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'Should Be Immediately Disbarred': Trump-Picked Prosecutor's Blunder in Comey Case Leaves Experts Stunned
"I honestly didn't even know this was a mistake you could make," said one observer.
Nov 19, 2025
Legal experts and reporters reacted with shock on Wednesday after Trump-appointed interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan acknowledged that a grand jury never voted on the operative indictment filed against former FBI Director James Comey.
Politico reports that the admission appears to have put the Comey prosecution "in serious jeopardy," as Halligan told US District Judge Michael Nachmanoff the grand jury never saw the final indictment that was handed down in September that charged Comey with one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding.
The final indictment was a revised version of an originally proposed three-count indictment that needed to be changed after the grand jury rejected one of the proposed charges against Comey.
Former federal prosecutor Ken White attempted to piece together exactly what Halligan did in a post on Bluesky.
"So here’s what apparently happened: they tried to indict Comey on the last day of the statute with a three-count indictment," he explained. "The grand jury rejected one. Rather than cross it out or indicate on the indictment that only two of the three counts were voted upon, Halligan creates a new indictment, which shows only the two counts they true billed, and has the foreperson sign it without presenting it to the grand jury."
Assistant US Attorney Tyler Lemons told Nachmanoff that it was necessary to revise the indictment on short notice after grand jurors no-billed one of the charges since the statute of limitations for Comey's alleged crimes was set to expire within mere hours.
"They really had no other way to return it," he told the court.
Nonetheless, many observers expressed shock that Halligan could make such an elementary error that could singlehandedly get the entire case against Comey dismissed.
"Lindsey Halligan should be immediately disbarred," wrote Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at the Georgia State College School of Law, in a post on X.
Political and leadership consultant Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, a former human rights attorney, also believed that Hallingan should face severe consequences for pushing forward with an indictment that had not been voted on by a full grand jury.
"This should result in the interim US Attorney losing her bar license," she wrote on Bluesky. "Never, in almost 30 years as an attorney, have I heard of this big of an intentional fuck up before a grand jury."
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) argued that Halligan's actions were enough to justify her termination as interim US attorney.
"In a normal Department of Justice not run by hacks and sycophants and malicious clowns," he wrote, "Lindsey Halligan would resign and the indictment against James Comey would be dismissed."
Quinta Jurecic, a longtime legal journalist who writes for The Atlantic, said that she found Halligan's error to be "impressive" because "I honestly didn't even know this was a mistake you could make."
Anti-Trump attorney George Conway, meanwhile, encouraged his followers on X to "please remember to give thanks to the Lord that Trump and his people are so unbelievably incompetent."
Maya Sen, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School, drew a line between the quality of legal competence in the Comey case and a three-judge panel in Texas shooting down the administration's efforts to redraw Texas' congressional map as part of a mid-decade gerrymandering scheme.
"High levels of incompetence between this and the DOJ-TX gerrymandering situation," she wrote on X. "It's hard to find people with high levels of competence and expertise when maximizing on ideological and personal loyalty, and this is a problem for [Republicans] in the age of educational polarization."
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At Least 13 Palestinians, 'Mostly Children,' Killed by Israel in Lebanon Massacre
Despite a November 2024 truce between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli forces have killed at least 121 civilians, including 21 women and 16 children, in Lebanon.
Nov 19, 2025
A series of Israeli airstrikes on targets in southern Lebanon have killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 100 others in recent days, including 13 people—mostly children, according to local officials—massacred Tuesday at a camp for Palestinian refugees.
Officials and residents said that the Israeli strike on Ain al-Hilweh near Sidon struck an area where children were playing soccer. Ain al-Hilweh is the largest camp in Lebanon housing refugees from the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing and terror campaign through which the modern Israeli state was founded—and their descendants.
The Israel Defense Forces said it targeted members of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas "operating in a training compound" in the camp.
Hamas rejected the IDF claim as "fabrication and lies."
The strike was the deadliest IDF attack in Lebanon since Israeli troops shot and killed at least 24 people including 6 women and injured 134 others in January.
The IDF carried out subsequent attacks, including a Wednesday morning drone strike on a vehicle in Al-Tayri that reportedly killed two civilians including the town's treasurer and wounded at least 10 university students. Israeli forces also bombed a residential area of the town of Tair Filsay in Tyre district. It is unknown if anyone was harmed in the strike.
Israeli warplanes carried out an airstrike on Wednesday, Nov. 19, targeting several points in the village of Tair Filsay in southern Lebanon’s Tyre district, Anadolu reports.Emergency teams moved toward the targeted locations after the attack.
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— Middle East Monitor (@middleeastmonitor.bsky.social) November 19, 2025 at 9:46 AM
Often overshadowed by its genocidal war on Gaza—which has left at least 249,600 people dead, maimed, or missing; millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened; and the coastal strip in ruins—Israel's bombardment and invasion of Lebanon has killed more than 4,000 people since October 2023, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. This figure includes at least 790 women and 316 children. More than 16,600 others have been wounded. Upward of 1.2 million Lebanese were also forcibly displaced by Israel's attacks and invasion.
