Lindsey Halligan probably doesn’t love political drama as much as it loves her. To get some background on her, we need to know that she was an insurance lawyer and a Donald Trump loyalist. And to add to that, she was a former Miss Colorado USA contestant who suddenly found herself in one of the most powerful seats in America. But her meteoric rise met a hard stop this week.
A federal judge has now dismissed the criminal cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, and he’s made it very clear as to why he did so. Lindsey Halligan, it seems, was unlawfully appointed!
Trump at first handpicked Halligan to run the Eastern District of Virginia as interim U.S. attorney in September 2025. She walked into the office on Monday, and by Thursday that same week, she had secured indictments against two of Trump’s favorite political enemies. But Judge Cameron McGowan Currie found that Lindsey Halligan’s appointment itself had flown past the legal guardrails, and we are explicitly talking about the 120-day limit on interim prosecutors serving without the Senate’s approval.
Lindsey Halligan, the newly-installed US Attorney prosecuting James Comey at Trump’s direction, is an insurance attorney and a Miss Colorado finalist. She has never prosecuted a case. pic.twitter.com/bZl0mn8mjZ
— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) September 26, 2025
The clock started ticking in January because after 120 days, only the district’s federal judges (and surely not the Attorney General) could fill the vacancy. But the Trump administration installed Halligan, thinking they could bypass the process entirely. Currie’s ruling said, “All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment (…) are hereby set aside,” so yes, everything Lindsey Halligan touched is now invalid. The Comey and Letitia James indictments are therefore gone as well, NPR confirms.
Now, prosecutors are scrambling for guidance on whose signature, if anyone’s, had legal authority anymore. At first, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBride was told to take over and then told not to. Filing instructions changed twice within an hour. One DOJ insider called the process “chaos.” Meanwhile, the two people that Lindsey Halligan was trying to put behind bars were overjoyed.
Letitia James described the charges as “baseless” and reaffirmed she’s “fighting for New Yorkers every single day.” Comey called the prosecution “malevolence and incompetence,” and warned that using the Justice Department as the president’s personal revenge squad crosses into “fundamentally un-American” territory.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insists this is just “technical,” but even if the Justice Department tries to revive the cases, the statute of limitations for Comey’s charges has expired.
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And then there’s the Lindsey Halligan subplot, because her prosecutorial résumé is barely there. Her first week on the job was insane, too, as we spoke of earlier. And at one hearing, Halligan even admitted that the grand jury never reviewed the final indictment against Comey. But here she is: Trump’s beauty-queen-turned-prosecutor who got frozen out in real time.
Will Lindsey Halligan become a cautionary tale or a MAGA martyr?
