A Trump-appointed judge in Richmond, Virginia, issued an unusual order on Tuesday that threatens one of President Donald Trump’s most high-profile Department of Justice appointees with disciplinary sanctions — or even with forbidding her from practicing in the federal courts in eastern Virginia.
The order, in a case known as United States v. Jefferson, is indirectly related to Trump’s attempt to get revenge against two of his perceived political enemies: former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In September, Trump ousted Erik Siebert, formerly the U.S. attorney for the eastern half of Virginia, after demanding that the Justice Department bring charges against Comey, James and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-CA. He then purported to install Lindsey Halligan, one of his former personal attorneys, as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia.
Prior to this assignment, Halligan worked as an insurance lawyer and had not been a prosecutor.
Halligan swiftly complied with Trump’s demand and brought charges against Comey and James, but those charges were dismissed after federal Judge Cameron Currie determined that she was illegally appointed as U.S. attorney.
The gist of Currie’s decision is that federal law permits the attorney general to temporarily fill vacant U.S. attorney jobs for 120 days, but the Justice Department already used this authority to appoint Siebert at the beginning of Trump’s second term. That means that any new presidential appointment must be confirmed by the Senate, and Halligan was never confirmed.
And that brings us back to Judge David Novak’s Tuesday order in United States v. Jefferson. In it, Novak “observes that Ms. Halligan identified herself” in a recent court filing “as the United States Attorney for this District.” And he faults her for doing so despite Currie’s previous decision. Novak, who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2019, orders Halligan to file a new document “explaining the basis for Ms. Halligan’s identification of herself as the United States Attorney, notwithstanding Judge Currie’s contrary ruling.”
Nearly half of Novak’s roughly two-page order consists of a long citation quoting various ethical rules and standards of professional conduct that Halligan may have violated. Novak quotes a Virginia rule providing that lawyers may not knowingly “make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal,” and another providing that it is “professional misconduct for a lawyer to” engage in dishonest conduct that “reflects adversely on the lawyer’s fitness to practice law.”
The most ominous quote in Novak’s list of disciplinary rules, at least for Halligan, is his citation to a judicial opinion holding that “Federal courts have the inherent power to control the admission of attorneys to their bars and to discipline attorneys who appear before them.” Novak explicitly raised the possibility that she could be disbarred from practicing within the federal judiciary’s eastern Virginia district.
Novak’s order reflects a growing trend of federal judges doubting whether the Department of Justice’s in-court statements can be trusted.
These embarrassments matter because they undercut one of the Justice Department’s most important assets: its credibility with federal courts. Historically, DOJ has tried very hard to cultivate a reputation for honesty with judges, even confessing error when it discovers that it has misrepresented a fact to a court.
If judges can’t trust DOJ’s lawyers, then that most likely means that more people who actually committed federal crimes will dodge the charges against them. If nothing else, it means that Justice Department lawyers will have to spend countless hours shoring up factual claims that judges simply would have believed in the past.
Nor is it clear that DOJ will regain its reputation for truth-telling in a future administration. While Trump will no longer be in office in 2029 (barring an unconstitutional third term), many of the lawyers hired during his administration will still work at the DOJ after he leaves. And once a judge grows accustomed to viewing federal prosecutors as untrustworthy, they may not change that view just because there’s a new president.
Thus Trump may have done permanent damage to the federal government’s ability to enforce the law.
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States.
