ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Virginia’s top federal prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, ripped a judge in court filings Tuesday for exercising a “gross abuse of power” by demanding she drop her “US attorney” title after having cases dismissed at the district level due to a prior ruling that she was unlawfully appointed.
Halligan blasted US District Judge David J. Novak in a pair of filings unrelated to the previously dismissed cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James — both of which have since been appealed to a federal circuit court.
In a Jan. 6 order, Novak — an appointee of President Trump in 2019 — had asked Halligan to answer how her continued use of the title “US attorney” doesn’t ignore a “binding” court order from US District Judge Cameron Currie, who tossed the Comey and James indictments.
Novak also demanded a response as to whether the title “does not constitute a false or misleading statement.”
Halligan, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney Todd Blanche fired back in the court papers that the judge was ignoring Supreme Court precedent and committing a host of other “legal errors” in suggesting her title should be scrapped — and also took Novak to task for making “a factual mistake of his own” in recent filings.
“The Court’s thinly veiled threat to use attorney discipline to cudgel the Executive Branch into conforming its legal position in all criminal prosecutions to the views of a single district judge is a gross abuse of power and an affront to the separation of powers,” they wrote in the Jan. 13 filings.
“Contrary to this Court’s suggestion, nothing in the Comey and James dismissal orders prohibits Ms. Halligan from performing the functions of or holding herself out as the United States Attorney,” they added.
Halligan, Bondi and Blanche also noted in both cases’ dockets — which concerned an alleged cocaine dealer illegally in possession of a firearm and an alleged armed carjacker who attempted to rob a bank — that former special counsel Jack Smith was not asked to forgo his title when prosecutions of Trump were dismissed.
In the cocaine distribution case, the trio also pointed out that Novak himself misstated in court filings that Halligan had defied Currie’s prior ruling — because the acting US attorney’s indictment preceded that order by six days.
Currie ruled on Nov. 24 that Halligan “had no lawful authority” to secure indictments of either of Trump’s longtime adversaries, since her appointment had not been confirmed by the Senate.
The order last November did not state Halligan had to be removed from office, and the DOJ has appealed it.
Novak, in his subsequent order this mont,h wrote that “no stay has been issued in conjunction with that appeal,” so Currie’s ruling “remains the binding precedent in this district and is not subject to being ignored.”
“The bottom line is that Ms. Halligan has not ‘misrepresented’ anything and the Court is flat wrong to suggest that any change to the Government’s signature block is warranted in this or any other case — particularly where that suggestion rests on an objectively incorrect chronology,” the DOJ officials said.
“[T]he reasons why this Court should not strike Ms. Halligan’s identification of herself as United States Attorney from the indictment in this matter” are that no authority exists for a court to strike an attorney title out of a signature block, and certainly not on its own motion,” they continued, quoting Novak’s own words back to him.
Halligan, Bondi and Blanche have also asked the judge to withdraw the order.
Trump appointed Halligan after her predecessor failed to secure indictments against Comey and James last fall.
