MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Flays Trump Pick Halligan Over Comey Performance: ‘Courtroom Clowns’

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell went off on Trump-picked prosecutor Lindsey Halligan over her first day in court since the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.

After a scuttled plan to “perp-walk” Comey, the embattled ex-FBI chief surrendered voluntarily to plead “not guilty” in court on Wednesday, where Halligan and a team of out-of-state prosecutors faced off against Comey and defense attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

On Wednesday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, O’Donnell flayed Halligan and her team in a blistering commentary on their first day in court, calling them “courtroom clowns”:

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: She was, like anyone who doesn’t understand what’s going on in a courtroom, apparently lost throughout the proceeding. The New York Times reports, Ms. Halligan, a former insurance lawyer, did not speak in court. Instead, she spent the hearing rocking and nodding in her chair as a junior federal prosecutor brought in from North Carolina spoke for the Justice Department.

And that junior federal prosecutor said, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” He didn’t speak those words, of course, but he said something that you can spend a lifetime in federal courts and never hear. When James Comey’s lawyer said, quote, “we haven’t received a single piece of paper of discovery to date”, the junior federal prosecutor, Tyler Lemons, said, “We’re just getting our hands around the discovery as well.”

What? How can you be standing there prosecuting James Comey and not know what your evidence is to prosecute James Comey? That’s what the junior federal prosecutor told the judge today. We don’t know what our prosecution evidence is. That’s what he meant. The judge knew that.

The judge’s response to that was a judicial version of, “Are you kidding me?” The judge said, “All right, well, I will tell you. I’m a little skeptical of that. This does not appear to me to be an overly complicated case. There are two counts. It’s a discrete set of facts.” That’s a polite way of saying this is the thinnest indictment that could possibly exist.

And here it is right here. It is two pieces of paper. And the only reason it’s two pieces of paper is that on the first page, it accuses James Comey of making a false statement in a senate hearing and on the second page it accuses him of obstruction of the Senate by making that same so-called false statement. So, the one sentence James Comey spoke managed to get them two pages of an indictment.

And James Comey said that on television in a Senate hearing. That’s the entire case. That one sentence that he spoke on TV.

And the junior federal prosecutor standing beside the silent Lindsey Halligan rocking in her chair tried to tell the judge that they are in possession of some massive amount of evidence which includes inexplicably, according to them, classified information. And there’s so much of it that this junior federal prosecutor who’s been on this case for exactly one day along with the other junior prosecutor from North Carolina who’s been on the case for one day because no real prosecutor in that office in Virginia will take the case are, quote, just getting our hands around the discovery.

The judge knows he’s dealing with courtroom clowns. The judge knows that every federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia has refused to participate in this case. The judge knows all of the public information in this case. The judge knows that he’s watching a legal Trump clown show in his courtroom.

And although he dealt with it politely today, he also made it clear he has zero patience for Trumpian nonsense. The judge told the Trump prosecutors in front of him, “I will not slow this case down because the government does not promptly turn everything over. And the government should have every interest in doing that. There should be no reason that this case gets off track because of the existence of some classified information. Either it’s not relevant to the case or it can be declassified or we will — we will go through the fastest CIPA process you have ever seen in your lives.”

Donald Trump’s fever dream about today’s proceeding was that he would, by ordering the prosecution of James Comey, force James Comey to suffer the humiliation of an arraignment in that federal courtroom today. That the only humiliation in that courtroom was on the Trump side of the courtroom today.

The humiliated, silent, inexperienced lawyer rocking in her chair in service to Donald Trump. The humiliated junior assistant prosecutor who was forced to speak and confess to the judge that he doesn’t know what the evidence in the case is. And then the humiliated other assistant federal prosecutor who’s an experienced prosecutor but who remains silent throughout the 27-minute proceeding.

Patrick Fitzgerald is actually the most experienced prosecutor in the room. He’s a former prosecutor who prosecuted the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, on corruption charges. He prosecuted al-Qaeda in terrorism cases and now appears proudly as James Comey’s defense counsel.

He told the judge just how incompetent and unprofessional the prosecution has been so far. He said, “We haven’t received a single piece of paper of discovery to date. We still haven’t been told who person three and person one are. We don’t know the nature of the charges below those charges.”

We have never been able to easily guess what the indictment. We’ve always been able to kind of easily guess based on James Comey’s televised testimony what the statement is, the false statement they’re accusing James Comey of making in his Senate testimony. But the indictment doesn’t actually identify a statement. It doesn’t have what this case requires at this point, which is showing in quotation marks exactly what James Comey said that Donald Trump’s favorite new prosecutor thinks was untrue.

Judge Nachmanoff said that he would refer the motion to disqualify Lindsey Halligan to another judge from a different district, which is the standard procedure in that court for such motions. But Judge Nachmanoff will consider the other pre-trial motions that Patrick Fitzgerald proposed a hearing schedule for, which the judge immediately accepted.

Patrick Fitzgerald told the judge, “The first tranche of defense motions, which would principally consist of a vindictive prosecution motion, and whenever I say vindictive prosecution motion, Your Honor, I mean both strands of the vindictive prosecution doctrine and the selective prosecution doctrine. So, it may be a retaliatory prosecution where our view is that this prosecution was brought at the direction of President Trump to silence a constant critic of him.”

And so, after Patrick Fitzgerald began the session by proudly announcing “it’s the honor of my life to represent Mr. Comey in this matter,” he made it clear that the person he, the most experienced prosecutor in that room, is going to in effect be prosecuting in that room is Donald Trump, the man who illegally ordered the prosecution of James Comey.

And the person who will be humiliated in that courtroom every day will be Lindsey Halligan.

Watch above via MSNBC’s The Last Word.