MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Flays Trump Legal ‘Craziness’ That’s ‘About to Blow Up This Week’

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow mocked officials appointed by President Donald Trump over examples of legal “craziness” she expects will “blow up this week” — including high-profile cases that have been criticized as malicious prosecutions.

Among the issues coming to federal courtooms this week are the cases against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey — both brought by Trump-picked prosecutor Lindsey Halligan.

On Monday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, the host opened her show with a marathon commentary on a number of issues, including the prediction that Halligan’s cases against the pair of Trump nemeses were about to “blow up” in Halligan’s face:

There’s a bunch of craziness and what really seems to me like a bunch of crazy failure that is unfolding this week on the legal front, specifically, what appears to be some really bad lawyering inside the Trump administration. A bunch of these things is about to come sort of to a head all at once, all over the course of this week. And I want to know what it means and how it might change things going forward.

Let me explain. Take, for example, Virginia, Eastern District of Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., very important jurisdiction as a U.S. Attorney’s Office. You might remember that they removed the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia recently, and they instead instead installed one named — a woman named Lindsey Halligan, who was a random Florida insurance lawyer and Trump fan who had never so much as prosecuted a traffic ticket. It’s under Lindsey Halligan’s estimable authority that that U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia brought federal criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey for supposedly lying to Congress and against New York Attorney General Letitia James for supposed irregularities in her mortgage paperwork.

Now, the reason that I’ve got eyes on that this week is because, I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, but this looks to me like it’s about to blow up in their faces. And I say this, I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the, you know, innate charm and abilities of somebody who’s never prosecuted a case, who’s suddenly in charge of one of the most important U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the country, but on Thursday this week, Lindsey Halligan is going to be up against two real lawyers, two — two really big deal, very accomplished, famous, almost household name lawyers who are representing Tish James and James Comey in those criminal trials.

The — the lawyers are Abbe Lowell and Patrick Fitzgerald, two very famous lawyers. And this week, the two of them are going to be in court challenging the cases against James Comey and Tish James in the Eastern District of Virginia. And they’re going to be challenging those cases, in part on the basis of, what the heck does this person, Lindsey Halligan, do? What the heck is this person Lindsey Halligan doing in that — that office anyway? They’re essentially going to be challenging her appointment and her ability to bring these cases.

If I was betting on Patrick Fitzgerald and Abbe Lowell on the one hand, and Lindsey Halligan, Florida insurance lawyer on the other, I mean, I know what side of the bet I would take, especially because the judge in the Comey case, at least, has already castigated Lindsey Halligan’s handling of this case, has described it as effectively not just irregular, but buffoonish and wrong. And the judge is already calling on that U.S. Attorney’s Office to justify their actions in ways that seem very damning for these cases. So I think those two cases may blow up, proverbially speaking, this week, when those — when that court hearing happens on Thursday.

And another reason this is worth watching this week in particular is a mysterious firing that happened last week. It didn’t get a lot of attention, but this firing may become a lot less mysterious in the next few days. And the firing relates to most specifically the case against Tish James. So that’s the mortgage irregularities case, right? You probably remember that that case appears to have originated with an obscure little federal agency that handles mortgage financing, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which nobody has ever had to think about ever before.

Trump put a very MAGA Trump appointee in charge of that agency. And now in running that agency, he appears to have been using the — the data, the paperwork that that agency has access to to essentially try to find crimes to prosecute against Trump’s list of enemies. He has tried to do it with California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff and his mortgage, and with Fed Governor Lisa Cook and her mortgage, and also with New York Democratic Attorney General Tish James and her mortgage.

Well, last week, little noticed story from Reuters, this Trump appointee who — who runs this obscure mortgage data agency, who seems to have been the source for all of these weird criminal cases against Trump’s political enemies, that guy last week fired the inspector general at that agency. Why did he fire the inspector general at his agency? We don’t know. We have not matched this reporting. But Reuters says four sources told them that the inspector general received notice of his termination from the White House after he made efforts to provide key information to prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Quote, “The information he turned over was constitutionally required, said two of the sources, while a third source described it as being potentially relevant in discovery.” So this mortgage case against Tish James is going to be in court this week, in federal court. It’s not going to be in the newspapers or in social media or at the White House podium. It’s going to be in real court with a real judge who gets to decide if that Tish James case and the James Comey case are real cases or not, or instead, are they pernicious abuses of power by people maliciously carrying out the president’s personal and political vendettas?

And if part of that is the inspector general trying to convey legally required information to the court, and that inspector general was blocked from doing so and then fired for doing so, well, you might expect that there’s going to be hell to pay in that courtroom this week about that.

Watch above via MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.