Trump Loses Cases Against FBI Vet Comey, AG James

0:00Hi, it's Sierra Miller. I can't wait for you to check out my new collection of shoes and accessories at Designer Shoe Warehouse. If you love shoes as much as I do, then trust me, I got you. From cute sneak arenas to the perfect flip-flops to stunning heels, these shoes are all style, no drama. It's a girls' girls summer and DSW has just the shoes. Shop the Sierra Miller collection right now at your DSW store or DSW.com.

0:30Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. One thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. For decades, Angie's helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at Angie.com. We're following the breaking news that Nicole's been following. The Trump DOJ dealt this huge loss in court today. This is a bigger and faster rebuke than expected. It's a setback to Donald Trump's wider plots to try to see if he can get away with something that is considered illegal and unlawful, the selective prosecution of his perceived opponents.

1:05Well, today he ran into a brick wall, a federal judge dismissing it outright. And let me walk you through right now each piece of it. We've been covering this today, but there are several components. One, the judge dismissing the charges against former FBI director James Comey. That's a rebuke to their effort to go after a critic who Trump has basically been clashing with and attacking since the first year of his first term. And that's not all. The judge also tossing Trump's recent case against New York Attorney General Letitia James. And that's because of the person you see on your screen. Both cases the judge found today have the same legally fatal flaw.

1:48Her name is Lindsey Halligan. and she is not, as of this hour, anymore a prosecutor. They ruled that she was basically powerless to bring these cases. Trump's handpicked attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally installed. She brought both these cases. And remember, it was a move of legal desperation that she acted alone. Now, this matters what I'm about to tell you because it affects a lot of the pending plots that Trump has. the evidence against Comey for example was so thin they could not get the sitting Trump appointee to bring the case this was someone who circa this year Trump 2025 was willing to work for Donald Trump was willing to do all that but wouldn't bring a Comey case so they replaced him with Halligan she's kind of the temp lawyer they couldn't get any other DOJ lawyers to join her crusades on these cases.

2:46And that might sound like a technicality if you watch our channel. We've heard lawyers and experts discuss this, but okay, Ari, who cares? Well, tonight you see why the law cares, because no other career nonpartisan lawyers would sign on to what they viewed as insufficient evidence or even a potentially unlawful indictment. So the indictments were only brought by her. And the court has now found tonight, this is brand new, first time this has happened this year, first time any lawyer has been DQ'd like this out of Trump's DOJ, the court found she doesn't have this job. She is not the valid U.S.

3:21attorney in that district. And now the cases collapse. Later tonight, we'll get into more details, but that's what you need to know up top. The cases are collapsed. They are null and void. The Justice Department will appeal. They have that right. And legally, if they can find another lawyer to bring the case, they might have a path to refiling the case against Attorney General James. The Comey case is basically DOA, and the technical legal reasons for that we will also get into tonight. I can tell you we've got some big guests for this big news night. But let me tell you a little more about what we're learning.

3:53Both defendants had been fighting these charges on several fronts. For example, both of these defendants argued that, number one, Halligan wasn't even the valid lawyer, that this was a loophole where they brought an attempt to go after people that other lawyers would not sign off on, what I just told you about. That was one lane. Another lane was that this was selective prosecution. The Trump administration was going to have to clear those hurdles before they ever got to trial, but now the cases are over. Now, if you broaden out, this is actually the third Trump revenge case to collapse, as did the case that was briefly brought against a New Jersey mayor and then dropped.

4:31No other cases that Trump has brought against these type of individuals have made it to trial, let alone one. So if you're keeping track, widening beyond just today's news, Trump's record this year is zero wins, three losses. The wider impact is a rebuke to Trump's efforts to abuse DOJ powers to go after some of the opponents that he perceives here that he wanted to go after, some running for Congress, some in Congress. The charges dropped in the lower left corner, Baraka, that's the mayor I mentioned. The precedent now is building up. He's losing these cases, not winning them. They're collapsing before they go to trial.

