On Monday afternoon, former FBI Director James Comey dropped two motions to dismiss his criminal case. Both are related to, in part, the antics of one Lindsey Halligan, everyone’s favorite insurance lawyer turned interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
This likely made for a not-fun Monday afternoon for Halligan, but then her day got hilariously worse when Lawfare’s Anna Bower dropped her story that Halligan had texted her out of the blue, via Signal, about the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Bower had tweeted about the Oct. 11 New York Times story revealing that James’s great-niece lives in the Virginia home that is the basis for the mortgage fraud case against James, and that she had testified to a different grand jury that she lived there for many years without paying rent.
That seems to be what made Lindsey Halligan lose her mind and contact Bower to complain that “your reporting in particular is just way off.”
This was probably exceedingly confusing for Bower, who does not work for The New York Times, did not write the story, and was doing no reporting. Instead, Bower had merely tweeted about the story.
Nevertheless, every time Bower asked Halligan what was false about the story or her characterization of it, Halligan offered a grievance-fueled response like, “Continue to do what you have been and you’ll be completely discredited when the evidence comes out.”
Just after Bower contacted the Department of Justice on Monday afternoon for a comment and to confirm the texts were authentic, Bower’s Signal flickered to life with Halligan saying, “By the way—everything I ever sent you is off record. You’re not a journalist so it’s weird saying that but just letting you know.”
There’s so much to unpack here.
Halligan referred to Bower as a reporter multiple times in their previous exchanges. More importantly, you can’t declare something off the record retrospectively, much less days after the fact. But when Bower explained this, Halligan came up with a different rationale: “It’s obvious the whole convo is off record. There’s disappearing messages and it’s on signal.”
It is gobsmackingly stupid to think that because you communicate on Signal and set your messages to disappear, it is off the record by default. Even setting that aside, there’s another big problem here: Halligan admitted she had set her phone to automatically delete messages that were official government communications, which are generally supposed to be preserved. (Also, hello? Ever heard of screenshots?)
Is this a good time to mention that Halligan studied broadcast journalism in college and could not feasibly have avoided learning what “off the record” means? Also, did she learn nothing from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal fiasco?
Actually, she probably did, which is that Hegseth suffered no consequences whatsoever.
And Halligan likely won’t lose her job over this, because Trump actually loves this sort of petulant, aggressive weirdness. But she might lose her job over Comey’s motion to dismiss based on asserting that Halligan was unlawfully appointed. Not because Trump cares, but because the courts do.
Two of Trump’s other temporary U.S. attorney appointees, Alina Habba and Sigal Chattah, have already been disqualified because the administration’s attempts to string together temporary appointments to avoid the Senate confirmation process are, well, not legal. Halligan is running up against the same issue and could suffer the same fate. If she does, it could render the indictment against Comey void. If she’s not legally in the job, she can’t legally indict anyone.
And yes, that would apply to the James case as well, should James go that route.
Comey’s other motion wouldn’t result in Halligan losing her job, at least not as far as a court is concerned. Comey argues the indictment should be dismissed because he is being both vindictively and selectively prosecuted.
Vindictive prosecution is exactly what it sounds like—that the prosecution is motivated by general animus toward the defendant. And Comey has everything he needs to make that argument. After all, Trump admitted that he fired U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert in favor of Halligan when Siebert wouldn’t bring charges, and then Trump celebrated the indictment on social media, making sure to thank Halligan and FBI Director Kash Patel. So thoughtful!
To prove selective prosecution, Comey has to show that other similarly situated people were not prosecuted for the same actions. Fortunately for Comey, Trump has multiple past appointees who allegedly lied to Congress.
Let’s roll back to Trump’s first term. As noted in Comey’s motion, there was then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions allegedly making false statements to Congress about his communications with Russia. There was Trump’s then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, allegedly lying about his use of a personal email account while he was Oklahoma attorney general. Then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price allegedly fibbed to Congress when he denied getting a sweet discount on buying shares of stock. And remember Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin? He allegedly lied about whether OneWest Bank, where he had been chairman and CEO, had used robo-signing of foreclosure documents.
It’s tough to get more similarly situated to Comey than these four are. They were all high-level political appointees, all accused of lying to Congress, but only Comey was charged.
Halligan is wildly overmatched here, but judging by her interactions with Bower, she remains blissfully unaware of that. She clearly thinks she’s running circles around everyone else, that she’s a unique genius who figured out how to indict Trump’s enemies when no one else could.
In reality, she has no idea what she’s doing and no business doing any of it, which means it will be a delight to see what her office manages to file in response to Comey.
