Left: Lindsey Halligan, then-special assistant to the president, speaks with a reporter outside of the White House, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin). Right: Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey gestures while addressing a gathering at Harvard University's Institute of Politics' JFK Jr. Forum in Cambridge, Mass., Monday, Feb. 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa).
The Trump administration has issued an explanation over an alleged gap in the transcript during the grand jury presentation that resulted in the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.
On Friday, in a flurry of court filings, the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Lindsey Halligan insisted the transcript was entirely aboveboard – despite the purported absence.
Earlier this week, Senior U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, a Bill Clinton appointee, called attention to an apparent problem with the transcript and squarely put the DOJ further on the defensive.
The contretemps comes amid the still-unspooling battle over whether Halligan was lawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney.
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During a hearing over the appointment battle on Thursday, Currie described a portion of the transcript as "missing." The judge said it "appears there was no court reporter present" or the court reporter had ceased activity during the grand jury proceeding from roughly 4:30 p.m. until the Comey indictment was handed up past normal business hours on Sept. 25, as Law&Crime previously reported.
"It became obvious to me," the judge said during the hearing, that Bondi "could not have reviewed" the whole grand jury proceeding.
The salience of such a review is due to Bondi's retroactive ratification of Halligan's work on both the case against Comey as well as the indictment filed against New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In an appointment order filed Nov. 3, dated Oct. 31, Bondi said she appointed Halligan as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on Sept. 22. The order also says Halligan was simultaneously made a "Special Attorney," which authorizes her to "conduct and supervise the prosecutions" of Comey and James. Finally, the order aims to specifically "ratify" Halligan's "actions before the grand jury and her signature on the indictments returned by the grand jury in each case."
To hear Comey's attorney Ephraim McDowell tell it, Halligan's would-be appointment represents "a fundamental defect" showing she had "no authority" to present the case to the grand jury on her own. It was "evasion of the Appointments Clause and separation of powers," according to a courtroom report by CNN.
An attorney for James echoed that assessment. Abbe Lowell said the government is claiming the power to authorize virtually anyone to "go into a grand jury and get an indictment and the attorney general could later authorize that." To that end, Lowell said Halligan is "pretending" to be a U.S. attorney, and cannot, by law, prosecute the cases.
The government, for its part, pushed back on the timeline issue. Currie responded by noting how days after the retroactive ratification, the DOJ came up with more grand jury details it didn't have earlier.
The judge seemed to frame the issue of the "missing" grand jury minutes as perhaps somehow indicative of – or at least related to – the alleged underlying problem with Halligan's appointment.
The DOJ seemingly sensed as much in the six different documents intended to address and correct the issue docketed late Friday.
First, the government filed an "informative notice correcting the record," which described the issue and asked the court to "take notice of the attached declaration of U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan (Exhibit 1), and the attached ratification dated November 14, 2025, by U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi (Exhibit 2)."
The first exhibit refers to the "alleged gap in the grand-jury record" and says "the transcript reflects that I, Lindsey Halligan and the court reporter exited the grand-jury room."
The filing offers to "clarify the precise sequence of events" that occurred on Sept. 22, and says the allegedly missing time was simply accounting for the deliberations of the grand jurors.
"By identifying that specific timeframe, the court placed the timing of the proceedings in dispute," the document reads. "There are no missing minutes, contrary to the suggestion raised by the court."
Left to right: the docket showing a correction of the clarification notice; a typo in one of Halligan's filings (DOJ).
The second exhibit is an additional retroactive ratification of Halligan's authority. This time, Bondi makes pains to reference the entirety of the grand jury proceedings and aims to refute the court's suggestion that the appointment was improper due to the missing minutes.
Bondi's second retroactive ratification reads, in full:
On October 31, 2025, and based on the record of the grand jury proceedings that was available to the government at the time, I ratified the actions of United States Attorney Lindsey Halligan before the grand jury and her signature on the indictment returned by the grand jury in the case of United States v. Comey (Case No. 1:25-CR-00272). See Att'y Gen. Order No. 6485- 2025. The district court has subsequently raised questions about the completeness of the record of the grand jury proceedings presented to me at the time of that initial ratification. For the avoidance of doubt, I have reviewed the entirety of the record now available to the government and confirm my knowledge of the material facts associated with the grand jury proceedings. Based on that knowledge, I hereby exercise the authority vested in the Attorney General by law, including 28 U.S.C. § 509, 510, and 518(b), to ratify Ms. Halligan's actions before the grand jury and her signature on the indictment returned by the grand jury.
The DOJ's attempted cleanup, however, took a couple of tries.
In short order, the trio of documents was swiftly re-filed due to a typo. In the first exhibit of the original suite of clarification documents, Halligan was listed as "Interim United Stated Attorney."
Matt Naham contributed to this report.
