The Daily Fuckup

A federal judge on November 24, 2025, knocked out the criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, finding that the prosecutor who brought the charges was illegally appointed. The ruling halted, at least for now, two prosecutions that had landed squarely on the president’s list of high-profile enemies and had become a test of how far his Justice Department could go in carrying out that agenda. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/5ec1a59d152bc1fd000ade15e20745b5?utm_source=openai))

The decision turned on the appointment of Lindsey Halligan, the lawyer installed to bring the cases after a series of personnel moves inside the Justice Department. In dismissing the indictments, the court concluded that the appointment did not comply with the law. That made the cases vulnerable on a threshold issue before the court ever reached the substance of the allegations against Comey or James. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/5ec1a59d152bc1fd000ade15e20745b5?utm_source=openai))

The setback matters because these prosecutions were never just ordinary criminal matters. They sat inside a larger pattern of retaliation politics that has defined much of Trump’s second-term legal posture: using federal power to target people the president has publicly cast as disloyal, hostile, or corrupt. The dismissals did not resolve that broader fight, but they did strip away two of the administration’s most visible examples of it. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/5ec1a59d152bc1fd000ade15e20745b5?utm_source=openai))

The administration can still try to revive the cases, and the underlying legal fights are not over. But Monday’s ruling gave Trump an unmistakable problem: the more aggressively his team pushes these prosecutions, the more exposed they become to basic legal challenges over who is authorized to file them and how they were put together. For now, the result is a public loss that undercuts the image of control the White House has tried to project and leaves a revenge-driven strategy looking less like strength than overreach. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/5ec1a59d152bc1fd000ade15e20745b5?utm_source=openai))