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      The Comey and James dismissals are a reminder of Trump’s lawlessness | Austin Sarat

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      Monday brought good news for two of Donald Trump’s most hated enemies: the former FBI director James Comey, and the New York state attorney general, Letitia James. A federal judge dismissed the sham indictments the administration had obtained against them.Judge Cameron McGowan Currie reminded the president and his attorney general of the great lessons of a society governed by the rule of law: how things are done matters as much as what is done. Without fair procedures, no one can be safe from the arbitrary exercise of government power.This is never more apparent than when leaders target their political opponents and seek revenge against those who do not fall in line. The US is learning this lesson in real time as the Trump administration politicizes prosecution.Recall the president’s infamous 20 September direction to Pam Bondi, the US attorney general.“Pam,” Trump posted to Truth Social, “I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as the last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.’“Then,” he continued, “we almost put in a Democrat supported U.S. Attorney, in Virginia, with a really bad Republican past … I fired him, and there is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so. Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot.”The president ended by making it clear what he wanted and why he wanted it. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”Two days later, Bondi installed Halligan as interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia with an apparent mandate to go after Comey, James and others. Several days after that, Comey was indicted in federal court, accused of lying to Congress; the next month, James was indicted in a mortgage case. Both denied wrongdoing and said the cases were intended to punish them for past clashes with him.On Monday, Currie delivered a decisive rebuke to Trump and Bondi when she threw out the Comey and James indictments. She found that Halligan’s appointment violated the clear language of the statute governing such appointments and of the constitution itself.As a result, all of the actions flowing from her appointment, including the indictments of Comey and James, were “unlawful exercises of executive power”. While Currie left the door open for the administration to refile indictments against Comey and James, in Comey’s case, the time allowed under the applicable statute of limitations has run out.As the Washington Post notes, Currie’s decision is just the latest in a series of judicial rulings “disqualifying Trump’s interim U.S. attorney picks in New Jersey, Nevada, and Los Angeles”. Like her colleagues, Currie made clear that Trump’s Department of Justice had again distinguished itself by its dangerous combination of lawlessness and incompetence.Her opinion is good news for defenders of the rule of law. It should also strengthen the hand of other judges who want to push back against the administration’s vindictive prosecutions.Judges, like Currie, are never eager to dismiss an indictment issued by a grand jury. They are inclined to trust the grand jury process and are reluctant to cast aside the investment of time and resources that a good prosecutor makes in securing an indictment.In 1988, the supreme court held that, in most cases, dismissal of an indictment is appropriate only if errors in the handling of the grand jury process prejudiced a defendant by “substantially” influencing the decision to indict or raising “grave doubt” about whether the decision was free from such influence.As the attorney James M Burnham has written, this high bar “plays a central role in the ever-expanding, vague nature of federal criminal law because it largely eliminates the possibility of purely legal judicial opinions construing criminal statutes”. Burnham wants judges to be more active in policing indictments and making sure they are legally justified.Currie did just that. She found that Halligan lacked the authority to seek indictments of Comey or James because the justice department had not followed the applicable law governing the appointment of interim US attorneys. That law is, in her words, “unambiguous”.It allows the attorney general to appoint an interim US attorney, who can serve for a period of 120 days. It falls to a federal district court, not the administration, to choose a successor or extend the term of the current interim appointee – as happened with Halligan’s predecessor.The purpose of the law, Currie noted, was to prevent the president from circumventing the constitutional requirement that US attorneys go through a Senate confirmation process by making a series of interim appointments back-to-back.But Senate confirmation takes time. Alas, how inconvenient when the president demands that his enemies must be brought to justice now.Bondi may have known what the law required when she appointed Halligan to do the president’s bidding. But she seems to interpret her role as serving Trump and pushing the outer boundaries of the law until a judge has the temerity to tell her she can’t.Like federal judges in other cases, that is what Currie did. Along the way, the judge noted that Halligan was a “White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience”, who appeared alone before the grand jury after career prosecutors in her office concluded that neither had committed any crime.In the end, the judge, having pointed out the lawlessness and incompetence that accompanied Halligan’s appointment and the Comey and James indictments, reminded Bondi and the president that the legal requirements governing appointments, as the supreme court once said, are “more than a matter of etiquette or protocol”. No matter how much the president insists or how many all-caps messages he posts to Truth Social, those requirements cannot be discarded, she concluded, to suit the president, since they are “among the significant structural safeguards of the constitutional scheme”.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      Is the Democratic party embracing Bernie Sanders-style politics? | Dustin Guastella

