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New updates in the Comey and James cases. Both indictments dismissed because Lindsey Halligan was not lawfully appointed as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and so all her actions as such are void and without effect. Comey and James opinions. Though the two are substantially identical, having both been authored by the same judge. These dismissals are without prejudice meaning the government can try and secure further indictments. Although, in Comey's case this faces some additional hurdles since the statute of limitations for his offense expired several days after the first indictment against him was secured.
Note that a similar dispute is playing out in New Jersey with respect to the appointment of Alina Habba as United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey and in Nevada with respect to Sigal Chattah's appointment as United States Attorney for the District of Nevada. These cases are a little more complicated than Halligan's due to implications of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act but they arose due to circumstances like what Halligan is facing now.
At the heart of these disputes is 28 USC 546 which provides:
The dispute is principally about whether the Attorney General is permitted to make successive 120-day appointments or whether the Attorney General gets a single 120-day appointment and then when that expires the District Court makes the appointment as to who shall be United States Attorney. In Halligan's case Erik Siebert had already been appointed for 120 days earlier this year and was appointed by the district court upon expiration of that appointment. He then resigned under pressure to prosecute James and Comey, whereupon Bondi purported to appoint Halligan under 28 USC 546. Naturally, the court finds that Attorney General Bondi has had her 120 day appointment and so authority to appoint a new USA for EDVA lies with the district court.
Conservatives really need to learn that the corrupt swamp cannot be taken out with the corrupt swamp's own tools. Buy guns people. You aren't fixing things by voting and things will only get worse.
edit: since I forgot how feminized this place is and don't want to get accused of fed posting. Rawls was a moron, institutions are downstream of culture. Our culture is shot, institutions will continue to degrade. The people that will inherit what is left will be people that have high trust and cohesive cultures + birth rates + guns (security). If you really want to be double safe find one that already has parallel institutions, like education (religious communities) money (crypto?) etc.
You're not going to get far with a consistent habit of booing the outgroup and clear consensus building. I note multiple previous warnings, so I'm going to extend a 3 day ban to make this one stick.
I have to ask, will it ever be considered "rational" to talk about living up to the ideals of the American Founding and watering the tree of liberty? I currently live in a state with my Attorney General elect thinks I and my children should die because we're breeding "little fascist". His top priority is emptying the prisons into my community to see this done. At what point does it become permissible to openly discuss your natural rights to self defense against the state?
Irrespective of whether it's "rational", is it really a conversation we need or want here? I'm with @FiveHourMarathon below regarding how these discussions always wind up going. I don't even think that there aren't interesting discussions to be had about how a popular uprising in the US would proceed, but the burden at this point should really be with those who want to talk about it to lead with something novel rather than another instance of "my chad tribesmen will beat the shit out of your effeminate wimps, if only the sheeple finally wake up and develop
classtribal counsciousness".There is no winning for anyone if it comes to that. Just violence until both sides are exhausted, or one is annihilated. I can't even speak with confidence which side it would be. But funnily enough, I always remember a line out of a trashy fantasy novel I read once.
"We don't fight to win. We fight so that we don't lose."
The prevailing wisdom here cannot be "Listen, it's just 'rude' not to walk into the ovens. It would get us into trouble with the feds if we talked too openly about non-compliance with their pogroms". Are we really so committed to ensuring everyone cannot even imagine a world where they aren't forfeiting their lives for nothing?
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In the post you replied to, self_made_human modded remzem for consensus-building and boo-outgroup, not for advocating violence. Did you mean to reply to Amadan's post?
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Hey @Amadan (and the other mods, if necessary), can we actually get a ruling on the "advice to, in the event of state failure, do things that are illegal under current law" genre? I can imagine some people saying that it's incitement to crime, but others saying that in the event of state failure, the present laws will have ceased to mean anything and thus the actions wouldn't really be crime anymore in the circumstance in which they're being recommended.
(The post I'm replying to probably doesn't qualify as being in that genre, as AIUI shooting bandits attempting to loot you is pretty legal in most of the 'States. But there are certainly adjacent positions which would qualify.)
I want to register that I find call to violence posts generally boring. It inevitably leads to internet tough guy, "my team/tribe/sensei/dad could beat up yours" nonsense posting, and generally just represents a total breakdown of interesting conversation.
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"how feminized this place is" - LOL. @remzem, Internet Tough Guy never impresses anyone. Do you think anyone actually believes you're the very model of a modern masculinity?
