CNN
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We told you Lindsey Halligan would make some history, and it just keeps repeating itself.
The former Broomfield resident, Miss Colorado USA contestant and Regis University graduate moved to Florida to attend law school, then wound up becoming a personal attorney for Donald Trump after confidential documents were seized from Mar-A-Lago in 2022. He brought her with him to the White House in January, where Halligan was quickly assigned numerous tasks, including working with J.D. Vance to clean up the Smithsonian to show that slavery wasn’t all that bad.
In late September, the 36-year-old who had never prosecuted a case got a new assignment: Trump made her chief prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, replacing Trump appointee Erik Siebert, one of several professional prosecutors to exit that office. Within five days, and with a statute of limitations clock ticking, Halligan had secured an indictment of James Comey, the former head of the FBI, alleging that in September 2020, Comey obstructed a congressional investigation into the disclosure of sensitive information and also made a false statement: that “he did not authorize someone at the FBI to be an anonymous source,” according to a September 25 Department of Justice announcement.
Halligan should know all about such journalistic definitions, since she majored in history and journalism at Regis. But apparently she missed a class or two: This week, Anna Bower, a reporter for Lawfare, revealed that Halligan had initiated a 33-hour text exchange with this unsolicited, hardly anonymous message: “Anna, Lindsey Halligan here.” She told Bower she wanted to correct inaccurate coverage of her second big indictment, of New York Attorney Letitia James, who had the misfortune to buy a secondary residence in Virginia.
Only later did Halligan insist that the messages were “off the record.” Too late.
For the record, James, who successfully brought a civil fraud case against Trump last year, is in federal court in Norfolk, Virginia, today, October 24, to answer charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution regarding the mortgage on a second home. Halligan will be on hand, too, of course.
James’s legal team plans to ask a federal judge to dismiss the charges on the grounds that Halligan was unlawfully appointed by Trump. Comey made the same argument in court on October 20. “The United States cannot charge, maintain, and prosecute a case through an official who has no entitlement to exercise governmental authority,” his lawyers claimed; they also asked a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case against Comey because he’s the victim of vindicative prosecution by Donald Trump.
“Bedrock principles of due process and equal protection have long ensured that government officials may not use courts to punish and imprison their perceived personal and political enemies,” his lawyers said. “But that is exactly what happened here.”
But for Halligan, appointed by a president who just leveled a wing of the White House down to bedrock, there may be no bottom. History is happening here.
