On November 24, 2025, U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissed criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The judge did not rule on whether Comey or James were innocent or guilty. Instead, she ruled that the prosecutor who brought those cases, Lindsey Halligan, had no lawful authority to act as U.S. attorney when she did.
Halligan was installed as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi. She was a former insurance lawyer and Trump-aligned attorney with no prior prosecutorial experience.
According to the judge’s opinions and news reporting:
- Trump and Bondi pushed out the existing interim U.S. attorney and bypassed the normal legal process that limits how long an interim U.S. attorney can serve and who gets to appoint them.
- Halligan’s appointment exceeded the statutory framework for interim appointments, which caps how much power the attorney general can exercise before a court or the Senate gets involved.
- Because her appointment was unlawful, everything that flowed from it — including securing the indictments against Comey and James — was treated as an invalid exercise of executive power.
The judge dismissed both cases “without prejudice,” which means the government could, in theory, bring the charges again with a properly appointed prosecutor. How Many Ounces in a Gallon in Comey’s case, the statute of limitations has likely already expired, which makes another prosecution almost impossible.
So the bottom-line reality: two high-profile criminal cases requested and celebrated by Trump were wiped off the board because the person he installed to bring them was not lawfully in that job.
Why A Judge Can Throw Out A Case Over An Appointment
On the surface, it looks like a technicality. A prosecutor filed charges, a judge liked or disliked the prosecutor’s résumé, and then the whole case disappeared. That version of the story, which many people hear first, easily fuels anger and distrust.
Underneath that reaction sits a very specific body of law. Federal prosecutors do not get their power from the president’s Twitter feed or from campaign promises. They get it from a mix of the Constitution, federal statutes, and formal appointments.
Here How to Become a News Reporter in the United States is the basic framework the judge worked with, according to the written opinions and legal analysis:
- The Constitution allows the Senate to confirm U.S. attorneys as “principal officers,” and Congress has also passed laws that let the attorney general make short-term interim appointments when vacancies arise.
- One key law, 28 U.S.C. § 546, sets a time limit and a sequence. The attorney general can appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days. After that, the local district judges can step in and appoint someone until a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney takes over.
- The judge concluded that the administration tried to chain together appointments in a way that effectively dodged the time limit and the role of the courts and the Senate.
In plain language, the court said: the executive branch does not get to keep restarting the 120-day clock or reshuffling interim U.S. attorneys just to maintain political control of prosecutions. Once the legal authority runs out, an “interim” U.S. attorney becomes an imposter in that role.
When that happens, every action that depends on that authority becomes tainted. Indicting people is one of those actions. So the judge treated the indictments as if they never legally happened.
From that vantage point, the court is not playing HR. The court is guarding the boundary between branches of government. The judge is saying that if a president can ignore appointment rules to install loyalists and then pursue legal enemies, the entire structure of checks and balances weakens.
The Feeling That Judges Are Acting Like Political Players
At the same time, your reaction reflects something real a lot of people feel. The judge in this case is a Clinton appointee. The defendants were high-profile critics of Trump. The prosecutor was a Trump-aligned attorney. The stakes were huge.
When people see patterns like that, they do not see neutral referees. They see two teams fighting across every institution.
We live in a moment where:
- Presidents talk openly about using the Justice Department to go the great switch after enemies and protect friends.
- Politicians campaign on promises to “lock up” opponents.
- Courts issue dramatic rulings that reshape elections, investigations, and prosecutions.
- Cable news, social media feeds, and talk radio instantly frame every ruling as a win for Team Red or Team Blue.
So when a judge tosses out prosecutions against figures conservatives have wanted punished for years, many people experience that decision as one more partisan move in a long series. When those same people see judges cracking down on Trump or his allies, their suspicion deepens.
On the other side, many Americans look at the Halligan episode and see something else. They see a president and attorney general who seemed to install a loyalist with no prosecutorial background in a powerful job, then pressed her to bring cases that career prosecutors had small lemon tree declined in earlier years.
To those Americans, dismissing these cases for an unlawful appointment feels like a sanity check. In their view, the judge is protecting the justice system from being weaponized against political foes.
We end up with a kind of mirror effect. Each side sees itself as defending “American values” and sees the other side as corrupting the system. Each side’s distrust grows with every headline.
How This Fits Into A Larger Pattern Of Politicized Justice
This case does not stand alone. It sits in a chain of events that has pushed many of us to lose faith in institutions we once trusted. What Is a News Anchor?