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      Since the Democrats’ sweeping victories on 4 November, a strange thing has happened among the party factions: a semblance of unity has emerged.At first, “affordability” became the slogan of rapprochement. Moderates, populists and socialists agreed Democrats must campaign around the cost-of-living crisis and hang the broken economy around Donald Trump’s neck.At the same time party grandees – left, right and center – quietly agreed to ditch wokeness and embrace common-sense appeals to American solidarity and equality. Ideologically, we see the same convergence. Last week, writing in the Atlantic, Rogé Karma argued that the left has pulled the moderates toward populism, while the centrists have won debates on a number of cultural issues.And this week, James Carville – the bête noire of every leftwing Democrat and Bernie Sanders voter, the architect of Clintonian centrism – writes in the New York Times that he is become a populist.Here is Carville (James Carville!) describing what Democrats should do:“I am now an 81-year-old man and I know that in the minds of many, I carry the torch from a so-called centrist political era. Yet it is abundantly clear even to me that the Democratic party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression.”Carville advocates a program that includes raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour (blowing past the old progressive demand of $15 an hour), universal childcare, free university education, and major investments in utilities. But more important than the suite of policies itself, the editorial signals to Democratic bigwigs that populism has won. A decade after he announced his first campaign for president, it seems that Sanders has won his crusade for the soul of the Democratic party.Winning consensus on the need for a “seismic” economic program is no small feat and it will go a long way to helping Democrats win back their working-class base. Still, there is a lot of work to be done and many pitfalls along the way.First, progressives must resist the temptation, so attractive to scorned factions, to reject centrist overtures. There is a danger that if moderates fulsomely embrace a social populist program, figures on the left will attempt to differentiate themselves by reanimating the dead-end politics of fringe woke causes.But being lefter-than-thou serves no one and would only succeed in helping the right paint the left as a collection of sky-pilots, eggheads, and weirdos. This is, in part, the lesson of the old Socialist party of Norman Thomas. Franklin Delano Roosevelt adopted the political narrative, and much of the practical program, of the socialists of his day. However, instead of embracing FDR’s social-democratic turn, Thomas & co tried more and more to distinguish themselves and discredit Roosevelt claiming that he only “carried out the socialist program on a stretcher”.Some on the left attacked Roosevelt’s enormously popular New Deal and lambasted Democrats as cynics and opportunists. The result was to hasten the political irrelevance of the very figures most responsible for inspiring a great populist revival in the 1930s. If today’s left wants to avoid a similar fate, they should embrace the new populists of the center and work with them to craft visionary social policy. And they should have the humility to revise their own opinions when the centrists have a point.Second, the turn toward populism will remain incomplete until party leaders are willing to stridently declare war on the economic elite – the same elite who fill the campaign coffers of powerful Democrats. Not only is it essential for candidates to draw lines between themselves and the very rich to demonstrate their populist convictions, but without naming the “millionaires and billionaires” as the cause of so much economic misery, Democrats will be unable to mount a serious challenge to rule by the rich.Many moderates who have lately flirted with populism have as yet been unwilling to point the finger at Wall Street and Silicon Valley as the villains of the contemporary order. Yet, it is precisely because the ultra-wealthy have hijacked American society that so many working-class Americans struggle to pay their bills. The fact is we cannot win a society that is more equal and more prosperous without directly challenging the plutocrats at the top.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFinally, policy matters. Becoming the party of “economic rage” is a good way to win elections but to fix the crisis (crises?), the new social populism must go beyond the standard welfare state toolbox. Carville and other newfound populists have made a huge political leap in embracing a suite of big, new public services and for that they should be commended. Yet it isn’t enough.No doubt, we urgently need bold redistributive programs to rebalance income and wealth and to address the persistent cost crunch. But these alone will not fix our broken economy. Nor are such programs popular enough to propel a populist takeover in Washington. To get a sense of just what is wrong, consider that since Bill Clinton was president, we have shed some 7m middle-income jobs in manufacturing, and in an exaggerated inverse-proportion we have gained some 700 billionaires.If a renewed leftwing populism is to succeed it needs to address this. We need to de-globalize the economy, to disentangle the home market from the increasingly dysfunctional world market. We need to bring manufacturing home and reindustrialize the rustbelt.We need to reign in and repatriate the hyper-global banking sector. We need to rebuild American infrastructure from coast to coast. And we need to strengthen the power of labor on the shop floor by leveling the legal playing field between workers and employers. All of this would amount to a democratic reorganization of the political economy away from the global rich and toward the domestic working class.This would be a populism worthy of the name and if moderate Democrats are embracing such a call, they ought to be welcomed with open arms. And if the hour isn’t too late, this kind of appeal might be the only chance Democrats have of winning back the working class and retaking Washington.

      Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 More

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      Trump news at a glance: James Comey, Letitia James welcome judge’s decision to toss criminal cases

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      A federal judge threw out the criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James on Monday, concluding that the prosecutor handling the case was unlawfully appointed.Lindsey Halligan, who Trump named the interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia in September, had “no lawful authority to present the indictment” against the former FBI director and New York attorney general, Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, wrote in her opinion.She added that “all actions flowing from Ms Halligan’s defective appointment” were “unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside”.The decision is a major win for Comey, who was charged with lying to Congress five years ago, and James, who was charged with mortgage fraud. Both unequivocally denied wrongdoing and said the cases were a thinly veiled effort by the Trump administration to punish them for opposing the president.Currie dismissed both cases “without prejudice”, which means the government could theoretically try to bring the charges again under a properly appointed US attorney. But it is unclear if they could even do that in Comey’s case because the statute of limitations for the crime he is charged with passed on 30 September 2025.US judge throws out criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James“I am heartened by today’s victory and grateful for the prayers and support I have received from around the country,” James said in a statement. “I remain fearless in the face of these baseless charges as I continue fighting for New Yorkers every single day.”Comey also praised the decision.“I’m grateful that the court ended the case against me which was a prosecution based on malevolence and incompetence,” he said in a recorded video. “This case mattered to me personally, obviously, but it matters most because a message has to be sent that the president of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies.”Read the full storyUkraine makes significant changes to US ‘peace plan’, sources sayUkraine has significantly amended the US “peace plan” to end the conflict, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned that no deal could be reached quickly.Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week, sources indicated, amid a flurry of calls between Kyiv and Washington. Ukraine is pressing for Europe to be involved in the talks.Read the full storyPentagon investigating US senator over call for troops to refuse illegal ordersThe Pentagon says it is investigating the Arizona senator Mark Kelly for possible breaches of military law after the federal lawmaker joined a handful of other Democrats in a video calling for US troops to refuse unlawful orders.It is extraordinary for the Pentagon to directly threaten a sitting member of Congress with investigation. Until Donald Trump’s second presidency, the institution in charge of the US military had usually strived to appear apolitical.Read the full storyTrump begins process of designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist groupsTrump began the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, a move would bring sanctions against one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements.Trump signed an executive order directing secretary of state Marco Rubio and treasury secretary Scott Bessent to submit a report on whether to designate any Muslim Brotherhood chapters, such as those in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, according to a White House factsheet. It orders the secretaries to move forward with any designations within 45 days of the report.Read the full storyVenezuela accuses US of using ‘narco-terrorism’ allegations to justify ‘regime change’Venezuela’s government has accused the US of peddling “ridiculous hogwash” about its supposed role in sponsoring “narco-terrorism” as Washington continued to turn up the heat on Nicolás Maduro’s regime and leftwing European politicians warned South America faced being plunged into “a torrent of bloodshed”.The Trump administration officially designated a Venezuelan group known as the “Cartel de los Soles” (the Cartel of the Suns) a terrorist organization – despite widespread doubts over its actual existence.Read the full storyFox Corp chief told Sean Hannity that Trump could not go on air in 2020 if he attacked network
      New revelations about the tense relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump in the fall of 2020 have emerged in a trove of thousands of court documents released Sunday as part of a massive defamation lawsuit filed against the network by voting technology company Smartmatic.One exchange showed that Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox News parent company Fox Corp, told star anchor Sean Hannity in a 1 October 2020 text chain that Trump could not appear on Fox again if he attacked the network.Read the full storyTrump hints support for fringe theory that Venezuela rigged 2020 electionDonald Trump on Sunday appeared to endorse the discredited conspiracy theory that Venezuela’s leadership controls electronic voting software worldwide and caused his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden.White House officials have previously said that Trump’s increasingly bellicose policy toward Venezuela is driven by concerns about migration and the drug trade. But the president’s new comment, made on Truth Social, hints that his hostility to Venezuela may also be based on an outlandish, implausible theory ruled to be false by a judge in 2023.Read the full storyTrump DoJ’s focus on Maga goals harms other investigations, experts warnDonald Trump’s weaponization of the US department of justice to focus on retribution against political foes, on fulfilling Maga goals and on granting pardons for allies has seen thousands of lawyers depart or be fired and weakened investigations in civil rights, national security and other areas, say ex-prosecutors and legal experts.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A church employee is under arrest in Houston, Texas, after being accused of posing as an ICE agent to extort money from a woman he had booked to give him a massage.

