Over the past week, the public has learned of three efforts by the Department of Justice to charge perceived enemies of President Donald Trump with federal crimes. One of those efforts, an attempt to indict former White House aide turned Jan. 6 committee star witness Cassidy Hutchinson, failed on Tuesday after a Washington, D.C., grand jury did not have the votes to return what’s known as a “true bill.”

The other two have resulted in the opening of criminal cases: one against former FBI Director James Comey, the third such effort against him in just over a year, and the other against two former FBI employees alleged to have lied to a congressional committee about what they knew about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

And with the midterm elections literally days away, despite this seeming escalation in prosecutions, the Justice Department has maintained that political considerations had nothing to do with the timing or existence of these criminal matters.

As a DOJ spokesperson told The New York Times, “The standard is purpose, not proximity to Election Day. Department policy does not require the department to stop ongoing work during an election season.”

Yet even assuming that Justice Department prosecutors are acting in good faith, that description of DOJ policy is incomplete.

A memo issued in 2024 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland mandated that prosecutors not time “criminal charges or any other action in any matter or case for the purpose of affecting any election.” The memo went on to say, “Such a purpose, or the appearance of such a purpose, is inconsistent with the Department’s mission and with the Principles of Federal Prosecution” (emphasis added).

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request to confirm whether the memo was still in effect. MS NOW is unaware of any evidence that it has been rescinded.

Moreover, the Justice Manual — sometimes called the bible of federal prosecution by current and former DOJ personnel — provides that any issue or even “the perception of an issue” concerning an investigative or prosecutorial action during an election season demands consultation with the Public Integrity Section, the deputy attorney general and/or the attorney general themselves. In other words, Trump political appointees, up to and including Attorney General Todd Blanche, are the final arbiters of whether a prosecutor’s purpose is legitimate.

Given that, some or all of them must have signed off on these recent prosecutorial developments. But the mistakes made by DOJ lawyers in each of these cases suggest both a rush to the courthouse and a desire to stretch the law, criminal procedural rules or both in ways that might fail or have already faltered.

Take the most recent criminal charges against Comey, unsealed earlier this week. Those charges center on the purported disclosure of allegedly classified information by an FBI employee to a New York Times reporter who published an article hours later. According to the DOJ, Comey intentionally caused that disclosure on Oct. 5, 2016, knowing the information was classified.

But the case against Comey, filed 10 years later to the date, was not initiated through an indictment, which requires a vote of at least 12 grand jurors in a federal court. The Justice Department charged Comey via an information, which does not require grand jury involvement and therefore typically can be filed much more quickly than an indictment.

Because the statute of limitations for each of the charges against Comey is 10 years, the DOJ seems to have assumed it could charge Comey by information within that window and then later obtain an indictment, which (barring a defendant’s waiver) is necessary to prosecute felonies.

But now the department is instead defending Comey’s near-immediate motion to dismiss. And his legal team’s argument has nothing to do with the substance of the charges or claims of selective or vindictive prosecution, which it supported with extensive documentation in the two prior cases against Comey.

Instead, Comey’s attorneys argue that the plain language of the statute of limitations pertains only to indictments, not informations or criminal complaints, the third way federal criminal cases can begin. A Washington, D.C., federal judge will hold a hearing on that motion Friday.

The case against former FBI analyst Nikki Floris and former agent Bradley Benavides seems to show signs of a similar rush to the courthouse. That case was instigated on Oct. 20 through a criminal complaint, which typically contains a written statement of “the essential facts” of the offense charged, usually submitted by a federal law enforcement agent under oath and then approved and signed by a federal magistrate judge.

But within days — and literally in the middle of the night before a preliminary hearing — the Justice Department filed what it characterized as a “superseding” criminal complaint. The new complaint lacked a signature from either the agent, swearing to its veracity, or the judge himself. It also was filed under the name of a different FBI agent, without any explanation.

