Nearly a year after a federal judge ruled Lindsey Halligan was never lawfully the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Trump administration returned to court.
The administration appeared before the Fourth Circuit on Tuesday, arguing that Halligan was in fact lawfully appointed and that politically charged prosecutions dismissed alongside her should be revived.
The hearing did not go smoothly for the government’s legal team, with the panel appearing deeply skeptical of the administration’s core arguments.
Halligan, a former Trump personal lawyer and insurance lawyer with zero prosecutorial experience, was installed as interim U.S. attorney in September 2025 after her predecessor was pushed out.
Within days of her installation, Halligan had secured indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Senior U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie found that the 120-day clock for an attorney general-appointed interim U.S. attorney had already run out on Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert.
That finding meant Attorney General Pam Bondi had no power to appoint anyone else to the interim position, rendering Halligan’s tenure and her indictments legally invalid.
Currie warned that the government’s theory would let it “send any private citizen off the street — attorney or not — into the grand jury room to secure an indictment.”
The dismissals were issued without prejudice, but subsequent DOJ attempts to restart the prosecutions collapsed entirely, with grand juries declining to re-indict James.
Currie separately found the statute of limitations had already run on the Comey case, though the DOJ has disputed that conclusion and continues to contest it.
Halligan continued acting as U.S. attorney for months after she was legally disqualified, until judges in the Eastern District forced the matter to a head.
A subsequent judicial rebuke described by observers as a brutal and humiliating benchslap effectively brought the Lindsey Halligan era to a close.
The Fourth Circuit must now decide whether to agree with the government’s appointment theory, a ruling that would determine whether either prosecution can ever be meaningfully revived.