When Donald Trump appointed Lindsey Halligan to act as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, critics worried that he had tapped her specifically to bring prosecutions against his enemies. It didn’t take long for Halligan to prove the critics right. On September 25, she successfully persuaded a Virginia grand jury to indict former FBI Director James Comey. Yesterday, she secured an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Whether those prosecutions will actually hold up under the scrutiny of judges and juries, however, is a different matter.Presenting the case against Comey to a grand jury was the first time Halligan had acted as a prosecutor. Trump installed her at the U.S. Attorney’s Office after her predecessor, Erik Siebert, reportedly refused to move forward with the case against James and raised concerns about a potential prosecution of Comey. “There is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so,” Trump wrote on September 20 in a Truth Social post addressed to “Pam”—which, The Wall Street Journal reported, was intended to be a private note for Attorney General Pam Bondi, not a public message on social media. After that post, the Justice Department began moving quickly against Comey and James. Other criminal cases, including one against Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, are in the works.[Jonathan Lemire: Retribution is here]At this point in the Trump era, insisting that none of this is normal has become so routine, it feels like a cliché. But, well, none of this is normal. Trump’s effort to turn the Justice Department into his personal legal weapon shatters norms of law-enforcement independence inculcated in the decades since Watergate, and arguably outstrips any previous abuses of the department at any other point in American history. The ability of law enforcement to prosecute genuine wrongdoing, rather than wielding the law as a tool of a leader’s whims, is central to life in a liberal democracy.Trump has made it no secret that his campaign against his enemies is essentially a tit for tat. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING,” he wrote on Truth Social. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” He was unfairly persecuted, the reasoning goes, and so he now should receive the opportunity to persecute his enemies in turn—a theory of justice that boils down to the playground taunt “I know you are, but what am I?”Yet this argument depends on maintaining a studious lack of interest in what Trump himself actually did. Trump was impeached and indicted for, among other things, abusing the office of the presidency and attempting to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He dislikes James in particular because of the civil case brought by the New York attorney general against the Trump Organization—allegations that led a state judge to find the organization liable for fraud. (An appeals court found the judge’s order that the Trump Organization pay $364 million in penalties to be excessive, but ruled that “the record at trial overwhelmingly supports” the lower court’s “finding of liability for violations of the Penal Law.”)James brushed up against the edges of acceptable conduct during her 2018 run for attorney general, when she called Trump an “illegitimate president” and suggested that he “should be charged with obstructing justice” and “can be indicted for criminal offenses.” At the time, legal experts warned that her comments could damage perceptions of her office’s fairness and risk endangering any prosecution of the president. (“A total double standard of ‘justice,’” Trump wrote on Twitter after she won the election.) But whereas James’s behavior was widely understood as an aberration, Trump is working to make this playbook into a standard text.Even Trump’s usually quiescent Justice Department is reportedly uneasy about the weakness of the cases against Comey and James. In the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, prosecutors recommended against bringing charges on the grounds that no case could stand up in court. Significantly, Halligan herself presented both cases to the grand jury alone, and her name is the only signature from the Justice Department on the indictments—a strong suggestion that nobody else in the office was willing to associate themselves with either case. According to CNN, Halligan didn’t even give Bondi a heads-up that an indictment might be on its way before bringing the James case before the grand jury.There is still a long road ahead. The Comey indictment accuses the former FBI director of lying to Congress, but doesn’t even specify which lie he is alleged to have told; at Comey’s arraignment this past week, his defense lawyer, the legendary former prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, said that the Justice Department has still not clarified the details of Comey’s supposed crime. The James indictment, which accuses the New York attorney general of mortgage fraud, appears to rest on the accusation that James rented out a Virginia property after securing a mortgage on the basis that the property would be a second home. But the indictment does not state that James was forbidden from renting out the property, and many mortgage agreements for second homes allow short-term rentals.The New York judge Sol Wachtler famously commented that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. But, if either case ever goes to trial, the Justice Department will have a difficult task persuading jurors to convict, especially because so many seasoned prosecutors want nothing to do with these cases.[Adam Serwer: Trump’s politicized prosecutions may hit a roadblock]And that’s a big if. Fitzgerald has indicated that he plans to file a number of pretrial motions aimed at getting the Comey case quickly dismissed. Among them will be a motion challenging the prosecution as selective or vindictive—typically a tough argument for defendants to make, but one for which Comey has acquired plenty of evidence, including the president’s Truth Social posts. James, too, might file such a claim. Fitzgerald will also be arguing that Halligan is not even legally in her job thanks to the gymnastics used by Trump to appoint her. Given that Halligan has shepherded Comey’s and James’s cases personally, both defendants have a good argument that an illegal appointment would mean both prosecutions should be thrown out.During his first term, Trump pushed for indictments of his political enemies but failed to secure them, in significant part because experienced lawyers and career Justice Department officials resisted his demands. During his second term, he is finally getting what he wanted, but at the expense of losing that professionalism and expertise. Because he never valued those skills, that trade-off doesn’t bother him. But the president might soon find that the same thing making these prosecutions possible is exactly what will undermine the Justice Department’s ability to actually win convictions.