President Donald Trump's team of prosecutors in the case against former FBI Director James Comey is so slapdash that the line attorneys hastily recruited from another district don't even understand the details of it yet, legal expert Lisa Rubin told MSNBC's "The Weeknight" hosts on Wednesday evening.

Comey, a longtime target of Trump's wrath, is being charged with false statements and obstruction of justice, based on testimony he gave to the Senate years ago that the indictment doesn't even quote correctly. The case, which required Trump to force out the U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia and install one of his former defense lawyers in his place, has come under widespread criticism from experts for a variety of defects, and some speculate that Comey could have the whole thing thrown out before it even gets to trial.

Today's proceedings didn't make things look much better, said Rubin.

"I will tell you, being in the courtroom today felt like being in the upside-down," she said. "Why? Because sitting at the center of the defense table is a person who put away criminals and criminals for years and years and years."

"I just want to remind you and our viewers, Jim Comey's best known to us in recent memory as a former FBI director, right? But before then, he was a longtime federal prosecutor," Rubin said. "He was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was the deputy attorney general, a position now held by Todd Blanche, somewhat infamously, because we talk about Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi on this network all the time."

In fact, Rubin went on, "Jim Comey served for five years as the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Richmond office, of the very same office that's prosecuting him now, the office that couldn't find a single line assistant to either sign the indictment or show up in court today, which is why [acting U.S. Attorney] Lindsey Halligan, while she was there, was silent as two people she recruited from the Eastern District of North Carolina stood up in court today and said, essentially, we'll agree to the trial date that Jim Comey's lawyers want. Why? Because all we're trying to give the defendant all the time, he needs to prepare for trial. But also there's a substantial amount of discovery in this case, your honor, including classified materials."

"That's a very, very nice, thinly disguised way of saying, we're brand new to this and we got to get our arms around it, too, because guess what? We're not the ones who investigated this case. We're not the ones who charged this case," Rubin added. "And we got to learn what it is that we're supposed to do here by some point in January."

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