Judge Berates Justice Dept. in Its Prosecution of Comey

The flashpoint was the Justice Department’s failure to turn over seized communications from a confidant of Mr. Comey’s, Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University.

A federal judge in the Trump administration’s prosecution of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on Wednesday blasted President Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, for taking an “indict first, investigate second” approach to the case.

The magistrate judge, William Fitzpatrick, repeatedly expressed his frustration — and at times his barely restrained annoyance — with Ms. Halligan during an otherwise procedural hearing in which he ordered the Justice Department to produce records from its investigation. Ms Halligan was hastily installed as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in September after her predecessor refused to indict Mr. Comey on charges that he lied to Congress.

The flashpoint was the Justice Department’s failure to turn over communications it had seized from a confidant of Mr. Comey’s, Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, as part of an internal investigation of leaks in the Russia case during the first Trump administration. The government claims he served as a conduit between the director and the news media for passing along information about the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016.

As part of their defense, Mr. Comey’s lawyers have accused the Justice Department of vindictive prosecution and challenged the legality of Ms. Halligan’s appointment. They have argued that they have been unable to adequately defend their client without access to emails and other communications obtained by the government from Mr. Richman’s electronic devices in 2019 and 2020.

The judge grilled one of Ms. Halligan’s deputies, Nathaniel Lemons, over prosecutors’ release of material in recent days, including private text exchanges intended to cast Mr. Richman and Mr. Comey in unflattering light in an otherwise quotidian court filing. He asked whether prosecutors had given Mr. Comey an opportunity to review such material first to challenge their release.

When Mr. Lemons said he had not offered Mr. Comey’s lawyers access to the material, obtained in several search warrants as part of the internal leak investigation, the judge chided him for placing an “unfair” burden on the defense.

“We’re going to fix that and we’re going to fix that today,” said Judge Fitzpatrick, who served as the chief of the financial crimes and public corruption unit in the office Ms. Halligan now leads before his appointment to the bench in 2022.

He then ordered prosecutors to turn over all grand jury materials and other evidence seized during previous investigations that involved Mr. Richman and Mr. Comey by the end of the day on Thursday.

Judge Fitzpatrick’s decision to force the government to hand over grand jury material to Mr. Comey’s lawyers was a significant development. The move will allow the defense to scrutinize exactly how Ms. Halligan characterized the evidence against Mr. Comey when she showed up for what was her first ever appearance in front of a grand jury.

In court papers, the lawyers have already accused Ms. Halligan of committing “irregularities so severe and pervasive” in front of the grand jury “that they likely prejudiced the grand jurors’ narrow decision to indict.”

In the papers, they cited some of Ms. Halligan’s rookie errors, pointing out how she had kept the grand jurors in the courthouse “well past normal business hours” after they had failed to endorse one of the three original counts she was seeking. The lawyers also noted that Ms. Halligan confusingly signed two different versions of the indictment.

Moreover, the lawyers argued that the grand jury process was potentially tainted because the F.B.I. agent who testified might have improperly shared privileged communications between Mr. Comey and one of his lawyers — some of which seems to have emerged from the disputed trove of materials in the leak investigation, known as Arctic Haze.

“All available information regarding Ms. Halligan’s first-ever grand jury presentation smacks of irregularity,” the lawyers wrote. “It is virtually unheard-of for a brand new prosecutor to make her first grand jury presentation alone, without the supervision and guidance of an experienced prosecutor to ensure the absence of factual and legal errors.”

Judge Fitzpatrick, who seemed exasperated with the government’s approach, described the case as “unusual,” adding, “We are in a little bit of a posture of indict first, investigate second” — drawing a sharp glance from an otherwise impassive Ms. Halligan.

Mr. Comey, who attended the hearing but remained silent, is accused of lying to and obstructing Congress in testimony on the investigation into Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, during which he was asked whether he had authorized anyone at the F.B.I. “to be an anonymous source in news reports.”

Current and former prosecutors have described the case as deeply problematic, motivated less by legitimate law enforcement goals than by Mr. Trump’s public demand that Attorney General Pam Bondi immediately prosecute Mr. Comey and several other people he has targeted.

On Monday, federal prosecutors disclosed evidence showing that Mr. Comey had used a confidant to provide information to reporters, even though it was difficult to tell how some of the evidence was relevant to the specific charges detailed in the case.

The 48-page filing appeared to be an effort to construct a narrative that Mr. Comey had leaked information to the news media without actually tying such assertions to the allegations made in the indictment brought against him.

The document, which mirrored the bombastic approach taken by Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers during his federal criminal proceedings, was a rebuttal of Mr. Comey’s claims of vindictive prosecution.

Ms. Halligan, an inexperienced former insurance lawyer who had no prosecutorial background before being thrust by Mr. Trump into her current role, was a lower-rung member of the Trump defense team in the case over whether he had mishandled classified documents after he left office.

Despite his misgivings about the filing, Judge Fitzpatrick denied a request by one of Mr. Comey’s lawyers, Rebekah Donaleski, to block prosecutors from dumping similar material into future filings.

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