The Trump administration’s rushed indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James have been tossed out, with a federal judge saying that Lindsey Halligan, who was appointed by the White House to bring the charges, had “no lawful authority” to appear before a Virginia grand jury.
U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie’s decision on Monday to dismiss the indictments marks a stunning upset for President Donald Trump and his efforts to exact revenge on those he considers political enemies. Currie’s ruling derailed the two cases that had been set for trial in January and were seen as a test of Trump’s long-promised and widely telegraphed retribution campaign.
The judge also ruled that the White House does not have the power to appoint a replacement for Halligan as the top federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia — leaving that task to judges in the district and precluding the president from selecting another lawyer willing to do his bidding.
Currie opened her 29-page opinion in the Comey case by noting that Halligan was “a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience.” She went on to point out how Halligan was chosen to replace Erik Siebert, who was appointed by Trump but who reportedly resisted political pressure to indict Comey “less than 48 hours” after Trump posted on social media an explicit call to prosecute the former FBI director.
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Currie wrote that Trump’s decision to place Halligan as interim U.S. attorney violated the Constitution’s appointments clause and that “all actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr. Comey’s indictment, were unlawful exercises of executive power.”
The judge laid out the same concerns and reasoning in a separate 26-page opinion in the James case.
The judge also struck down Attorney General Pam Bondi’s belated effort to ratify Halligan’s appointment several weeks after she took command of the U.S. attorney’s office, issued in an Oct. 31 proclamation that claimed to bestow upon Halligan the novel title of “special attorney.”
Neither the Justice Department nor Halligan immediately responded to requests for comment.
The Trump administration had decided to charge ahead with the two cases even though they’d run into problems during the investigative stage, with lower-level prosecutors at the Virginia office voicing concerns about the strength of the accusations that Comey had lied to Congress and James had lied on a bank loan application, according to a source familiar with internal deliberations. The White House and DOJ leadership chose to put Halligan in charge — and Halligan then chose to present both cases to grand juries on her own.
That decision ultimately tanked the case by creating a single point of failure. If Halligan has no prosecutorial authority, then the grand jury presentations were never valid.
“The implications of a contrary conclusion are extraordinary. It would mean the government could send any private citizen off the street — attorney or not — into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the attorney general gives her approval after the fact. That cannot be the law,” Currie wrote.
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