argued that Comey lied when he said he stood by the earlier testimony, because they believe Comey did authorize his deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe, to leak information about the Clinton probe to the Wall Street Journal. Comey and McCabe have provided differing accounts of a conversation the two men had on the day after the Journal published a story on the probe, although there’s no indication McCabe has ever claimed he got advance permission from Comey for any leak.

Complicating the matter, Cruz’s question to Comey during the 2020 hearing was ambiguous: Cruz apparently misquoted Grassley and asked Comey about “the Clinton administration.” Cruz seems to have meant to refer to an FBI probe into the Clinton Foundation. And at the 2017 hearing, Grassley was focused on the higher-profile investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Now, the indictment is spare to the point of obtuse. Comey, it alleges, committed perjury in testifying to Congress, but what he said, and why it is perjury, goes unexplained and unfounded. This is where “Richman” comes in.

There were also reports Friday that the disclosure prosecutors contend Comey falsely denied didn’t come from McCabe at all, but from a longtime friend of Comey, Columbia Law Professor Daniel Richman. However, Cruz’s question to Comey was about an authorization to “someone else at the FBI.” Richman was an official adviser to Comey for the FBI, but whether a full-time law professor could be considered to be “at the FBI” is open to debate.

Years before the Cruz questioning, Comey acknowledged that after he was fired by Trump he released some memos about his dealings with Trump to the press through Richman. But it seems implausible that leak is what the false-statement charge is about because Comey made that acknowledgment at a nationally televised Senate hearing in 2017.

Again, it’s gotta be 2020, because 2017 is too long ago. But there’s grasping at straws, and then there’s “Richman."

Prosecutors can face professional sanctions — including disbarment — for bringing a case without a valid basis. A trio of former White House ethics lawyers who have been persistent Trump critics pressed the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Friday to investigate Halligan’s unexpected appointment on the eve of the Comey indictment.

I think “sanctions” here would mean Halligan losing her license in federal district court. Pretty rough for a USA who can’t sign pleadings in that district.

Basically, this is an uphill fight with a prosecutor who doesn’t know how to prosecute, in an office where none of the lawyers would sign off on this indictment (and so appear in court for the case), based on an indictment so lacking in evidence as to rest in nine, and a case desperately cobbled together to avoid the statute of limitations; but which also cuts out any real chance of a conviction (if there ever was one)..