      A controversial and secretive private company backed by the US and Israel that distributed food in Gaza has announced the end of its operations in the devastated territory.

      The Trump administration announced it will cancel temporary asylum for about 10,000 Myanmar nationals living in the US, despite the country being ruled by a military dictatorship that has a record of executing dissidents.

      The North Dakota supreme court revived the state’s abortion ban on Friday, once again making it a felony for doctors to perform the procedure except in medical emergencies or in some cases of rape or incest.

      A flurry of social media posts from Maga influencers have laid bare the disorientation felt by members of Trump’s base at the spectacle of Friday’s cordial Oval Office meeting with Mamdani, who the president previously painted as a “communist lunatic”.

      Viola Ford Fletcher, one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in Oklahoma, has died at 111. She spent her later years seeking justice for the deadly attack by a white mob on the thriving Black community where she lived as a child.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 23 November 2025. More

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      Trump begins process of designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist groups

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      Donald Trump on Monday began the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, a move that would bring sanctions against one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements.Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and treasury secretary Scott Bessent to submit a report on whether to designate any Muslim Brotherhood chapters, such as those in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, according to a White House fact sheet. It orders the secretaries to move forward with any designations within 45 days of the report.The Trump administration has accused Muslim Brotherhood factions in those countries of supporting or encouraging violent attacks against Israel and US partners, or of providing material support to Palestinian militant group Hamas.“President Trump is confronting the Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational network, which fuels terrorism and destabilization campaigns against US interests and allies in the Middle East,” according to a White House fact sheet.The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in the 1920s as an Islamic political movement to counter the spread of secular and nationalist ideas. It swiftly spread through Muslim countries, becoming a major player but often operating in secret.Republicans and right-wing voices have long advocated for and considered terrorist designations for the Muslim Brotherhood.Trump mounted a similar effort during his first term. Months after his second term began, Rubio said the Trump administration was working to designate the movement as a terrorist organization.Texas Governor Greg Abbott, also a Republican, last week imposed the same designation on the Muslim Brotherhood at a state level. More

