A lawyer loyal to President Trump was sworn in as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia on Monday, as the president becomes increasingly impatient for the indictments of two people he despises: the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and Attorney General Letitia James of New York.
The lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, a White House adviser and former Trump defense attorney with no prosecutorial experience, was tapped as the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, whose office has been conducting separate investigations of Mr. Comey and Ms. James. In a sign of how rushed the replacement process was, the internal Justice Department email announcing Ms. Halligan’s arrival misspelled her first name.
Ms. Halligan replaces Erik S. Siebert, who was forced out of the job late last week amid rising dissatisfaction from Mr. Trump and his top advisers that Mr. Siebert had not delivered indictments in the two high-profile cases.
Days before he resigned, Mr. Siebert conveyed to his Justice Department superiors that the cases against Mr. Comey and Ms. James were quite weak and not likely to result in any charges, according to people familiar with the interactions.
On Thursday night, a senior Justice Department official warned Mr. Siebert that the White House wanted him gone, one of the people said. The next day, Mr. Trump forced him out.
The switch in leadership comes amid a time crunch in the case of Mr. Comey, as one of the areas under investigation is his congressional testimony on Sept. 30, 2020, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity about a sensitive investigation. The five-year statute of limitations for any charges arising out of that testimony expires in eight days, barring a novel legal interpretation by prosecutors.
In and out of office, Mr. Trump has pursued an eight-year vendetta against the former F.B.I. director, blaming him for the investigation into his 2016 campaign and Russian election interference, which the president has called a “witch hunt” meant to hobble his presidency. Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey in 2017, an action that eventually led to the appointment of a special counsel who investigated Mr. Trump for the next two years.
Ms. James, the New York attorney general, has been one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest opponents since she first ran for the office in 2018, pledging to investigate him. Four years later, she sued him and his family business, accusing him of overvaluing his assets. A divided New York appeals court threw out a half-billion-dollar judgment against Mr. Trump, but preserved the fraud case, in a ruling last month.
The Trump administration has opened three separate investigations centered on Mr. Comey — the one in the Eastern District of Virginia; another in the Western District of Virginia, which is looking at the handling of classified documents inside F.B.I. headquarters; and one in a third federal district, the people familiar with the matter said. The location and subject matter of that third investigation could not immediately be determined.
The latest flashpoint in Mr. Trump’s demands for charges to be brought is in the Eastern District of Virginia, but that is far from the only place where politically driven cases are raising alarms among rank-and file prosecutors and federal agents.
Over the summer, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, Todd Gilbert, abruptly resigned after barely a month on the job. His reasons are still unclear, but that office has been tasked with running one of the investigations related to Mr. Comey.
And in recent weeks, pressure from some members of the Trump administration has been mounting on the U.S. attorney in Maryland, Kelly Hayes, to bring charges against Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, over what Trump administration officials allege is mortgage fraud.
Mr. Schiff served as the lead House manager in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, in 2019, and has been a relentless critic of the president.
Mr. Trump has suggested that Ms. James and Mr. Schiff are guilty of crimes related to their mortgage applications, but people familiar with the cases described them as weak, particularly when it comes to evidence of intent on the part of the two Democrats to deceive their lenders.
Senior Justice Department officials have nevertheless pushed U.S. attorneys to file criminal charges on the politically sensitive cases in a matter of weeks, these people said.
In Mr. Comey’s case, some of the investigative efforts have focused on answers he gave to Republican senators about intelligence documents he did or did not see in 2016 and 2017, and whether he orchestrated leaks of information to reporters.
Mr. Comey testified in 2020 that he could not recall a September 2016 intelligence document he had been sent, a document Republicans claim showed that the investigation of Russian election interference under Mr. Comey’s leadership had been engineered by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. When pressed at the hearing about whether he had directed his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, or others at the F.B.I. to leak information to reporters, Mr. Comey stood by earlier testimony that he had not authorized such conduct.
On Saturday, the president wrote a social media post that shocked many current and former Justice Department officials because it publicly demanded that specific people be charged with crimes quickly.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Mr. Trump wrote in the post, which was addressed to “Pam,” meaning Attorney General Pam Bondi. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Mr. Trump named Mr. Comey, Mr. Schiff and Ms. James, saying he was reading about how they were “all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.”
He also said that Mr. Siebert had concluded “that we had no case,” but the president insisted the prosecutor was wrong. “There is a GREAT CASE,” he wrote.
Speaking to reporters later about his message to the attorney general, Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that what he most wanted to see were criminal charges.
“We have to act fast, one way or the other, one way or the other — they’re guilty, they’re not guilty, we have to act fast,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “If they’re not guilty, that’s fine. If they are guilty, or if they should be charged, they should be charged.”
Even for a president who has shredded the traditional independence of the Justice Department when it comes to decisions about criminal charges, Mr. Trump’s explicit order to Ms. Bondi shocked many Justice Department veterans, and could be used by defense lawyers to fight any criminal cases that are filed after his demands.
Given the president’s bellicose posture toward the department, federal prosecutors in Virginia and Maryland are increasingly worried about a potential confrontation over the politically sensitive cases, according to current and former Justice Department officials — the kind of clashes that have already led to the ouster of at least one U.S. attorney.