The "ruling" is that fedposting is against the rules because it could get Zorba in legal trouble, and actually advocating violence is against the rules because it's rude. We have all these feminized rules about being civil and shit.
Can you discuss what you'd do "hypothetically" in the event of the Happening? Depends. Advice about how to stock up on ammo and form your own militia - probably okay. Talking about how you're going to murder all the people you hate? Not okay.
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Government by social media strikes again.
The deliverable that Lindsey Halligan was tasked with producing was not, "putting Comey in jail". It was, "generate headlins about Comey going to jail". In that light, she did about as well as she could given the circumstances. You see the same thing with Hegseth posting about court-martialling Mark Kelly.
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I'm amused that progressive copium that "nobody competent will work with these assholes" is turning out not to be cope.
It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.
One of the more politically enlightening experiences I had was being on a committee with a socialist who argued strenuously against the secret ballot because “people need to know there are consequences for how they vote”.
While I am sure that the woke left punishes defectors who cooperate with Trump, it is team MAGA which has perfected using administrative decisions to go after the people who were in the past on the wrong side. I vaguely recall law firms (who by design are mercenary) who had represented people who were litigating against Trump finding themselves without security clearance at the start of the year (or at least having to do an extraordinary amount of ass-kissing to keep them).
Political retaliation is bad no matter who does it. But the way I recall it, when Musk bought Twitter, the reaction of the Biden admin was not to try their very best to burn Tesla and SpaceX to the ground. By contrast, if there was a billionaire who was as firmly committed to opposing Trump as Musk was opposed to the Democrats, I would totally expect Trump to do his best to destroy any companies where that billionaire holds significant stock.
I definitely agree in the case of political retaliation without legitimate provocation. With respect to political retaliation which does have legitimate provocation, I would say it's bad in the same sense that war is bad. Yes, it's expensive and destructive but sometimes it's the best choice.
There's been a problem in the last few years, with abusive lawfare-style tactics on the part of certain prosecuting authorities. How does one handle such attacks? By gently entreating the attackers to stop behaving unfairly?
The question I have about this is whether this strategy was used during the first Trump administration.
Has Trump abused the power of the federal government to "do his best to destroy" CNN?
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For that very specific example, the Biden FCC did in fact cut a major SpaceX (StarLink) contract/grant program on clearly spurious grounds (see FCC v. Starlink here for further details), the Biden EEOC brought questionable claims of anti-immigrant discrimination against SpaceX directly. And those are just the ones with Biden admin people directly signing the paper.
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This is a "thing," but is it does it outweigh encouragement of people to keep their jobs, rather than create openings to be replaced?
Story? What kind of committee? What kind of socialist? What consequence did they want?
The story is a bit doxxy. It was local politics, he was a Labour activist and leader of the militant wing of the committee who were in the middle of a hostile takeover. He did not have ‘I am a socialist’ tattooed on his forehead but he did have a desk full of books on Marx and biographies of 20th century socialists - I knew him and believe me he was socialist.
The consequence he wanted in this particular case was extensive public shaming. It worked too - lots of people were unhappy with the new direction but absolutely refused to say so in public.
Corvos probably knows more than me, but there is an extensive history of arguments about whether internal elections in left groups, and particularly in militant unions, should be by secret ballot. Some of it is good-faith arguments the scope of the principle that people voting in a representative capacity don't get a secret ballot because they are accountable to the people they are representing. Some of it is the hard left favoring public votes as a loyalty oath with democratic-sounding characteristics (cf elections in people's democracies).
The announcement that Labour MPs representing London constituencies would not get a secret ballot in the 2000 Mayoral selection was the point at which it became obvious to people paying attention that the selection was rigged and that Ken Livingstone would run as, and probably win as, an independent.
I think that there is a vast gulf between people voting as representatives and people voting on the base.
Secret elections are obviously better at establishing common knowledge of what the base actually wants.
But for a representative, it is more important that they be accountable to their electorate. If 3/4th of the senate vote for something deeply unpopular, you do not want every senator to be able to tell his voters "no, I totally voted against this. It was all the other lying senators to vote for it."
For important personnel decisions (where there may be a lot of pressure to vote a particular way), the fix would be not to have representatives vote but just let the base vote. In secret, obviously.
Very much agreed - for instance all legislators vote publicly on legislation and when electing officers such as the Speaker. But there are a lot of corner cases when it comes to internal party elections. One particularly important one is MPs electing their party leaders - which in Parliamentary democracies will usually be a de facto election of a Prime Minister or selection of a candidate Prime Minister. Almost all parties in almost all functioning Parliamentary democracies have decided to give MPs a secret ballot in the internal vote. (UK parties have a range of processes for combining the views of MPs and grassroots members when electing their leaders). Obviously MPs are expected to vote non-secretly for their party's preferred candidate for PM in the external vote.
