Keri Johnson

There were allegations that Trump had obstructed justice, had obstructed his investigation and had dangled pardons to people in an effort to convince them not to cooperate honestly with the FBI.

And Mueller said because the Justice Department has a policy that you cannot indict a sitting president, that he couldn't even make that determination.

But he also importantly said, if we could have exonerated Trump, we would have.

And I'm not doing that.

And so that's one of the many things that has stuck in the craw of this president.

and certainly is something that he keeps in mind almost every day.

He still calls it the Russia hoax all the time.

And he's in process of either hanging out with, getting advice from, or granting additional favors to some of the people who were caught up in that investigation, people like Michael Flynn, people like Roger Stone, who still gives him informal advice.

Roger Stone was charged as part of the Mueller investigation and later got clemency from Trump.

So

All of these allegations seem so far away, and yet we're still living in the shadow of them in some ways.

NPR's Keri Johnson has more.

The Trump administration installed Lindsey Halligan as U.S.

attorney in Virginia in late September, soon after the prosecutor already in that job expressed doubts about moving forward with charges against prominent critics of President Trump.

Now, federal judges found Halligan's appointment defective under the Constitution.

The ruling means that indictments Halligan won against the former FBI director and the sitting New York Attorney General are dismissed for now.

The Justice Department has the option to appeal and could try to revive both cases.

Lawyers for Jim Comey and Tish James are challenging the indictments on several other grounds.

Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.

We just got a filing from the special counsel, Jack Smith, suggesting the process of unwinding these cases has begun. They asked the judge in Washington, D.C., Tanya Chutkin, to give them until early December to offer a status report or an update because of what they called an extraordinary circumstance.