The magistrate judge, Zia Faruqui, was furious, asking the DOJ lawyer whether he was aware of any prior federal case in which a magistrate judge had allowed a superseding criminal complaint without a judge’s sign-off. The lawyer acknowledged that he was not — and ultimately, the judge refused to sign the new complaint, telling the prosecutors, “I am concerned about what your view of the law is.”

The hearing was further derailed when Bryan Witt, the agent who replaced the original affiant, took the witness stand to defend the government’s finding of probable cause to charge Floris and Benavides.

On questioning by Floris’ lawyer, Witt testified that the day after Trump complained during a national address that some FBI intelligence officials had downplayed a report that China had tried to interfere in the 2020 election in order to defeat him, FBI Director Kash Patel directed the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas City, Missouri, to investigate some of those same officials, including Floris. Witt further testified that the letter arrived “right in the middle of a major public corruption case,” that the new investigation was “a huge distraction” and that he had concerns from the outset that “this would be viewed as political.”

He also admitted that he never interviewed Floris, though he said it would have been “incredibly useful” and normally would have been something agents did, and that the initial complaint contained factual inaccuracies. As of Wednesday afternoon, Faruqui was still weighing whether prosecutors had probable cause to charge Floris and Benavides.

In light of the challenges the DOJ has encountered in that case, one may wonder if it would have been more effective to slow down and present an indictment to a grand jury. Yet the department’s failed attempt to secure an indictment against Hutchinson — its third potential own goal in recent days in D.C. federal court — might explain why it didn’t.

Because grand jury proceedings are secret, it is unclear why the grand jury did not indict Hutchinson. But according to public reporting, including from MS NOW, lawyers from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division proposed charging her with false statements to Congress, crimes not usually within that unit’s ambit.

The Justice Department’s inability to indict her comes after an unusual number of similar losses in other cases in Washington that have involved known targets of Trump’s ire, including an attempt to indict six members of Congress who, through a video, encouraged military service members to refuse to follow unlawful orders.

And with days to go before the midterm elections and with a president who is openly taking credit for the DOJ’s litigation strategy, it could be that no matter what charging instrument the department chooses, it is working too fast — and with too conspicuous a veneer of partisanship — to succeed.

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A federal judge has denied the Trump administration’s request for an emergency order that would have forced California to set aside mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters whom the Department of Homeland Security has identified as “likely” noncitizens.

In a 26-page opinion, U.S. District Judge David Carter, based in Santa Ana, California, noted that the relief the Department of Justice was seeking was unprecedented in both substance and timing.

“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” Carter wrote.

“In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too,” he continued.

The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal late Wednesday night. Bill Essayli, the top DOJ official in Los Angeles, said at a news conference Tuesday that he expected the case to reach the Supreme Court.

“Every day, more ballots are processed by election officials,” Essayli said in a statement Wednesday night. “This ongoing emergency disenfranchises American citizens through dilution.”

In rejecting the Justice Department’s motion for a temporary restraining order, Carter also rejected the argument that California and Los Angeles County were impeding the federal government’s enforcement of a statute criminalizing noncitizen voting by refusing to use DHS’ database to verify the citizenship of the flagged voters.

Carter noted that the Justice Department announced the prosecution of 28 alleged noncitizens residing in California for election-related crimes on the same day it sought the emergency order.

That demonstrated, Carter reasoned, that the Justice Department had the ability — as well as the power — to enforce federal law. California and the county, he ruled, were not interfering with that ability “by administering an ongoing election in accordance with established State and Federal law, rather than assuming new obligations pursuant to a federal criminal law they are not responsible for enforcing.”

The Justice Department’s lawsuit, filed on Oct. 15, came just days after the federal government first asked California and Los Angeles County to review its list and set aside ballots from people whose citizenship could not be confirmed. The DOJ also sent letters to both the state and the county warning that they could face prosecution if election officials allowed noncitizens to vote.

In his ruling, Carter directed that such threats end immediately.

The opinion also detailed Carter’s concerns about the reliability of DHS’ database, which an agency official admitted in a sworn declaration was “enhanced” with commercial data sources.

The judge’s overriding concern, however, was preventing chaos and protecting public confidence in the democratic process.

