On Monday, a judge ruled that acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was improperly appointed, and subsequently dismissed her indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). Former federal prosecutors are now saying that the judge’s ruling may have thrown all of her office’s work into question.
During a Monday segment on CNN, former U.S. attorneys Harry Litman — who led the Department of Justice’s (DOJ, or Main Justice) operations in the Western District of Pennsylvania under former President Bill Clinton’s tenure — and Greg Brower, who handled cases in the District of Nevada during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, both agreed that anything bearing Halligan’s name is likely now damaged goods.
“Her future was already pretty well sealed … with a series of blunders and pratfalls, including misconduct in the grand jury,” Litman said of Halligan. “There seemed to have been some serious mistakes.
Brower piled on, telling CNN host Erica Hill that prosecutors who worked under Halligan have stopped all new case filings due to the chaos within the Eastern District of Virginia that was touched off after her disqualification. He pointed to similar examples of this happening to other improperly appointed prosecutors that President Donald Trump nominated, like Alina Habba in the District of New Jersey., and said that the chaos is likely to continue of the Trump administration follows through on its promise to appeal Halligan’s disqualification.
“For an acting U.S. attorney who’s been deemed unlawfully appointed to be continuing to act raises all kinds of issues that put very real, very important cases in jeopardy simply because they may have her name on it,” Brower said. “So this really this puts the U.S. attorney’s offices around the country that are in similar positions — and Main Justice — in a real tough spot in terms of having to figure out now,how do they go forward and prosecute cases? … It’s a very real problem for the DOJ right now.”
Litman added to Brower’s point, observing that the administration standing by Halligan “short-circuits any sorts of considerations that anybody in prudence would make.”
“While that appeal goes forward … Everything’s in jeopardy in that office so long as Halligan still remains the acting U.S. attorney,” Litman said. “And when the Court of Appeals rules, it could be a total … overhaul of everything that’s been done to date.”
Watch the segment below:
– YouTube www.youtube.com
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