Devlin Barrett

And that really came to a head last week in court when Comey's lawyers made their case to the judge that this was just a vindictive prosecution, that this case existed because President Trump wanted him punished.

So this was a hearing that did not go well for Lindsay Halligan.

And the judge had a lot of pointed questions about the grand jury, how the grand jury actually ended up voting on this.

And at one point, the judge specifically called Lindsay Halligan up to answer his questions directly, as opposed to having a different, more experienced federal prosecutor answer the questions.

And in that line of questioning...

Halligan and her associate conceded that the written final version of the indictment wasn't exactly the same paperwork that the grand jury had voted on.

Well, it's a technical thing, but obviously a grand jury is supposed to vote on the indictment that gets filed to the court.

But Lindsay Halligan's answers seem to raise new doubts as to whether the grand jury had actually approved the final version of the case against Jim Comey.

So much so that Comey's own lawyers immediately popped up and said, Your Honor, what they just said is another reason to dismiss this case.

Halligan and the Justice Department's argument is that this is a technical procedural thing.

It doesn't affect any of the substance.

That's their argument to those concerns.

Right.

I think that hearing really raised expectations that there was going to be potentially a seismic ruling about

the whole question, the whole issue of vindictive prosecution.

But in fact, on Monday, the first judge's opinion dismissing these cases came on the technical issue of Lindsay Halligan's appointment.

Right.

The judge basically agrees with the arguments Comey and others have made that you can't have essentially a double temporary U.S.

attorney.

And the judge says that it simply can't be right that when you don't follow the normal process for putting a U.S.