U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan is expected to ask a grand jury to indict Comey over allegedly lying to Congress.
U.S. attorneys will make a determination on a possible indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump said on Sept. 25.
“I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, because I don’t know. You have very professional people headed up by the Attorney General [Pam Bondi], Todd Blanche, and Lindsey Halligan, who’s very smart, good lawyer, very good lawyer,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “They’re going to make a determination. I’m not making that determination.”
Halligan is the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Trump’s comments came after several media outlets, citing anonymous sources, on Wednesday reported that Halligan’s office was closing in on seeking an indictment against the former FBI director.
MSNBC, which first reported the story, said that one part of the indictment would include allegations of lying to Congress.
During his September 2020 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey was questioned about his role in and awareness of a 2016 to 2017 plan by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, to discredit her Republican opponent, Trump.
Comey told the panel he had no knowledge of a CIA memo sent to him to inform him of the plan.
A week later, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe released a redacted form of the 2016 memo apprising Comey of intelligence suggesting that Clinton had approved such a plan.
Notes by John Brennan—who served as director of the CIA during the 2016 election—showed that the CIA had obtained intelligence of “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russia security services.”
Investigations into alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign staff and Russia—first by the FBI in an operation dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane” and later by Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Mueller III—were almost ubiquitous across Trump’s first term.
By Jackson Richman and Joseph Lord
