Judge dismisses DOJ lawsuits against James Comey and Letitia James as Trump’s revenge tour fails
A federal judge on Monday dismissed criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, concluding that the prosecutor who brought the charges at the request of President Donald Trump was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.
The rulings by U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie end at least for now two lawsuits that had heightened fears that the Justice Department was being used as a weapon to pursue the president’s political adversaries and constitute a resounding rebuke of the Trump administration’s legal maneuvers to appoint a loyal and inexperienced prosecutor willing to prosecute.
These orders make Lindsey Halligan the latest Trump administration prosecutor to be disqualified because of the manner in which they were appointed. Both defendants had requested that the cases be dismissed without prejudice, meaning the Justice Department could not take them back. But the judge dismissed them without prejudice, although it was not immediately clear if and how the Justice Department might try to revive the prosecution.
The challenge to Halligan’s nomination was one element of a multi-pronged attack on the indictments of Comey and James, who had each sought to have their cases thrown out on the grounds that the prosecutions were vindictive. Comey’s lawyers also seized on irregularities in the grand jury proceedings to try to get the charges dropped. Each of these requests remains pending.
Monday’s order focuses exclusively on the mechanism the Trump administration used to appoint Halligan, a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience, to head one of the Justice Department’s most elite and important offices.
Halligan was appointed to the position in September after another acting U.S. attorney, Erik Siebert, was forced to resign under pressure from the Trump administration to pursue charges against Comey and James.
After Siebert resigned, Comey’s lawyers argued, federal district court judges should have had sole authority over choosing the vacancy. Instead, Trump named Halligan while publicly imploring Bondi in a social media post to take action against his political opponents, declaring in a Truth Social post that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! »
Comey was indicted days later on charges of making a false statement and obstructing Congress, and James was indicted shortly afterward in a mortgage fraud investigation.
In a statement, James said: “I am heartened by today’s victory and grateful for the prayers and support I have received from across the country. »
“I remain fearless in the face of these baseless accusations as I continue to fight every day for New Yorkers,” said New York’s attorney general, a Democrat.
The justices separately disqualified the acting U.S. attorneys for New Jersey, Los Angeles and Nevada, but allowed the cases brought under their watch to move forward. But lawyers for Comey and James had argued that Currie’s decision had to go even further because Halligan was the sole signatory of the indictments and the driving force behind them.
Comey has been one of Trump’s main antagonists for years. Appointed to the position in 2013 by President Barack Obama, Comey, at the time of Trump’s election in 2016, was overseeing an investigation into whether his presidential campaign conspired with Russia to influence the outcome of the race. Furious over the investigation, Trump fired Comey in May 2017, and the two officials clashed verbally in the years that followed.
James has also been a frequent target of Trump’s ire, particularly since she won a stunning judgment against him and the Trump Organization in a lawsuit alleging he defrauded banks by overstating the value of his real estate in his financial statements. An appeals court overturned the fine, which amounted to more than $500 million with interest, but upheld a lower court’s finding that Trump committed fraud.
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Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak in New York and Lindsay Whitehurst and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.
