Federal Prosecutor Is Fired Amid Further Turmoil in Comey Case – The New York Times

Federal Prosecutor Is Fired Amid Further Turmoil in Comey Case

Robert K. McBride had been serving as the top deputy to Lindsey Halligan, who has continued to act as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Listen to this article · 4:08 min Learn more

By Devlin Barrett and Alan Feuer

Jan. 12, 2026, Updated 3:48 p.m. ET

A senior federal prosecutor in Virginia was fired after a disagreement about whether he would take charge of the Trump administration’s effort to reindict James B. Comey, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The dismissal of the prosecutor, Robert K. McBride, is the latest fallout in the Justice Department over President Trump’s effort to punish Mr. Comey, the former F.B.I. director and his longtime nemesis, whom the president blames for past investigations of his conduct.

Mr. McBride had been in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia for only a couple of months, temporarily serving as the top deputy to Lindsey Halligan after more than a decade as a federal prosecutor in Kentucky. Mr. Trump selected Ms. Halligan as the U.S. attorney after her predecessor resisted bringing charges against Mr. Comey, saying the evidence was not sufficient to warrant doing so.

Ms. Halligan was put in the job through an unusual personnel maneuver that a judge later determined was unlawful. In doing so, the judge declared that she was not a valid U.S. attorney and dismissed two high-profile cases that she had brought, charging Mr. Comey with lying to Congress and charging the New York attorney general, Letitia James, with lying on mortgage paperwork.

The administration has tried to restart the Comey prosecution and wanted Mr. McBride to lead that effort, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Mr. McBride said he could not do that while also running the prosecutor’s office as the first assistant U.S. attorney — he could do one or the other, these people said.

One person familiar with the events disputed that explanation, stating that Mr. McBride had been dismissed because he had secretly met with judges in the district to try to persuade them to appoint him as U.S. attorney. Mr. McBride, that person added, had resisted pursuing immigration-related investigations related to local jurisdictions’ sanctuary policies and drug enforcement. The person also said Justice Department leaders supported the decision to fire Mr. McBride.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Federal Prosecutor Is Fired Amid Further Turmoil in Comey Case – The New York Times

Letters from an American – November 24, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, November 24, 2025

By Heather Cox Richardson, Nov 24, 2025

U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie of South Carolina today dismissed the indictments of former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that President Donald J. Trump’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid.

Trump had demanded the indictment of the two. When he was FBI director, Comey had refused to drop an investigation into Trump’s then–national security advisor Mike Flynn, who had lied to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian operative before Trump took office. James had successfully sued Trump, several of his children, and the Trump Organization for fraud, and when the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Seibert, said there was not enough evidence to indict them, Trump forced him out of office and replaced him with Halligan, a former insurance lawyer and Trump aide.

Within days, Halligan obtained a grand jury indictment for Comey, charging him with lying to Congress, and another for James, charging her with alleged mortgage fraud. As David Kurtz points out in Talking Points Memo, the indictments were widely understood to be targeted prosecutions of those Trump considered enemies.

By law, after a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney leaves the job, the attorney general can appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days. If the position still has not been filled, the right to make another interim appointment goes to the district court, which has sole authority over the position until the Senate confirms a president’s nominee. This provision prevents a president from making an end run around the Senate’s duty to advise and consent by making consecutive 120-day appointments.

The Trump administration attempted to thwart this law. Trump appointed Seibert the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on January 21, and as the 120-day deadline approached, he nominated Seibert for the position. The district judges voted unanimously to keep Siebert on as the interim U.S. attorney as his nomination proceeded. But then Siebert declined to prosecute Comey and James, and Trump forced him out, pushing Attorney General Pam Bondi to put Halligan into his place as a new interim appointment.

Today, Currie found that Halligan’s appointment violated not only the law, but also the appointment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which requires the president to obtain the “advice and consent of the Senate” for such appointments. That unlawful appointment means that all of Halligan’s actions undertaken as a U.S. attorney are invalid. Because she was the only prosecutor to sign off on the Comey and James prosecutions, they, too, are invalid.

Currie wrote that if the indictments were to stand, “the Government could send any private citizen off the street—attorney or not—into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the Attorney General gives her approval after the fact. That cannot be the law.”

After the judge’s decision, Comey posted a video saying that while the case mattered to him personally, “it matters most because a message has to be sent that the president of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies. I don’t care what your politics are. You have to see that as fundamentally un-American and a threat to the rule of law that keeps all of us free.” He called for Americans to “stand up and show the fools who would frighten us, who would divide us, that we’re made of stronger stuff, that we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in the importance of doing things by the law.”

Attorney General Bondi said the government will “be taking all available legal action, including an immediate appeal.”

Shut down by the courts, Trump is turning to military justice to enforce his will.

Since six lawmakers released a video last week reminding servicemembers that they must refuse to carry out unlawful orders, Trump and his loyalists have continued to insist that such a reminder is “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR… punishable by DEATH!”

Their argument appears to be that by reiterating the law, the lawmakers implied that Trump has issued unlawful orders and therefore that they made troops question their orders and thus directly attacked the chain of command. It’s a convoluted argument, one that administration officials are using to claim that the lawmakers’ reminder that troops must not obey an unlawful order is actually encouragement not to obey lawful orders.

Administration officials insist that the lawmakers’ video is an attack on Trump because all of his orders have been lawful, although lawyers, lawmakers, and military personnel have expressed concerns about the legality of the administration’s deadly strikes on civilians in small boats near Venezuela.

This morning, the administration escalated its attacks on the lawmakers. The social media account of the “Department of War” posted that the department is investigating Captain Mark Kelly, a retired Navy officer who is now a Democratic senator from Arizona and who participated in the video, after “serious allegations of misconduct.” It suggested that Kelly, a retired Navy officer, could be recalled to active duty “for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: November 24, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

#cameronMcgowan #easternDistrictOfVirginia #formerFbiDirector #heatherCoxRichardson #jamesComey #lawfulOrders #letitiaJames #lettersFromAnAmerican #markKelly #newYorkAttorneyGeneral #november242025 #pamBondi #southCarolina #substack #uSAttorney #uSDistrictCourt