5:08And as you know, you don't need to be a lawyer to know, courts are supposed to work off precedent. The precedents this year are running against this so far faltering revenge plot. Now, James Comey had publicly said he expected to win this case. Indeed, he recently told our colleague Nicole Wallace in an interview about the wider intimidation efforts that while he was well aware of how bad things have gotten, I mean, James Comey, whatever you think of him in the 2016 emails and whether you think he did a good job, he has borne the brunt of Donald Trump's efforts to attack him, to ruin his career and his life, to audit him, to investigate him, to subpoena him.

5:47They interviewed him about a whole exaggerated issue around security. They didn't charge him on that. Then they went after this case that I'm telling you about. So Comey's lived through it. And yet he maintained, he said, his optimism because courts are still a place to deal in evidence and facts. On this case tonight, it appears he was right. It was the evidence of this unlawful appointment that the judge dealt with. And he issued this new response on video today. The message has to be sent that the President of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies.

6:28There that is. Trump had been trying to bend the DOJ. And the wider point of what he's doing here is installing loyalists and trying to test the loopholes. So if you broaden out one step further and you look at the National Guard or clashes with Venezuela, this is a president who, despite his cratering approval, is still testing every single power that he might get away with. That's what he's trying to do. And here he did something that the judge called probably unprecedented American history. Now think about that. We've had the Nixon era. We've had McCarthyism. there are historians who remind us that we have been through times where the federal government has been abused like this before, that has politicians trying to use the powers to investigate, to charge, to try, to end free speech and free democracy.

7:22Certainly that's what McCarthyism was about. But historians remind us these things often run out of steam and run into the wall of the courts. And what the court found here was that Trump had tried or his aides had brainstormed something that was so sort of mischievous, no other president had tried it, where they ran out the clock on basically one temp prosecutor and tried to put in another temp prosecutor. And I'm going to explain this in plain English. The judges point out that, well, if that were allowed, then you'd never need to go to the Senate to confirm anyone. You could just stack temp prosecutors all the way down.

8:00So certainly that's not allowed. And this ruling goes into much greater depth, about 30 pages, of exactly why all of the law precedent in the Constitution itself is against that. So even if you say, okay, Ari, a lot of details here, you seem excited about the news, sure. The bottom line is this was a test of whether a president willing to go farther than anyone in history could use a loophole to hijack more of the Justice Department, cutting out not not only the Senate, but the rule of evidence to go after their opponents. And tonight the answer is, no, you don't get to do that. No, you lose the case on Comey.

8:37No, you lose the case on James. And no, while we're at it, your lawyer, pack up your bags. She doesn't work here anymore. That is as wide a rebuke as we've seen in a while on these issues. And the losses come amid the wider reckoning for Trump that we are all living through. You can't miss all of this, whether you open your phone or follow the news through television or newspapers. However you follow what's been going on in the last few weeks, let me remind you that in the last three weeks alone, Trump lost these two cases today. Lost the prosecutor who was doing his bidding. Lost his effort to stop those 20 ,000 new Epstein emails.

9:14Lost the wider fight to block a vote on the release of the remaining Epstein files. Lost all the Republicans on that score in the Senate, most in the House. Lost MTG as a MAGA ally and then as a member of Congress. She announced going into the weekend she's resigning. And if you go back a full three weeks, he lost the off-year elections. All these losses add up to a crisis of credibility that will clearly hurt him in his clashes with these other branches, losing to the judicial branch today and the legislative branch last week. I bring in former federal prosecutor and congressional counsel John Flannery, That's our breakdown Give us yours, sir My breakdown is that We had learned something in Watergate That involved a president, an attorney general And the ousting of a special counsel Very similar rules to here And that after that we thought we would be independent So just to go to a couple of the facts That scream that this was not taking our laws serious A woman who may be a fine lawyer in other ways was a prosecutor for four days in her life before she indicted Comey and James.

10:30That's it. No training, no understanding, no experience, no cases ever tried before. She'd never been in the grand jury before. And we should be fighting about whether or not they could bring this back. I don't think so. I think the statute of limitations means you're limited. Yeah. I think that. Well, let me read you the judge. I'll let you continue. But as you say, as the kids say, no shade to Ms. Allegan, but she had no experience for the job. That's a fact, not a criticism. The judge, to your point, says the implication of any other conclusion would be extraordinary. It would mean that Trump, the government, could send any private citizen off the street, attorney or not, in the grand jury room to indict so long as the AG gives their approval afterwards.

