There’s no shortage of ways that the Donald Trump-demanded indictments of James Comey and Letitia James might be dismissed pretrial. One of the latest examples came this week from James, who argues that “outrageous government conduct” should lead to the dismissal of her charges.
“Perhaps in no case before this Court has there been a more shocking course of government conduct,” James’ lawyers wrote in a motion filed on Monday. “The unprecedented, extensive, and outrageous misconduct in this case reached its apex when President Donald Trump, as part of his revenge campaign, decided that AG James needed to be indicted, no matter the cost,” they wrote, laying out the argument in a 22-page filing.
Arguing that the bank fraud indictment brought by the Trump-installed prosecutor Lindsey Halligan violates the New York attorney general’s due process rights, the motion calls out the “Trump-directed quartet” of Halligan, Attorney General Pam Bondi, “weaponization czar” Ed Martin and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte. “Despite the overwhelming lack of evidence or support from career prosecutors,” the motion reads, those officials “set out to do what they had been ordered to do: indict AG James.”
The motion was filed on the same day that a federal magistrate judge issued a scathing assessment of Halligan’s conduct in Comey’s case and took the rare step of ordering the disclosure of all the grand jury materials to the defense. That order is temporarily on hold while Halligan challenges it.
Likewise seeking grand jury disclosures, James on Monday filed her own such motion, in which she raised questions about, among other things, whether the grand jury was properly instructed. The answer could be especially illuminating in light of Comey’s judge observing Monday that Halligan, who hadn’t prosecuted a case before, appeared to make “fundamental misstatements of the law” to the grand jury that indicted the former FBI director. Both he and James have pleaded not guilty to their respective indictments in the Eastern District of Virginia.
The two Trump-targeted defendants are also challenging the validity of Halligan’s interim appointment to lead the Virginia office, as well as arguing that their prosecutions are vindictive and selective. Those pending motions each provide a separate basis to dismiss the charges, and they may represent the defendants’ best shots at avoiding trials. And there are still other pending motions to dismiss besides those big ones. James’ latest offering, which highlights the extraordinary nature of her prosecution, shows that there’s more than one route to dismissal. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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