Judge tosses cases against Comey and James, rules prosecutor appointment unlawful
The decision could end the prosecution of the former FBI director. The government could refile charges against the New York attorney general.
Updated
November 24, 2025 at 2:44 p.m. EST today at 2:44 p.m. EST
Lindsey Halligan was named interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in September. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Jeremy Roebuck
and
Salvador Rizzo
A federal judge dismissed charges 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 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 to her position and, therefore, indictments she secured against Comey and James must be thrown out.
Currie’s decision would allow the Justice Department to seek a new indictment against James under a lawfully appointed prosecutor. In Comey’s case, though, the judge suggested the time to do so has run out.
Comey’s lawyers have argued that he cannot be recharged because the statute of limitations in his case expired days after he was indicted in September. In her written opinion, Currie appeared to endorse that view, citing precedents 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.’”
A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately return calls for comment Monday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday that Trump’s reaction to the ruling was, “We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen partisan judges take unprecedented steps to try to intervene in accountability before, but we’re not going to give up.”
“I know that the Department of Justice intends to appeal these rulings very soon, if they haven’t already,” she said.
But lawyers for Comey and James said they would fight any attempt by the government to revive the cases.
“Today an independent judiciary vindicated our system of laws not just for Mr. Comey but for all American citizens,” Comey’s attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said.
Abbe Lowell, an attorney for James, said Currie’s decision showed the “extreme measures” Trump took to “bring these baseless charges after career prosecutors refused.”
“This case was not about justice or the law,” he said. “It was about targeting Attorney General James for what she stood for and who she challenged.”
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, had been specially assigned to rule on the validity of Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Her decision delivered rebukes to the Justice Department on two fronts.
By declaring Halligan’s appointment invalid, Currie joined several other judges in rejecting legal arguments the Trump administration has used to install loyalists in top prosecutorial positions across the country.
The judge’s decision to go further and dismiss the cases against Comey and James complicates Trump’s efforts to deploy the Justice Department in furtherance of his desire for retribution.
Trump has called for Comey’s prosecution for years, following his decision to fire the then-FBI director in 2017. He has accused James — a Democrat who ran for office, in part, with vows to hold Trump accountable — of wrongdoing after she secured a multimillion-dollar civil fraud judgment against Trump and his real estate empire last year.
Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has repeatedly called on the Justice Department to prosecute 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, took both cases before grand juries and secured indictments.
In addition to the effort to challenge the validity of Halligan’s appointment, Comey and James both had urged judges to end their prosecutions on grounds that they are 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.
In defending Halligan, 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 rein in the circumstances in which appointees can fill those roles while bypassing 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 maintain that the attorney general has the authority to make successive interim picks as she did with Halligan’s appointment after Siebert was forced out.
Attorneys for Comey and James disputed that interpretation of the law. They argued 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 for confirmation.
“If the position remains vacant at the end of the 120-day period,” Currie wrote in her opinion Monday, “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.”
Currie’s ruling on the validity of Halligan is the highest-profile decision yet on an issue that has roiled courts across the country. 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.
In those cases, courts have declined to dismiss indictments the challenged prosecutors oversaw because career prosecutors whose authority was not in question were also involved in bringing those cases.
Unusually, Halligan was the only prosecutor present when the cases against Comey and James were put before the grand jury. Career prosecutors in her office had expressed concerns over the strength of the case.
Shayna Jacobs contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... mey-james/
