"The collapse of the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James speak to the rot at the heart of the Trump administration. Lindsey Halligan, predictably, was found to be appointed illegally after her predecessor was driven out of office after rightly concluding that the cases did not have legal merit. The Senate never confirmed Halligan, and her interim appointment couldn't be indefinite as a matter of law."
"In a fascist society, where the rule of law means nothing, it would not have mattered that the deeply underqualified Halligan was illegally appointed or that the cases were incredibly weak. The dictator decrees his political enemies must go to prison, and they are marched off. MAGA was plainly hoping, on some level, this was true now. Trump would get his glorious revenge for his own state and federal indictments, cowing all the Democrats who dared to resist him."
"But Comey and James are not going anywhere. Trump is free to pressure his sycophantic attorney general, Pam Bondi, to bring indictments against anyone he so chooses. He can prosecute through Truth Social posts. What he's not entitled to, though, is actual legal victory. We do have judges in his country and we do have juries. If Halligan's cases against Comey and James somehow reached the trial stage, it's hard to fathom how she'd win."
Donald Trump mounted a revanchist campaign earlier in the year but has recently begun to fail. Indictments brought against James Comey and Letitia James collapsed, exposing legal and managerial rot. Lindsey Halligan was found to have been appointed illegally after her predecessor concluded the cases lacked merit; the Senate never confirmed her and her interim appointment could not legally continue indefinitely. In a fascist system such legal defects would be irrelevant, but current institutions and independent judges and juries remain. Trump can pressure allies like Attorney General Pam Bondi and use Truth Social, but those pressures do not guarantee courtroom victories. The Halligan prosecutions were ham-fisted compared with past uses of power.
Read at Intelligencer
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]