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      White House insists Trump’s prosecutor was legally appointed after federal judge throws out Comey and James indictments – live

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      The White House press secretary insisted that Lindsey Halligan, the interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia handpicked by Donald Trump, was legally appointed to her position.This comes after a federal judge threw out the charges against James Comey and Letitia James, saying that Halligan had no “legal authority” to charge two of the president’s most notable adversaries.“The Department of Justice will be appealing very soon, and it is our position that Lindsey Halligan is extremely qualified for this position, but more importantly, was legally appointed to it,” Leavitt told reporters.The press secretary said that Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, who issued today’s rulings, was “trying to shield” the former FBI director and New York attorney general “from receiving accountability”.The White House just posted the full text of a new executive order Donald Trump signed on Monday, “to begin the process of designating certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as Foreign Terrorist Organizations”.Laura Loomer, a pro-Israel, anti-Muslim extremist with unusual influence over Trump, responded to the announcement by renewing her call for the administration to designate as terrorists Muslim American elected officials she claims, without evidence, are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.Writing on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Loomer was barred from for anti-Muslim racism before it was purchased by Elon Musk, the extremist podcaster called on Monday for the White House to use the new designation to arrest and jail three prominent Muslim Democrats: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Zohran Mamdani.Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has welcomed the decision by a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case against her on Monday, on the grounds that the prosecutor who brought the case, former White House aide Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed.“The court’s order acknowledges what’s been clear about this case from the beginning,” Lowell said in a statement. “The President went to extreme measures to substitute one of his allies to bring these baseless charges after career prosecutors refused. This case was not about justice or the law; it was about targeting Attorney General James for what she stood for and who she challenged. We will continue to challenge any further politically motivated charges through every lawful means available.”While gaggling with reporters, Karoline Leavitt said that she had spoken with secretary of state Marco Rubio “at length” following the US delegation’s meeting with Ukrainian officials in Geneva. She also mentioned that she’d spoken with the president.“Everybody inside feels optimistic about what happened in transpired yesterday,” she said. “The whole team really worked through the points of that 28-point peace plan that the United States authored, with input from both sides, the Russians and the Ukrainians.”Leavitt affirmed that “the vast majority” of these points had been agreed upon. “The Ukrainians have worked on language with us together,” she said. “So we feel as though we’re in a very good place.”The White House press secretary insisted that Lindsey Halligan, the interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia handpicked by Donald Trump, was legally appointed to her position.This comes after a federal judge threw out the charges against James Comey and Letitia James, saying that Halligan had no “legal authority” to charge two of the president’s most notable adversaries.“The Department of Justice will be appealing very soon, and it is our position that Lindsey Halligan is extremely qualified for this position, but more importantly, was legally appointed to it,” Leavitt told reporters.The press secretary said that Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, who issued today’s rulings, was “trying to shield” the former FBI director and New York attorney general “from receiving accountability”.Speaking to reporters outside the West Wing today, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the White House supports the Pentagon’s announcement that it is investigating veteran and Arizona senator Mark Kelly.Today, the Democratic lawmaker accused the Department of Defense of intimidation, Leavitt pushed back when asked about his Kelly’s statement.“I think what senator Mark Kelly was actually trying to do was intimidate the 1.3 million active-duty service members who are currently serving in our United States Armed Forces with that video that he and his Democrat colleagues put out,” the press secretary said, referencing the social media post where six Democratic members of Congress told members of the military that they should “refuse” illegal orders.“They knew what they were doing in this video, and Senator Mark Kelly and all of them should be held accountable for that,” Leavitt added today.My colleague, Jeremy Barr, has been combing through the tens of thousands of pages that were released on Sunday as part of voting technology company Smartmatic’s $2.7bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News over its coverage of the 2020 presidential election.He notes that Fox News has strenuously denied Smartmatic’s claims and said the company has vastly overstated its value. In a statement, Smartmatic said Fox’s “attempts to delay accountability won’t work, and its day of reckoning is coming”.You can read the top takeaways from the documents below.

