ALEXANDRIA, VA—This morning’s hearing on James Comey’s motion to dismiss for vindictive and selective prosecution was largely overshadowed by the revelation that the indictment may not be valid because it was botched by interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan. You can read my initial report from court here.

It would be an epic way for the weaponized prosecution of Comey to end: the Trump loyalist with no prosecutorial experience so badly mishandling the basic nuts and bolts of grand jury practice that no indictment ever attached to Comey.

But a botched indictment only indirectly gets at the heart of the bad faith and ill motive that is driving the Comey prosecution, so let’s run through some of the highlights of the nearly hour-long argument that preceded U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff pressing prosecutors for answers on their mishandling of the grand jury. Instead of recounting the arguments from both sides — former deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben for Comey and Nathaniel Lemons for the government — I want to zoom in on what most interested the judge and where his questions were most focused.

Yesterday President Trump met in the Oval Office with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and, in the midst of defending him over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said that MBS “knew nothing about it.” Last night Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA) went to the well of the House and gave a brief speech in which he said that the two most troubling presidential calls he had reviewed while serving on the National Security Council staff were the infamous one with President Zelenskyy and another heretofore unknown call with MBS. Vindman then goes on to imply that the call showed Trump not knew MBS ordered the murder but likely supported it. Vindman first posted the video on Twitter last night. This morning he posted the same video on Bluesky. But in the caption he writes in the post — as opposed to the video — he zeroes in specifically on Trump’s claim that MBS “knew nothing about it.”