Lindsey Halligan was supposed to be Donald Trump’s handpicked closer, the loyalist prosecutor who would put Trump’s enemies, former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James behind bars. Instead, she is walking away with no legal victories and now has experts openly wondering whether she will even be allowed to keep her law license.
On Monday, United States District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie tossed the federal indictments against Comey and James, ruling that Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was unlawful and that she “had no lawful authority to present the indictment.” Every action that flowed from that defective appointment, the judge wrote, was an invalid exercise of executive power, including the headline grabbing charges against Trump’s two high profile critics.
The ruling was a huge loss for Halligan, a Florida insurance lawyer turned Trump defender who was promoted into one of the most high-profile prosecutor jobs in the country despite having no prior criminal trial experience. She was installed after the administration pushed out her predecessor, Erik Siebert, who had reportedly concluded there was not enough evidence to charge either Comey or James.
Now, in addition to seeing her big cases blown up on appointment grounds, Halligan is facing a wave of ethics scrutiny over how she handled the prosecutions.
On CNN, national security attorney Bradley Moss did not sugarcoat the stakes. “It doesn’t look good for her in terms of any real idea that she’s going to get to remain there, unless somehow they succeed on appeal,” Moss said, calling the situation “a mess of their own making” and “the president’s personal vendetta” that had “blown up in their faces on a Monday morning as we’re getting ready for Thanksgiving.”
Moss said his “bigger concern” for Halligan is what the Comey litigation has already revealed about how she presented the case to the grand jury. “That speaks to potential ethics violation, that speaks to potential disbarment at some point by whichever state bar she’s licensed in,” he warned, adding, “That’s no small thing… in terms of actually being a licensed attorney to practice, that’s in real jeopardy from what we learned in this whole case.”
A watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, has already filed a bar complaint in Florida and Virginia, where Halligan is licensed and where she led the prosecutions, accusing her of “egregious” misconduct in service of Trump’s revenge agenda. The complaint says Halligan “may have violated” multiple rules of professional conduct, citing alleged false or misleading statements, bringing charges not supported by probable cause, and engaging in improper out of court comments about the cases.
The filing also highlights a bizarre Signal and text exchange Halligan reportedly initiated with legal journalist Anna Bower about grand jury matters, which the group argues raises its own ethics issues. “Failing to discipline Ms. Halligan under these egregious circumstances will embolden others who would use our system of justice for their own political ends,” the complaint warns.
Halligan’s rapid rise and even faster fall will become a case study in what happens when a political vendetta is turned into federal prosecutions. According to public reporting, Trump personally pushed Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring Halligan in after railing for years that Comey and James should be prosecuted, then cheered when grand juries finally indicted both of them under her watch.
Now those cases are gone, at least for the moment, and the spotlight has swung back on the prosecutor herself. The Justice Department has indicated it may appeal Currie’s decision, and in theory the charges could be refiled by a properly appointed prosecutor, although Comey’s case is likely tangled up in statute of limitations problems.
For now, the lawyer who was supposed to deliver Trump a pair of prized scalps is looking at a very different kind of reckoning, one where the question is not what punishment Comey and James might face, but whether Lindsey Halligan will be allowed to keep practicing law at all.
