Return to Transcripts main page

Inside Politics

Pentagon Threatens To Court-Martial Sen. Mark Kelly; Rep. Greene Resigns And Says She Won't Run For President In 2028; Judge Dismisses DOJ Cases Against James Comey And Letitia James; Judge Says Trump's Prosecutor Lindsey Halligan Was Unlawfully Appointed. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired November 24, 2025 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:30:00]

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR: -- I want to add to your point, Pete Hegseth just tweeted, "The video made by the Seditious Six -- new nickname unlocked -- was despicable, reckless, and false, encouraging our warriors to ignore the orders of their commanders undermines every aspect of good order and discipline. Their foolish screed sows doubt and confusion, which only puts our warriors in danger." Goes on to say that Kelly's conduct brings discredit upon the Armed Forces and will be addressed appropriately.

I have to wonder also if the whole issue is about following an unlawful or illegal order versus a lawful or legal order, is this also something you want to make an example of, right? You want to make someone as decorated as Mark Kelly regret that he spoke this way publicly.

AARON BLAKE, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: I think it's obvious that they're trying to apply that pressure. And we saw over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance and others aligned with the President on this issue, basically arguing that if you didn't -- if there haven't -- hasn't been an illegal order yet, then suggesting that there could be one is somehow illegal.

It's kind of a strained argument, like this hasn't happened yet, you know, you saying that people shouldn't obey those illegal orders is somehow illegal in itself.

CORNISH: Yes.

BLAKE: I think it's a pretty strained legal argument at least from everything that we're seeing.

CORNISH: It is, but the Democrats seem to be struggling responding.

BLAKE: Yes.

CORNISH: They're kind of leaving these folks twisting in the wind, unless I've missed some forceful response.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

CORNISH: OK.

Next, we're going to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene and whether or not she's going to run for President. She says never, but seems to have kind of a stump speech prepared.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:36:06]

CORNISH: "Are you happy that Social Security won't be able to pay full benefits starting in 2033, and most of us will never receive any benefits at all? Are you happy that Democrats created our healthcare crisis with Obamacare and tax credits, and Republicans refuse to fix it? Then do I have a candidate who is not running for president for you?"

Those are the words of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not me. It's part of her full-throated, I think, four-page insistence that no, she's not running for president. So we're back to the table.

I heard a mix of things and mix of interpretations of her commentary about why she was leaving. One of the things that I was struck by is her basically listing kind of the reasons why she has parted from Trump on a couple of issues, and those issues included the Epstein files, of course, but also H-1B visas, AI state regulations, which we know somehow they got stripped out of the Big, Beautiful Bill, and just the issue of foreign entanglements.

Each one of these issues, I could go down a MAGA rabbit hole online and find people fighting about it.

BLAKE: It is really pretty striking, and that's the danger for Trump in all of this, which is that he has taken a number of steps in this second term that have been very kind of not America first and not MAGA, kind of went away from the base that he really created over all these years. But that base is so devoted to him that they haven't abandoned him.

CORNISH: Right. Or we just learned that.

BLAKE: Well --

CORNISH: I think for a moment it was like, oh, are we seeing a crack or a fissure? And then she seemed to not survive politically the back and forth.

BLAKE: But -- and that's the danger here. She's pointing to fissures that are very real. And if you look deep down in the polling, you start to see these things kind of rearing their heads. The people didn't love when he struck Iran. You know, Republicans said, yes, that's good, but it wasn't a majority that even approved of it strongly.

A number of these issues kind of have been lurking in the background that have been kind of waiting to come to the fore. And I think she's giving people, in a way that we haven't seen before, who might be uneasy about some of these things. She's giving them a little bit of a figurehead to talk about those things.

CORNISH: OK. Seung Min, I want to read for you her post on X, although she's still posting now, but we're going to go with this one, where she describes what it would be like running for president. "Running for president requires traveling all over the country, begging for donations all day, every day to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, arguing political talking points every day to the point of exhaustion, destroying your health and having no personal life. The fact that I have to go through all that but would be totally blocked from truly fixing anything is exactly why I would never do it."

I mean, no lies detected. You've covered campaigns.

SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right.

CORNISH: This can be rough.

KIM: Right, right.

CORNISH: But she sounds like the kind of low propensity voter who often speaks disparagingly of the political system.

KIM: Right. And we've seen how that critique of the political system has been such a potent and powerful argument with voters on both the right and the left, which is why, you know, setting aside her, you know, statements that she would, quote, "never run for president," this really shows that Marjorie Taylor Greene really wants to stay, obviously -- at a minimum, stay in the political conversation and kind of help shape the system as it is.

