A federal judge has dismissed the criminal cases 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 are a stunning rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to target Trump’s political opponents. It also highlights its legal maneuvering to appoint a loyal prosecutor willing to bring cases expeditiously.
These orders make Lindsey Halligan the latest Trump administration prosecutor to be disqualified because of the way they were appointed. Both defendants asked for the cases to be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the Justice Department would not be able to file them again. But the judge instead dismissed them without prejudice, although it was not immediately clear whether the Justice Department might try to revive the prosecutions.
Monday’s order deals exclusively with the mechanism the Trump administration used to appoint Halligan, a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience, to lead one of the Justice Department’s most elite and important offices.
Halligan was appointed to the position last September after another interim US attorney, Eric Seibert, was forced to resign amid pressure from the Trump administration to bring charges against Comey and James.
After Seibert’s resignation, Comey’s lawyers said the federal district court judges should have had exclusive say in deciding who would fill the vacancy. Instead, Trump nominated Halligan while publicly pleading with Bondi in a social media post to take action against his political opponents, saying in a post on Truth Social that “Justice Must Be Served Now!!!”
Comey was indicted days later on charges of making a false statement and obstruction of Congress, and James was indicted shortly thereafter in a mortgage fraud investigation.
The justices separately disqualified temporary U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, Los Angeles and Nevada, but allowed cases under their watch to move forward. But lawyers for Comey and James said Currie’s sentence needed to go further because Halligan was the sole signatory of the indictments and the driving force behind them.
Comey was for years one of Trump’s main opponents. Comey, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013, was overseeing an investigation into whether his presidential campaign conspired with Russia to influence the outcome of the race. Angered by the investigation, Trump fired Comey in May 2017, and the two officials engaged in a verbal spat in the years that followed.
James has also been a frequent target of Trump’s wrath, especially since she won a stunning ruling against him and the Trump Organization in a lawsuit alleging that he defrauded banks by overstating the value of his real estate holdings on financial statements. An appeals court overturned the fine, which had swelled to more than $500 million with interest, but upheld a lower court’s ruling that Trump committed fraud.
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