On Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, was back in court to once again argue for the legitimacy of a temporary appointment of a U.S. attorney, amid legal challenges. This case involves prominent figures, as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey are demanding that their indictments in Virginia’s Eastern District be dismissed.

Presiding over the case was Senior U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, appointed by Bill Clinton and serving in South Carolina, who is tasked with determining the legality of Lindsey Halligan’s interim role as U.S. attorney. Represented by renowned legal teams, James and Comey are some of the most high-profile defendants since Donald Trump.

Leading the defense for Comey, attorney Ephraim McDowell argued that Halligan’s appointment is fundamentally flawed, claiming she lacked the authority to bring the case before the grand jury on her own. He described this as a breach of the Appointments Clause and a violation of the separation of powers, according to CNN.

McDowell further argued that any attempt by Bondi to rectify Halligan’s appointment by later designating her as a supervisory special attorney did not resolve the core issues at hand.

“The critical question is whether Ms. Halligan had legitimate authority in the grand jury room, and she did not,” Comey’s lawyer emphasized.

Attorney Abbe Lowell, representing AG James, criticized the government’s approach, suggesting it implies they could authorize virtually anyone, even private figures like Steve Bannon or Elon Musk, to secure an indictment, which the attorney general could then retroactively legitimize.

Reportedly claiming Halligan is “pretending” to be a U.S. attorney, Lowell insisted she was merely a “private person” in the grand jury room who cannot by law prosecute the Comey and James cases.

At the same time, Lowell reportedly conceded that there probably is a way for the DOJ to salvage the James prosecution “in the future.”

When it was Bondi counselor Henry Whitaker’s turn to stand up for Halligan, he reportedly downplayed the defense arguments as “at best a paperwork error” claim for which dismissal would not be the appropriate remedy.

Whitaker reportedly ridiculed as “fanciful” the notion that the DOJ has been evading the senate confirmation process through repeat interim and acting appointments of U.S. attorneys.

According to CNN, Currie, after hearing these arguments, emphasized that she asked for the Comey grand jury transcript ahead of time because she viewed it as essential for evaluating the “extent of the indictment signer’s involvement” and whether Bondi could have fully “reviewed” Halligan’s actions before she retroactively ratified them.

Skeptical that the appointment was legal and skeptical that anything short of dismissals were warranted.

— Roger Parloff (@rparloff) November 13, 2025

Reportedly describing a portion of the transcript as “missing,” the judge said it “appears there was no court reporter present” or that the court reporter had ceased activity during the grand jury proceeding from roughly 4:30 p.m. until the Comey indictment was handed up past normal business hours on Sept. 25.

“It became obvious to me,” Currie reportedly said, that Bondi “could not have reviewed” the whole grand jury proceeding.

It raised the question of whether DOJ, as a possible fallback, could confirm Bondi reviewed complete audio of Halligan’s grand jury presentation. Emptywheel’s Marcy Wheeler addressed the discrepancy in a post from just over a week ago, concluding that Bondi couldn’t have done so as of Oct. 31 based on a Nov. 5 filing from the DOJ.

When Whitaker pushed back, the judge reportedly said that days after Bondi’s retroactive Halloween ratification of Halligan’s late September actions the DOJ came up with more grand jury details it didn’t have earlier.

CBS News’ Scott McFarlane reported that Currie vowed to rule on the issue “before Thanksgiving.”

In the lead-up to the disqualification and dismissal-oriented hearing, Comey’s lawyers, including the well-known Patrick Fitzgerald, advanced two notable arguments in support of the notion that Halligan was unlawfully appointed.

The first pointed out that the DOJ’s longstanding practice, as buttressed by former Office of Legal Counsel attorney and eventual Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, has been that the attorney general “may not make successive interim appointments” of U.S. attorneys.

Halligan, a former Trump defense lawyer, got the job after ex-interim U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert was forced out, clearing the way for her to seek indictments of the president’s rivals — all on her own both in her grand jury presentation and her signature on the filings, and all while career prosecutors doubted the strength of the cases.

On a related point, Comey’s team has asserted, if Halligan’s appointment violated 28 U.S. Code § 546, a vacancy statute, then her appointment violated the appointments clause, meaning the indictment should be dismissed on the same Appointments Clause grounds that were the undoing of then-special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents prosecution of Trump.

All of this is to say that, even leaving aside Comey’s claims of grand jury abuses and shortcomings in the alleged false statement and obstruction case, the indictment was purportedly secured by an attorney who was little more than a private citizen masquerading as a government lawyer — just before the statute of limitations expired.

AG James’ attorneys have argued much the same to dismiss her bank fraud indictment, claiming that a recent Bondi move to retroactively appoint Halligan as a special attorney with supervisory powers over the federal prosecutors’ office was practically an admission that the interim appointment was fatally flawed from the start.

As Law&Crime has previously reported, Bondi signed a special attorney appointment order on Halloween and backdated it to Sept. 22, before the indictments, claiming that move removed any “doubt” about the validity of Halligan’s status.

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).

For James’ defense, led by attorney Lowell, Bondi’s apparent need to bend “space and time” was a “telling indication” that the DOJ “knows” the bank fraud indictment is “null and void.”

When Bondi signed the order, the DOJ said the AG’s action “personally ratified the indictments,” certified Halligan’s “actions before the grand jury and her signature,” and “cured any arguable flaw in Ms. Halligan’s authority to prosecute.”

The defense maintained that Bondi only exposed the root issue — that Halligan’s “actions were unauthorized, null and void.”

“The Attorney General’s attempt to fix Ms. Halligan’s appointment is invalid on its face,” a filing said at the start of the week.

Just as Comey argued, James’ defense insisted that the U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago prosecution was a relevant example of what should happen with the bank fraud case.

“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. “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.”

During the motions hearing, Currie reportedly questioned Whitaker on whether Smith’s invalidation was relevant or the incorrect ruling.

Whitaker, according to CNN, responded that Smith wasn’t qualified to wield the “unique and broad authority” he claimed to have through his appointment by former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.

James’ lawyers asserted in a court filing that 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.

Alina Habba, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, speaks outside at Manhattan criminal court during Trump’s trial in New York, on Monday, April 22, 2024 (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP).

Currie, an out-of-district judge nonetheless within the 4th Circuit, was designated to handle the appointment challenges — the same exact procedure used in challenges to special attorneys and acting U.S. Attorneys Alina Habba, Sigal Chattah, and Bill Essayli.

In each of those cases, federal judges ruled against Bondi’s personnel maneuvering, but the indictments themselves were not tossed out. The Trump administration’s appeals remain pending and may end up at the U.S. Supreme Court one way or another.

The DOJ has argued that Bondi’s retroactive special attorney title for Halligan means that Comey would not be able to make a statute of limitations expiration argument, as federal prosecutors would nonetheless be able to seek a new indictment within six months.