By Ben Meiselas
This afternoon brought one of the most sweeping legal rebukes yet of Donald Trump’s weaponized Department of Justice while he is the sitting president. A federal judge has dismissed the indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James after finding that the supposed prosecutor who brought those cases, Lindsey Halligan, was never lawfully appointed in the first place.
This is not a fluke or a clerical error (even if that’s the line Fox is using right now). It is the rule of law doing exactly what it is supposed to do when a president tries to turn the justice system into a personal hit squad.
Judge Cameron McGowan Currie held that Halligan’s appointment violated 28 U.S.C. section 546 and the Appointment Clause of the United States Constitution and that “all actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr. Comey’s indictment, constitute unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside.” The judge also ruled that the “Attorney General’s attempts to ratify Ms. Halligan’s actions were ineffective and are hereby set aside.”
Once Halligan’s appointment fell, everything she touched fell with it.
Here is what happened. Trump’s DOJ first installed Eric Siebert, a career Republican prosecutor, as the interim United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. Under federal law, you get one interim United States Attorney before you have to follow the appointments process set out in the Constitution, which means nomination by the president and confirmation by the Senate. Judges in that district, appointed by presidents from both parties, extended Siebert’s interim term because he was competent and independent.
That independence is exactly why Trump turned on him. Siebert reportedly refused to bring frivolous charges against Trump’s perceived enemies like Comey and Letitia James. So Trump’s team pushed him out and tried to install Lindsey Halligan as a new interim United States Attorney, even though the statute is crystal clear that you do not get a second interim. You cannot fire the first interim and simply pretend the clock resets. Trump may be used to taking plenty of mulligans in golf. It doesn’t work that way here.
Halligan had never been a federal prosecutor in her life. She was a beauty pageant contestant who became an insurance lawyer, then a Trump loyalist. That is who Trump’s DOJ sent into a grand jury room, all alone, to seek indictments of a former FBI director and a sitting state attorney general.
The court did not even need to reach the mountain of other misconduct we exposed from Halligan’s time in that grand jury. She presented an indictment that had been rejected by the grand jury, then had the foreperson sign a second indictment the grand jury never even saw. She put an FBI agent on the stand who had been exposed to attorney client privileged material. She gave false instructions to the grand jury about Fifth Amendment rights and acted as if the burden shifted to Comey to prove his own innocence. Any one of those would have been grounds to throw these cases out. The judge stopped at the threshold and said Halligan never had lawful authority to be in the room at all.
The consequences are enormous. Because the Comey indictment was brought on the very last day of the statute of limitations, and because it has now been dismissed, that case cannot be refiled. It is over. The Letitia James indictment was dismissed without prejudice, which technically allows refiling. In reality, after this ruling and the documented misconduct, any federal prosecutor who tried to resurrect that case would be risking their bar license. No serious career prosecutor is going to volunteer to be the next Lindsey Halligan.
The ruling also exposes Attorney General Pam Bondi, who tried to retroactively “ratify” Halligan’s actions by filing declarations claiming she had reviewed the grand jury transcripts and approved what took place. The court expressly rejected that attempt. Bondi now owns the conduct she tried to bless, including the use of a tainted FBI witness, the fake indictment not actually voted on by the grand jury, and the false legal instructions given in the grand jury room. Those are the kinds of abuses that can and should lead to disbarment, and they raise even deeper questions about her broader record at the Trump DOJ while he is president.
Beyond the legal jargon, here is what this really is. A sitting president tried to criminalize his political enemies using a fake interim prosecutor who had no lawful authority to act. A federal court caught it, called it what it is, and shut it down. The indictments against James Comey and Letitia James never should have existed. Now a judge has said, in plain text, that the entire effort was an unlawful exercise of executive power.
James Comey and Attorney General James will have strong malicious prosecution claims. As is too often the case, taxpayers will ultimately pay the price for Trump’s abuse of government power. But accountability matters. The written record matters. And today that record reflects a rare and direct line in federal court: this president’s Justice Department broke the law to go after his enemies, and the courts refused to go along.
This is what it looks like when the rule of law survives contact with a lawless president. And it is a reminder that the fight to defend democratic institutions is not abstract. It is fought case by case, motion by motion, order by order, in real time, while Trump still sits in the Oval Office.
Watch my live report about the big news above, like this post, and subscribe for more. And be sure to tune in tonight to the MeidasTouch Podcast on YouTube, live at 8p ET/5p PT.
