'Legal circus': Trump’s revenge prosecutions are hitting a brick wall — one after another

During his first presidency, Donald Trump bitterly clashed with some of his own appointees to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — including former Attorneys General Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions. And ex-FBI Director Christopher Wray, another Trump appointee, resigned in late 2024 rather than waiting to be fired.

Trump, however, has made a point of only choosing MAGA loyalists for DOJ and FBI. Among them: U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, and federal prosecutors Jeanine Pirro and Lindsey Halligan.

But on Monday, December 8, Trump loyalist Alina Habba announced her retirement from DOJ's District of New Jersey. And Salon's Garrett Owen, in an article published on December 14, reports that Trump keeps stumbling in his efforts to use DOJ as a tool of revenge against his foes.

"Trump's interim U.S. attorneys are failing one by one," Owen explains. "Alina Habba, his embattled top attorney for New Jersey, resigned on Monday. A former lawyer for Trump, she was found to be illegally serving in her interim role after continuing past her 120-day mark…. Lindsey Halligan, the president's former personal lawyer, was explicitly picked to indict and prosecute two of Trump’s most high-profile enemies: former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James…. James was ready to face a new indictment surrounding alleged mortgage fraud. But on December 4, a grand jury declined to indict her."

Owen continues, "The Justice Department then attempted to indict her for a third time — and the second time in one week — but they failed again. When the department will follow up with Comey is unclear. For the moment, it is missing a lawfully serving U.S. attorney."

Owen notes that although longtime DOJ prosecutors "cautioned against charging Comey due to insufficient evidence," Halligan "did it anyway."

"The Justice Department has no clear prosecutor," Owen observes. "Instead, it has questionable cases, indictments made possible only by manipulation that have drawn the ire of federal judges and cast what Trump wanted to be a highly-publicized case of political revenge into a fly-by-night legal circus."

Garrett Owen's full article for Salon is available at this link.