The challenges to Lindsey Halligan in courtroom arguments Thursday are simply the newest approach the previous Trump private attorney has come beneath fireplace in the Comey and James cases.
Halligan has additionally been attacked, particularly by critics of the Justice Department, for a way she took the Eastern District of Virginia’s US Attorney’s Office by storm with a fast, shock appointment in late September.
Her predecessor, Erik Siebert, a Trump appointee, was pushed out of the job after overseeing the investigations into James Comey and Letitia James.
The White House had wished Siebert to carry costs in opposition to James, regardless of prosecutors’ resistance that the investigation hadn’t yielded sufficient proof for an indictment. Prosecutors additionally expressed concern internally about indicting Comey on yearsold allegations.
Halligan landed in the workplace a couple of days after Siebert’s departure, despatched by Trump himself to Alexandria. She personally took the Comey case by a grand jury simply days earlier than the DOJ’s capacity to carry a case expired. She additionally introduced James’ indictment to the grand jury shortly thereafter, on one other afternoon the place she personally went to the courthouse.
She flexed her authority, with two profession prosecutors fired and then by eradicating the prosecutor who led the workplace in the times after Siebert’s departure.
Halligan alone additionally signed the indictments — an atypical method in felony cases. Judge Cameron Currie has privately reviewed the transcripts of what Halligan mentioned to the grand jury earlier than Thursday’s listening to.
Currie wrote that she thought trying on the transcripts was “necessary to determine the extent of the indictment signer’s involvement in the grand jury proceedings,” since Comey and James argue that if Halligan is invalidly performing as a prosecutor, the indictments would should be dismissed in full.
NCS’s Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.