Category World News

A magistrate judge in the United States has issued a stern rebuke to the administration of President Donald Trump, criticising its handling of the indictment against a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), James Comey.

On Monday, Judge William Fitzpatrick of Alexandria, Virginia, made the unusual decision to order the release of all grand jury materials related to the indictment.

Normally, grand jury materials are kept secret to protect witnesses, defendants and jurors in cases of grave federal crimes.

But in Comey’s case, Fitzpatrick ruled there was “a reasonable basis to question whether the government’s conduct was willful or in reckless disregard of the law”, and that greater transparency was therefore required.

He cited several irregularities in the case, ranging from how evidence was obtained to alleged misstatements from prosecutors that could have swayed the grand jury.

“The procedural and substantive irregularities that occurred before the grand jury, and the manner in which evidence presented to the grand jury was collected and used, may rise to the level of government misconduct,” Fitzpatrick wrote in his 24-page decision.

Fitzpatrick clarified that his decision does not render the grand jury materials public. But they will be provided to Comey’s defence team, as the former FBI director seeks to have the indictment tossed.

“The Court recognizes that the relief sought by the defense is rarely granted,” Fitzpatrick wrote, underscoring the unusual nature of the proceedings.

“However, the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps.”

Scrutiny of US Attorney Halligan

The decision is the latest stumble for interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer to Trump whom he then appointed as a top federal prosecutor.

A specialist in insurance law with no prosecutorial background, Halligan was tapped earlier this year to replace acting US Attorney Erik Siebert in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Trump has indicated he fired Siebert over disagreements about Justice Department investigations.

According to media reports, Siebert had refrained from seeking indictments against prominent Trump critics, such as Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, citing insufficient evidence.

But that appears to have frustrated the president. Trump went so far as to call for Comey’s and James’s prosecutions on social media, as well as that of Democratic Senator Adam Schiff.

“They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” Trump wrote in a post addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”

Halligan took up her post as acting US attorney on September 22. By September 25, she had filed her first major indictment, against Comey.

It charged Comey with making a “false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement” to the US Senate, thereby obstructing a congressional inquiry.

A second indictment, against James, was issued on October 9. And a third came on October 16, targeting former national security adviser John Bolton, another prominent Trump critic.

All three individuals have denied wrongdoing and have sought to have their cases dismissed. Each has also accused President Trump of using the legal system for political retribution against perceived adversaries.

Monday’s court ruling is not the first time Halligan’s indictments have come under scrutiny, though.

Just last week, US District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie heard petitions from James and Comey questioning whether Halligan’s appointment as US attorney was legal.

As she weighed the petitions last Thursday, she questioned why there was a gap in the grand jury record for Comey’s indictment, where no court reporter appeared to be present.

Inside Fitzpatrick’s ruling

Fitzpatrick raised the same issue in his ruling on Monday. He questioned whether the transcript and audio recording of the grand jury deliberations were, in fact, complete.

He pointed out that the grand jury in Comey’s case was originally presented with a three-count indictment, which it rejected. Those deliberations started at about 4:28pm local time.

But by 6:40pm, the grand jury had allegedly weighed a second indictment and found that there was probable cause for two of the three counts.

Fitzpatrick said that the span of time between those two points was not “sufficient” to “draft the second indictment, sign the second indictment, present it to the grand jury, provide legal instructions to the grand jury, and give them an opportunity to deliberate”.

Either the court record was incomplete, Fitzpatrick said, or the grand jury weighed an indictment that had not been fully presented in court.

The judge also acknowledged questions about how evidence had been obtained in the Comey case.

The Trump administration was facing a five-year statute of limitations in the Comey case, expiring on September 30. The indictment pertains to statements Comey made before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020.

To quickly find evidence for the indictment, Fitzpatrick said that federal prosecutors appear to have used warrants that were issued for a different case.

Those warrants, however, were limited to an investigation into Daniel Richman, an associate of Comey who was probed for the alleged theft of government property and the unlawful gathering of national security information.

No charges were filed in the Richman case, and the investigation was closed in 2021.

“The Richman materials sat dormant with the FBI until the summer of 2025, when the Bureau chose to rummage through them again,” Fitzpatrick said.

He said the federal government’s use of the warrants could violate the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which prohibits the unreasonable search and seizure of evidence. He described the Justice Department’s actions as “cavalier” and asserted that no precautions were taken to protect privileged information.

“Inexplicably, the government elected not to seek a new warrant for the 2025 search, even though the 2025 investigation was focused on a different person, was exploring a fundamentally different legal theory, and was predicated on an entirely different set of criminal offenses,” Fitzpatrick wrote.

He speculated that prosecutors may not have sought a new warrant because the delay would have allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the Comey case.

“The Court recognizes that a failure to seek a new warrant under these circumstances is highly unusual,” he said.

Fitzpatrick also raised concerns that statements federal prosecutors made to the grand jury may have been misleading.

Many of those statements were redacted in Fitzpatrick’s ruling. But he described them as “fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the grand jury process”.

One statement, he said, “may have reasonably set an expectation in the minds of the grand jury that rather than the government bear the burden to prove Mr. Comey’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, the burden shifts to Mr. Comey to explain away the government’s evidence”.

Another appeared to suggest that the grand jury “did not have to rely only on the record before them to determine probable cause” — and that more evidence would be presented later on.

Calling for the release of the grand jury records on Monday was an “extraordinary remedy” for these issues, Fitzpatrick conceded.

When she hangs her neck’s noose. Justice will only be served when Sheikh Hasina’s just-adopted death sentence is carried out, claim some of the protesters who supported Sheikh Hasina’s ouster in Bangladesh.

