There was a reason why Trump named Lindsey Halligan, an insurance defense lawyer who was unquestionably loyal, to the position of interim United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after firing career prosecutor Erik Seibert for his refusal to indict former FBI Director James Comey. Halligan would do as ordered, no matter what obstacles stood in the way. The problem, however, was that she just didn’t have the knowledge, experience and ability to do so lawfully.

Consider two stories, both from this week alone. First, on Monday, William Fitzpatrick, a federal magistrate judge who is assisting Michael Nachmanoff, the federal judge presiding over the administration’s prosecution of James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released an opinion about a series of staggering procedural irregularities that originated with Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s handpicked prosecutor in the case.

David French runs through the “comedy of errors,” or tragedy of incompetence if you can’t laugh about it, that permeated the Comey indictment process.

The judge found that the prosecutors had mishandled attorney-client communications between Comey and one of his former lawyers, Daniel Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia Law School and a personal friend of Comey’s.

This was what Halligan deemed “bombshell” evidence, a bizarre characterization of highly ambiguous writings, atop the fact that the government should neither have possessed it nor presented it to a grand jury.

According to the magistrate, when grand jurors challenged Halligan on the strength of the evidence against Comey, Halligan responded with a “fundamental and highly prejudicial misstatement of the law that suggests to the grand jury that Mr. Comey does not have a Fifth Amendment right not to testify at trial.”

There is no judge in the grand jury, and the prosecutor serves as the grand jury’s legal advisor, meaning that they get their instructions on the law from the prosecutor. It’s incumbent on the prosecution to correctly instruct the grand jury as to the law. This was not only wrong, but so basic to criminal and constitutional law as to be laughably wrong.

It gets worse. Halligan also seemed to assure the grand jury that “they did not have to rely on the record before them to determine probable cause, but could be assured that the government had more evidence — perhaps better evidence — that would be presented at trial.”

The government is allowed to present hearsay evidence to the grand jury. It can put one person on the stand who can then tell the story by relating information provided by others, even though the person giving testimony has no personal knowledge of the truthfulness of the evidence. Even so, the grand jury can’t engage in speculation about evidence other than what’s presented to compensate for the lack of evidence presented. Nor can the government instruct the grand jury they can do so if they find the evidence before them lacking.’

But French then gets to the failure that just doesn’t happen.

Halligan also appears to have completely botched the process of securing the indictment. She sought a three-count indictment, but the grand jury indicted only on two counts. Yet, through a mysterious series of events, she signed two different indictments — a first indictment that, according to the magistrate, “indicated that the grand jury failed to find probable cause as to any count” and a two-count indictment that didn’t include the rejected third count.

Compounding the problem, at a court hearing on Wednesday, the D.O.J. admitted that it never presented the two-count indictment to the full grand jury. Instead, Halligan seems to have copied the two approved counts into a new document and discussed it with the foreperson without returning to the grand jury.

To the unwashed, this might not seem like a terrible thing to do. After all, if the grand jury voted to indict on two of three counts, than getting the foreperson to sign off on a new indictment with only the two counts might seem like fair shortcut. No harm, no foul. Sure, all the other errors may have occurred, but this mistake might be considered more formalistic than substantive. After all, it’s not as if the grand jury didn’t vote to indict at all.

As the magistrate wrote, “If this procedure did not take place, then the court is in uncharted legal territory in that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.”

In criminal law, procedure matters, and when it comes to an indictment, which happens outside the court’s view and is entrusted to the prosecution to be handled in full accordance with the mandatory procedural requirements of the law, this is a screw up of unfathomable proportions.

Or to put it bluntly, the paper that bears the word “Indictment” and the signatures of the grand jury foreman and putative interim United States Attorney, another problem outside the realm of Halligan’s incompetence since Seibert had already used up the 120-day period for an unconfirmed US Attorney, thus precluding Trump/Bondi from naming Halligan to a post that could only be filled by the judges of the court, is not an indictment at all. It’s inoperative. It’s words on paper signifying nothing.

At National Review, former SDNY AUSA Andy McCarthy takes the “harmless error” approach to Halligan’s array of errors, instead focusing on whether the evidence was sufficient to sustain probable cause for the two approved counts of the indictment.

To me, this is irregular but hardly a shredding of the Constitution. If the final indictment that was filed accurately reflects the two counts the grand jury approved, I don’t see why a second grand jury presentation would have been necessary. And as long as the no true bill document is preserved, giving Comey notice and an opportunity to object to any irregularities it implies (as he is doing), I don’t see the harm.

I see the harm. Procedures required to protect the integrity of the grand jury process, not to mention the prosecution itself, are either mandatory or not. If not, then this is all a big joke and the ends justify the means. That’s not the law, and that is the shredding of the Constitution.