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While Donald Trump values unquestioning loyalty above all else, he may want to consider appointing competent people to key government positions to do his bidding. Otherwise, his efforts to exact real revenge on those whom he imagines to have committed crimes and slights against him may stall.

That is the inescapable conclusion one has to reach after reading the opinion that a magistrate judge handed down in the criminal case against James Comey on Monday.

The judge, William Fitzpatrick, took the rare step of ordering prosecutors to immediately turn over to the legal team of the former FBI director records of the secret grand jury proceedings that led to Comey’s indictment in September.

His lawyers had argued that Comey is the target of a politically motivated prosecution, and that the charges of making false statements and obstructing Congress should be thrown out. To make that case, the attorneys demanded access to the grand jury records.

“The Court recognizes that the relief sought by the defense is rarely granted,” the judge wrote. However, the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”

Fitzpatrick had come to this conclusion after reviewing the records himself… and it is easy to see why.

In his opinion, the judge detailed a series of inconsistencies that may amount to “government misconduct.”

Specifically, Fitzpatrick questioned whether the Department of Justice had submitted all records of the interactions between Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s former insurance lawyer whom Attorney General Pam Bondi appears to have installed as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia solely to go after the president’s “enemies,” and the grand jury.

That grand jury had initially rejected one of the counts against Comey before Halligan presented a new indictment.

At least that is what might have happened, because the records of the grand jury proceeding are incomplete.

“The short time span between the moment the prosecutor learned that the grand jury rejected one count in the original indictment and the time the prosecutor appeared in court to return the second indictment could not have been sufficient to draft the second indictment, sign the second indictment, present it to the grand jury, provide legal instructions to the grand jury, and give them an opportunity to deliberate and render a decision on the new indictment,” Fitzpatrick wrote.

“If the prosecutor is mistaken about the time she received notification of the grand jury’s vote on the original indictment, and this procedure did take place, then the transcript and audio recording provided to the Court are incomplete,” he added, which seems to cut Halligan a lot of slack in making it sound as though this could be an honest mistake. “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.”

That’s not all. Fitzpatrick also stated that it appears as though prosecutors “suggested to the grand jury that they did not have to rely only on the record before them to determine probable cause but could be assured the government had more evidence – perhaps better evidence – that would be presented at trial.”

One of the reasons why prosecutors may have acted in such haste is that the statute of limitations to charge Comey was running out.

The potential misconduct is not the only problem that plagues the prosecution.

Last week, a US District Court judge seemed to question whether Halligan had been properly appointed as interim US attorney.

No judge is ever going to rule on whether she is qualified to fill that position, and that is fortunate for Halligan because it likely would not turn out well: Before being involved in the Comey prosecution, she had never worked on a criminal case.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.