Judge dismisses Comey, NY AG James indictments after finding that prosecutor was illegally appointed
The orders make Lindsey Halligan the latest Trump administration prosecutor to be disqualified because of the manner in which they were appointed.
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.
Currie agreed.
“The 120-day clock began running with Mr. Siebert’s appointment on January 21, 2025. When that clock expired on May 21, 2025, so too did the Attorney General’s appointment authority,” Currie wrote. “Consequently, I conclude that the Attorney General’s attempt to install Ms. Halligan as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid and that Ms. Halligan has been unlawfully serving in that role since September 22, 2025.
Instead, Trump nominated Halligan while publicly imploring Bondi in a social media post to take action against his political opponents, saying in a Truth Social post that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Though the defendants had asked for the cases to be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the Justice Department would be barred from bringing them again, the judge instead dismissed them without prejudice. The Justice Department did not immediately comment on next steps, but it is likely to appeal.
Comey was indicted days later on charges of making a false statement and obstructing Congress, and James was charged soon after that in a mortgage fraud investigation.
In a statement, James, a Democrat, said, “I am heartened by today’s victory and grateful for the prayers and support I have received from around the country.”
“I remain fearless in the face of these baseless charges as I continue fighting for New Yorkers every single day,” she said.
Judges have separately disqualified interim U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, Los Angeles and Nevada, but have permitted cases brought under their watch to move forward. But lawyers for Comey and James had argued that Currie’s ruling needed to go even further because Halligan was the sole signer of the indictments and the driving force behind them.
Comey has for years been one of Trump’s chief antagonists. Appointed to the job in 2013 by President Barack Obama, Comey, at the time of Trump’s 2016 election, was overseeing an investigation into whether his presidential campaign had conspired with Russia to sway the outcome of the race. Furious over that investigation, Trump fire Comey in May 2017 and the two officials have verbally sparred in the years since.
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, which had ballooned to more than $500 million with interest, but upheld a lower court’s finding that Trump had committed fraud.