11:17That, quote, cannot be law. John. Right. Well, and when you spoke about the developments in recent days leading to this decision, you're talking about a march to justice, a march to the republic, in opposition to the march that Trump would prefer, which is to be an autocrat, to be a dictator. How dare you? How dare you contradict me when I want to prosecute this guy who's a political enemy of mine, and I have no more evidence than my say-so that you should go after him and ruin his public and private life, even if you don't have anything to prove he committed a crime. And, you know, they talk about if they go in, if I was advising them, I would tell them, let it go.

12:05Because if you win on anything, the next one's going to be a selective and vindictive prosecution, and it'll probably only be against James. Right, like I mentioned, this is step one. You mentioned the deadline. I'm going to read briefly, John. The Comey case was already rushed. It was desperate. I mean, it just wasn't going to happen. The Trump appointee said no. So they slam her in there. The judge rules. And I'm just going to summarize. Judge Currie today said basically the DOJ's time to indict Comey had run out. And when an indictment like this is void, she says the DOJ has no legitimate peg.

12:41That's the quote of a Supreme of a lower court ruling to quote no legitimate peg to refile after the deadline. and that's the US v. Comey citation there is today citing a 1987 case. Walk us through why that matters, John, because it would mean that while they've gone after Comey a million ways, they can't even refile this case if they found a new lawyer to do it. Well, the notion goes like this. I have the power given to me by a set of rules that legitimately empower me. One of those is if you have an open seat, say for the U.S. attorney, you can appoint someone for 120 days. But at the end of that, then, and you need someone because you didn't get anyone to present to the Senate, what you do is you have to have the judges appointed.

13:34So judges then would have appointed a person who knew something about prostitution. Then the question is, would it go to the Senate? And it is very possible that it could go to the Senate and they would sit on it because the two senators from Virginia are Democrats. And one of them could just put a hold on it. There'd be no U.S. attorney for that district. There'd be no charges. I think that. And let me I'm going to jump in. I'm jumping in a lot today because there's so much there's so much in this ruling. But to let you finish the point, I just want to I just want to underscore that's the new status quo.

14:08Well, the court's ruling today disqualifies Halligan and they can have a judge pick the replacement who would presumably be more qualified than her. And that could be the U.S. attorney for the rest of the term. It's incumbent on only Trump. He now is on defense. He'd have to go to the Senate, as you say. And if he doesn't, they'll just have a career type person for the rest of the three years. Well, and here's the other thing. That period, that 120 days is already run. You don't get a second and a third and a fourth 120 days. So the limitations are the judges and the Senate. And the judges, I assume they would appoint somebody that they know that's qualified for that position.

14:50And we might see what they call another declination letter, which is that the U.S. attorney, when appointed legitimately a real lawyer who's not owing anything to Trump and is not a loyalist, which is ironic given the charge against Comey, which is why he's charging Comey because he wasn't a loyalist to Trump. So you have a real prosecutor and he might write exactly what happened before. There's no there there. There's no case. What is wrong with you? Now, the flip side of this is what happened to the people in Watergate should be happening to these people. From the president to the attorney general to the lawyers who were wrongly invested in the corruption of our system of law because they want to earn and own this country, for example, to use it as they want.

15:37And we'll see how that process goes. I think a headline tonight for lawyers is, do you want to be the type of lawyer who does your job and stops where the legal and ethical line is? Or do you want to be Lindsey Halligan, where you get to pretend you were a prosecutor until you are ignomiously removed by the courts? I don't know how many lawyers, even on self-interest before you get to ethics, would say, oh, I want to end up like her. John, I'm out of time. I got Congressman Conner standing by. I have a formula that you should think. Very simply. OK, I'm done. Briefly. OK. All right. We'll do a rain check only because I got the congressman and he's on a tight.

16:16John Flannery, thank you. Congressman Ro Khanna on this big news. Oversight leader, of course, and the Epstein bill author. Ro Khanna here next.