“The Executive’s requested relief, however, would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens,” Carter wrote.

“Eroded trust in our democracy is irreparable,” he contined. “Once a vote is segregated, lasting harm has occurred. If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger.”

He concluded, “This Court declines to be a party to such process.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta called Wednesday’s ruling a “victory,” but warned that the state’s fight continues.

“No administration can disenfranchise thousands of individuals or disrupt an ongoing election based on highly unreliable claims of noncitizenship,” Bonta said in a statement. “Today’s ruling is yet another important victory for the rule of law and the right to vote. But this fight is not over. We will keep fighting to protect California’s elections from unlawful federal interference and get this baseless lawsuit dismissed.”

CORRECTION (Oct. 29, 2026, 9:31 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misspelled the name of California’s attorney general. He is Rob Bonta, not Banta.

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A federal judge on Monday ruled that Maureen Comey, a former senior prosecutor at the Justice Department and the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, was unlawfully fired and is entitled to back pay.

In a 55-page opinion, Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York ruled that Comey’s July 2025 firing from her job as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was a violation of the Civil Service Reform Act and the Constitution. Furman, an Obama appointee, ordered her reinstated with back pay from her firing through December 2025, when she accepted a job as a partner with a Manhattan-based law firm. The opinion does not give Comey the option to return to the prosecutor’s office.

Furman also determined the DOJ violated separation of powers principles under the Constitution and Comey’s Fifth Amendment due process rights, as well as her rights under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Comey filed a civil suit against the DOJ after she was fired last year in a terse letter that stated she was being terminated “pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States,” without further elaboration. Her lawsuit alleged that she was unlawfully fired because of her affiliation to her father — whom President Donald Trump has unsuccessfully sought to prosecute — and/or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs. She also named then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, and the White House as defendants.

Comey led the Southern District of New York’s cases against convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, music mogul Sean Combs and others. Furman noted that during her tenure, Comey “consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike.” Comey spent nearly a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney at the Southern District of New York before she was fired.

While the court’s decision is a near-total victory for Comey on her legal claims, she has been waiting for relief since September 2025, when she filed her complaint. Comey joined the Manhattan-based law firm of Patterson Belknap as a partner three months later.

Comey’s lawyers called the decision a “hard-earned victory” for her and “all civil servants and … all fighting for the rule of law.”

“This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law,” they said in a statement.

Maurene Comey did not respond to a request for comment from MS NOW.

A DOJ spokesperson said the department “disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course.”

The Trump DOJ has fired several high-level prosecutors who have refused to carry out the administration’s priorities — including one who declined to lead the prosecution of James Comey. That case has been delayed until early next year. In the meantime, the former FBI director has vowed to continue critcizing Trump despite the pending litigation.

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House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Monday released an unsigned staff report laying out what they call “the case against Donald Trump emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s desperate efforts to cover it up,” with those Democrats now calling for an independent special counsel to investigate the president as well as what they describe as Attorney General Todd Blanche’s conflicts of interest and the Justice Department’s reluctance to share relevant evidence with state and foreign law enforcement.

“The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard,” the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement. “Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice.”

The more than 50-page report alleges that Trump was “an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the mid-to-late 1990s.” Although it also contains at least one entirely new allegation against the president, it provides no direct evidence other than the woman’s own conversations with Judiciary Committee staff.

For years, Trump has denied that he engaged in any sexual misconduct with any woman connected to Jeffrey Epstein, and he has also said that he knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes.

The report also repeats several other longstanding, unsubstantiated allegations against Trump.

A Democratic Judiciary Committee source told MS NOW the report draws on publicly available accounts as well as conversations with survivors. The source declined to provide additional details about those conversations, citing concerns for survivors’ privacy. The source also declined to quantify how many survivor conversations they had.

The report also compares Trump’s statements about Epstein in recent years to documentary evidence — including emails, deposition transcripts, Trump’s prior public statements, and Trump’s drawings and signatures.

Among the discrepancies highlighted in the report are inconsistencies with what Trump has said about his awareness of Epstein’s crimes.