This is why the London Labour thing was controversial - Blair made the MP ballot public even though analogous internal elections usually give MPs a secret ballot.
Something similar is supposed to happen in Congressional leadership elections in the US. The House majority caucus elects the Speaker-designate by secret ballot, and then all caucus members should vote for the chosen candidate in the recorded House vote for Speaker
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Classic banana republic tier shit. Why even pretend to have a vote if you're going to use social pressure tactics. Disgusting.
Funny. I’d have thought you’d be all about accountability for government.
When you’re electing representatives, it’s nice to know their actual voting record. That’s why Congress does roll-call voting.
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A similar disqualification happened in the central district for California, bringing the total to 4.
Team R has a majority in the senate. They should be running every single US Attorney through confirmation instead of stepping on rakes with this fighting over acting/interim US Attorneys. I understand the admin's "just do things" approach, but getting hung up on procedural stuff like this is amateur hour.
"why are the people who perpetually go out of their way to step on rakes, stepping on all these rakes??? I voted for President 'i love stepping on rakes to own the libs' so he could get shit done, not step on rakes!"
Elect clowns, expect a circus
Or in this case, elect a reality TV star, expect amusing antics
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The exact mirroring is eerie, though. Some of Jack Smith's cases against Trump got dismissed because his appointment was considered unlawful by the District Judge (and Clarence Thomas).
It did ultimately lead to the clusterfuck that's happening now, though. If Bondi could have appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump's enemies, she likely would have done so. But because of the Smith decision, she had to push the interim appointments laws beyond where the court was willing to take them and throw the district offices into disarray as a consequence. There is effectively no one in charge of four offices at this point, though I can imagine that the career supervisors there will keep things running in the meantime, at least as far as routine matters are concerned.
Aren't courts supposed to appoint US attorneys if the AG's choices can't secure Senate confirmation?
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Could you please explain this?
I think the OP does a pretty good job of explaining Trump's interpretation of the law and why the court didn't buy it. As for the second part, there are four US Attorney's offices operating without a US Attorney for the time being. While the district courts can appoint a US Attorney, I don't know how long this will take, and I don't know what's going to happen if they appoint someone the administration doesn't approve of. Right now it's currently a matter of dispute who is, in fact, the US Attorney, if anyone even holds the position at all, and Federal prosecutions there have accordingly ground to a halt.
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Judge Cannon ruled that Jack Smith had no statutory power to bring the classified documents case. Thus, Bondi couldn’t just spawn a Special Counsel to manage the lawsuits Trump wanted. She had to slot them into an existing office.
In this case, Siebert was the lawfully appointed U.S. Attorney for Virginia. But he wouldn’t sign the indictment. Bondi fired and replaced him with Halligan, who did. Since that skipped the confirmation process, though, it ran into the same problem which got Smith.
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Easier said than done. I can't speak for the other three, but Lindsey Halligan would not make it through Senate confirmation. Her Wikipedia bio says:
This is a bit misleading for someone not familiar with the legal industry. Cole, Scott, & Kissane is what's known as a "defense mill". She did not represent insurance companies directly in coverage cases or bad faith cases, etc., she represented them as carriers covering other defendants. So if you get into an accident that's your fault and the person you hit isn't happy with what the insurance company is offering they sue you, your insurance company pays for your representation and pays the settlement. While they're the ones paying for everything and (mostly) calling the shots, they aren't the named defendant; you are. These places are known for low pay and high billing requirements, and that she made partner after five years isn't surprising because most attorneys will jump ship as soon as they get a better offer. And being partner doesn't mean that you can bring in business like it does at most firms, just that you get to bill at partner rates which are ten bucks an hour more than associate rates. This is mostly just to compensate for a lower billable requirement due to increased administrative work.
After nearly a decade of doing that, during which time she never once took a case to trial, she met Trump and he hired her as one of his personal attorneys in the classified documents case, where she basically did doc review. I don't want to denigrate what she did here (there's a kind of do review that's bottom of the barrel in the legal profession, but this isn't that), because reviewing documents and analyzing them is a core part of legal work. But it hardly qualifies one to be United States Attorney. Most of these people are career prosecutors with significant trial experience. Halligan is about as qualified to be US Attorney as I am, and I'm not qualified at all. There are people associated with this board who are more qualified by virtue of their having worked as criminal defense attorneys for some amount of time. The only real "qualification" she had was that she was willing to sign an indictment that literally no other attorney in the office was willing to sign.
