When Donald Trump’s Justice Department filed dubious criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, they were widely recognized as some of the most obvious examples in American history of politically motivated prosecutions. The question, however, was whether the cases might succeed anyway.
On Monday, that question was answered in an emphatic way. My MS NOW colleague Jordan Rubin explained:
A federal judge has ruled that Lindsey Halligan was unlawfully appointed as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, leading the judge to dismiss the indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The indictments are dismissed ‘without prejudice,’ meaning they could theoretically be brought again by a lawful prosecutor.
Time will tell whether, when and how Team Trump tries again to go after the president’s perceived political foes, but shortly after the cases were discarded, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt turned her attention to the one person she characterized as the real problem in the case:
U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, the president’s chief spokesperson told reporters, deserved to be dismissed as a “partisan judge” who’d taken “unprecedented steps to try to intervene in accountability.”
That the White House is disappointed was not surprising, but the suggestion that Currie bears responsibility for this fiasco is foolish.
Indeed, if Leavitt and her colleagues really want to know why these cases failed, the evidence is fairly clear, though it might not be especially popular in the West Wing.
The cases began with a flailing president, desperate to retaliate against his perceived enemies. It led to a pointless investigation, a baseless prosecutorial ouster, the installation of an unqualified White House aide in a key U.S. attorney’s office, and a legal process that a Trump-appointed prosecutor bungled in every possible way.
A handful of figures deserve the blame. The judge isn’t one of them. These cases were brazenly and transparently corrupt, for the sake of brazen and transparent corruption. Their dismissal wasn’t just an example of justice being served, it was also a timely reminder of a larger dynamic. After the Comey indictment, Alan Rozenshtein, a former department official who now teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, told The New York Times, “What we are seeing is the almost wholesale collapse of the Justice Department as an organization based on the rule of law.” That’s true, though we can take some solace in knowing the condemnation doesn’t yet apply to the entirety of the federal judiciary. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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