George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Monday that former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Attorney General Letitia James of New York could still face charges despite a judge saying a federal prosecutor was improperly appointed.
James was indicted in October on mortgage fraud charges stemming from her purchase of a house in Virginia, while Comey was indicted in September on obstruction and lying to Congress charges. Turley told “America Reports” co-hosts John Roberts and Sandra Smith that the dismissal was not on the merits of the charges, but instead a question about whether interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan of the Eastern District of Virginia was properly appointed.
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“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,” Turley said. “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 the authority to do that. So the obvious thing here is to get someone who is lawfully in a position to perform this role.”
“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. They could also appeal. They are already past the original date, but the argument is that 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.’”
Senior United States District Judge Cameron Currie of the Eastern District of Virginia, a Clinton appointee, ruled that Halligan was not properly named as interim United States attorney because Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert, had used up the 120-day limit for an interim prosecutor when he was named under the statute.
“Everything about this indictment seems to be rather rushed into – and improvisational,” Turley said. “When the Comey indictment came down, I noted that it seemed sort of disjunctive. They took out this count, and the other two counts did not exactly fit neatly together, and you got a sense of how quickly they had to get this through, and that, I think, sat badly with this judge.”
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