Just as I previously warned, a liberal judge was appointed to oversee complaints regarding an allegedly illegal appointment in the DOJ, and that jurist just sided with James Comey and Letitia James, dismissing the cases brought against them without prejudice.

Both Comey and James took a victory lap, but their legal worries are still far from over due to the “without prejudice” nature of the dismissals.

But we have to ask how this all fell apart so quickly, and what Pam Bondi’s DOJ will do to fix this if prosecutors decide to file again?

Case dismissed

U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie agreed with the defendants that the appointment of prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was unlawful.

Currie ruled, "Because Ms. Halligan had no lawful authority to present the indictment, I will grant Mr. Comey’s motion and dismiss the indictment.”

The judge continued, "All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr. Comey’s indictment, were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside.” Currie also dismissed the Letitia James case along the same lines.

Prior to her hand-selection by President Donald Trump to prosecute these cases, Halligan was reportedly an insurance attorney with no prosecutorial experience. The White House defended her selection to serve in the role, stating, “Lindsey Halligan was legally appointed, and that’s the administration’s position.”

Not over yet

The one legal pundit I respect most in the mainstream media is Jonathan Turley, and he believes that the legal problems for Comey and James are far from over at this point.

He stated, “Letitia James might be celebrating a tad too early. The problems here are not with the charges themselves, but essentially with the cop, or in this case the prosecutor. So the court is not saying that she did -- that she was innocent of these charges. The court is simply saying that the person who signed off on the charges didn’t have authority to do that. So the obvious thing here is to get someone who is lawfully in a position to perform this role.”

Turley continued, “Usually after 120 days, the district court appoints someone as the replacement. They are going to have to work this one out,” Turley continued. “It’s rather uncharted territory here to make sure that the next person who signs is going to be beyond these types of questions.”

He then added, “They are already past the original date, but the argument is they do have the right to go back to the grand jury. They may say, we think we have a good argument here, that yes, there’s that 120 days, but we had some rather novel sort of shifts that occurred here that we believe do not trigger that final date and that we had the ability to use Halligan in the way that we did.”

How did we get here?

At times, the Trump DOJ has been more akin to the Keystone cops, so this dismissal was fairly easy to predict, especially when you add in the fact that a Bill Clinton-appointed judge was drawn to preside over the matter, but there is more to it than that.

First and foremost, problems arose from the fact that Halligan presented the case to the grand jury all by herself, with no other prosecutors available to help her, and that was a major mistake on the part of the Department of Justice and of AG Pam Bondi.

Halligan reportedly only called one witness to testify before the grand jury, and that individual's testimony was tainted by second- and third-hand evidence. Federal Judge William Fitzpatrick even commented on this during the Comey trial, stating, “The government’s decision to allow an agent who was exposed to potentially privileged information to testify before a grand jury is highly irregular and a radical departure from past Justice Department practice.”

This was really sloppy work, and it is not the first time we have seen this from Bondi’s DOJ, but she is not alone in taking the blame here. Trump is the one who appointed Halligan because he knew she would do whatever he wanted in this case. If Bondi is serious about taking down Comey and James, she needs to put a serious prosecutor in place. She did have one in place before Halligan, Erik Siebert, but he refused to prosecute these matters, believing that the Justice Department did not have strong enough evidence to do so.