President Donald Trump and his beauty queen prosecutor’s bid to punish two of his political enemies just went down in flames—and even seasoned lawyers are gawking at the wreckage.
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig all but winced on air as he walked through the collapse of Trump’s revenge prosecutions, calling the debacle “humiliating” and “painful” after a federal judge tossed out both cases in a single blow.
The dismissals landed after U.S. District of South Carolina Senior Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that Trump’s 36-year-old former Miss Colorado beauty pageant contestant, interim U.S. Attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally appointed.
This instantly vaporised her prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. On CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Honig said the legal faceplant exposed the two “fundamental flaws” infecting both cases.
Collins pressed him on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s claim that the Justice Department would appeal. Honig was unimpressed: “I don’t like their odds,” he said. “As a Justice Department alum, Kaitlan, it’s painful.”
He described learning about the dismissal mid-lecture while teaching a college class on Justice Department independence. “We stopped. We did breaking news… and at some point, I just turned to them and said, ‘Guys, if you become prosecutors, don’t ever do any of this.’”
Honig didn’t sugarcoat the ruling’s implications: “The only reason Lindsey Halligan was there as the prosecutor in the first place is because the real prosecutors refused to charge it and got pushed out.” The second flaw, he said, was even more basic—“the inability to return a grand jury indictment and to follow the basic rules.”
“It’s a dark day for the Justice Department,” he added, warning that even an appeal is unlikely to save the cases.
When Collins asked whether the implosion would be embarrassing for anyone in Halligan’s shoes, Honig didn’t hesitate.
“My God!… To lose not just one, but two? Your two biggest cases? Again, on such a basic defect that you couldn’t follow the basic law of just installing somebody who was technically qualified?… That’s humiliating!”
Collins noted that former federal prosecutor Gene Rossi had been predicting exactly this outcome “every night” on the program. She added that people around the White House believe the administration may try to refile the Letitia James case.
But on the Comey case, Honig said it was all but dead. “Four days in, on Comey,” he emphasized, reminding viewers that prosecutors had rushed to file before the statute of limitations ran out.
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