Three judges this week slammed President Donald Trump’s Justice Department for keeping Lindsey Halligan‘s name on court documents.
A district court judge and two magistrate judges in Alexandria, Virginia, said in an open court to prosecutors that they didn’t think Halligan’s name should be on any of the new criminal case filings, including guilty plea documents or indictments, following a decision last week that stated she is not the U.S. attorney, CNN reported.
Magistrate William Fitzpatrick said at a criminal hearing this week that filing criminal charging papers “under Ms. Halligan’s name” was “simply not acceptable,” according to a transcript obtained by the outlet.
Removing her name shouldn’t be complicated, Miles Taylor, former Trump administration official and founder of defiance.org, told CNN anchor Boris Sanchez on Friday. He added that the cases are most likely to be thrown out by these judges and that “…there’s almost no other conclusion you can come to here other than the U.S. Department of Justice has decided to thumb their noses at the courts. And I got to be honest with you, put everything else aside about the controversies here, I am not sure it’s the best strategy to go win cases to off federal judges, but that is what they are doing here.”
A judge two weeks ago said that Halligan was never officially appointed to her position.
“It’s not a matter of interpretation. This is black and white. And so the Trump Justice Department has made a decision. They’re going to pretend that was never said,” Taylor said. “This is the type of thing, Boris, folks have been worried about. Is the administration just starting to defy the orders of the courts? Now, folks may think this is a small one because they’re defying the order of a court about the appointment of one person to a job. But that’s a slippery slope. And my fear is it leads to other defiance of court orders.”
And that wasn’t his only concern.
“But the problem here, Boris, is still that the process is the punishment,” Taylor said. “So if the president’s loyalists, his hardcore political loyalists, are put in these jobs to bring obvious revenge prosecutions, then they are still able to upend these people’s lives, blacklist them, force them to spend money on lawyers, force them to spend time in court. They can destroy people’s lives. Before you even get to the point where a judge says, ‘Hey, we told you guys this person wasn’t lawfully appointed, we’re throwing this case out.’ That’s a big deal. And I know that this Justice Department thinks they can still do that.”
He specifically cited the Letitia James case.
“And look, I think that what you just saw with Letitia James is going to be another forcing function is we’ve got a person that’s accused of breaking the law here, but who apparently isn’t breaking the law,” Taylor said. “Letitia James, it looks to me personally more like it’s people at the Justice Department breaking the law. And here’s what I mean by that, Boris. We all see what’s happening here with these cases. To me, these are very obvious revenge prosecutions.”
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