Lindsey Halligan, Prosecutor In Letitia James Case, Sent Unsolicited Texts To Reporter

So, it turns out a funny thing happens when a sitting president taps his personal attorney to serve as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, despite said attorney having no prosecutorial experience whatsoever…

The idiot president runs the risk of having high-profile cases prosecuted by another idiot.

My GOD, y’all — Lindsey Halligan is an idiot!

According to Newsweek, Halligan — who has been placed in charge of the bogus, MAGA revenge fantasy prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James — is facing scrutiny over a series of text messages exchanged with journalist Anna Bower of Lawfare, messages she initiated because she didn’t like the way Bower was reporting James’ prosecution.

In an article recently published by Lawfare, Bower recalled that, on Oct. 11, she got a new message alert on Signal purported to be from Halligan.

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” the text read. “You are reporting things that are simply not true. Thought you should have a heads up.”

Bower wrote that she initially “assumed the exchange was a hoax,” because “while it is not unusual for lawyers to reach out to me about my reporting or commentary, it is highly unusual for a U.S. attorney to do so regarding an ongoing prosecution—particularly in a high-profile case in which her conduct is already the subject of immense public scrutiny.”

Nah, Bower is being nice. It’s not just “highly unusual,” it’s dumb as hell for a top prosecutor to go blabbing to a reporter with unsolicited discussions about the ongoing prosecution of the attorney general of the fourth most populated state in the U.S. Bower wrongly thought it was a hoax because it had to be a hoax, because this is the kind of prosecutorial snafu that happens in sitcoms or in some Law & Order script that Dick Wolf thought was too far-fetched to make into an episode — but this kind of stupidity doesn’t happen in real life.

But wait, Halligan gets dumber.

According to Bower, Trump’s reverse-DEI hire sent her dozens of messages via Signal.

SIGNAL!!!

Imagine being so daft that, not only did you, as a federal prosecutor, send dozens of messages to a journalist — who asked you for none of those messages — about an ongoing, high-profile prosecution on behalf of the president, but you did so over the same platform that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was, just a few months ago, dragged very publicly for exposing confidential war plans on.

But wait, HALLIGAN GETS EVEN DUMBER!!

After sending all of these dozens of text messages, something apparently finally clicked in the big bubble of air that is Halligan’s head, and she finally thought to introduce the words “off the record” into the conversation.

“By the way, everything I ever sent you is off record,” Halligan wrote, according to a screenshot of the text thread. “You’re not a journalist, so it’s weird saying that, but just letting you know.”

Bower, of course, is a journalist, and the whole discussion was only “weird” because a U.S. attorney is out here DMing reporters with an unprompted debate on the facts of a case she isn’t supposed to be talking to any civilian about, let alone a journalist who has already reported things she didn’t like.

“I’m sorry, but that’s not how this works,” Bower rightfully responded. “You don’t get to say that in retrospect.”

“Yes, I do. Off the record,” the legal professional who doesn’t seem to have a handle on how the law works shot back.

The two continued to go back and forth about what the very simple words “off the record” mean, but since Halligan didn’t have a leg to stand on in that debate, she just basically ended up giving Bower a whole new story she wasn’t even seeking.

“She knew I was a journalist,” Bower wrote. “She approached me. She invited my questions. She even encouraged me to stop chasing other reporters’ stories and focus on my own.”

Stephen Gillers, professor at NYU School of Law, told Newsweek that when lawyers comment publicly on a pending criminal matter, “there’s always the risk that what they say could create a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing a fair trial.”

From Newsweek:

He pointed to professional rules that forbid such statements — notably ABA Model Rule 3.6, which limits lawyer speech that could affect a proceeding, and Rule 3.8, which bars prosecutors from making comments that might heighten public condemnation of the accused.

“Seasoned prosecutors know this intuitively—or learn it early in the job—and stay far away from any risk of crossing those red lines,” Gillers said. “Halligan’s outreach suggests she either never absorbed those lessons or ignored them.”

Ahh, but we’re not talking about a seasoned prosecutor; we’re talking about another one of Trump’s stooges who signed on to prosecute James for alleged bank fraud, replacing at least two seasoned prosecutors who were fired by the Trump administration for opposing the charges they believed had no merit.

But again, this is what happens when the president hands an important position to a loyalist instead of someone with experience.

Here’s what the New York Times reported about Halligan last month:

As one of his personal lawyers, Ms. Halligan, a go-for-the-jugular loyalist who is comfortable on television, denounced the F.B.I. when agents seized classified documents in 2022 from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida. As a White House special assistant, she has taken the lead in scrutinizing exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution for “improper ideology.”

Lacking from her background altogether, however, is any experience in working as a prosecutor or overseeing the complex national security cases that regularly pass through the Eastern District of Virginia. Court records show that Ms. Halligan, who has largely spent her career handling insurance matters in Florida, has filed appearances in only a handful of federal cases during her decade in the law — all of them as one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.

Oh, that’s right — Halligan, who is in no way a historian, is the very same attorney Trump consulted in his agenda to rid the Smithsonian of non-whitewashed Black history.

“I would say that improper ideology would be weaponizing history,” Halligan said earlier this year, according to the Washington Post. “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.”

So, the white woman put in charge of deciding how much Black history is too much Black history, despite having no experience as a historian, has also been put in charge of what easily appears to be a bogus, vengeful prosecution against an accomplished Black woman, despite having no experience as a prosecutor.

SEE ALSO:

James Comey Indicted Over Alleged Russian Collusion Lies

Trump’s DOJ Charges AG Letitia James With Bank Fraud