Over the past decade, the United States has seen:
- Public fights over special counsels and their independence.
- Accusations that the FBI, DOJ, and state attorneys general either protect their friends or target their enemies.
- State and federal judges stepping in to block executive actions and prosecutions, sometimes at lightning speed.
- Intense, partisan confirmation battles for judges themselves, especially at the Supreme Court level.
In the Comey and James cases, reporting shows that Halligan stepped into the role of interim U.S. attorney after earlier prosecutors had not pursued charges. She arrived as a Trump loyalist, with a background in insurance defense and as a member of Trump’s personal legal team, then almost immediately moved to indict some of the president’s most visible critics.
Courts and commentators have focused not just on the appointment, but on how she handled the cases once in office:
- A magistrate judge highlighted serious missteps in grand jury practice and evidence presentation, calling them “profound” and unusual.
- The district court later emphasized that the appointment itself broke the statutory framework, which made those missteps even harder to overlook.
This storyline feeds the belief that the justice system itself has become a weapon. One president uses prosecutions, appointments, and public pressure to go after why did chloe leave dance moms enemies; judges and later administrations respond by tearing those prosecutions down. The losers on each side feel persecuted, the winners feel vindicated, and trust keeps eroding.
What “American Values” Look Like In A Messy System
You wrote that “the U.S. judicial system is becoming more and more political as they hate Trump and hate American values.” That feeling comes from somewhere real. Many Americans watch these events and no longer recognize the calm, neutral system they learned about in civics class.
At the same time, it helps to slow down and unpack what “American values” mean in this context.
Some of the core values baked into the system include:
- Rule of law: government actors must follow clear rules, even when it hurts their side.
- Separation of powers: no single branch gets to do everything; courts have a duty to say when the executive goes out of bounds.
- Due process: people facing criminal charges have a right to a lawfully appointed prosecutor and a properly convened grand jury.
- Neutral justice: cases should not be driven by vendettas or political demands from the president.
The same ruling that feels like “judges playing HR” also how long is food good in freezer without power reflects some of those values. The judge did not say, “Comey and James are national heroes.” She said the president and attorney general broke the law when they tried to install a loyal prosecutor to bring these particular cases, and that those legal shortcuts matter.
For many people who support Trump, that ruling feels like an attack on their champion and on the issues they care about. For many people who oppose Trump, the ruling feels like the system finally pushing back on what they see as revenge prosecutions.
Both sets of feelings exist in the same country at the same time. Both sets of citizens think they are defending the real America.
Living With A Justice System Everyone Distrusts
This leaves all of us in a hard spot. We live with:
- Courts that sometimes act as brakes on aggressive prosecutions from the executive branch.
- Prosecutors whose appointments and decisions carry obvious political fingerprints.
- A media environment that amplifies every misstep and every partisan angle.
- Leaders who regularly tell us that the system is rigged against them.
In that environment, every big ruling turns into a new test of faith. Some of us see the Halligan decision as proof that “the deep state” and the courts will never allow The Good News in the Bible Trump or his allies to hold enemies accountable. Others see it as proof that Trump tried to bend the law to crush opponents and that judges are the last line of defense.
The truth, as usual, sits in a more complicated place. The Comey and James dismissals grew out of a concrete statute, a real timeline, a series of aggressive political moves, and a judge’s duty to enforce limits that many of us rarely notice until they break.
We may not like the outcome. We may feel that certain people never face consequences. But we still live inside a legal structure where appointments, timelines, and procedures matter as much as the raw desire to see someone punished.
A Moment That Demands Clear Eyes, Not Blind Faith
This episode does not restore faith in the justice system. It does not suddenly convince people who support Trump that the courts are neutral, or ease the anger of those who see Comey and James as symbols of a double standard.
What it does, for all of us, is underline a hard reality.
We live in a country where:
- Presidents now openly seek prosecutions of specific when does chloe see lucifer’s face rivals.
- Attorneys general sometimes bend long-standing norms under political pressure.
- Judges sometimes act as the only effective limit on those choices, and those judges themselves carry political histories.
- Every step in that chain lands in our feeds, framed as total victory or total corruption.
You, me, and everyone else have to find a way to watch these events with clear eyes. We can recognize the political warp in how these cases began. We can also recognize the legal logic in how they ended. We can feel anger, disappointment, or relief and still see the deeper design at work: a system that tries, even in a messy and polarized age, to keep raw power from swallowing the law whole.
