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Main: Attorney General Pam Bondi appears before a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025 (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein). Left inset: New York Attorney General Letitia James speaks to the media, Nov. 6, 2023, in New York (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File). Right inset: Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey gestures while addressing a gathering at Harvard University”s Institute of Politics’ JFK Jr. Forum in Cambridge, Mass., Monday, Feb. 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa).
The Justice Department, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, returned to the courtroom on Thursday to once more affirm the legitimacy of a temporary U.S. attorney appointment, which is under scrutiny. This time, the case involves prominent figures, as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey argue that their indictments in the Eastern District of Virginia should be dismissed.
Senior U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, appointed by Bill Clinton and presiding from South Carolina, is tasked with determining the legality of Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney. On Thursday, she heard arguments from the formidable defense teams representing two of the most high-profile defendants since Donald Trump, as reported by CNN.
Leading the defense for Comey, Attorney Ephraim McDowell argued that Halligan’s appointment was fundamentally flawed, asserting she lacked the authority to present the case to the grand jury independently, which he characterized as a violation of the Appointments Clause and the principle of separation of powers.
McDowell further contended, according to CNN, that Bondi’s later attempt to rectify Halligan’s appointment by designating her as a supervisory special attorney did little to bolster the government’s position.
“The crux of the matter is whether Ms. Halligan had lawful authority in that grand jury room, and she did not,” Comey’s lawyer reportedly insisted.
When it was AG James’ turn, attorney Abbe Lowell reportedly mocked the retroactive special attorney gamesmanship by asserting that the government is claiming a power to authorize virtually anyone, even private citizens “like Steve Bannon or Elon Musk,” to “go into a grand jury and get an indictment and the attorney general could later authorize that.”
Reportedly claiming Halligan is “pretending” to be a U.S. attorney, Lowell insisted she was merely a “private person” in the grand jury room who cannot by law prosecute the Comey and James cases.
At the same time, Lowell reportedly conceded that there probably is a way for the DOJ to salvage the James prosecution “in the future.”
When it was Bondi counselor Henry Whitaker’s turn to stand up for Halligan, he reportedly downplayed the defense arguments as “at best a paperwork error” claim for which dismissal would not be the appropriate remedy.
Whitaker reportedly ridiculed as “fanciful” the notion that the DOJ has been evading the senate confirmation process through repeat interim and acting appointments of U.S. attorneys.
According to CNN, Currie, after hearing these arguments, emphasized that she asked for the Comey grand jury transcript ahead of time because she viewed it as essential for evaluating the “extent of the indictment signer’s involvement” and whether Bondi could have fully “reviewed” Halligan’s actions before she retroactively ratified them.
Skeptical that the appointment was legal and skeptical that anything short of dismissals were warranted.
— Roger Parloff (@rparloff) November 13, 2025
Reportedly describing a portion of the transcript as “missing,” the judge said it “appears there was no court reporter present” or that the court reporter had ceased activity during the grand jury proceeding from roughly 4:30 p.m. until the Comey indictment was handed up past normal business hours on Sept. 25.
“It became obvious to me,” Currie reportedly said, that Bondi “could not have reviewed” the whole grand jury proceeding.
It raised the question of whether DOJ, as a possible fallback, could confirm Bondi reviewed complete audio of Halligan’s grand jury presentation. Emptywheel’s Marcy Wheeler addressed the discrepancy in a post from just over a week ago, concluding that Bondi couldn’t have done so as of Oct. 31 based on a Nov. 5 filing from the DOJ.
When Whitaker pushed back, the judge reportedly said that days after Bondi’s retroactive Halloween ratification of Halligan’s late September actions the DOJ came up with more grand jury details it didn’t have earlier.
CBS News’ Scott McFarlane reported that Currie vowed to rule on the issue “before Thanksgiving.”
In the lead-up to the disqualification and dismissal-oriented hearing, Comey’s lawyers, including the well-known Patrick Fitzgerald, advanced two notable arguments in support of the notion that Halligan was unlawfully appointed.