And which is why this whole fallout has been so fascinating for me to watch, because she's not the Republican critic who left office like the Corkers and the Flakes and the Romneys of the world. That is not Marjorie Taylor Greene.

CORNISH: Or sort of the rump state of the old party.

KIM: Exactly, exactly. I mean, I think one, you know, one trait of her is that she does have a pulse on the MAGA movement. And so she's really different from those other critics. And she can point to, like Aaron said, these cracks in the movement that may widen that -- especially when Trump is out of office, which -- so that's why whatever she does in the future, whether --

CORNISH: Yes.

KIM: -- it is run for higher office or not, will be really interesting to watch.

CORNISH: Other than her district in Georgia, I'm curious about who you think she represents.

[12:40:03]

I'm looking at the Turning Points USA folks. They represent Elaine (ph), JD Vance, I think, trying to -- KIM: Right.

CORNISH: -- embrace that. You have the Tucker Carlson of the -- of all of that, embracing this sort of antisemitic and sort of white nationalist lane of that. And then you have Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, you know, it's not like she gets along with Laura Loomer, like, it's not clear to me --

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Definitely not.

CORNISH: You're smiling, right? They were trading insults --

TREENE: Oh no, they hate each other.

CORNISH: -- for a long time.

KIM: It was pretty vicious.

CORNISH: Yes. So who is -- who follows her out of the room, right, if this is her Jerry Maguire memo?

TREENE: You know, it's so fascinating because this whole conversation is just -- it's so weird to me. Just because a couple of weeks ago --

CORNISH: Yes.

TREENE: -- I would have never believed you if you told me that we were having this conversation about Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the President's fiercest supporters, even at times when no one else would back him, she was in his corner. And so to see this, I mean, she's been building toward this for some time. We've seen it in the media interviews she's doing, her changed rhetoric, in the policy positions she's taking --

CORNISH: Everyone thought, though, that that was a rebrand, not a retreat. And for people at home who are like, why do they keep talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene? It's a little bit of confusion there.

TREENE: It is, and it's weird. But I think part of it is, it does seem, and this was very clear, at least the message she was trying to portray --

CORNISH: Yes.

TREENE: -- in that long -- portray in that very long statement, is that she's fed up.

CORNISH: Yes. All right.

TREENE: And that's what I think this comes down to.

CORNISH: We're going to come back to this in a minute, but we actually got some more breaking news. So this time, and this is big, we have learned that the Justice Department's case against former FBI Director Jim Comey and the New York Attorney General have both been dismissed.

CNN's Katelyn Polantz is covering this. Katelyn, OK, what happened here?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Yes.

CORNISH: I don't know which case you want to take first.

POLANTZ: Well, they both are being dismissed and for essentially the same reason that Lindsey Halligan, the Eastern District of Virginia, interim U.S. attorney, sent there by Donald Trump, not Senate- confirmed, that she doesn't have the power. What the judge here has found, this is Judge Cameron Currie from South Carolina, she came into the district, heard arguments from both of the lawyers on these cases against Lindsey Halligan's role.

They argued that she didn't have the power because she wasn't Senate- confirmed, and thus these indictments are invalid. The judge is agreeing with that. Judge Currie is saying that the Attorney General's attempt to install Ms. Halligan as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid. And because Ms. Halligan had no lawful authority to present the indictment, James Comey's motion is granted. The indictment is dismissed.

Now, the judge does mention that this is without prejudice. So in legal speak, that means that it could be brought back by another prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia if they took it through the grand jury again. But everything Lindsey Halligan did at the end of September, beginning of October, and since then, this judge is saying she couldn't have done that, she didn't have the authority, she was not confirmed by Congress, by the U.S. Senate as the Eastern District of Virginia's U.S. attorney.

And thus, the President went out of his bounds, and the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, also overstepped her bounds in sending Lindsey Halligan into this district to get these indictments against both Comey and James. Audie?

CORNISH: And can I raise a question with Comey? I know that she had made, at least the judge pointed out, a serious error when it came to the grand jury. So what we're saying now is even those -- that mistake that everyone had been talking about, it's moot, because essentially what I'm hearing you say is they're saying she shouldn't have been in the job in the first place.

POLANTZ: It may be moot, yes. We still are waiting to see if Judge Nachmanoff, the presiding judge over this case, what he does. He hasn't actually entered into the record yet that the cases are dismissed. We just have this other order from the judge saying that the indictment against James should be dismissed, the indictment against Comey should be dismissed.

We'll see what this other judge does now with that. But this isn't about, Audie, what you are bringing up, what Lindsey Halligan may have done with the grand jury in getting the indictment of James Comey through to the magistrate judge after the -- they had voted down one of the charges against Comey and only secured two charges against him.

