Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Monday afternoon, a federal judge threw out the criminal charges that the Trump administration brought against two of the president's biggest enemies — today, the unexpected technicality that doomed the cases, and what the ruling will mean for Trump's ambitious second-term campaign of retribution. It's Tuesday, November 25th.
Devlin, thank you for, as you always do, dropping everything and coming into the studio on a breaking news night. Thanks for having me. It's old hat for you at this point. Always tired, never bored.
That's my life.
Amen. So I think it's fair to say that nothing embodied the progress that President Trump made. has been making in his campaign of retribution against his enemies so much as the indictments of James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the current attorney general of New York. And just a couple hours ago, a judge tossed out both of them in one fell swoop.
Right, because this retribution campaign by the president has delivered some incredible scalps for the president and what he wants. But it did so in a very legally risky way, a very – I think a lot of people would say factually risky way –
And as important as these cases are and as alarming as it has been to some people to see the president publicly order prosecution of people he doesn't like... I think the unanswered question until Monday was, would the court system go along with this? Would judges go along with this?
And the first cut, and it's not going to be the last cut, but the first answer to that question is an emphatic no.
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Chapter 2: What legal charges were dismissed against Trump’s perceived enemies?
The other involves mortgages. Just briefly remind us about the legal basis for both these cases.
Right. So let's take a look at who each of these people are and what they're accused of. So when it comes to James Comey, he was obviously the FBI director when Trump became president the first time. And he oversaw the FBI as it investigated Russian election interference, as it investigated the Trump campaign.
Which made him enemy number one for Trump forever.
Right, exactly. I think it's safe to say that there's no one Trump despises more than James Comey. And if you fast forward now to 2025... there has been a building pressure on the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute Comey. And what you saw over the summer was career prosecutors taking a look at the evidence that had been gathered
on a range of issues, but primarily a question of whether he may have lied in congressional testimony from 2020 career prosecutors look at that and say, there's no case here. Right. And then in very short order, the person running that office is forced out who was a Trump pick themselves and serving in that role on a The administration puts Lindsey Halligan.
Lindsey Halligan is a longtime Trump aide who had no prosecutorial experience before she was given this assignment to become the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Right. Trump cycles through as many prosecutors basically as it takes until he can get someone, a loyal aide, Halligan, it turns out, who would bring a charge against Comey.
And not just bring a case against James Comey, but also bring a case against Letitia James, the New York attorney general. The Trump history on Letitia James is that she pursued him in court. She sued him in New York and won a verdict for hundreds of millions of dollars over business fraud related to Trump's businesses. And he has been mad about it for a very long time.
Again, you get to this summer and Justice Department officials are under pressure to charge Letitia James with some sort of mortgage fraud. And eventually, once Lindsay Halligan is in place, Halligan brings an indictment.
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Chapter 3: How did the judge's ruling impact Trump's campaign of retribution?
attorney. Why? Because normally what's supposed to happen is that a U.S. attorney is supposed to be nominated by a president, confirmed by a Senate. And if for whatever reason that can't happen, you know, there's a process to pick a temporary replacement for a limited period of time. And as you might remember, I already said there was someone already serving in that role on a temporary basis.
So Lindsay Halligan becomes sort of a double temporary U.S. attorney. The defense argument here is actually a pretty simple one, which is like you can't just keep adding temporaries on top of temporaries at the same time that lawyers for Comey and lawyers for James are fighting about the Halligan appointment, which is kind of a technical issue.
They're also waging a much bigger fight in some ways over the very premise of what just happened, meaning they're arguing that this is vindictive prosecution. They're arguing that but for Trump's dislike of these two human beings for political reasons. there would never have been a criminal case against either of them.
And that's obviously an important issue in the whole larger picture of what's happening in the Justice Department, what's happening in the Trump administration.
Right. They're making an argument that really gets to the heart of both cases. Basically, does it have any merit? Is it simply an act of revenge? And if it's just an act of revenge, isn't that illegal?
Right. And that really came to a head last week in court when Comey's lawyers made their case to the judge that this was just a vindictive prosecution, that this case existed because President Trump wanted him punished.
Well, just describe this hearing.
So this was a hearing that did not go well for Lindsay Halligan. And the judge had a lot of pointed questions about the grand jury, how the grand jury actually ended up voting on this. And at one point, the judge specifically called Lindsay Halligan up to answer his questions directly, as opposed to having a different, more experienced federal prosecutor answer the questions.
And in that line of questioning... Halligan and her associate conceded that the written final version of the indictment wasn't exactly the same paperwork that the grand jury had voted on.
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Chapter 4: What are the details surrounding the cases against James Comey and Letitia James?
So
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So Devlin, walk us through this ruling that ultimately determines that Lindsay Halligan is not legally able to have brought these indictments against either James Comey or Letitia James.
Right. The judge basically agrees with the arguments Comey and others have made that you can't have essentially a double temporary U.S. attorney. And the judge says that it simply can't be right that when you don't follow the normal process for putting a U.S. attorney into that job, that would sort of negate the whole purpose of having a rule about this to begin with.
So what the judge said was this. It would mean the government could send any private citizen off the street into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the attorney general gives her approval after the fact. That cannot be the law, the judge wrote.
And what she means by that is if you were to allow this system to continue to the obvious conclusion, you really wouldn't have any more Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys. It would just be the president picks whoever they want, whenever they want, and they just keep doing that.
Basically, this judge is saying that the administration has so diluted the normal process of picking a U.S. attorney, who is, of course, the local embodiment of the Justice Department, that the process is completely disconnected from its original intent. And like the judge said, basically, the president could put any old person in that job now.
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Chapter 5: What arguments were made regarding the legality of Lindsay Halligan's appointment?
So is it possible that the basis for tossing out these cases, as technical as it might seem, becomes... a broader rejection of the entire Trump administration's strategy of picking pretty inexperienced allies of the president to bring the cases against his enemies that he wants that the rest of the Justice Department system is really resistant to bringing.
It's entirely possible. And so there are a lot of question marks here as to what will the administration's next steps be because they have pushed the department into a bunch of situations and scenarios that really haven't been contemplated before.
Well, I wonder where this ends up leaving the president's vision for retribution. Because it was always our understanding that in the second term, he learned from the mistakes of the first. And in the first term, he really struggled to carry out retribution.
In the second term, he was going to appoint people who were willing to do what he wanted against his enemies and who were supposed to be qualified to do it. And this ruling suggests that's not really the case.
So this is obviously a very important set of rulings by this judge. And I think they represent a major setback for the president's retribution campaign against his enemies. But I also think it's a trap. to think that in court, that the thing that just happened is the most important thing, is the decisive thing.
And so I don't think this is going to be the final word or the final indicator of anything to do with the president's retribution campaign. For instance, if you look in Florida,
The Justice Department is putting together an investigative, prosecutive effort that's trying to pull together all these different parts of what Trump supporters argue is a great conspiracy against him, stretching back to his first campaign for president and trying to build that effort specifically under the auspices of Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge who threw out the charges against Donald Trump.
Right. The thinking here seems to be if you can't find a prosecutor who will do this work of retribution, then go find a judge who will.
Right. Which is why I say I think it's a mistake to assume that this ruling will stop efforts at retribution, efforts at payback, because I think the Trump administration has made clear they're going to keep looking for cases and places to pursue retribution.
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