The report also suggests that DOJ officials, including the attorney general, are “doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark” about Trump’s alleged participation in Epstein’s abuse of young women.

“Attorney General Blanche may have engaged in criminal obstruction of justice while acting on a mission to protect Trump,” the report alleges.

The report lays out how Blanche’s meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell “potentially constituted witness tampering and obstruction of an official proceeding.”

“Blanche’s apparent instructions not to discuss a specific Epstein victim, and how that victim could implicate Donald Trump, could easily run afoul of 18 U.S.C. § 1512, which forbids hindering or delaying the communication of information relating to the potential commission of a federal offense to a law enforcement officer, as well as corruptly influencing the testimony of any person in an official proceeding — such as a congressional interview and investigation,” Democrats write in the report.

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In June, a federal judge found that Blanche had effectively conceded that DOJ was in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by not producing certain unredacted and foreign language documents, among other issues. DOJ is appealing that ruling.

Blanche himself bristled at the suggestion that the Justice Department has withheld documents that should have been released, maintaining that DOJ “undertook a Herculean task to review millions and millions of potentially responsive files” and met their review and production obligations “expeditiously.”

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, told MS NOW, that “none of these allegations are true.”

“This ‘report’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans from the surging Republican momentum driven by President Trump’s historic achievements,” Bis said. “The President kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club at Mar-a-Lago because he was a creep, and he has been fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein.”

While only Democratic staff authored Monday’s report, the House Judiciary Committee has not been the principal congressional committee investigating Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes and whether others participated in or enabled his abuse.

The investigation from the House Oversight Committee has included interviews with a number of former Epstein employees, such as his lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountant Richard Kahn, as well as one of his survivors and alleged co-conspirators. That investigation principally focused on who else has directly participated in, as well as funded or otherwise enabled, Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

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A University of Chicago fraternity is facing allegations of sexual assault from a local resident in a lawsuit filed this week.

The 19-year-old woman, who is not a student at the school and is identified in the suit only as “Jane Doe,” alleged that she was raped at a party at the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house in February after a fraternity member offered her “unidentified alcohol” that made her lightheaded and unsteady. According to the complaint, obtained by MS NOW, the assault occurred in a “secluded room” of the house while the woman was “visibly impaired” and both physically and mentally incapable of giving consent.

Filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, the lawsuit comes on the heels of a national reckoning around sexual misconduct at universities, which was sparked last month when allegations of a 2024 gang rape at Cornell University resurfaced in a civil suit.

News of the Chicago lawsuit was first reported by NBC News on Tuesday.

The complaint named just two defendants: the Alpha Delta Phi Inc. national organization, which governs individual chapters and memberships, and the fraternity’s Chicago chapter. Jane Doe claimed that both were negligent in ensuring the safety of guests at the Chicago house, especially given multiple allegations of sexual assault at the same residence, which has been maintained by the chapter for almost 100 years.

According to the complaint, two alleged sexual assaults occurred in the same month in 2009 at the same Alpha Delta Phi house where Jane Doe alleges she was raped. Her complaint alleges that those incidents, combined with the documented prevalence of campus sexual assault, should have put both the national fraternity and its Chicago chapter on notice of the serious and specific risks of sexual assault to party guests like Jane Doe at the Alpha Delta Phi house.

In a statement provided to MS NOW, Gerald McSwiggan, a spokesperson for the University of Chicago, called the allegations “very disturbing to the University community” and said the school was “committed to addressing and preventing incidents of sexual assault.” McSwiggan noted that the university was not named as a defendant in the suit and was prepared to work with the Chicago Police Department as it investigates.

Jane Doe’s lead attorney, Mike Grieco, confirmed to MS NOW that the university was not a defendant but said that following discovery, he could amend the complaint to seek damages from the university as well.

