The carpet and the mountain of justice misconducts by Edoardo Moretti

There’s a certain theatrical quality to the way the American justice system has been forced, over the past decade, to perform for an audience that never bought tickets but keeps showing up anyway. We’ve grown used to indictments that read like political fan fiction, prosecutors who seem to have leapt fully formed from the fever swamps of cable news, and statements from public officials that fall somewhere between Greek tragedy and slapstick. But even in this crowded landscape of institutional oddities, the latest episode, District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie’s dismissal of the criminal cases brought against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, manages to achieve a kind of sublime absurdity.

The core of the ruling is almost elegant in its simplicity, Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor appointed to bring the case, was never legally appointed at all. It’s the sort of bureaucratic footnote that in a better-functioning moment in American governance would be just that a footnote. Yet here, it becomes the entire story. Judge Currie’s finding amounts to saying that the architect of this legal assault was essentially a squatter in the seat of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. And with that, everything built on that foundation collapses.

Enter, stage right, the attorney general, promising an appeal, vowing this isn’t over, insisting that the dismissal itself is a miscarriage of justice, even as the scaffolding of the case lies in splinters at his feet.

It would all be merely farcical if it weren’t also so predictable.

For years, the pattern has repeated: a handpicked loyalist elevated to a position of immense prosecutorial power; a case targeting one of the administration’s greatest political irritants; a rollout drenched in primetime bravado; and then, eventually, the unraveling, the judicial equivalent of turning on the kitchen lights and watching the whole enterprise scatter.

This time, the targets were especially symbolic: Comey, the ghost who never stops haunting the former president’s psyche, and Letitia James, the New York power attorney whose investigations have so consistently pierced the membrane of myth that surrounds Trump’s business empire. Bringing them down would have been a kind of operatic revenge, the stuff of presidential daydreams.

But even dream sequences require continuity and the casting here was all wrong. Halligan’s appointment was, in retrospect, a case study in arrogance disguised as administrative oversight. To call her “Trump-installed” is both accurate and insufficient; she was the kind of appointment that said the quiet part loud. Her presence telegraphed intent long before any indictment was unsealed. It’s no wonder Judge Currie’s ruling seemed to carry the faint aroma of judicial exasperation. Not for the first time, a court was being asked to treat political theater as legal architecture. And not for the first time, it refused.

What makes this fiasco especially revealing is not the legal failure itself but the narrative that will inevitably be woven around it. The attorney general has already begun stitching the first threads: the courts are biased, the system is rigged, the deep state strikes again. These refrains have been repeated so often that their cadence is practically patriotic. But repetition does not make them true; it only makes them familiar.

The truth is far less conspiratorial and far more mundane. The case collapsed not because of a vast institutional resistance but because the administration governing its prosecution cannot seem to manage the basic mechanics of governance. Incompetence is not as thrilling as sabotage, but it is far more common.

Still, one has to admire the rhetorical choreography. The promise to appeal even if such an appeal is little more than a procedural ghost ship, allows the administration to keep the story alive. It keeps the loyalists engaged, the critics enraged, and the legal press corps on a low simmer. It also delays the inevitable reckoning: that this was never a serious case, that it was never meant to be, and that its downfall was baked in from the start.

And yet, the most instructive image to emerge from all of this comes not from the courtroom but from the metaphor the public has now started repeating: there is only so much you can shove under the carpet.

The carpet, in this metaphor, is of course the administration’s preferred storage unit for political embarrassments. Over the past years, it has bulged with inspector general reports, contradictory executive memos, failed legal crusades, and a revolving cast of officials whose tenure could be measured in lunar cycles. And now, added to the pile, lies the crumpled remains of the Comey-James prosecutions, a case so poorly engineered it barely survived its own unveiling.

The attorney general may try to sweep this one under as well, but geometry has limits. Eventually the carpet rises to meet the furniture, and the furniture shifts, and someone, usually a judge, stumbles on the whole thing and pulls the corner back.

In the end, what remains is not some grand political victory or symbolic cleansing. What remains is a familiar tableau: institutions battered, norms ignored, professional standards contorted into partisan configuration, and a public asked again to suspend disbelief.

And yet, the courts, those stubborn guardians of process, those maddeningly patient custodians of procedure, continue to do the quiet work of pulling the carpet back down to the floor.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not headline-friendly. But it is how the republic endures.

Even when the room is a mess.