Judge tosses cases against Comey and James, rules prosecutor appointment unlawful
A federal judge dismissed the criminal cases against former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday, delivering an emphatic blow to President Donald Trump’s rushed efforts to engineer prosecutions of two of his prominent foes.
U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor overseeing both cases, had been unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and, therefore, indictments she single-handedly secured against Comey and James must be thrown out.
The judge said the Justice Department could seek a new indictment against James under a lawfully appointed prosecutor. In Comey’s case, though, Currie suggested that the time for doing so has run out.
Comey’s lawyers had argued that he cannot be recharged now because the five-year deadline to bring a case against him expired days after he was indicted in September. Currie appeared to endorse that view in her written opinion Monday. She cited rulings by other courts that have held that if an indictment is invalid at the time it is issued, it does not pause the clock on the statute of limitations.
“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,” Currie wrote. “There is simply ‘no alternative course to cure the unconstitutional problem.’”
Her decision delivered rebukes to the Justice Department on two fronts. By declaring Halligan’s appointment invalid, Currie joined several other judges who have rejected the legal arguments the Trump administration has relied upon to install loyalists in top prosecutorial positions across the country.
But in deciding to end the cases against Comey and James, Currie went further than the other judges who have ruled on that issue and set back Trump’s efforts to deploy the Justice Department as a tool of retribution.
Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed that the department would pursue “all available legal action including an immediate appeal.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed Currie as another “partisan judge” who she said had taken “unprecedented steps to try to intervene in accountability.”
Comey and James, meanwhile, hailed Currie’s decision, and their lawyers vowed to fight any effort to revive the cases against them.
“I know that Donald Trump will probably come after me again,” Comey said in a video posted to social media. “My attitude is going to the be same: I’m innocent. I am not afraid. And I believe in an independent federal judiciary.”
James, in a statement, said that no matter what comes next, she remains “fearless in the face of these baseless charges.”
Currie, an appointee of President Bill Clinton normally based in South Carolina, was specially assigned to rule on the validity of Halligan’s appointment. She based her ruling on the unique history of the two cases.
Trump has called for Comey’s prosecution for years, following his decision to fire the then-FBI director in 2017. And he has repeatedly excoriated James - a Democrat who ran for office, in part, with vows to hold Trump accountable - after she secured a multimillion-dollar civil fraud judgment against Trump and his real estate empire last year.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to charge James and Comey with crimes, paying little mind to whether evidence existed to support charges.
When Erik S. Siebert, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney overseeing both investigations, concluded that the evidence did not suffice, Trump forced him out of his job and installed Halligan, an ex-White House aide and one of the president’s former personal lawyers, in his place.
Within days, Halligan, who had no previous prosecutorial experience, secured indictments against Comey on charges that he lied to Congress about authorizing leaks to the news media, and James on allegations of mortgage fraud.
She presented the evidence to grand juries alone after career prosecutors in her office expressed concerns over the strength of the cases.
In defending Halligan’s appointment, the Justice Department advanced an expansive view of its authority to temporarily fill U.S. attorney vacancies with the president’s candidate of choice despite efforts by Congress to limit the circumstances under which appointees can fill those roles without first receiving Senate approval.
Typically, the Senate must confirm a president’s U.S. attorney picks. But the law empowers the attorney general to temporarily fill vacancies by making an interim appointment for a period of 120 days.
If the Senate has still not confirmed the president’s nominee by the end of that time, the law permits the federal judges in a given judicial district to name a temporary replacement.
Justice Department lawyers maintained that the attorney general has the authority to make successive interim picks, as she did with Halligan’s appointment after Siebert was forced out.
But Currie rejected that argument Monday, saying that if an administration were allowed to name new interim U.S. attorneys every 120 days, there would be no reason for a president to ever put nominees before the Senate.
“If the position remains vacant at the end of the 120-day period,” Currie wrote, “the exclusive authority to make further interim appointments under the statute shifts to the district court, where it remains until the president’s nominee is confirmed by the Senate.”
After deeming Halligan’s appointment invalid, Currie said, she had no choice but to dismiss the Comey and James cases given the singular role Halligan had played in securing both indictments.
Doing otherwise, Currie said, “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.”
In addition to challenging the validity of Halligan’s appointment, Comey and James both had urged judges to end their prosecutions on grounds that they were improperly driven by Trump’s vindictive animosity toward them. Separately, Comey had sought dismissal of his case over what his lawyers have described as irregularities in the grand jury process that resulted in his indictment.
Currie’s ruling on Halligan’s legitimacy is the highest-profile decision yet on an issue that appears bound for the Supreme Court. Judges have previously disqualified Trump’s interim U.S. attorney picks in New Jersey, Nevada and Los Angeles - decisions the Justice Department continues to appeal.
James, meanwhile, is pursuing a separate challenge to Trump’s acting U.S. attorney in Albany, New York, who is investigating the work of her office in pursuing the civil fraud case against Trump.
In other cases in which courts have ruled that Trump’s interim U.S. attorneys were unlawfully appointed, judges have declined to dismiss indictments because career prosecutors whose authority was not in question were also involved in bringing the prosecutions. The fact that Halligan had no other prosecutors with her made this case different, Currie wrote.
And perhaps in recognition of appellate court battles to come, Currie peppered her opinion Monday with references to similar decisions by conservative legal minds.
Those included U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ruling last year dismissing the classified-documents case against Trump over issues with special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment, as well as a 1986 Justice Department legal memo that shared Currie’s view of the U.S. attorney appointment law. Its author: then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Speaking to reporters in Memphis on Monday, Bondi vowed that the Justice Department would fight to keep Halligan in her job as it has done with U.S. attorneys in each of those other cases.
“Lindsey Halligan is an excellent U.S. attorney,” she told reporters. “Shame on them for not wanting her in office.”
Shayna Jacobs contributed to this report.
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