A representative from Alpha Delta Phi’s national office confirmed to MS NOW that the fraternity member accused of perpetrating the assault — who is named in the complaint but is not listed a defendant — has been suspended from the organization. Alpha Delta Phi’s statement described the alleged conduct as “deeply troubling and inconsistent with our values” and said the fraternity takes the allegations “extremely seriously,” adding, “We are committed to the safety and well-being of our members and communities and will cooperate with law enforcement as appropriate.”

Jane Doe alleges in the complaint that the fraternity member left her unconscious in a bedroom of the house, and that other members initially blocked a friend who accompanied her to the party from searching for her until another member discovered Jane Doe unconscious and allowed the friend to enter. Jane Doe alleges that she was “struggling to speak and required assistance to walk” when leaving the room where she was assaulted.

The morning after the alleged assault, Jane Doe allegedly “awoke to blood stains in her underwear” and made a report to the Chicago Police Department, the complaint states. MS NOW obtained the police report, which states the woman said she believed the alcohol she received that night “might have been laced with [an] unknown substance” and that she “does not remember giving consent,” though she remembers asking the man to wear a condom and he refused.

Grieco told MS NOW that Jane Doe went to a hospital and underwent rape kit testing the morning after the assault, which the police report confirms. At the hospital, the woman provided police with a photo of the alleged perpetrator, according to the incident report.

Grieco said he was unaware of whether CPD or the university police ever interviewed the alleged perpetrator or anyone else other than his client. He said he hopes the suit will prod both departments to prioritize their investigations.

The lawsuit was filed just over a week after a second woman alleged she was sexually assaulted at another University of Chicago fraternity house, according to a police report obtained by MS NOW. The 21-year-old woman told police that she attended a party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi house. After consuming about three cans of alcohol, a man she had been dancing with — and whose advances she had refused — followed her into the bathroom. There, she lost consciousness and awoke to find her bodysuit undone at the bottom and her bra removed, according to the incident report. She told authorities “that she was unable to resist due to her altered state of consciousness.” The Chicago Sun-Times previously reported that the woman does not attend the university.

The woman’s friend told police that when she was searching for her, she saw “three to five males standing outside the bathroom door, cheering and appearing to encourage the activity inside,” according to the incident report, which also states that the men denied to the woman’s friend that Jane Doe was inside the bathroom. When the friend demanded entry, one of the men “grabbed [her] by the hair to prevent her from entering,” the report states. After picking the lock, she managed to open the door and found the alleged perpetrator “standing over [the woman] with his pants down” and the woman “not fully conscious” with her shirt undone. The man told the friend that “everything was ‘cool,’” according to the incident report.

According to the report, when the woman and her friends left the residence, they confronted the alleged offender and the men who had been cheering outside the bathroom. The group fled and the woman pursued them until she found university police and filed a report. The woman received a rape kit at a hospital.

The university says it alerted students on Oct. 11 that a sexual assault had allegedly occurred at a frat house near campus that day. Two days later, a second public alert said that a “person of interest” who was not “affiliated with the university” had been identified and banned from campus.

According to a statement posted to the Instagram page of the school’s Alpha Epsilon Pi chapter, the perpetrator “was chased out of the building” and “captured on cameras when they fled.” Both the school’s chapter and the fraternity’s national organization condemned the incident and said they supported the victim and the police investigation.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department said that nobody was in custody in connection with either alleged incident — the one on Oct. 11 or the one described in the lawsuit — and that both investigations were ongoing.

The university held a safety meeting on Wednesday night, according to Grieco and NBC Chicago. But McSwiggan, the university spokesperson, said the meeting had been planned prior to Jane Doe’s lawsuit.

Grieco told MS NOW the meeting highlighted the chasm between the university’s stated policy on fraternities — the institution says it does not recognize them —and officials’ responsibilities to prevent and address sexual assault. That’s why, he said, Jane Doe’s lawsuit focuses on achieving institutional accountability, not criminal prosecution.

Meanwhile, Jane Doe, who was a college student living in Cook County at the time of the assault, is no longer enrolled in school, according to Grieco.

“She is in therapy,” he said, “and focused on her recovery.”

This story was updated to incorporate details from the police reports obtained by MS NOW.

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