This, despite a November 2024 truce between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 121 civilians, including 21 women and 16 children, in its northern neighbor—which Israel has invaded or bombed numerous times since 1948, killing and wounding tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians.
Israeli forces also bombed the Qizan an-Najjar area, south of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, killing at least one Palestinian and wounding a mother and her child, according to local officials, who said at least 280 Palestinians have been killed and 650 others wounded in nearly 400 Israeli violations of the October ceasefire with Hamas.
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Report Details How 'Half-Baked' GOP Healthcare Scheme Would Further Enrich Insurance Giants
"No matter how Republicans design their plan, their promise to take money out of the hands of big insurance companies and put it in the hands of patients will go unfulfilled."
Nov 19, 2025
US President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have made a show of criticizing insurance company greed as they stand firm against extending Affordable Care Act tax credits and offer ill-formed alternatives.
But a report published Wednesday by the office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) explains how a scheme endorsed by Trump and some top Republicans would further enrich insurance giants and big banks.
The report focuses on growing GOP support for a proposal that would give Americans money in tax-advantaged vehicles such as health savings accounts (HSAs) to help cover out-of-pocket costs. Last week, Trump championed the idea in the Oval Office, characterizing the proposal as a way to "forget this Obamacare madness."
In a social media post on Tuesday, Trump railed against "BIG, FAT, RICH INSURANCE COMPANIES" and doubled down on the idea of funding health savings accounts instead of extending the enhanced ACA tax credits.
But Wyden's report argues that "no matter how Republicans design their plan, their promise to take money out of the hands of big insurance companies and put it in the hands of patients will go unfulfilled, because the very arrangements they tout are administered by large financial institutions and the same big insurance companies."
The report notes that Optum Bank, a subsidiary of the corporate behemoth UnitedHealth Group, is one of the nation's largest administrators of HSAs and would be well-positioned to profit from the Republican plan.
"The numerous fees OptumBank charges, including a $20 Outbound Transfer Fee, a several-dollar monthly account maintenance fee, and a $2.50 ATM Transaction fee, flow directly out of consumers’ and patients’ pockets and into the coffers of the nation's largest health insurer," the report observes. "Even a fraction of these revenues adds up to massive profits."
"While some big insurance companies own HSA providers directly, others partner with large financial institutions to operate similar arrangements. Centene, for example, partners with Fidelity; Anthem partners with Bank of America," the report continues. "The common theme across these arrangements is massive profits for financial institutions and big insurance companies."
Wyden's report came as congressional Republicans worked to translate Trump's all-caps social media ramblings into coherent policy. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the Senate committee with jurisdiction over healthcare, is leading the effort as tens of millions of people brace for massive premium increases stemming from Republicans' refusal to extend enhanced ACA subsidies.
Cassidy has explained to reporters that the emerging GOP plan would entail Americans using existing ACA tax credits—not the enhanced subsidies that are set to lapse at the end of the year—to purchase high-deductible "bronze" plans on the insurance marketplace.
HSA funding from the federal government would then help enrollees cover out-of-pocket costs (HSA funds generally cannot be used to cover monthly premiums). Under the recently enacted Trump-GOP budget law, tax-advantaged HSAs are now available to everyone who buys a bronze plan on the ACA marketplace.
The average deductible for a bronze plan is $7,476 in 2026.
"Half-baked ideas that put more taxpayer dollars into health tax accounts will enrich big banks and insurance companies while saddling Americans with high premiums and deductibles," Wyden said in a statement on Wednesday. "Sending a few thousand dollars to Americans isn’t going to do them much good when they face a giant medical bill for a serious health diagnosis or even routine but expensive care, like giving birth in a hospital."
In a Fox News appearance on Wednesday, Cassidy likened his vision of an ideal health insurance marketplace to bargain-hunting for shampoo.
"By giving the patient the money herself... she becomes a wiser consumer," said Cassidy. "If she goes and gets two types of shampoo and one's a dollar cheaper, she'll get the cheaper one and the other one lowers their price."
Cassidy: "By giving the patient the money herself, she becomes a wiser consumer. If she goes and gets 2 types of shampoo and one is a dollar cheaper, she'll get the cheaper one and the other one lowers their price. One you give her the power of making the decision, she's gonna… pic.twitter.com/52u7IMJkFk
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 19, 2025
Ryan Cooper, managing editor of The American Prospect, wrote in response to the GOP healthcare scramble that "the stupidity is the point."
"For decades now, the Republican Party has been dedicated to the proposition that rich people are too highly taxed and the working and middle classes get too many benefits from the government. With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, they have finally caught the car," Cooper wrote Tuesday. "Medicaid and Obamacare have been slashed to free up budget headroom for tax cuts heavily slanted to the wealthy."
"Republicans don’t have a 'healthcare plan' per se because this is their plan: to take your healthcare funding and give it to Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the rest of the fascist billionaire class," he added.
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