Top Justice Department officials defended Lindsey Halligan’s attempts to remain in her position as a U.S. attorney in court filings Tuesday, responding to a federal judge who demanded to know why she was continuing to do so after another judge had found that her appointment was invalid.

The filing, signed by Halligan, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, accused a Trump-appointed judge of “gross abuse of power,” and attempting to “coerce the Executive Branch into conformity.”

Last week, U.S. District Judge David Novak, who sits on the federal bench in Richmond, ordered Halligan to provide the basis for her repeated use of the title of U.S. attorney and explain why it “does not constitute a false or misleading statement.” 

Novak gave Halligan seven days to respond to his order and brief on why he “should not strike Ms. Halligan’s identification as United States attorney” after she listed herself on an indictment returned in the Eastern District of Virginia in December as a “United States attorney and special attorney.”

U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie had ruled in November that Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney was invalid and violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, and she dismissed the cases Halligan had brought against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. 

The statute invoked by the Trump administration to appoint Halligan allows an interim U.S. attorney to serve for 120 days. After that, the interim U.S. attorney may be extended by the U.S. district court judges for the region. 

Currie found that the 120-day clock began when Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert was initially appointed in January 2025. Currie concluded that when that timeframe expired, Bondi’s authority to appoint an interim U.S. attorney expired along with it. 

The judge ruled that Halligan had been serving unlawfully since Sept. 22 and concluded that “all actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment” had to be set aside. That included the Comey and James indictments.

In their response, Bondi, Blanche and Halligan called Novak’s move an “inquisition,” “insult,” and a “cudgel” against the executive branch. The Justice Department argued that Currie’s ruling in November applied only to the Comey and James cases and did not bar Halligan from calling herself U.S. attorney in other cases that she oversees. 

“Adding insult to error, [Novak’s order] posits that the United States’ continued assertion of its legal position that Ms. Halligan properly serves as the United States Attorney amounts to a factual misrepresentation that could trigger attorney discipline. The Court’s thinly veiled threat to use attorney discipline to cudgel the Executive Branch into conforming its legal position in all criminal prosecutions to the views of a single district judge is a gross abuse of power and an affront to the separation of powers,” the Justice Department wrote.

In his earlier order, Novak said that Currie’s decision “remains binding precedent in this district and is not subject to being ignored.”

The Justice Department called Currie’s ruling “erroneous”: and said that Halligan is entitled to maintain her position “notwithstanding a single district judge’s contrary view.”

On Monday, the second-highest ranking federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, Robert McBride, was fired after he refused to help lead the Justice Department’s prosecution of Comey, a source familiar with the matter told CBS News. McBride is a former longtime federal prosecutor in Kentucky’s Eastern District and had only been on the job as first assistant U.S. attorney for a few months after joining the office in the fall. 

Halligan is a former insurance lawyer who was a member of President Trump’s legal team, and joined Mr. Trump’s White House staff after he won a second term in 2024. In September, Halligan was selected to serve as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after her predecessor abruptly left the post amid concerns he would be forced out for failing to prosecute James.

Just days after she was appointed, Halligan sought and secured a two-count indictment against Comey alleging he lied to Congress during testimony in September 2020. James, the New York attorney general, was indicted on bank fraud charges in early October. Both pleaded not guilty and pursued several arguments to have their respective indictments dismissed, including the validity of Halligan’s appointment, and claims of vindictive prosecution.

Scott Adams, the controversial cartoonist who skewered corporate culture, has died at age 68, He announced in May 2025 that he had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live.

Months later, in November, Adams took to X to request — and receive — some very public help from President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in addressing health insurance issues that had delayed his treatment with an FDA-approved cancer drug called Pluvicto.

Adams said he was able to book an appointment the next day. Despite the Trump administration’s public intervention, Adams shared on his YouTube show in early January 2026 that “the odds of me recovering are essentially zero.”

Adams’ former wife, Shelly Miles, announced his death Tuesday during a YouTube livestream, and then read a statement from Adams who said, “I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my life, I ask you pay it forward as best you can.”

Adams rose to fame in the early 1990s with his comic strip Dilbert, satirizing white-collar culture based on his own experiences working in company offices. He made headlines again in the final years of his life for controversial comments about race, gender and other topics, which led to Dilbert‘s widespread cancellation in 2023.

Dilbert, which at its height was syndicated in some 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries, spawned a number of books, a video game and two seasons of an animated sitcom.