16:34Trump has a deadline now, 25 days to release the Epstein files. Remember when Politico was reporting that a Kentucky Republican and California liberal were the unlikely alliance pushing Trump on Epstein? That was back when it was a new idea that this pair was trying to get the files out. When Congress returned in the fall, they were ready to act. Massey was filing a petition to force that vote. Take a look. There is something that is rotten in Washington. Less than 1 % of these files have been released. We are demanding today on the discharge petition that all of the files be released. The perpetrators are being protected because they're rich and powerful and political donors to the establishment here in Washington, D.C.

17:29What looked like a long shot was picking up steam, including MTG. I believe the country deserves transparency in these files. And I don't believe that that rich, powerful people should be protected. I'm not afraid to name names. And so if they want to give me a list, I will walk in that Capitol on the House floor and I'll say every damn name that abused these women. I'm standing with the women and I will continue to do my small part to get the files released. MTG joining that initial pair and more Democrats who'd filed the petition to do something that rarely happens, override the speaker. The women and those survivors were speaking out as well.

18:16And they went up against Trump and the Speaker, who were fighting to the very end to prevent the vote we all witnessed last week. There was even an effort to not seat someone. The petition ultimately triggered a full vote just last week. And it's now law. So this is a Democrat hoax that never ends. The discharge petition is not only reckless, it is also a totally moot point. Well, I don't want to talk about it because fake news. He had nothing to do with it. President Trump has clean hands. He's not worried about it. Let the Senate look at it. Let anybody look at it. But don't talk about it too much.

18:57We're just hearing that Trump has signed the Epstein Act. Donald Trump put his surrender and humiliation in writing in capital letters. Today is a day because of the survivors that we can say is the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency. Beginning of the end of the Trump presidency. It sounds like sweeping rhetoric, but compare it to what we just learned today. A judge rebuking Trump on two cases, losing his handpicked prosecutor. The earthquake of that Republican revolt continues to reverberate. While it started, as I mentioned, with Congressman Ro Khanna, the Democrat from California who joins me now working with his Republican counterpart, Massey, on the House Oversight Committee.

19:39Welcome. Thank you, Ari. Thank you for having me. I'm curious how you see this ruling against Trump on the Comey and James case. You do oversight. More Americans have learned about you sort of pushing that. And this would seem like an example where both branches, legislative and judicial, are pushing back now. Seems like we finally read the Federalist Papers and the other branches of government have woken up. Congress woke up and said we don't have to be supplicants to Donald Trump. We can actually overcome his objections and prevail. And now judges are standing up, not just these judges who dismissed those baseless cases, but even in the Supreme Court, you saw justices questioning Trump's tariff policies.

20:29So it should give people faith about our democratic process. hmm i want to read just remind people what's in the bill it was quite a chaotic week the bill is broad uh it asks for all files relating to epstein and maxwell who's imprisoned although she got a better spot uh under the trump administration uh it also talks about the doj internal communications uh which could be striking although you know you're going to get some legal battle over that. Some of that stuff usually doesn't come out. And it also asks for documentation regarding Epstein's detention or death. This part of the bill, Congressman says, examiner files, autopsy reports, records detailing the cause of death.

21:16Can you explain to us what the value is of these documents? And should we take the inclusion of the death review to be that you and your colleagues, which now are most of the House, think there are unanswered questions or even potentially questions about foul play regarding Epstein's death in custody in what was then the Trump era Bureau of Prisons. Laurie, Thomas Massey and I have always tried to be very factual and not engaged in speculation. So there are unanswered questions that we need release of these documents for. But I don't know what happened, nor do I want to speculate. The main thing, though, that the survivors want, having really spent time with them over the last five months and that their lawyers want, is to understand which other rich and powerful men went to Epstein's rape island, which other men engaged in the trafficking of these girls.

22:10And I do believe that information will come out through Epstein's computer, the pictures that are there, the emails that are there and a lot of the FBI witness interviews where they have interviewed a lot of these people who either covered up for Epstein or participated in the trafficking. One of the things about this that was unusual was your committee got the emails, you released a few, and then very quickly we got a bunch more. Maybe it's not the best organized course of transparency, but it definitely added a lot of transparency. Now, the initial emails that your committee found important, one of them made a lot of news because, as you know, it said that Trump, quote, spent hours with, and then the victim's name was redacted.

