Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday, Aug. 11, 2025, in Washington, as President Donald Trump looks on (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
Lawyers for New York Attorney General Letitia James are calling shenanigans on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi”s bending of “space and time” to retroactively shore up a controversial interim U.S. attorney appointment, arguing the move was a “telling indication” that the DOJ “knows” the bank fraud indictment is “null and void.”
Bondi raised eyebrows by signing an appointment order on Halloween and backdating it to Sept. 22, claiming to have removed any “doubt” about the validity of Lindsey Halligan’s installation.
The retroactively granted supervising special attorney role for Halligan, the lone signer of the Comey and James indictments, meant her appointment cannot reasonably be questioned, the DOJ said, to stave off James’ and ex-FBI Director James Comey’s dismissal bids in the Eastern District of Virginia.
The attorney general “personally ratified the indictments,” certified Halligan’s “actions before the grand jury and her signature,” and “cured any arguable flaw in Ms. Halligan’s authority to prosecute,” the DOJ proclaimed.
Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to the president, speaks with a reporter outside of the White House, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
AG James’ attorneys Abbe Lowell and Andrew Bosse, doubling down on arguments that Halligan was unlawfully appointed from the get-go, responded directly to Bondi’s bold attempt to bend “space and time,” essentially calling it a “telling” admission that there is a root problem.
“The government argues that Attorney General James’s request for an injunction has been ‘overtaken by events.’ But none of those ‘events’ cure the constitutional violation or render Ms. Halligan eligible to supervise this prosecution,” the Monday filing said. “The Attorney General’s attempt to fix Ms. Halligan’s appointment is invalid on its face.”
President Donald Trump, the defense went on, “could not announce tomorrow” that Bondi was NASA’s acting administrator from January to March. Thus, Bondi “lacked the power announce [sic] an appointment of Ms. Halligan that bent space and time.”
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Tearing a page from Comey’s playbook, the defense said Halligan was not a “government” attorney but merely a “private citizen” when she went to the grand jury, meaning the case should be dismissed on the same Appointments Clause grounds that befell then-special counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago prosecution of Trump.
“In United States v. Trump, the district court recognized that if an inferior office [sic] is appointed in a manner that does not comply with any statute, her appointment violates the Appointments Clause,” James said, embracing the dismissal ruling that benefited Trump. “The government contends that Attorney General James’s theory of Appointments Clause violations is too broad, but tellingly, it does not argue that Trump was incorrectly decided.”
Special counsel Jack Smith turns from the podium after speaking about an indictment of former President Donald Trump, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023, at a Department of Justice office in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The “only appropriate remedy” now is the dismissal of an indictment that the DOJ — as evidenced by its own “series of novel maneuvers to attempt to clean up the mess” — “knows” is doomed, the filing asserted.
“[T]he Executive Branch cannot retroactively appoint Ms. Halligan to positions she never held. Nor can it ratify this illegitimate indictment or claim that Ms. Halligan—whose purported appointment plainly violated the Appointments Clause—was a ‘de facto’ officer,” court documents said. “Attorney General Bondi’s attempt to retroactively give Ms. Halligan new titles and to bless the improper indictment is a telling indication that the government knows Ms. Halligan’s actions were unauthorized, null and void.”