      In a blow to Trump’s justice department, a federal judge has tossed out criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that Lindsey Halligan, the Trump-installed prosecutor who secured the indictment against two of the president’s most noted adversaries, was illegally appointed to her position as US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. Currie wrote that Halligan had “no lawful authority” to present the indictments to both Comey and James (in separate cases).

      The Pentagon has said it’s investigating Democratic senator Mark Kelly of Arizona for possible breaches of military law after Kelly joined a handful of other lawmakers in a video that called for US troops to refuse unlawful orders. The Pentagon’s statement, which was posted on social media this morning, cited a federal law that allows retired service members to be recalled to active duty on orders of the defense secretary for possible court martial or other measures. For his part, Kelly wrote in a statement that he’s “given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution”.

      Talks continued in Geneva between US and Ukrainian representatives today. Earlier, Donald Trump said that “something good just may be happening” in a post on Truth Social. Meanwhile, Ukraine has significantly amended the US “peace plan” for Ukraine, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned on Monday that no deal could be reached quickly. For his part, Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week.

      The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has filed a notice in the federal register to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for the roughly 10,000 Myanmar nationals living in the US. This, despite the country being ruled by a military dictatorship that has a record of executing dissidents. The Trump administration has already withdrawn protected status for a number of other nationalities, including Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan and Venezuela, as part of sweeping changes to immigration policy.

      The outgoing Georgia congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, said today that “smears, lies, attacks, and name calling is childish behavior, divisive, and bad for our country”. This comes after she announced her decision to resign from Congress in January. In recent weeks, Greene has had a very public falling out with Donald Trump, which culminated in the president calling her a “traitor” after she supported a vote for the justice department to release the complete trove of Jeffrey Epstein files. Today, without naming the president or any Republican colleagues, the Georgia lawmaker pushed back on X. “Memes and red meat rants do nothing. Actions speak louder than words,” Greene wrote
      The president has said he will visit Beijing in April, after a “very good” call with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he “discussed many topics including Ukraine/Russia, Fentanyl, Soybeans and other Farm Products”.He also teased a “good, and very important, deal for our Great Farmers”, and summarised the relationship with China as “extremely strong”. This despite a brewing trade war with the nation, following their decision to limit exports of rare earth minerals, and the US issuing retaliatory tariffs.“President Xi invited me to visit Beijing in April, which I accepted,” Trump added. “I reciprocated where he will be my guest for a State Visit in the U.S. later in the year. We agreed that it is important that we communicate often, which I look forward to doing.”Earlier, we brought you the news that the Department of Defense is investigating veteran and sitting Democratic senator Mark Kelly.This, after the Arizona lawmaker joined five other members of Congress in telling active duty military to “refuse illegal orders” in a social media video.For his part, Kelly has responded in a statement. “Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death,” he wrote in a post on X. “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”Kelly also gave a brief summary of his military career:
      In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.
      Halligan’s conduct in the Comey case came under sustained scrutiny from three different judges. A magistrate judge determined that Halligan may have committed other significant legal errors in instructing and presenting evidence to the same grand jury.The justice department denied to Reuters that Halligan engaged in any misconduct and argued that the magistrate judge’s ruling was based on misinterpretations and assumptions.A reminder that Comey was charged with making false statements and obstructing a congressional investigation. Prosecutors alleged he lied to the Senate judiciary committee during a 2020 hearing when he said he stood behind prior testimony that he had not authorized FBI leaks about investigations into Trump and his 2016 presidential election rival, Hillary Clinton.Comey has had an antagonistic relationship with Trump since his first term in 2017, when the president fired Comey while he was overseeing an investigation into alleged ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.Comey, who pleaded not guilty, mounted an array of legal challenges to the case, arguing that Halligan was unlawfully appointed as interim US attorney, that the case was an improper “vindictive” prosecution engineered by Trump, and that the substance of the false statement allegation was legally flawed.A federal judge has tossed out criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James.District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that Lindsey Halligan, the Trump-installed prosecutor who secured the indictment against two of the president’s most noted adversaries, was illegally appointed to her position as US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia.Currie wrote that Halligan had “no lawful authority” to present the indictments to both Comey and James (in separate cases). Lawyers for the former FBI director argued that when Halligan secured the indictment, the clock for a temporary US attorney had been run-out by her predecessor, Erik Siebert (who had already served for 120 days). They said it ultimately disqualified Halligan from holding the position at all. More

