Halligan's motion is very weak
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/19/james-comey-lawyer-criminal-case-00615102
Fitzgerald fired back at prosecutors Monday morning, accusing them of attempting to “defame” him with demonstrably false allegations.
“There was no ‘leaking’ of classified information to the press by either Mr. Comey or his counsel. Full stop,” Fitzgerald and other defense attorneys wrote.
The prosecution’s filing is short on details, but references a Justice Department Office of Inspector General report from 2019 that found Fitzgerald had a role in Comey’s effort to get information to the media about what he viewed as improper efforts by Trump to get him to pledge loyalty in the days before his firing.....
The inspector general report found that some of the information Comey shared with his attorneys was classified and faulted him for sharing sensitive investigative information with outsiders and the media, but also found no evidence “that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media.”
Fitzgerald argued in the filing Monday that he and Comey acted appropriately in that episode and that Comey shared information with him as he mulled his legal options related to the firing.
“After Mr. Comey was fired on May 9, 2017, he sought legal advice with respect to his termination and with regard to having witnessed behavior by the President that he considered unlawful,” Fitzgerald wrote. He said Comey attempted to segregate some memos with classified information from others he deemed unclassified, but that others came to different judgments after the fact and deemed a portion of one memo he’d shared with his lawyers to be classified at the lowest level used by the government.
The last paragraph in this article amused me. trump had the Inspector General report deleted because it has material adverse to trump. Because of the deletion by trump, Halligan had to file an unofficial copy using a "wayback" website
Prosecutors did not provide the judge with a copy of the Inspector General report, but offered a link to a version of it provided on the non-profit Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The DOJ Inspector General’s office reported earlier this month that its website was frozen and then taken offline due to the Trump administration’s effort to shutter an umbrella group, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.
The DOJ is trying to use a report that the trump DOJ had deleted.
= new reply since forum marked as read