CASE DISMISSED: A federal judge yesterday dismissed indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James ruling that the appointment of interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan in Alexandria, Virginia, was legally invalid. Halligan, a former beauty contestant who had no prior experience as a prosecutor, was handpicked by President Trump after other prosecutors declined to press the cases.

  Attorney General Pam Bondi said the government will appeal.

  According to Judge Cameron McGowan Currie “all actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment” including the indictments against Comey and James “were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside.” She said Halligan needed to be appointed by the courts or approved by the Senate.

  Both Comey and James claimed that their indictments should be dismissed on grounds that they were purely political, but there’s been no decision on that.  New charges might be brought against James, but possibly not against Comey because it is past the statute of limitations to indict him regarding his testimony to Congress in September 2020.

THE WAR ROOM:  Ukraine is reported this morning to have agreed to a peace deal with Russia. Vladimir Putin would have to approve.

  The joke going around is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was delayed making amendments to Donald Trump’s Ukraine peace proposal because he couldn’t translate it from the original Russian.

  The original 20-point plan has been whittled down to 20. Ukraine is drawing a line on surrendering territory taken by force, reducing the size of its military, and be barred from joining NATO.

THE REGIME: 

— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is threatening court martial for Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and astronaut, who appeared in a video with four other former military members of Congress and a veteran of intelligence telling people in military they have a duty to refuse illegal orders.

  The Uniform Code of Military Justice clearly says that members of the military must follow “lawful” orders and that orders that are “manifestly illegal” must be refused. Kelly said on the video, “Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders.” He did not specify any current orders worthy of refusal, but the deployment of troops in cities and the destruction of drugs boats on the high seas have been under question.

  A post from the Defense Department says, “The Department of War has received serious allegations of misconduct against Captain Mark Kelly, USN (Ret.).”

  Hegseth wrote that as a retired officer Kelly could be brought back to active duty for court martial. He said, “Kelly’s conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.”

— The Associated Press continued its appeal yesterday to be allowed back into the tight White House press pool after being kicked out for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in accordance with President Trump’s executive order changing the name. The AP argued before a panel of three appellate judges that the organization’s First Amendment rights have been violated by the White House.

THE EPSTEIN CLASS: As the drama continues to play out over the investigative files on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Anand Giridharadas writes in The NY Times about what has been dubbed “The Epstein Class,” the power elite who traded on knowledge and influence with Epstein at their hub. 

  He says that sex with teenagers not withstanding:

  “People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good.”

  Giridharadas says that Epstein’s network was the people from business, government, and academia who triggered wars, drug crises, business monopolies, housing and banking collapses, and technologies that invade lives: “His reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, would never have been possible without this often anti-democratic, self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for a ride.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Viola Fletcher, who at 111 was believed to have been the oldest survivor of the infamous 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in, has died. She was seven years old when a mob of white people surged through the affluent Black neighborhood of Tulsa, burning and killing. 

  As many as 300 people were killed in the destruction of what was known as “Black Wall Street” for the prosperity of the neighborhood. More than 1,000 homes were destroyed as well as almost all of the district’s Black-owned businesses, theaters, restaurants, hotels, barbershops, and professional offices.

  Fletcher later said that her family fled in a horse and buggy. She recalled seeing an airplane dropping what looked like firebombs and passing piles of corpses. She said she saw a white man blow off a Black man’s head with a shotgun.

  She spent her adult life working as a maid.

  Along with others seeking reparations that were never awarded, Fletcher testified  in 2021 before a House subcommittee. “The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich — not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community, heritage — and my family had a beautiful home,” she said. “Within a few hours, all that was gone.”

THE SPIN RACK: The head coach of an undefeated high school football team in Virginia has gone missing in a case that’s not your usual missing person. Travis Turner, the head coach at Union High School in Big Stone Gap, disappeared as police were on the way to his house in the “early stages of an investigation.”  Now the school district has revealed that an unidentified staff member was placed on leave because of some kind of internal investigation.  

BELOW THE FOLD: The once-prominent infomercial pitchman Vince Shlomi, the “ShamWow guy” is running for Congress in Texas. We’ll see if he can clean up the place.

-30-