“I think you have to be fundamentally irrational to think that you can make money as a cartoonist, and so I can never answer succinctly why it is that I thought this would work,” Adams told NPR’s Weekend Edition in 1996. “It was about the same cost as buying a lottery ticket and about the same odds of succeeding. And I buy a lottery ticket, so why not?”

He said that he had “pretty much always wanted to be a famous cartoonist,” even applying to the Famous Artists School, a correspondence art course, as a pre-teen.

“I was 11 years old, and I’d filled out the application saying that I wanted to be a cartoonist,” he said. “It turns out, as they explained in their rejection letter, that you have to be at least 12 years old to be a famous cartoonist.”

Turning to more practical matters, Adams studied economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. and earned an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also trained as a hypnotist at the Clement School of Hypnosis in the 1980s.

Adams began his career at Crocker National Bank, working what he described in a blog post as a “number of humiliating and low paying jobs: teller (robbed twice at gunpoint), computer programmer, financial analyst, product manager, and commercial lender.”

He then spent nearly a decade working at Pacific Bell — the California telephone company now owned by AT&T — in various jobs “that defy description but all involve technology and finances,” as Adams put it in his biography. It was there that he started drawing Dilbert, working on the strip on mornings, evenings and weekends from 1989 until 1995.

“You get real cynical if you spend more than five minutes in a cubicle,” he told NPR’s Weekend Edition in 2002. “But I certainly always planned that I would escape someday, as soon as I got escape velocity.”

Adams satirized corporate culture for decades 

Scott Adams works on his comic strip in his California studio in 2006. He announced in May that he was dying of metastatic prostate cancer.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

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Dilbert revolves around its eponymous white-collar engineer as he navigates his company’s comically dysfunctional bureaucracy, alongside his sidekick: an anthropomorphized, megalomaniac dog named Dogbert.

“Dilbert is a composite of my co-workers over the years,” Adams wrote on his website. “He emerged as the main character of my doodles. I started using him for business presentations and got great responses … Dogbert was created so Dilbert would have someone to talk to.”

Dilbert — with his trademark curly head, round glasses and always-upturned red and black tie — fights a constant battle for his sanity amidst a micromanaged, largely illogical corporate environment full of pointless meetings, technical difficulties, too many buzzwords and an out-of-touch manager known only as Pointy-haired Boss.

Even after Adams quit his day job, he kept a firm grasp on the absurdities and mundanities of cubicle life with help from his devoted audience.

He included his email address on the strip and said he got hundreds of messages each day. Recurring reader suggestions ranged from stolen refrigerator lunches to bosses’ unrealistic expectations.

“So they all, for example, say, ‘I need this report in a week, but make sure that I get it two weeks early so I could look at it,’” Adams said. “Just bizarre stories where it’s clear that they either have never owned a watch or a calendar or they are in some kind of a time warp.”

Dilbert‘s storylines evolved alongside office culture, taking aim at a growing range of societal and technological topics over the years. In 2022, Adams introduced Dave, the strip’s first Black character, who identifies as white — a choice critics interpreted as poking fun at DEI initiatives.

That ushered in an era of anti-woke plotlines that saw dozens of U.S. newspapers drop the strip in 2022, foreshadowing its widespread cancellation just a year later.

The comic strip was cancelled over Adams’ comments

Adams didn’t limit himself to cartoons. He was a proponent of what he called the “talent stack,” combining multiple common skills in a unique and valuable way: like drawing, humor and risk tolerance, in his case.

He ventured briefly into food retail at the turn of the millennium, selling vegetarian, microwavable burritos called Dilberitos. He published several novels and nonfiction books unrelated to the Dilbert universe over the years.

Adams was open about his health struggles throughout his career, including the movement disorder focal dystonia — which particularly affected his drawing hand — and, years later, spasmodic dysphonia, an involuntary clenching of the vocal cords that he managed to cure through an experimental surgery.

And he opined on social and political events on “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” his YouTube talk series with over 180,000 subscribers.

His commentary, which often touched on race and other hot-button issues, led to Dilbert‘s widespread cancellation in February 2023.

In a YouTube livestream that month, Adams — while discussing a Rasmussen public opinion poll asking readers whether they agree “It’s OK to be white” (which is considered an alt-right slogan) — urged white people to “get the hell away from Black people,” labeling them a “hate group.” The backlash was swift: Dozens of newspapers across the country ditched Dilbert, and the comic’s distributor dropped Adams.

The incident also renewed focus on numerous controversial comments Adams had made in the past, including about race, men’s rights, the Holocaust and COVID-19 vaccines. Adams defended his remarks as hyperbole, and later said getting “canceled” had improved his life, with public support coming from conservative figures like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk.