The first pointed out that the DOJ’s longstanding practice, as buttressed by former Office of Legal Counsel attorney and eventual Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, has been that the attorney general “may not make successive interim appointments” of U.S. attorneys.
Halligan, a former Trump defense lawyer, got the job after ex-interim U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert was forced out, clearing the way for her to seek indictments of the president’s rivals — all on her own both in her grand jury presentation and her signature on the filings, and all while career prosecutors doubted the strength of the cases.
On a related point, Comey’s team has asserted, if Halligan’s appointment violated 28 U.S. Code § 546, a vacancy statute, then her appointment violated the appointments clause, meaning the indictment should be dismissed on the same Appointments Clause grounds that were the undoing of then-special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents prosecution of Trump.
All of this is to say that, even leaving aside Comey’s claims of grand jury abuses and shortcomings in the alleged false statement and obstruction case, the indictment was purportedly secured by an attorney who was little more than a private citizen masquerading as a government lawyer — just before the statute of limitations expired.
AG James’ attorneys have argued much the same to dismiss her bank fraud indictment, claiming that a recent Bondi move to retroactively appoint Halligan as a special attorney with supervisory powers over the federal prosecutors’ office was practically an admission that the interim appointment was fatally flawed from the start.
As Law&Crime has previously reported, Bondi signed a special attorney appointment order on Halloween and backdated it to Sept. 22, before the indictments, claiming that move removed any “doubt” about the validity of Halligan’s status.
Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to the president, speaks with a reporter outside of the White House, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
For James’ defense, led by attorney Lowell, Bondi’s apparent need to bend “space and time” was a “telling indication” that the DOJ “knows” the bank fraud indictment is “null and void.”
When Bondi signed the order, the DOJ said the AG’s action “personally ratified the indictments,” certified Halligan’s “actions before the grand jury and her signature,” and “cured any arguable flaw in Ms. Halligan’s authority to prosecute.”
The defense maintained that Bondi only exposed the root issue — that Halligan’s “actions were unauthorized, null and void.”
“The Attorney General’s attempt to fix Ms. Halligan’s appointment is invalid on its face,” a filing said at the start of the week.
Just as Comey argued, James’ defense insisted that the U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago prosecution was a relevant example of what should happen with the bank fraud case.
“In United States v. Trump, the district court recognized that if an inferior office [sic] is appointed in a manner that does not comply with any statute, her appointment violates the Appointments Clause,” James said. “The government contends that Attorney General James’s theory of Appointments Clause violations is too broad, but tellingly, it does not argue that Trump was incorrectly decided.”
During the motions hearing, Currie reportedly questioned Whitaker on whether Smith’s invalidation was relevant or the incorrect ruling.
Whitaker, according to CNN, responded that Smith wasn’t qualified to wield the “unique and broad authority” he claimed to have through his appointment by former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
James’ lawyers asserted in a court filing that the “only appropriate remedy” now is the dismissal of an indictment that the DOJ — as evidenced by its own “series of novel maneuvers to attempt to clean up the mess” — “knows” is doomed.
Alina Habba, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, speaks outside at Manhattan criminal court during Trump’s trial in New York, on Monday, April 22, 2024 (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP).
Currie, an out-of-district judge nonetheless within the 4th Circuit, was designated to handle the appointment challenges — the same exact procedure used in challenges to special attorneys and acting U.S. Attorneys Alina Habba, Sigal Chattah, and Bill Essayli.
In each of those cases, federal judges ruled against Bondi’s personnel maneuvering, but the indictments themselves were not tossed out. The Trump administration’s appeals remain pending and may end up at the U.S. Supreme Court one way or another.
The DOJ has argued that Bondi’s retroactive special attorney title for Halligan means that Comey would not be able to make a statute of limitations expiration argument, as federal prosecutors would nonetheless be able to seek a new indictment within six months.
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