Rising This Week: Whose Happy Thanksgiving?

There is a veritable cornucopia of ways the cases against James Comey and Letitia James could crash and burn by Thursday.

James Comey, Lindsey Halligan and Letitia James (Photos via Getty)

All Rise News has much to be grateful for this year. Read more about that subject below.

By Thanksgiving, there may be joyous celebrations inside the households of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, or profound sighs of relief ringing inside the corridors of the U.S. Department of Justice.

That’s U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie’s self-imposed deadline to file a ruling on whether she will disqualify Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer turned rookie prosecutor Lindsey Halligan — and if so, whether to dismiss the high-profile cases that Halligan brought.

For Comey and James, there are varying degrees of victory, and any of them would start with Currie finding Halligan’s appointment unlawful.

If that happens, Halligan will join the company of other inexperienced Trump loyalists like Alina Habba, Sigal Chattah, and Bill Essayli. In those cases, federal judges disqualified the prosecutors without dismissing their cases. Comey’s attorney Ephraim McDowell and James’s lawyer Abbe Lowell argued that nothing less than a dismissal of the ex-FBI director’s and New York Attorney General’s cases with prejudice would send a message to the government that it’s unacceptable to install a loyalist U.S. Attorney to persecute a perceived political enemy.

It’s also possible that Judge Currie will dismiss the cases without prejudice, giving the government another opportunity to try again with a prosecutor legally in that position.

There might also be different outcomes for different defendants.

Judge Currie discovered unique defects in Comey’s grand jury proceedings, starting with a more than two-hour gap from the beginning of deliberations through the indictment. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick found that Halligan fundamentally misstated the law to the grand jury in Comey’s case twice. Halligan suggested that Comey had the burden of proof, rather than the government, and she also told the jury that they could assume that prosecutors had other evidence against Comey beyond the record before them.

The core of the evidence presented to the grand jury may have been constitutionally defective on multiple grounds. Fitzpatrick said prosecutors likely obtained the evidence without a court-authorized warrant in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights and potentially used attorney-client privileged material, flouting Comey’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

If the government’s cases survive past Thanksgiving, Comey and James will have several opportunities to dismiss them before trial. Comey also has pending motions to dismiss for vindictive prosecution, grand jury violations, and the literal truth of his 2020 congressional testimony. James’s defense plans to argue her vindictive prosecution on Dec. 5 in Norfolk, Va.

All Rise News will cover those arguments on the ground, if James’s criminal case remains standing by that time.

Five years ago, Thanksgiving fell during the height of Trump’s scheme to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, and this is how I chose to express my gratitude.

Those checks and balances are under greater strain today.

Major broadcasters like ABC and CBS have folded to Trump’s attempts to intimidate them with lawsuits. Some of the most powerful law firms in the world opted to provide Trump’s government with hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono services rather than vindicate their constitutional rights in court. Some universities sacrificed their academic freedom to save their government funding and access.

The media companies, law firms and academic institutions that fought back won or appear to be on a path to victory.

This Thanksgiving, there are reasons for both alarm and optimism. Trump’s authoritarian actions have been unrelenting, and they have been met with unrelenting opposition.

For several months, the GOP-controlled Congress acted, in the words of Steve Bannon, like the Duma, Russia’s toothless and subservient legislative body that rubber stamps Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. Republican lawmakers let Trump usurp their Article I powers to impose tariffs, approve military actions, and attempt to destroy USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

But even this unusually pliant 119th U.S. Congress just handed Trump a humiliating defeat over the Epstein files.

Trump’s purge of the Justice Department has left it a shell of its former self in the eyes of its most seasoned and respected veterans, but his inexperienced loyalists appear to be woefully unqualified to carry out Trump’s promised retribution tour. Historic protests, cropping up by the thousands with an international reach, have become routine. Independent reporters and even comedians have shown executives of media conglomerates what it means to have a spine.

These are some of the reasons why I am approaching this year’s holiday season with immense gratitude, but I am overwhelmingly thankful that readers like you have made All Rise News live up to its name.

Since this newsletter’s launch in April, All Rise News has grown constantly, steadily, and with increasing acceleration.

Though the rankings have fluctuated, this newsletter clocked in at second place in Substack’s “Rising” in the news category. It’s not a coincidence that this rapid growth occurred during weeklong, live coverage from federal courts in the cases of Comey, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and John Bolton.

Your support spoke loudly. The message is that news consumers are demanding live, independent, in-depth and on-the-ground coverage of the cases that affect the health of our democracy, and they are willing to financially sustain such coverage. It’s a message that will keep me on the ground for the next nationally significant court hearing, and that growth hopefully will be seen and heard by other news organizations considering how to invest their time and resources.

Going independent this past April was a calculated risk, and watching this newsletter’s success in roughly half a year increases my confidence that All Rise News will staff up as a media organization before next Thanksgiving.

If you are in a position to do so at this time, your subscriptions will help fulfill that ambition. Your readership and interest in the most vital issues affecting our democracy are greatly appreciated, at whatever tier of subscription you choose.

Every Sunday, “Rising This Week” previews the stories unfolding in the courts and the streets.

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