There was that big hiccup, but it isn't what's being addressed here. This is solely about, did the Department of Justice formally take the pains it needed to to get someone into the position of U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia? And this judge, Judge Currie, she says they did not. And so everything that interim U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, has done, it's invalid at this time.

CORNISH: Does this mean this is done? Can these charges come back?

POLANTZ: Audie, there are always appeals. This is at the district court level. And so it's very likely that whatever happens next will be kicking around in appeals for months, if not years.

CORNISH: OK. Thanks so much, Katelyn.

I want to bring it to the panel now. Obviously, the administration really wanted to have the lawyers they wanted to have in place, usually people from Trump's teams in the past, to go after these figures.

[12:45:05]

And I know Comey had planned in his defense to talk about vindictive prosecution. Now it didn't even get that far. How does this look? I don't know what some of the, you know, reaction here is.

BLAKE: I mean, it's kind of predictable in a way. Shortly after the Comey indictment landed, we saw people talk about whether Halligan was actually lawfully prosecuted. And just to be clear, this wasn't some kind of lefty legal commentator who was raising this. This was Ed Whelan of the National Review, who I think initially really raised --

CORNISH: Yes.

BLAKE: -- this as an issue. So there were so many different issues with these prosecutions. It was kind of a question of which one was really going to be the one to get in the way.

CORNISH: Well, then let's see how the White House is taking it.

CNN's Kristen Holmes is there. Kristen, what are you hearing?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, we're waiting to hear some kind of response here. Nothing from President Trump yet, nothing from the White House. But of course, we have reached out.

But just a reminder, the White House has been heavily involved in almost all of this. Part of the reason that these charges were brought against Comey, were brought against Letitia James, was because President Trump wanted to have his political foes brought to court. And that's what we saw unfold over the last several months.

We know that the U.S. attorney who was in the Southern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, was not willing to bring these cases. He's becoming a problem for President Trump. He's becoming kind of a thorn in his side. And eventually, he was ousted from that position. He was forced to resign. He's no longer in there. Then we saw President Trump be very involved in the appointment of Lindsey Halligan, to the point where he was posting on Truth Social a direct note to Attorney General Pam Bondi saying that Lindsey Halligan would be a good fit. Halligan herself had been a personal attorney, but she had never appeared before a grand jury ever before this Comey indictment.

She was prepared by the FBI attorneys. That's who kind of did murder boards with her and practice rounds with her. And then she did the Comey indictment. And then almost on a whim, from what I'm told by officials, she decided she would also do bring these charges against Letitia James in Alexandria just a few weeks ago, which of course then ended up in an indictment there.

The White House is going to have a lot to say about this, I am certain, because they have been involved in every single step of this as it has unfolded. And this, bringing these kind of charges against President Trump's political enemies, that is something that he cares deeply about. So that is something that we expect to hear from him on.

CORNISH: OK. Thanks so much, Kristen.

I want to come back to Katelyn Polantz, who's been following the legal aspects of this. Are you getting more detail?

POLANTZ: Yes, Audie, I was able to read the 26 pages very quickly that Judge Currie wrote in both of these cases, James and Comey. They're essentially the same thing that she's articulating that Lindsey Halligan, the Eastern District U.S. attorney, placed there on an interim basis by the executive branch that she didn't have the power to bring these.

And what she is citing, the judge here, the very last thing she says in this opinion is she's invalidating the acts performed by Ms. Halligan and dismissing the indictments, returning Ms. James to the status she occupied before being indicted, which was not being an employee of the Justice Department. She was in the White House.

And she cites the case U.S. v. Trump. So that is the nail in the coffin at this point in time for these two cases. The decision made by Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida last year that the case against Donald Trump related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents, that that could not go forward.

The judge is saying in this case that James and Comey, they cannot face these charges because the prosecutor was invalid. And she is basing that, according to this order, this 26-page order, largely upon the Trump case, which Donald Trump won and which freed him from being a criminal defendant as he was taking office this year. In that case, that was a case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

And the judge there in Florida, a Trump appointee, Aileen Cannon, she also found that the steps that prosecutor had taken were invalid. He had not been properly appointed. So a really interesting correlation there between these two situations. CORNISH: And again, just so we're clear, it's not on any of the big merits of the case people had wondered about, about whether this was vindictive, whether it was revenge, all of these other things. In the end, it's like the people who are supposed to be in these jobs are not in these jobs.

Can you remind us what that case that Cannon had ruled on last year comes into play here? What aspects of it?

POLANTZ: Yes, it specifically is the aspect of the prosecutor. In that case, that case was about Trump allegedly mishandling classified documents. But the person who took that indictment through the grand jury, it was Jack Smith, who was brought into the Justice Department to be a special counsel and hold that office.

