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Can the president circumvent Congress and the judiciary to install partisan loyalists as prosecutors so they can charge his political adversaries for crimes they did not commit? On Monday, a court held that he cannot. The decision , by U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to appoint Lindsey Halligan, a personal lawyer, as interim U.S. attorney in Virginia, condemning the scheme as a patently unlawful evasion of federal statute and the Constitution. Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, picked the utterly unqualified Halligan to indict former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia Jame

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