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      US judge throws out criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James

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      A federal judge threw out the criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James on Monday, concluding that the prosecutor handling the cases was unlawfully appointed.Lindsey Halligan, who Trump named the interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia in September, had “no lawful authority to present the indictment” against the former FBI director and New York attorney general, Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, wrote in her opinion.“I conclude that the attorney general’s attempt to install Ms Halligan as Interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia was invalid and that Ms Halligan has been unlawfully serving in that role since September 22, 2025,” Currie, who was appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, wrote in her opinion. She added that “all actions flowing from Ms Halligan’s defective appointment” were “unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside”.The decision is a major win for Comey, who was charged with lying to Congress five years ago, and James, who was charged with mortgage fraud. Both unequivocally denied wrongdoing and said the cases were a thinly veiled effort by the Trump administration to punish them for opposing Trump.“I am heartened by today’s victory and grateful for the prayers and support I have received from around the country,” James said in a statement. “I remain fearless in the face of these baseless charges as I continue fighting for New Yorkers every single day.”Comey also praised the decision.“I’m grateful that the court ended the case against me which was a prosecution based on malevolence and incompetence,” he said in a recorded video. “This case mattered to me personally, obviously, but it matters most because a message has to be sent that the president of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies.“I know that Donald Trump will probably come after me again and my attitude is gonna be the same. I’m innocent, I am not afraid, and I believe in an independent federal judiciary,” he added.US attorneys must be confirmed by the Senate. Federal law allows the attorney general to appoint someone to serve on an acting basis for 120 days while a nomination is pending. Once that 120 day period is up, the law allows the judges on the district court where the prosecutor handles cases to appoint a top prosecutor.Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert, began serving in the role on an interim basis in January. In May, at the end of the 120-day period, the judges in the eastern district of Virginia chose to extend his appointment. In September, Siebert was forced out of his role as it reportedly determined there was insufficient evidence to charge James with a crime. Trump installed Halligan, a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience in the role and Comey was indicted on charges of lying to Congress days later. Halligan then indicted James on allegations of mortgage fraud shortly after that.The Trump administration argued that the attorney general could simply revisit someone new every 120 days, but Currie said that would simply allow the attorney general to indefinitely appoint someone on an interim basis. The “text, structure, and history” of the law do not support the government’s argument she wrote.Currie dismissed both cases “without prejudice”, which means the government could theoretically try to bring the charges again under a properly appointed US attorney. But it is unclear if they could even do that in Comey’s case because the statute of limitations for the crime he is charged with passed on 30 September 2025.“The decision further indicates that because the indictment is void, the statute of limitations has run and there can be no further indictment,” said Patrick Fitzgerald, a lawyer for Comey. “The day when Mr Comey was indicted was a sad day for our government. Honest prosecutors were fired to clear the path for an unlawful prosecution. But today an independent judiciary vindicated our system of laws not just for Mr Comey but for all American citizens.”Halligan personally presented both cases to the grand jury and has been under intense scrutiny since taking her position. Last week, a judge overseeing the case questioned whether she had properly followed routine procedure in obtaining an indictment in Comey’s case. Prosecutors handling the case say they followed appropriate procedure.“The court’s order acknowledges what’s been clear about this case from the beginning. The president went to extreme measures to substitute one of his allies to bring these baseless charges after career prosecutors refused,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for James, said in a statement. “This case was not about justice or the law; it was about targeting Attorney General James for what she stood for and who she challenged. We will continue to challenge any further politically motivated charges through every lawful means available.” More

