Trump’s revenge campaign is now putting the entire Justice Department at risk |
A Trump-appointed judge in Richmond, Virginia issued an unusual order on Tuesday that threatens one of President Donald Trump’s most high-profile Department of Justice appointees with disciplinary sanctions — or even with forbidding her from practicing in the federal courts in eastern Virginia.
The order, in a case known as United States v. Jefferson, is indirectly related to Trump’s attempt to get revenge against two of his perceived political enemies: former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Last September, Trump ousted Erik Siebert, formerly the US attorney for the eastern half of Virginia, after demanding that the Justice Department bring charges against Comey, James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA). He then purported to install Lindsey Halligan, one of his former personal attorneys, as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia.
Prior to this assignment, Halligan worked as an insurance lawyer and had not been a prosecutor.
Halligan swiftly complied with Trump’s demand and brought charges against Comey and James, but those charges were dismissed after federal Judge Cameron Currie determined that she was illegally appointed as US attorney.
The gist of Currie’s decision is that federal law permits the attorney general to temporarily fill vacant US attorney jobs for 120 days, but the Justice Department already used this authority to appoint Siebert at the beginning of Trump’s second term. That means that any new presidential appointment must be confirmed by the Senate, and Halligan was never confirmed.
And that brings us back to Judge David Novak’s Tuesday order in United States v. Jefferson. In it, Novak “observes that Ms. Halligan identified herself” in a recent court filing “as the United States Attorney for this District.” And he........