Amateur hour is the fact that these indictments even happened. The Comey one was already on incredibly thin ice anyway after Halligan failed to read the corrected version of the indictment to the grand jury before they voted on it. Or that the James indictment, which didn't have a lot of meat on the bone to begin with, somehow failed to make the best argument. Or that literally everyone in the US Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia, including Trump's named interim US Attorney, came to the conclusion that unemployment was preferable to being involved in these prosecutions. Given Trump's vindictiveness, it's a miracle he didn't order Halligan to fire the entire staff and just not have any prosecutions in the Eastern District for a while. If there's one silver lining to the corruption it's that it's balanced by a heavy dose of incompetence.
To be fair, that is a moderately impressive achievement (unless she was handing the trial work off to a trial specialist). That type of law firm avoids trials like the plague.
The Comey indictment paperwork screwup is one of the all-time great amateur hour screwups and the Lowering the Bar and/or Above the Law accounts of it are going to be coffee/keyboard risks. If Trump were more personally involved I would say it is an example of his scofflaw attitude and calculated contempt for procedural regularity and cast aspersions that he was trying to lose on a technicality deliberately in order to avoid losing on the merits, but in this case I think it is just that Halligan is incompetent and either she didn't bother to find a competent junior career AUSA to help her with the paperwork or the whole thing is so outrageous to the culture of career prosecutors that she couldn't.
The lawyer who was selected for hotness has a fool for a client.
Lawyers are like houses - if you judge by the usual criteria, you pay through the nose and get one no better than anyone else’s. So you need a find a criterion which is meaningful to you :P
What's the lawyer version of the worst house on the best street you can afford?
A paralegal or wet-behind-the-ears junior associate writing under a Biglaw letterhead.
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The worst lawyer from a Big Four legal company, naturally.
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Has this objection been used before? Conversely, have previous administrations gotten away with repeated interim positions?
I seem to recall Trump I having a lot of trouble filling similar positions. Trump II has done a much better job on that front, so I’m a little surprised that they left the goal open. With control of the Senate, Republicans had to have the option, right?
I’m tentatively okay with this outcome. If your handpicked man resigns rather than take a case, it’s a sign that the case is weak.
I don't know if the repeated interim appointment thing has ever been done, but that's not really the whole story, because it likely wouldn't have mattered in the past. The problem is that she was the only one in the office to sign the indictment. Typically, a line prosecutor would be in charge of the case and sign the indictment, but these indictments were so incompetently handled and obviously politically motivated that nobody else in the office was willing to sign them. Hell, her predecessor got fired for refusing to sign. So the only person who signed the indictment had as much authority to do so as you or I do, so they aren't valid.
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The opinion talks a little about the history. Pre-1986 there was no mechanism for the Attorney General to appoint USAs at all. Between 1986 and 2006 it seems there were a couple times the Attorney General re-appointed someone, but no one challenged it. In 2006 Congress abolished (c)(2) and (d) altogether. Then in 2007 it brought them back.
For Halligan, specifically, I think there were timing issues. Siebert resigned on 9/19 and the statute of limitations for Comey's charges would be up on 9/30. So that's ~7 business days to get Halligan confirmed in the Senate and secure an indictment. Halligan was ultimately appointed the 22nd and the indictment was docketed on the 25th.
For the others, part of the problem is that the way they've made them "Acting" officials under the FVRA means they can't go ask the Senate for confirmation. The FVRA generally prohibits the nominee for a position from also serving as an "Acting" official in the role they are nominee for, subject to some exemptions that don't apply here.
The key background to this is that as soon as the 2006 law passed GW Bush fired a bunch of his own Senate-confirmed US Attorneys for no obvious reason and replaced them with long-term interims. Democrats tried to run with this as a massive abuse-of-power Bushitler scandal and Republican senators saw it as an attack on their patronage. (The mos maiorum was that home-state senators from the President's party had a major role in picking US Attorneys). So if you are trying to tea-leaf-read Congress's intent (which you should only be doing if the actual statutory text is ambiguous, but on a superficial reading it appears to be) there was a bipartisan consensus against long-term interim US Attorneys.
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See my above comments, but those concerns aren't really valid when you consider:
There's no way Halligan was getting Senate confirmation and
This wouldn't have been an issue at all if there had been literally one other person in the office willing to sign the indictment.
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