“You can’t advise the FBI if you don’t have the experience necessary to avoid the traps, and that’s what I’m afraid of,” said O’Grady, who’s also a former Eastern District prosecutor. “They’ve got no one to go to to understand how to work the case up.”

“That’s where the void is—that transfer of information and decisions that need to be made on how, when, and if to prosecute a case. There’s a total breakdown there,” said Judge Liam O’Grady, formerly of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, retired in 2023.