Adams, in his final years, was a vocal supporter of President Trump and a critic of Democrats.

But he extended his “respect and compassion” to former President Joe Biden in a video the day after Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis became public in May 2025.

The prognosis was personal for Adams: He shared that he too had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live, saying he expected “to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”

“I’ve just sort of processed it, so it just sort of is what it is,” he said on his YouTube show. “Everybody has to die, as far as I know.”

Iran’s theocratic rulers are under the most intense pressure they’ve felt in years, as President Trump leaves the option of a U.S. military intervention on the table in the face of a fast-mounting death toll amid more than two weeks of anti-government protests across the Islamic Republic.

Mr. Trump said Sunday that Iranian officials had called him looking “to negotiate” after his repeated threats to intervene if authorities kill protesters. In an unusual move, meanwhile, Iran‘s state-controlled media aired video on Sunday showing mass casualties in and outside a morgue in a Tehran suburb.

The video shared widely online shows dozens of bodies outside the morgue, which CBS News has geolocated to the southern Tehran suburb of Kahrizak. The bodies were wrapped in black bags, and people can be seen grieving and searching for their loved ones at the site.

The state TV reporter says in the clip that some of those seen dead may have been involved in violence, but that “the majority of them are ordinary people, and their families are ordinary people as well.” 

Video posted by social media users on Sunday showed scenes from the same morgue, and people could be heard wailing in the background as others appeared to be looking for loved ones amid the bodies.  

It is unclear why Iranian authorities might have chosen to show the mass casualties, but it could be an attempt to show sympathy with the protesters and to bolster their narrative that it is more radical actors, inspired by Mr. Trump’s messages of support, behind the violence, not the government.

President Trump and Iranian officials have escalated their warnings over the past week, with both sides insisting they’re ready for, but not seeking a military confrontation. 

On Sunday, however, Mr. Trump said Iran’s leadership had called looking to talk.

Trump issues fresh warning, says Iran seeking negotiations

“The leaders of Iran called” yesterday, he told reporters Sunday on Air Force One, saying “a meeting is being set up … They want to negotiate.”

“We may have to act before a meeting,” Mr. Trump warned. He first warned 10 days ago that if Iran killed protesters, the U.S. would “come to their rescue,” but he’s yet to say what exactly would prompt some action against the regime, or what that might entail.

A senior U.S. official confirmed to CBS News on Sunday that the president had been briefed on new options for military strikes in Iran, after Mr. Trump warned that if the regime started “killing people like they have in the past, we would get involved.”

“We’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts,” he said at the White House. “And that doesn’t mean boots on the ground, but it means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts.”

The U.S. has not yet moved any forces in preparation for potential strikes on Iran, officials with the military’s Central Command told CBS News over the weekend.   

Iran’s top diplomat claims protests “under total control”

Iran did not confirm any direct outreach to the Trump administration, but speaking on Monday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi suggested the regime had brought the protests under control – repeating the government’s claim that the U.S. was to blame for the violence.

The “situation is now under total control,” Araghchi said, according to the Reuters news agency, as Iranian state TV aired video of massive pro-government demonstrations around the country.

Government-controlled broadcaster IRIB called one demonstration and funeral march an “Iranian uprising against American-Zionist terrorism.”

In the face of Mr. Trump’s repeated threats, Araghchi said Iran was “ready for war, but also for dialogue” with the U.S. at any time.

In another indication that the regime may believe it is weathering the storm, the foreign minister said internet service would be resumed in coordination with Iran’s security services, though he offered no specific timeline. 

Rights groups say death toll from protests could be in the thousands

According to human rights groups based outside the country, which rely on contacts inside Iran, the death toll has already climbed into the hundreds. 

The Washington D.C.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said that, as of Sunday, the 15th day of protests, at least 544 people had been killed, including 483 protesters and 47 members of the security forces. HRANA said the unrest had manifested in 186 cities across all of Iran’s 31 provinces.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), which is also based in the U.S., said over the weekend that it had “eyewitness accounts and credible reports indicating that hundreds of protesters have been killed across Iran during the current internet shutdown,” accusing the regime of carrying out “a massacre.” 

The Iran Human Rights (IHR) organization, based in Norway, said Saturday that it had confirmed at least 192 protesters were killed, but that the number could be over 2,000.

“Unverified reports indicate that at least several hundreds, and according to some sources, more than 2,000 people may have been killed,” IHR said in a statement, adding that according to its estimate, more than 2,600 protesters had been arrested. 

HRANA estimates that over 10,000 people have been detained.