A federal judge has thrown out the criminal cases against James Comey, the former FBI Director, and Letitia James, the New York Attorney General. The dismissal comes after the judge ruled that the prosecutor, who had been appointed at the behest of President Donald Trump, was put into position unlawfully by the Justice Department.

This decision by U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie serves as a striking condemnation of Trump’s administration and its attempts to pursue legal action against political adversaries. It underscores the administration’s swift and questionable appointment of a loyalist prosecutor ready to press charges.

In her ruling, Judge Currie addressed Lindsey Halligan’s appointment, marking her as the latest in a series of Trump administration prosecutors disqualified due to the nature of their appointments. Although Comey and James sought to have the charges dismissed with prejudice—meaning they could not be refiled—the judge opted for dismissal without prejudice. This leaves a sliver of possibility for the Justice Department to reinstate the cases, though their next steps remain unclear.

The Monday order delved into the Trump administration’s process of appointing Halligan, a former White House aide lacking prosecutorial experience, to take the reins of one of the Justice Department’s critical offices. Her appointment followed the departure of Erik Siebert, an interim U.S. attorney who was reportedly pressured out by the administration, which was eager to proceed with charges against Comey and James.

Halligan was named to the job in September after a different interim U.S. attorney, Erik Siebert, was effectively forced out amid pressure from the Trump administration to file charges against Comey and James.

After Siebert resigned, Comey’s lawyers argued, the judges of the federal court district should have had exclusive say over who got to fill the vacancy. Instead, Trump nominated Halligan while publicly imploring Bondi in a social media post to take action against his political opponents, saying in a Truth Social post that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Comey was indicted days later on charges of making a false statement and obstructing Congress, and James was charged soon after that in a mortgage fraud investigation.

Judges have separately disqualified interim U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, Los Angeles and Nevada, but have permitted cases brought under their watch to move forward. But lawyers for Comey and James had argued that Currie’s ruling needed to go even further because Halligan was the sole signer of the indictments and the driving force behind them.

Comey has for years been one of Trump’s chief antagonists. Appointed to the job in 2013 by President Barack Obama, Comey, at the time of Trump’s 2016 election, was overseeing an investigation into whether his presidential campaign had conspired with Russia to sway the outcome of the race. Furious over that investigation, Trump fired Comey in May 2017 and the two officials have verbally sparred in the years since.

James has also been a frequent target of Trump’s ire, especially since she won a staggering judgment against him and the Trump Organization in a lawsuit alleging he defrauded banks by overstating the value of his real estate holdings on financial statements. An appeals court overturned the fine, which had ballooned to more than $500 million with interest, but upheld a lower court’s finding that Trump had committed fraud.