Pam Bondi Waves Magic Wand To Solve Her Lindsey Halligan Problem

A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.

Big energy oops

In a remarkable filing in the Jim Comey and Letitia James cases, Attorney General Pam Bondi submitted a document she signed on Halloween — more than a month after Comey’s indictment — stating that she was retroactively ratifying everything Acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan did to secure the two indictments.

The Bondi filing follows the Trump administration’s response to Comey and James’ motions to dismiss their indictments on the grounds that Halligan was illegally appointed U.S. Attorney.

Bondi took a restrictive approach, claiming that she had validly appointed Halligan as Acting U.S. Attorney on September 22, but also purporting to give new and additional authority to Halligan: “For the avoidance of doubt as to the validity of this appointment…I hereby appoint Ms. Halligan to the additional position of Special Prosecutor” retroactive to the same date.

No doubt has been avoided. In fact, it was amplified.

The fact that Bondi felt the need to do an after-the-fact cleanup of Halligan’s nomination tended to undermine the rest of Trump’s DOJ brief, which attempted to argue that Halligan is a perfectly valid U.S. attorney.

All this magic wand-waving and retroactive appointments appear to be a huge concession, perhaps imposed by federal judges in New Jersey, Nevada and California, who have previously criticized the appointment of other Trump U.S. attorneys under less unusual circumstances than Halligan’s.

Trump DOJ throws kitchen sink at Comey

In a strange new filing, the Trump Justice Department defended itself against allegations of vindictive and selective prosecution of former FBI Director Jim Comey by placing in the court record a set of private emails with tenuous ties between Comey and Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman.

The New York Times put it adroitly: “The evidence was included in a 48-page filing that appeared to be an effort to construct a narrative that Mr. Comey leaked information to the media without actually linking those claims to the allegations made in the indictment against him.” »

At times, the record gives the impression that its target audience is not the judge but the man who occupies the Oval Office.

The Punishment: Jack Smith Edition

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) is “likely to issue a subpoena in the coming weeks” to former special counsel Jack Smith rather than grant his request for a public hearing, the New York Times reports.

Aileen Cannon gets slapped by the appeal court

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals took the unusual step of asking U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to decide whether to unseal Volume II of special counsel Jack Smith’s report, which addresses the Mar-a-Lago classified documents affair.

Citing “undue delay,” the appeals court gave Cannon an additional 60 days to rule on motions to unseal the report, pending since February.

The three-judge panel included appointees of Obama, Trump and Biden.

The purges: country music edition

• Bloomberg: “The FBI expelled a top official overseeing aviation shortly after Director Kash Patel became outraged over revelations from his publicly available logbooks that he flew to see his musician girlfriend perform, three people familiar with the matter said.
• Reuters: The White House has ousted Joe Allen, the acting inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, whose director spearheaded false mortgage fraud complaints against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA). This passage is particularly notable in:

Allen received a termination notice from the White House after he made efforts to provide key information to prosecutors in that office, according to four sources. The information he provided was constitutionally required, two of them said, while a third described it as potentially relevant to the preliminary investigation.

Stay tuned to see what James’ attorney, Abbe Lowell, does with this juicy tidbit.

Happy reading

New York Times: The battle in Virginia over an activist who protested Stephen Miller

Laura Loomer, Pentagon reporter

Trump’s Pentagon gave far-right agitator Laura Loomer press credentials to cover the Defense Department, WaPo reports, completing the ousting of traditional new media and their replacement with right-wing entities.

One year since Trump’s re-election

This week marks one year since Donald Trump was re-elected for a second non-consecutive term. Thomas Zimmer assesses where we are:

An authoritarian, fascist movement controls the government; they attempt – and succeed to some extent – ​​to build an authoritarian state; but they failed to extend authoritarian rule to the whole of society. A system which is no longer democratic, but which is also not a consolidated autocratic regime.

Again.

Dick Cheney, 1941-2025

Three initial thoughts on the death of Dick Cheney, President Ford’s White House chief of staff, congressman, Bush I’s secretary of defense and, shall we say, Bush II’s viceroy:

• The September 11 attack happened on his watch. Everything that followed – Afghanistan, Iraq, torture, surveillance and a toxic form of patriotism – was an overcompensation for his own initial failure.
• His physical resilience was remarkable. TPM doesn’t publish obituaries, but he was such a dominant figure in TPM’s early years that we wrote one for him…around 2012, when he had his heart transplant. No one expected Cheney, who had the first of five heart attacks at age 37, to live to be 84.
• Cheney is Proof A of why “polarization” is the wrong word to describe the state of American politics in the 21st century. As his Republican Party fell off a cliff, even Dick Cheney, the supervillain of a previous generation, was left behind. His unreserved support for Kamala Harris against Donald Trump in 2024 was a final effort to try to save the constitutional order that he himself had made considerably more fragile during his mandate.

Future generations trying to understand Cheney’s grip on the instruments of government power in the years after 9/11 need only know this: When Dick Cheney, then vice president, accidentally shot a 78-year-old Texas lawyer during a hunting accident in 2006, the victim apologized to Cheney for being shot in the face.

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