Judge dismisses Comey, James indictments after finding that prosecutor was illegally appointed

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Monday 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 President Donald Trump’s urging was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

The rulings from U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie halt at least for now a pair of prosecutions that had targeted two of the president’s most high-profile political opponents and amount to a stunning rebuke of the Trump administration’s legal maneuvering to install an inexperienced and loyalist prosecutor willing to file cases.

The orders do not concern the substance of the allegations against Comey or James but instead deal with the unconventional manner in which the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was named to her position as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Defense lawyers said the Trump administration had no legal authority to make the appointment. In a pair of similar rulings, Currie agreed and said the invalid appointment required the dismissal of the cases.

“All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment,” including securing and signing the indictments, “were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside,” she wrote. Halligan, the judge said, has been serving unlawfully in the role since September 22, the day she was sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The challenges to Halligan’s appointment are just one facet of a multiprong assault on the indictments by Comey and James, who have each filed multiple motions to dismiss the cases that have not yet been resolved. Both have separately asserted that the prosecutions were vindictive and emblematic of a weaponized Justice Department. Comey’s lawyers last week seized on a judge’s findings of grand jury irregularities and missteps by Halligan in moving to get his case tossed out, and James has cited “outrageous government conduct.”

At issue in Currie’s rulings is the mechanism the Trump administration employed 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 named as a replacement for Erik Siebert, a veteran prosecutor in the office and interim U.S. attorney who resigned in September amid Trump administration pressure to file charges against both Comey and James.

After Siebert resigned after having served more than 120 days in the role, defense lawyers argued, the judges of the federal court district should have had exclusive say over who got to fill the vacancy. They said the law does not permit the Justice Department to make successive appointments as an end-run around the courts and the Senate confirmation process.