No Dignity Left Behind
Pam Bondi long ago gave up her dignity, so having her corrupt prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James blow up is not a humiliation in the normal sense of the word. But as a lickspittle attorney general whose career is dependent on currying favor with President Trump, yesterday was a personal and professional disaster.
Bondi’s scheme to install Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and rush to indict Comey before the statute of limitations expired was thoroughly rejected by a federal judge. Comey’s indictment was dismissed along with James’. But it was quite a bit worse than that.
Bondi had overextended herself throughout the fight over Halligan’s appointment, taking unusual and embarrassing steps to try to paper over the flaws in her scheme. There was the first attempt to retroactively ratify Halligan’s acts as U.S. attorney and, bizarrely, to appoint Halligan to a second position, also retroactively, just in case the initial scheme failed.
That was followed by a public dressing-down when the judge questioned how Bondi could have ratified the Comey indictment since the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings were incomplete. That forced Bondi to rush out a second purported ratification, admitting that she had only seen a partial transcript but had since reviewed the fuller record.
Bondi’s maneuvering only reinforced how ham-handed and inept her scheming on Trump’s behalf had been. In the end, the judge rejected all of it: Bondi’s appointment of Halligan as interim U.S. attorney, her subsequent after-the-fact appointment of Halligan as a special attorney, her first ratification, and her second one.
Judged by the perverse standards of the Trump White House, Bondi utterly failed. Appeals will follow and corrupt re-indictments may come, but for this day Bondi was the Trump’s incompetent henchman who left a string of messes behind for others to clean up.
A Missed Chance for a Perfect Test Case
The dismissal of the Comey indictment, while the right call on the law and the facts, does deprive us of as strong a vindictive prosecution claim as we’re likely to see. Comey’s legal team had structured its arguments to be the seminal test case for whether Donald Trump could freely use the Justice Department to exact retribution against his foes, with serious implications for the other vindictive prosecutions, both those pending and those still to come.
The Halligan appointment was part and parcel of that vindictive prosecution — a former Trump personal lawyer turned White House aide with no experience as a prosecutor rushed into place after her predecessor was ousted for refusing to do Trump’s dirty work — so you can’t easily separate it from the rest of Comey’s vindictive prosecution claim.
But to the extent the courts are going to have to grapple with new standards or benchmarks for vindictive prosecutions in the Trump era, the Comey case was as good as they get. Someone else will have to set that standard now, with perhaps fewer advantageous facts and without as stellar a legal team as Comey had.
Not a Fair Fight in Some Ways
Watching Comey’s legal team spar in court with B-team DOJ lawyers over the past two weeks was another reminder of how much damage Bondi has done to the Justice Department. Halligan was too inexperienced to fight this fight, so outside DOJ lawyers were brought in. They were no match for the Comey team.
While Comey is most often identified as a former FBI director, for the purposes of this case it was always more striking to me that he was a former deputy attorney general, the No. 2, who ran the department day to day. Being targeted by the department he once ran operationally, while also witnessing the erosion of its professionalism and traditions, made for an especially poignant tableau.
Comey was defended by longtime Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and Michael Dreeben, the former deputy solicitor general who was a legendary Supreme Court advocate and criminal law expert, plus several other highly capable litigators. The quality of his defense showed in every aspect of the case, especially when contrasted with what Bondi failed to bring to the table.
What Was at Stake in the Halligan Fight
In bypassing local judges to install Halligan, the Trump administration was seeking to rob both the judicial and legislative branches of some of their prerogatives.
The Retribution: Ed Martin Edition
Last week, I wasn’t sure what to make of the reports that the Trump DOJ seemed to be looking into how the bogus mortgage fraud claims against Letitia James and Adam Schiff emerged. It seemed hard to believe that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was overseeing an investigation into DOJ official Ed Martin and Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
It’s still not clear what exactly is going on, but the scenario that makes the most sense and best lines up with the reporting so far is that prosecutors and investigators are trying to get a handle on the origin story of the mortgage fraud nonsense now instead of finding themselves surprised later.
It all blew out into the open on Thursday when a potential witness named Christine Bish went public about being questioned by prosecutors that morning at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland (where an important hearing in the Abrego Garcia civil case happened to be underway). She was generally disgruntled that their questioning of her was not focused on Schiff’s conduct.
Since then reports have understandably been focused on the weird tactics Martin and Pulte used, including the possible use of intermediaries, to gin up the mortgage fraud claims. But the Trump DOJ has circled the wagons and it’s looking less likely now that Martin and Pulte are the targets of any investigation: “Martin and Pulte are not being investigated by a grand jury, according to a person familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly,” the WaPo reports.
Quote of the Day
“We’ve never dealt with this. This is really chilling.”–former Army JAG Geoffrey Corn, on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s unprecedented investigation into Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for exercising his First Amendment rights as a retired Navy captain
Trump Has Sidelined CISA for 2026
At the end of his first term, President Trump fired Christopher Krebs as head of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for publicly saying that the 2020 election was free from fraud. In his second term, Trump revoked Krebs’ security clearance and has gutted CISA, whose duties included protecting election infrastructure. The agency was mostly sidelined in this year’s elections, leaving election officials scrambling to fill the gaps going into next year’s midterms.
Real-Time Analysis
Greg Sargent and I had a quick conversation about all of the breaking news yesterday afternoon — from the Comey/James dismissals to Hegseth’s retaliation against Kelly:
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
