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 the 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.
The Justice Department did not immediately disclose its next steps, though it may appeal the rulings and could look to refile the cases.
“The facts of the indictments against Comey and James have not changed and this will not be the final word on the matter,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.
Indictments had been subject to multiple challenges
The challenges to Halligan’s appointment are just one facet of a multiprong assault on the indictments by Comey and James, whose multiple other efforts to dismiss the cases were still pending at the time of Monday’s rulings. Both have separately asserted that the prosecutions were vindictive and emblematic of a weaponized Justice Department. Comey’s lawyers last week, in moving to get his case tossed out, seized on a judge’s findings of a constellation of grand jury irregularities and missteps by Halligan. James likewise has cited “outrageous government conduct” preceding her indictment.
“I am grateful that the court ended the case against me, which was a prosecution based on malevolence and incompetence and a reflection of what the Justice Department has become under Donald Trump, which is heartbreaking,” Comey, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of making a false statement and obstructing Congress, said in a video statement.