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      Surprise envoy pushing Ukraine ‘peace’ plan belies Vance influence on US policy

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      The US army secretary, Daniel Driscoll, was an unlikely envoy for the Trump administration’s newest proposal to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine – but his ties to JD Vance have put a close ally of the Eurosceptic vice-president on the frontlines of Donald Trump’s latest push to end the war.Before his trip to Kyiv last week, Driscoll was not known for his role as a negotiator or statesman, and his early efforts at selling the deal to European policymakers were described as turbulent.His close ties to Vance, with whom he studied at Yale and shares a close friendship, indicate the resurgence of the isolationist vice-president in negotiations to end the Ukraine crisis.It was Vance who stepped in during Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s disastrous first trip to the Trump White House in March and demanded he show Trump more “respect” – now Ukraine is once again resisting pressure from the US to cut a quick deal that local officials have described as a “capitulation”.After a tumultuous first year in office, foreign policy decisions in the White House are said to be shaped by a handful of Trump’s top advisers – including chief of staff Susie Wiles, rightwing adviser Stephen Miller, envoy Steve Witkoff, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and finally Vance.Vance has been a vocal booster of the latest proposal, which was developed by Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner together with the Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev.Vance’s early efforts at hammering out a peace deal with Russia – while also seeking to renew relations with Moscow – were unsuccessful, and left his camp feeling frustrated with their Russian interlocutors. European officials, meanwhile, were angered by his early speeches in which he accused them of “running from their voters” – who Vance said had anti-immigration and conservative positions close to those of Trump’s own constituency.But the new peace deal published last week closely resembled his positions, and he has been one of the most forceful spokespeople for the deal in the administration while the US has been under fire for accepting a peace framework that largely resembles Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands.In posts this weekend, Vance argued that a peace deal would have to produce a ceasefire that respected Ukrainian sovereignty, be acceptable to both sides, and prevent the war from restarting.“Every criticism of the peace framework the administration is working on either misunderstands the framework or misstates some critical reality on the ground,” Vance wrote. “There is a fantasy that if we just give more money, more weapons, or more sanctions, victory is at hand.”“Peace won’t be made by failed diplomats or politicians living in a fantasy land,” he added. “It might be made by smart people living in the real world.”It was also Vance who followed up on the presentation of the peace plan in a phone call with Zelenskyy. Trump had mainly tasked his team with bringing a signature on the peace deal before Thanksgiving this Thursday in the United States.That was a notably more full-throated endorsement of the plan than that given by the secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio, a more traditional hawk in the administration who has gone from a shaky stature inside the administration to more firm footing.Rubio was part of a US delegation that traveled to Geneva this weekend to meet with Ukrainian officials to help moderate the initial 28-point peace plan in order to make it more acceptable to leaders in Kyiv.But his initial response to the deal was lukewarm: “Ending a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas,” Rubio wrote over the weekend before the conference. “And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.”In private, he was said to be much more doubtful of the plan. The Republican senator Mike Rounds said last week at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia that Rubio had called lawmakers to explain that the deal was just a preliminary offer from the Russians and not an initiative pushed by the administration.“Rubio did make a phone call to us this afternoon and I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” said Rounds. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”Rubio moved quickly to fall in line. “The peace proposal was authored by the US,” he later wrote. “It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.” More