– San Francisco, United States – Just a few weeks ago, a pastor from Norfolk, Virginia, spoke to residents of his area about a program that would assist them in installing rooftop solar units in their homes. The government would cover the costs of installing them, and once finished, it would lessen the strain of rising electricity costs, a pressing issue.

Then, Praileau learned that the $7 billion Solar For All program, which funded his project and other solar projects across the nation, had been discontinued, leaving them stranded.

It is one of several federally funded renewable energy projects that has been abandoned or will end sooner, veering away from the country’s planned transition to renewable energy, which also makes it more difficult to achieve climate goals.

The project, which received $ 156 million in federal funding to support 7,500 low- and middle-class families with solar installation, had been helped by Praileau, the Virginia program director for Solar United Neighbors. Praileau claims that the sudden withdrawal left him “under the spell.”

This December, the federal government will also end the 30% tax credit for installing solar panels on rooftops. By June 2026, businesses will only be able to receive these tax credits if they begin building the factories, malls, or other types of businesses for which the solar installations are intended.

Additionally, the Department of Energy withdrew funding from a number of other renewable energy initiatives, including battery energy storage, carbon-neutral cement production, and power grid upgrades. Additionally, the administration ended a number of wind energy funding initiatives.

According to President Trump, “We won’t be approving windmills until something unexpected occurs.”

According to a report from BloombergNEF in April 2025, this could result in a $114 billion loss in wind energy projects.

When the $ 56 million project was scrapped in August, intake forms for 10, 000 low- and middle-class households in Florida were ready.

A Miami-Dade County resident had informed the volunteers who were assisting her with the application for the grant that she was afraid to use power. Because of the state’s steep rise in power costs, she is afraid to turn on the air conditioning.

According to Heaven Campbell, the program director for Solar United Neighbors, which was putting the project into practice, some residents’ electricity costs in the state have increased by 60% since then.

Due to hurricanes and the Ukraine war, which increased the price of Russian natural gas, there have also been varying power cost increases in other states.

According to Florida’s Office of Public Counsel, the utility provider, Florida Power and Light is currently arguing that the state’s Office of Public Counsel should raise rates even further to close the gap to nearly $10 billion over the next four years.

The staff at Solar United has tried to inform residents that reconnecting with electricity may result in their being disconnected.

According to Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the Environmental Working Group, “consumers are left at the mercy of utilities,” and their rising rates will increase as a result of the tax credit’s early termination.

“Reinforcement by rain shadows”

There has been a lot of installation work, with some solar installers reporting having to turn away customers because the solar rooftop tax credits are set to expire in December.

Del Chiaro claims that the industry’s “we will see the rain shadow impact of this in 2026,” referring to a significant decline in business and employment that it is preparing for in the coming year.

According to Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Cinnamon Energy Systems, a San Francisco-based solar installation company, “this is a big plunge on the solar coaster.”

California Solar and Storage Association president Ed Murray stated to Al Jazeera that he anticipates that the elimination of tax credits will reduce solar unit installation and other costs by up to 12 years.

Even as the state’s air quality is likely to worsen and its climate goals are predicted to fail, according to Murray, it would also cause job losses for thousands of highly skilled workers in the sector.

The Department of Energy stated in its notification that these projects “advance the previous Administration’s wasteful Green New Scam agenda.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated in the statement that the Trump administration is “affirming its commitment to advance more affordable, trustworthy, and secure American energy and being more responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars” by returning these funds to the taxpayer.

Because solar customers pay less to utilities but still use that power when necessary, critics claim that solar projects increase the cost of households still using the power grid.

Instead, the Trump administration has supported oil and gas production through a number of initiatives, including recent plans to lease the entire ANWR to the oil and gas industry. Additionally, it made it simpler to get permits for drilling on federal lands.

rising costs

The Green New Deal, a program designed to promote economic growth and job creation while having a positive impact on the environment, was a grant funding program for renewable energy projects by the Biden administration.

However, power costs have soared significantly in many states, including Virginia, even as these projects started to roll out.

A recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that 26 states’ power costs had increased faster than their inflation, citing factors like the Ukraine war and extreme weather events like wildfires and hurricanes, among others.

According to the study, California’s prices have increased by more than 34 percent since the study’s conclusion, largely as a result of the country’s record-breaking wildfires forcing utilities to replace and strengthen their power lines. The Department of Energy canceled a number of projects, including the $ 630 million federal funding to strengthen California’s grids.

According to Ryan Schleeter, communications director of The Climate Center, a think tank with a California base, “the majority of the projects that were scrapped were mid-implementation.”

Additionally, electric vehicles (EVs) were used in more than 20% of the state’s sales over the past two years as a result of federal incentives. According to Schleeter, these enabled middle-class families to purchase EVs. The main issue will be how to be equitable, he says, with incentives ending on September 30.

According to Susan Stephenson, executive director of California Power and Light, which supports places of worship that have renewable energy, several places of worship that intended to convert to solar energy or install EV charging stations are now having trouble finding installers and have seen costs increase above their initial budget as a result of federal budget cuts.

Praileau says one of the biggest concerns he had with his congregants was the cost of power in Virginia. Praileau thinks that the state has one of the nation’s largest data centers, which could contribute to rising costs.

In the state’s governor’s elections on November 4, voter dissatisfaction with rising power costs was one of the top issues. The Democratic presidential candidate who won made the promise to lower power costs by boosting energy production and requiring more money from data centers for energy production.

Praileau hopes the new governor will also bring the solar project back into the debate over the cuts that are already being made. Florida is also the subject of ongoing litigation regarding the funding cuts.

California is one of the states that has made its own renewable energy incentive rollbacks.