President Donald Trump just appointed one of his former personal attorneys to lead a desperate last-ditch legal charge against two of his longest-detested enemies.
Lindsey Halligan, 35, assumed her new role as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia on Monday, where she’ll be taking over the office’s investigations into former FBI chief James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
A former insurance lawyer, Halligan has zero prosecutorial experience. She has, however, twice competed in the Miss Colorado USA pageant and has represented Trump since 2022, most notably in a lawsuit against CNN for allegedly comparing the president to Adolf Hitler, as well as in his defense against federal charges of concealing classified documents.
She’s also the latest of Trump’s former lawyers to enter public office, with other notable examples including Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch and Interim Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba.
Her appointment also fits in with a wider pattern of less experienced young ideologues assuming top posts in the MAGA administration, like DHS terror prevention chief Thomas Fugate, or Office of Special Counsel lead Paul Ingrassia.
Trump is reported to have forced out Hailligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, over his dissatisfaction at Siebert’s failure to secure indictments against Comey and James. The president fired Comey in 2017 after the former FBI director led an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. James, meanwhile, sued Trump in 2022 over allegations he and his family had overvalued their assets.
The statute of limitations on prospective charges against Comey apparently runs out in less than eight days. Siebert is understood to have received word from a senior official at the Justice Department last Thursday that the White House’s patience had run out. On Friday, he was fired.
Halligan has previously spoken of how she first met the president in November 2021 at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. “She had come from court and was in a suit, which probably made her stand out from other female attendees,” as the encounter was described in an April interview with Halligan in the Washington Post. “Trump noticed her, asked what she did, and made her part of his legal team in early 2022.”
Before her appointment Monday, she had spearheaded MAGA’s efforts to purge the Smithsonian Institution of “improper ideology” under Trump’s March executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” in line with the president’s arguments the museums’ exhibits focus too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the nation’s historic “success.”
In that capacity, she’d also become an increasingly visible part of the president’s new team, putting in an appearance with Trump at the U.S. Open this month alongside White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
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