Hearing on Lindsey Halligan’s authority as US attorney in James Comey and Letitia James cases

The challenges to Lindsey Halligan in court arguments Thursday are just the latest way the former Trump personal attorney has come under fire in the Comey and James cases.

Halligan has also been attacked, especially by critics of the Justice Department, for how she took the Eastern District of Virginia’s US Attorney’s Office by storm with a quick, surprise appointment in late September.

Her predecessor, Erik Siebert, a Trump appointee, was pushed out of the job after overseeing the investigations into James Comey and Letitia James.

The White House had wanted Siebert to bring charges against James, despite prosecutors’ resistance that the investigation hadn’t yielded enough evidence for an indictment. Prosecutors also expressed concern internally about indicting Comey on yearsold allegations.

Halligan landed in the office a few days after Siebert’s departure, sent by Trump himself to Alexandria. She personally took the Comey case through a grand jury just days before the DOJ’s ability to bring a case expired. She also presented James’ indictment to the grand jury shortly thereafter, on another afternoon where she personally went to the courthouse.

She flexed her authority, with two career prosecutors fired and then by removing the prosecutor who led the office in the days after Siebert’s departure.

Halligan alone also signed the indictments — an atypical approach in criminal cases. Judge Cameron Currie has privately reviewed the transcripts of what Halligan said to the grand jury before Thursday’s hearing.

Currie wrote that she thought looking at the transcripts was “necessary to determine the extent of the indictment signer’s involvement in the grand jury proceedings,” since Comey and James argue that if Halligan is invalidly acting as a prosecutor, the indictments would need to be dismissed in full.

CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.