Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday, Aug. 11, 2025, in Washington, as President Donald Trump looks on (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
Attorneys representing New York Attorney General Letitia James are challenging U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s decision to retroactively validate a contentious interim U.S. attorney appointment. They argue that this move indicates the Department of Justice acknowledges that the bank fraud indictment is effectively “null and void.”
Bondi sparked controversy by signing an appointment order on October 31 and backdating it to September 22. She claimed this action removed any “doubt” about the legitimacy of Lindsey Halligan’s appointment.
The role, granted retroactively to Halligan as a supervising special attorney and the sole signatory on indictments against James and former FBI Director James Comey, supposedly defends her appointment from being questioned, according to the DOJ. This move aims to counter dismissal efforts by James and Comey in the Eastern District of Virginia.
The DOJ stated that the attorney general “personally ratified the indictments,” endorsed Halligan’s “actions before the grand jury,” and “rectified any potential flaws in Ms. Halligan’s authority to prosecute.”
Lindsey Halligan, special assistant to the president, speaks with a reporter outside of the White House, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
Abbe Lowell and Andrew Bosse, representing AG James, reinforced their stance that Halligan’s initial appointment was unlawful. They responded directly to Bondi’s attempt to manipulate “space and time,” interpreting it as a clear admission of underlying issues.
“The government contends that Attorney General James’s request for an injunction has been ‘overtaken by events.’ However, none of these ‘events’ resolve the constitutional breach or qualify Ms. Halligan to oversee this prosecution,” the filing on Monday stated. “The Attorney General’s effort to correct Ms. Halligan’s appointment is inherently invalid.”
President Donald Trump, the defense went on, “could not announce tomorrow” that Bondi was NASA’s acting administrator from January to March. Thus, Bondi “lacked the power announce [sic] an appointment of Ms. Halligan that bent space and time.”
Tearing a page from Comey’s playbook, the defense said Halligan was not a “government” attorney but merely a “private citizen” when she went to the grand jury, meaning the case should be dismissed on the same Appointments Clause grounds that befell then-special counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago prosecution of Trump.
“In United States v. Trump, the district court recognized that if an inferior office [sic] is appointed in a manner that does not comply with any statute, her appointment violates the Appointments Clause,” James said, embracing the dismissal ruling that benefited Trump. “The government contends that Attorney General James’s theory of Appointments Clause violations is too broad, but tellingly, it does not argue that Trump was incorrectly decided.”
Special counsel Jack Smith turns from the podium after speaking about an indictment of former President Donald Trump, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023, at a Department of Justice office in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The “only appropriate remedy” now is the dismissal of an indictment that the DOJ — as evidenced by its own “series of novel maneuvers to attempt to clean up the mess” — “knows” is doomed, the filing asserted.
“[T]he Executive Branch cannot retroactively appoint Ms. Halligan to positions she never held. Nor can it ratify this illegitimate indictment or claim that Ms. Halligan—whose purported appointment plainly violated the Appointments Clause—was a ‘de facto’ officer,” court documents said. “Attorney General Bondi’s attempt to retroactively give Ms. Halligan new titles and to bless the improper indictment is a telling indication that the government knows Ms. Halligan’s actions were unauthorized, null and void.”