At the time, Judge Cannon dismissed that case last year, saying that Jack Smith, he wasn't approved by Congress to have that job. And Congress hadn't appropriated him the money.

[12:50:09]

That case was dismissed. And then he won the presidency, prompting the Justice Department to put not just that case by Jack Smith, but another one he had brought against Trump in Washington, D.C. on ICE, dismissed them. They're not having Trump as a criminal defendant. And so in this case, it's very similar.

It is about, did the Justice Department and the executive branch do the things it needed to do? And did Congress approve this prosecutor being in this job? Judge Currie here in the James case, in the James Comey case, the Letitia James case, she's saying, no, Congress did not give the authority to this prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, in the Eastern District of Virginia. And that is why it is being tossed at this time.

She is quite clear here, though, that these indictments need to be dismissed. But she is saying that another prosecutor who appropriately is given the authority by Congress at this point in time could try and revive these cases if they wanted to. That was a very similar thing to what happened in the Trump case as well, where it was dismissed and there was always the possibility that it could come back with another prosecutor, but just not that one. And here, just not this one.

Audie?

CORNISH: OK. Katelyn, thanks so much.

Katelyn bringing to us kind of a political question there at the end, right? I mean, if there's one thing this administration has not been that interested in doing, it's going to Congress for approval of something. I don't know if this will have implications going forward.

But Alayna, what do you see in sort of how this is playing out?

TREENE: I mean, wow, the way Katelyn broke that down. This is very process-y (ph). CORNISH: It is. It is.

TREENE: But I mean, one, I think the President's going to be furious. I'd remind everyone, remember when he was accidentally posted a personal message? I was told it was supposed to be a text message to Attorney General Pam Bondi saying, Pam, why aren't we prosecuting Comey and Letitia James? Everyone is wondering. We've got to get on that.

I think you can see how this is going to land with them. I think one of the things Katelyn said earlier, I think Kristen alluded to it as well, I totally agree with this idea that they're going to appeal this, they're going to fight this. This is one court. They have other avenues to try and go around this. I absolutely seeing that probably being the next step and trying to push back on what this judge is saying.

CORNISH: OK. I'm going to bring in a little bit more legal help for us to understand what's going on. Former Federal Prosecutor Alyse Adamson.

OK, Alyse, you and I have talked a lot about Halligan, how she got into the role, and whether that would affect this case. Have you seen anything like this before?

ALYSE ADAMSON, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: Yes, Audie, we just spoke about this a couple of days ago. I told you that I thought the case was a choose-your-own-adventure of procedural errors, and here we are because this was a huge one. And as we also discussed, Halligan being appointed after the 120 days of the interim appointment had been exceeded was a huge problem. And, indeed, the court agreed that she wasn't lawfully appointed.

And the problem here is that Halligan did everything on her own, and so now these indictments can't stand. Now, with respect to, have you seen anything like this before? I mean, I just heard the conversation. We did see the Mar-a-Lago case being dismissed on similar but different grounds.

The legal grounds of why the Jack Smith Mar-a-Lago indictment was ultimately dismissed with Jack Smith's unlawful appointment is different here, but, you know, similar broadly. But prior to these two indictments, not really, right? Like, usually, usually DOJ follows proper process and procedure, and now we see what happens when DOJ attempts to do an end-run around those procedures. The cases have now been dismissed and probably delivered a humiliating defeat to the Trump administration.

CORNISH: OK. Alyse, thanks so much.

Bringing it back to the table, just -- Alyse, at the end, saying humiliating moment. I do have a question about what this means for a Pam Bondi's DOJ, right, which has taken a couple of hits the last couple of months.

KIM: Right, right. Which is why I think what Alayna's last point was so important, that they continue to fight this in the courts. There are a lot of -- on separate cases, legal -- or Trump allies in the legal sphere have pointed out that whenever -- whether it's on immigration or other issues -- whenever they get to the Supreme Court, they have a pretty good batting average of having the Supreme Court land on their side.

So a lot of these lower court decisions, they try to brush up, but no doubt this is a huge defeat for the Trump administration at this point.

CORNISH: All right. You guys, we talked about a lot today. Thank you so much. And a lot of breaking news, just to remind people, one of those being that Pete Hegseth of the Pentagon saying that he wants to basically bring back Senator Mark Kelly for a potential court-martial because Kelly is a retired Navy captain.

And we're also talking about this news, about these cases with Jim Comey and Letitia James and the Trump administration hitting some major legal roadblocks with that court saying that Halligan was an improper representative of the government there.

[12:55:08]

I want to thank you guys for joining Inside Politics. And I'm hoping you can stay with us because CNN News Central is going to start after a quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)