Criminal cases against ex-FBI director Comey, Letitia James dismissed in blow to Trump administration

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 U.S. President Donald Trump’s urging was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

The rulings from U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie amount to a stunning rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to target the president’s political opponents. It also highlights its legal maneuvering to hastily install a loyalist prosecutor willing to file the cases.

The orders make Lindsey Halligan the latest Trump administration prosecutor to be disqualified because of the manner in which they were appointed. It is a similar ruling to others that have gone against the administration, concerning U.S. attorneys in California, Nevada and New Jersey. In those instances, judges permitted cases brought under their watch to move forward with different officials.

“All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr. Comey’s indictment, were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside,” the judge wrote in his ruling.

Both Comey and James had asked for the cases to be dismissed with prejudice, meaning that the Justice Department would not be able to bring them again. But the judge instead dismissed them without prejudice.

It was not immediately clear if or how the Justice Department might attempt to revive the prosecutions.

James was charged in a mortgage fraud investigation.

The Comey indictment was filed just days before an apparent statute of limitations for the charges he faced — making a false statement to Congress, and one charge of obstructing a congressional proceeding.

The challenge to Halligan’s appointment was one piece of a multiprong assault on the indictments by both Comey and James, who had each sought to have their cases dismissed on grounds that the prosecutions were vindictive. Comey’s lawyers had also seized on irregularities in the grand jury process in seeking to get the prosecution thrown out.

Each of those requests remains pending.

James welcomes ruling amid ‘baseless charges’

Monday’s order deals exclusively with 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 to the job in September after a different interim U.S. attorney, Erik Siebert, was effectively forced out amid pressure from the Trump administration to file charges against Comey and James.

After Siebert resigned, Comey’s lawyers argued, the judges of the federal court district should have had exclusive say over who got to fill the vacancy. Instead, Trump nominated Halligan while publicly imploring Attorney General Pam Bondi in a social media post to take action against his political opponents including Comey and James, saying in a Truth Social post that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

WATCH | Tracing the timeline of the Trump-Comey relationship:

In an apparent escalation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on his political enemies, former FBI director James Comey has now been indicted on criminal charges. For The National, CBC’s Lyndsay Duncombe lays out a timeline of how it got to this point.

Comey has for years angered Trump. A registered Republican appointed to the job in 2013 by Democratic president Barack Obama, Comey was overseeing an investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had conspired with Russia to sway the outcome of the race. Furious over that investigation, Trump fired Comey in May 2017.

James has also been a frequent target of Trump’s ire, especially since she won a staggering judgment against him and the Trump Organization in a lawsuit alleging he defrauded banks by overstating the value of his real estate holdings on financial statements. An appeals court overturned the fine in August, which had ballooned to more than $500 million US with interest, but upheld a lower court’s finding that Trump had committed fraud.

In a statement, James said she was “heartened by today’s victory” .

“I remain fearless in the face of these baseless charges as I continue fighting for New Yorkers every single day,” she said.

The Trump message to Bondi was cited by the legal teams for James and Comey to back their contention that they were subject to a vindictive prosecution. Comey’s attorneys also have alleged that the grand jury process wasn’t properly followed in his case, focusing on revisions made to the indictment and improper statements they allege Halligan made to the grand jury.