Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan is not having a good time.

Sure, indicting people because President Donald Trump said so was probably a bit of a rush, but now she’s stuck with two high-profile cases where the only help she has is prosecutors borrowed from other districts, since no one in her office would agree to handle these travesties.

While Halligan is running these cases on a shoestring, former FBI Director James Comey is going HAM and filing motion after motion to get rid of both Halligan and the indictment she secured against him.

He’s assembled a giant team of high-powered, experienced attorneys, and they are absolutely burying Halligan in a flurry of motions —an excellent strategy against an inexperienced prosecutor. Now, Halligan has to respond to all of these, and meanwhile, time marches on. Both Comey’s case and Halligan’s prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James are on the rocket docket, so Halligan has to simultaneously prepare for two big trials scheduled just a few weeks apart in January.

Comey had already filed two earlier motions to dismiss, one based on Halligan being illegally appointed and one alleging vindictive and selective prosecution. This week, he added three more.

First, he filed a motion to force the government to disclose the grand jury proceedings. Normally, grand juries are entitled to a “presumptionof regularity,” meaning the actions of the grand jury are presumed to be reasonable. But if a defendant can point to significant irregularities, they can get access to the grand jury materials.

Here, Comey points to two significant irregularities. First, it appears there may have been a tainted witness—an FBI agent who may have had access to privileged material between Comey and his attorneys, which would be covered by the attorney-client privilege. If the agent provided the grand jury with attorney-client information in an effort to buttress the indictment against Comey, that’s a big problem.

Additionally, Comey alleges that Halligan kept the grand jury well into the evening instead of sending them home after they refused to indict Comey on three counts. She then presented the two-count indictment and kept the jury until nearly 7 PM. Comey wants access to those proceedings to see if Halligan basically told the jury they couldn’t leave until they indicted him.

That might sound fanciful and ridiculous in a normal case with a normal prosecutor—a long-shot complaint. But this is no normal case, and Halligan is no normal prosecutor, so it’s not hard to imagine her thinking it’s totally appropriate to hammer a grand jury until she got what she wanted.

He’s also filed a motion for a bill of particulars. A defendant is supposed to know the basis for the charges against them so they can prepare for trial. But the indictment Halligan presented has literally no information about the factual basis for charging Comey. So, Comey is asking for all of it, and let’s face it: We know that whatever Halligan has as material supporting her fact-free indictment is probably pretty sparse.

If that wasn’t enough, Comey also filed a motion to dismiss the indictment “based on fundamental ambiguity and literal truth.” That’s a mouthful, but what it’s about is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s mangled, multi-part questions to Comey, creating confusion as to what, exactly, he was asking Comey about. The “literal truth” part is precisely what it sounds like—that Comey says he was literally truthful when responding to Cruz. Of course, if Comey was truthful, the whole indictment falls apart.

Meanwhile, in the Letitia James case …Halligan charged James with fraud over lying to her bank to get a better mortgage on a second home, but then renting it out in violation of the “Second Home Rider” contract. But there is language in her contract that says she can use the home “including short-term rentals.” In fact, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say that a second home rider means the property “may be rented out on a short-term basis.”

James’ grand-niece lives in the home and testified to a different grand jury convened by Halligan that she had lived there for many years without paying rent. But then Halligan didn’t put the grand-niece before the grand jury that ultimately indicted James. That looks a lot like Halligan withheld material—that could have shown James’s innocence—from the grand jury that ultimately indicted James.

Halligan is overmatched and, honestly, seems to think her job ended after she secured indictments. Even though she’s gotten Justice Department attorneys from other jurisdictions to help out, that assistance can’t remedy the deficiencies in her indictments.

These experienced defense attorneys are not going to let up, and by now, Halligan has to feel like a mouse being batted around in a cat’s claws.

How long do we give her before she quits? Of course, if either of these indictments gets dismissed, Halligan might be purged by the same people who installed her in the job.

Perhaps she’ll go back to her previous job in the administration, where she got to singlehandedly remove any material from the Smithsonian museums that made white people sad, like exhibits about slavery.

She’s not qualified for that either, of course. But it’s got to be easier than her current thankless gig.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos