On September 20, President Donald Trump announced that he had picked Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump defense lawyer with no prosecutorial experience, to replace Erik Siebert as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Trump was displeased with Siebert because he was not inclined to prosecute two of the president's nemeses: former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Halligan showed no such reluctance, delivering a perjury and obstruction indictment of Comey three days after taking office and a mortgage fraud indictment of James two weeks later.
On Monday, a federal judge dismissed both of those indictments without prejudice after concluding that Halligan had been illegally appointed. Those decisions do not put an end to the criminal cases against Comey and James, since the Justice Department can refile the charges. But the grounds for dismissal reflect the grudge-motivated nature of both cases, which drove Trump and Halligan to take shortcuts that doomed the indictments.
