Who Is Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s Newest Yes-Woman?
New York attorney general Letitia James was indicted on Thursday on mortgage-fraud charges in the latest example of President Donald Trump using the Justice Department to go after his political enemies. James spent years investigating Trump for property fraud, eventually filing a civil case against him in 2022, which she won. Her indictment came shortly after former FBI director James Comey — another Trump foe, who was fired by the president in 2017 after confirming the FBI was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election — was indicted on charges of making false statements to the Senate and obstruction of justice.
For months now, Trump has been trying to bring charges against both James and Comey, even if the cases aren’t particularly strong. “This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system,” James said in a statement. She also said the prosecutor in her case was someone who is “blindly loyal not to the law, but to the president.” That prosecutor is Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer and loyal Trump aide with basically no experience in criminal law, who will be handling two of Trump’s most ambitious vendettas against people who spoke out against him.
In September, Trump appointed Halligan to be the interim United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, replacing his own appointee, Erik Siebert. He also formally nominated her to permanently fill the position, which will require Senate confirmation. Usually, the people who serve as a U.S. Attorney have been working as prosecutors for years and years, but Halligan got to cut the line, seemingly because she will do whatever Trump asks her to. So who is she? Here’s what you need to know about Trump’s new favorite attack dog.
Who is Lindsey Halligan?
Prior to entering Trump’s orbit, Halligan competed in the Miss Colorado pageant in 2009 (a semifinalist) and 2010 (third runner-up), according to the Washington Post. She went on to study law at the University of Miami, where she interned at the school’s innocence clinic trying to exonerate wrongfully convicted people. She also interned at the Miami-Dade County public defender’s office. After graduation, she pivoted away from public-interest law, opting instead to represent insurance companies at Cole, Scott & Kissane in Florida, where she became a partner in 2018.
In November 2021, she met Trump at his golf club in West Palm Beach and went on to join his personal legal team the next year. Halligan was one of the lawyers by Trump’s side when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Since then, she has remained in the president’s inner circle and was rewarded with a plum role in his second administration.
Following Trump’s inauguration this January, Halligan was named White House senior associate staff secretary and was tasked with “removing improper ideology” from the Smithsonian after apparently visiting the D.C. museums and going to Trump with her concerns. “I would say that improper ideology would be weaponizing history,” Halligan told the Washington Post in April. “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.”
“And so I talked to the president about it,” Halligan said, “and suggested an executive order, and he gave me his blessing, and here we are.” The executive order Trump signed, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” claimed that the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and that the institution had to be restored to its “rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.” In layman’s terms, the museums had to cool it with all the talk of America being built on racism.
In August, Halligan sent a letter to Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, announcing an audit of eight Smithsonian museums “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” Sadly, she’s not going to get to be the one to oversee her dream of a less woke Smithsonian because she was called up to serve as the president’s prosecutor of choice.
How did she get her prosecutor gig?
Basically, the guy in the role before her had a bit too much integrity for the job. Trump has been pressuring the Justice Department to go after James and Comey for months now — her for alleged property fraud, him for allegedly making a false statement in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee — but, according to the New York Times, experienced DoJ prosecutors reported internally that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against either.
On September 19, Erik Siebert resigned as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after the president told reporters, “I want him out.” Siebert, who was put in the role by Trump in January, had reportedly “balked at bringing criminal charges against” Comey and James, according to the New Yorker. The Times reported that Siebert told some colleagues that quitting was “the easiest thing” he had ever done.
On September 20, Trump shared a Truth Social post that was reportedly intended as a private message to Attorney General Pam Bondi, ranting about how nothing was being done about “Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia.” He insisted there were strong cases to be made against his foes and told Bondi (and, deliberately or not, the rest of us) that Halligan is a “really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot.”
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump continued. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” In another post, Trump said Halligan’s job would be to “get things moving.” She was officially appointed to Siebert’s former role a few hours later.
Is she doing a good job?
That depends on who you ask. She is doing exactly what Trump wanted her to do, which is indict his enemies. In that sense, she’s an A-plus foot soldier for the president. In every other sense, she is kind of a disaster. According to the Times, she went to the wrong courtroom when trying to secure Comey, stood on the wrong side of the judge, and then “appeared confused about the paperwork she just had signed.” To be fair, it was her first time ever appearing in criminal court as a prosecutor.
While Halligan did manage to secure an indictment against Comey, it’s unclear if it’s going to stick. Thanks to Trump’s incessant posting and public badgering of Comey, Halligan might not even make it long enough to prosecute her first criminal trial. Comey’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, told the court on Wednesday he planned to file two motions that could get the whole case dismissed. Fitzgerald said he intended to file one motion calling the charges against Comey “vindictive prosecution” and another claiming that Halligan’s appointment to the U.S. Attorney position was unlawful. While vindictive-prosecution motions rarely amount to anything, Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University criminal-law professor, told the Times that this might be the rare instance in which the defense is able to pull it off, given that the “sequences of events here” are “so extraordinary.”
When it comes to James, Halligan reportedly blindsided Bondi with news of the indictment, proving that she is loyal to Trump’s whims above all else. According to CNN, Bondi, who sits above Halligan in the administrative chain of command, was one of the people who thought the case against James was weak. So, again, Halligan is not doing a “good job” at her literal job, but she is excelling at doing exactly what Trump wants her to do.
Does anybody like her?
Other than Trump, it doesn’t seem like Halligan is very popular among her more experienced colleagues. She reportedly had trouble finding support within her office to indict Comey, prompting two North Carolina assistant U.S. attorneys to join the case. Seems like things are going really well over there.
Trump installing someone to do his bidding regardless of evidence has prompted an outcry across partisan lines. “This is what tyranny looks like,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “President Trump is using the Justice Department as his personal attack dog, targeting Attorney General Tish James for the ‘crime’ of prosecuting him for fraud — and winning.”
“One U.S. Attorney already refused this case,” Schumer continued. “So, Trump hand-picked an unqualified hack that would go after another political enemy. This isn’t justice. It’s revenge.”
Republican senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina was also wary about Trump’s attacks. “Whatever threshold gets set here is the new floor for future prosecutions when roles are reversed. That’s just the way this town works,” he told a CNN reporter on Thursday.
However, Halligan really only needs to stay on Trump’s good side to keep her job. That will probably include going after more people who have stood up to the president in the past. The DoJ is currently investigating democratic senator Adam Schiff (the “Schifty” Schiff of Trump’s Truth Social post) for alleged mortgage fraud and Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton for allegedly mishandling classified information (an investigation that began during the Biden administration). Both men have previously clashed with Trump: Schiff headed up the president’s impeachment trial in 2019 and Bolton reportedly got a bit too much credit for Trump’s national-security decisions.
If Halligan is able to convince grand juries to indict Schiff, Bolton, or anyone else on Trump’s bad side, she’ll probably be sticking around for a while. That’s a pretty big “if,” considering she doesn’t really seem to know what she’s doing. That being said, this administration loves inexperienced people creating maximum chaos throughout the federal government, so why stop now?
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