Lindsey Halligan Discovers That Prosecuting Is Way Harder Than Texting

Luckily, she probably won't be doing it for much longer.

Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer LARPing as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had another bad day Tuesday.

Not as bad as last week, when her Signal messages with Lawfare’s Anna Bower made international news and enshrined “everything I ever sent you is off record” in the pantheon of Legal F-ups for the Ages. But still . . . pretty bad!

Gag me with a spoon

It started with the fallout from her Chatty Cathy episode. New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a motion for a gag order last week, noting that Halligan’s disappearing texts appear to violate Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure; the corresponding federal regulation; EDVA’s local rules; the American Bar Association’s model rules of professional conduct; and the Justice Department Manual.

Oopsie!

Halligan filed her response yesterday, and, if she possessed the capacity for shame or any legal ethics to speak of, she’d be pretty embarrassed.

“Defendant attempts to impose unilateral obligations on the Government,” she whined, complaining that the requested order would only require the government to log its contacts with the media, leaving James free to hold press conferences on the courthouse steps decrying the prosecution as a corrupt weaponization of the DOJ. How is that even fair?