It’s been several weeks since Lindsey Halligan was told in no uncertain terms by a federal court that she is not the interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and has never ever legally occupied that role, despite being appointed by President Donald Trump.
But Halligan, an insurance lawyer with zero experience as a prosecutor, is as persistent as she is unqualified. So she has, inexplicably, continued to sign off on criminal indictments as “United States Attorney and Special Attorney.”
Yeah, about that …
Yesterday, U.S. Judge David Novak, a Trump appointee, ordered Halligan to explain why she signed off as the U.S. attorney on a criminal indictment in a case before him. Novak gave her one week, and if Halligan had any real experience whatsoever, being the subject of this order would leave her terrified.
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Halligan’s response—which Novak specified must be signed by her—must explain the basis for calling herself a U.S. attorney despite a court ruling to the contrary. She also has to set forth reasons why the court shouldn’t strike her name from the indictment.
But Novak didn’t stop there. Halligan also has to explain how calling herself U.S. attorney in legal filings doesn’t constitute a false or misleading statement in violation of the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct, the Eastern District of Virginia Local Criminal Rules, and the Federal Rules of Disciplinary Enforcement.
Novak also dropped in a wee bit from a relevant case that, again, if Halligan understood anything, would be grounds for freaking the absolute fuck out about her future as an attorney:
Acts or omissions by an attorney admitted to practice before this Court, individually or in concert with any other person or persons, which violate the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct adopted by this Court shall constitute misconduct and shall be grounds for discipline.
The dumbest thing about this whole situation is that the underlying case looks like a bog-standard criminal prosecution for attempted bank robbery and hijacking a car. Halligan isn’t even the attorney who presented the case to the grand jury—a regular line attorney from the district did.
So why make this the centerpiece of a showdown between the Department of Justice and the judges that its attorneys have to appear before? Attorney General Pam Bondi has been doing a round of “How dare you!” about this for quite some time, insisting that judges are “engaging in an unconscionable campaign of bias and hostility” against Halligan by saying that perhaps someone who is not the U.S. attorney should not be signing things as the U.S. attorney.
Bondi is doing this pursuant to an Office of Legal Counsel memo that she had the pet attorney loyalists in that office invent, saying that Halligan can sign off as U.S. attorney as long as Deputy Attorney Todd Blanche and the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for EDVA, Robert McBride, sign off as well.
Federal judges are, of course, in no way bound by some random OLC memo that Bondi had cooked up, which is why Novak is ordering Halligan to explain herself.
It isn’t clear whether this is just the DOJ flexing its muscles and showing that it’s more than happy to violate court orders, or if it is part of some larger strategy to keep the indictments against Trump enemies James Comey and Letitia James alive by keeping Halligan installed while the government appeals her disqualification.
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But it isn’t like Halligan slapping her name on totally unrelated criminal indictments helps with that. If anything, all it is doing is serving to irritate the judges in the district. Eventually, those judges may just start tossing indictments that Halligan signs, a thing normal prosecutors tend to want to avoid.
This really highlights how little the DOJ cares about the real work of actual U.S. attorneys, which is successfully prosecuting crimes in their district. Instead, it’s clear this office, with Halligan atop it, is seen as the best place for Trump to wreak vengeance.
And if that means that a few actual criminals end up back on the street? Apparently that’s just the price that the people who live in the Eastern District of Virginia have to pay.