23:01House Republicans identified that as the late Virginia Dufri. She had also previously publicly indicated she didn't witness any misconduct by Trump regarding the sexual abuse of minors, at Epstein's home. That's from The Times. What do you say to these questions about whether if her name was going to come out anyway, and she has, in effect, cleared Trump, that should have been included with the initial batch, or people have asked whether the committee was somehow trying to be misleading? There was so much happening that first week. I wanted to give you a chance to address that in detail here. No, I mean, look, the Republicans and Democrats both release files.

23:44Thomas Massey and I have said release all of them. Robert Garcia, who's the ranking member, also believes we should be releasing all of these emails. And from day one, actually, I've not made this about Donald Trump. I have no idea what he may or may not have been involved in. For me, this has been about justice for survivors who've been denied justice for over a decade. And there are over a thousand victims. And whether there are Democrats or Republicans who were involved in either the rape or abuse of underage girls or simply the trafficking of young women who may have been overage, but it was exploitive, the relationship, that should come out.

24:23And these people should not have buildings named after them and scholarships named after them. That's really what this is about. But on that point, and we've heard that from people, and you've been a leader on this, we showed that. What do you say to people who ask, well, if it was that important, why not push to get them released when the Biden administration controlled DOJ and the same party might have been able to do that? I think it's a fair point. Look, I raised this with Elijah Cummings originally in 2019. Under the Biden administration, there was a federal judge who was slowly releasing these files.

24:56But having gotten to know the survivors and their stories, I think the entire country let them down. And I wish we had advocated stronger and more forcefully in years past. What happened is that Trump then said he was going to release the files. I think it's good that he campaigned that way. No one criticized him for the first six, seven months. Then Pam Bondi said there's nothing more to see. That's when Thomas Massey and I did this petition, and that's where we built momentum to get it released. So I don't deny that we owed these survivors justice earlier on and all of us should have been more vocal.

25:32But the good thing is, at least now they're going to get that justice. Interesting. Yeah, appreciate your answer on that. You mentioned being led by the evidence. Everyone's still going through it. From the perspective of the oversight work you do, I wanted to get you on, get your response to some of this because it's quite disturbing what the new emails show. For example, Steve Bannon, who worked in the top of the government, had a lot of power advising Trump in the White House. When he left, he was trying to help Epstein redeem his reputation. We didn't have all these details until we got the new emails from your committee.

26:09I just want to remind viewers, we did some reporting on this. Epstein was emailing that he met with Christians and the media portrayed him as beyond redemption. And he found that offensive. And Bannon replies, quote, we must counter the narrative of, quote, rapists who traffics and female children to be raped by the powerful richest men and can't be redeemed. And then he writes secretly to Epstein and they were hiding their relationship at the time, as you know. You're a lot of things we will show. You are not that. Another email has Epstein writing to Bannon. You can understand why Trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears we're friends.

26:44Does it concern you that someone at the top of government, in this case the Trump White House, self-described was trying to redeem and rehab this sex trafficker's reputation? Yes, it's disgusting. But you know what these emails will show is that there were a group of rich and powerful people who just thought it was normal to be corresponding or raising money from Epstein. I've taken to describing it as this Epstein class, a group of people who think that the rules don't apply to them or that they aren't accountable. And it has really angered a lot of Americans that you have one set of rules for these powerful folks and another set of rules for Americans.

27:30So let's let's dive into that, because some of the emails suggest the idea. And as we know, as investigators, someone asserting something or bragging or what have you doesn't mean it's 100 percent true. You got to run down the lead. But there's an email on April 18 where Epstein's writing to a person that, according to what you released, we can't exactly confirm. But they say, I like your F Wall Street statement. Don't know how you're doing, but it seems he is following your lead. The sender says a thousand percent. I have Kudlow and Bolton in there. Epstein says, nice to finally have good soldiers for you.