Pam Bondi Waves Magic Wand to Solve Her Lindsey Halligan Problem
INSIDE: James Comey ... Letitia James ... Dick Cheney
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Big Oops Energy
In a remarkable filing in both 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 — declaring that she was retroactively ratifying everything that interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan had done to secure the two indictments.
The Bondi filing came in the Trump administration’s response to motions from Comey and James to dismiss their indictments on the grounds that Halligan was unlawfully appointed as U.S. attorney.
Bondi took a belt-and-suspenders approach, claiming she validly appointed Halligan as interim U.S. attorney on Sept. 22 but also purporting to give new and additional authority to Halligan: “For the avoidance of doubt as to the validity of that appointment … I hereby appoint Ms. Halligan to the additional position of Special Attorney” retroactive to the same date.
Not much doubt was avoided. In fact, it was amplified.
The fact that Bondi felt the need to do any after-the-fact cleanup of Halligan’s appointment tended to undermine the rest of the Trump DOJ brief, which attempted to argue that Halligan is a perfectly valid U.S. attorney.
All the magic-wand waving and retroactive appointments seem like a huge concession, perhaps forced by federal judges in New Jersey, Nevada, and California already having found fault with the appointments of other Trump U.S. attorneys under less unusual circumstances than Halligan’s.
Trump DOJ Throws Kitchen Sink at Comey
In a weird new filing, the Trump Justice Department defended against former FBI Director Jim Comey’s claims of vindictive and selective prosecution by dumping into the court record a bunch of tenuously-related private emails between Comey and Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman.
The NYT put it deftly: “The evidence was included in a 48-page filing that appeared to be an effort to construct a narrative that Mr. Comey had leaked information to the news media without actually tying such assertions to the allegations made in the indictment brought against him.”
At times, the filing reads like its target audience is not the judge but the man occupying the Oval Office.
The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition
House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) is “likely to issue a subpoena in the coming weeks” to former Special Counsel Jack Smith rather than accede to his demand for a public hearing, the NYT reports.
Aileen Cannon Gets Smacked by Appeals Court
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals took the unusual step of telling U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to get moving in deciding whether to unseal Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, which deals with the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
Citing “undue delay,” the appeals court gave Cannon another 60 days to rule on motions to unseal the report that have been pending since February.
The three-judge panel included Obama, Trump, and Biden appointees.
The Purges: Country Music Edition
Bloomberg: “The FBI forced out a senior official overseeing aviation shortly after Director Kash Patel grew outraged about revelations of his publicly-available jet logs indicating he’d flown to see his musician girlfriend perform, said three people familiar with the situation.”
Reuters: The White House ousted Joe Allen, the acting inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, whose director has been the source of the bogus mortgage fraud claims against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA). This passage is of particular note in:
Allen received notice of his termination from the White House after he made efforts to provide key information to prosecutors in that office, according to four sources. The information he turned over was constitutionally required, two of them said, while a third described it as being potentially relevant in discovery.
Stay tuned to see what James’ attorney Abbe Lowell does with this juicy morsel.
Good Read
NYT: The Battle in Virginia Over an Activist Who Protested Stephen Miller
Laura Loomer, Pentagon Reporter
The Trump Pentagon has given far-wing pot-stirrer Laura Loomer press credentials to cover the Defense Department, the WaPo reports, completing the ousting of traditional new outlets and their replacement by right-wing entities.
One Year Since Trump’s Re-Election
This week mark’s one year since Donald Trump was re-elected to a nonconsecutive scond term. Thomas Zimmer assesses where we are:
An authoritarian, fascistic movement controls the government; they are trying – and to some extent succeeding – to build an authoritarian state; but they have not been able to extend authoritarian rule across society. A system that is democratic no more, but also not a consolidated autocratic regime yet.
Yet.
Dick Cheney, 1941-2025
Three initial thoughts on the death of Dick Cheney, President Ford’s White House chief of staff, member of Congress, Bush I’s secretary of defense, and Bush II’s, shall we say, viceroy:
The Sept. 11 attack happened on his watch. Everything that came afterward —Afghanistan, Iraq, torture, surveillance, and a toxic form of patriotism — was overcompensation for his own initial failure.
His physical resilience was remarkable. TPM doesn’t do obituaries, but he was such a dominant figure in the early TPM years that we drafted one for him … way back around 2012, when he had his heart transplant. No one expected Cheney, who had the first of his five heart attacks when he was 37, to live to the age of 84.
Cheney is Exhibit A for why “polarization” is the wrong word to describe the state of American politics in the 21st century. As his Republican Party marched itself off a cliff, even Dick Cheney, a prior generation’s supervillain, was left behind. His full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in 2024 was a last gasp to try to save the constitutional order that he himself had made significantly more brittle during his time in office.
Future generations trying to understand the grip Cheney had on the instruments of government power in the post-9/11 years need only know this: When then-Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old Texas lawyer in a 2006 hunting accident, the victim apologized to Cheney for being shot in the face.
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All posting is great, as usual. But, in a few words, you captured Cheney very well.
Excellent writing about Cheney. I always felt he was the more corrupt of that administration.