On Monday, Lawfare’s Anna Bower reported on a stunning Signal exchange she had with Lindsey Halligan, the loyalist lawyer whom Donald Trump installed as interim United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia with an explicit mission to go after his political foes. Halligan—who had no experience as a prosecutor before she brought an indictment against James Comey days after being sworn in—had initiated a correspondence with Bower over the secure-messaging app just to browbeat Bower over her “way off” and “biased” reporting. That “reporting,” as it were, was actually a tweet summarizing parts of a New York Times story (with screenshots included) about the case Halligan had brought against New York attorney general Letitia James.
Bower asked what, exactly, she had gotten wrong. Halligan wouldn’t say, and eventually went quiet—until Bower sought comment from the Justice Department on the extraordinary matter of a US attorney discussing an active case with a member of the press. That’s when Halligan went into cleanup mode.
“By the way—everything I ever sent you is off record,” Halligan texted. “You’re not a journalist so it’s weird saying that but just letting you know.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s not how this works,” Bower replied. “You don’t get to say that in retrospect.”
“Yes I do,” Halligan shot back. “Off record.”
A first-year journalism student, let alone a DOJ attorney, would surely know the rules governing on- and off-record conversations between reporters and sources. (That student would also understand that “off the record” is a privilege granted by mutual agreement between a source and a journalist, rather than some sort of binding contract.) So it’s fair to assume that Halligan wasn’t actually misinformed, but was instead seeking to intimidate Bower into backing off—a media strategy White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also recently tried to deploy against HuffPost’s S.V. Dáte, who had the temerity to ask her a question about Trump’s planned meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in Budapest.
Given the city’s significance as the site where Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear weapons if Russia respected its territory, Dáte asked, “Who suggested Budapest?”
“Your mom did,” Leavitt texted back, in an exchange the press secretary then proudly posted on social media while denouncing Dáte as a “left-wing hack.”
Pete Hegseth—who got into some Signal-related trouble, like Halligan, when he accidentally texted attack plans earlier this year in a group chat that mistakenly included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg—has taken that bellicose approach to media to an even greater extreme. The defense—er, war—secretary recently demanded that members of the Pentagon press corps sign a pledge not to report material that hasn’t been approved by the department, a ham-fisted attempt to control the flow of information. News organizations ranging from The New York Times to Fox News, where Hegseth used to be a host, refused, and journalists turning in their press badges; a reporter from the far-right Epoch Times even resigned after his outlet became one of the few to agree to the new rules.
If these exercises in chest-puffery have something in common beyond their being embarrassing, it’s their Trumpian bluster—a shared effort to bully the press into submission. These officials would have you think they’re so indifferent or contemptuous that they don’t feel compelled to respond with anything but threats and jokes. But Halligan’s “off record” take-backsies also underscores the desperation behind the bombast, while Hegseth’s ultimatum may come to show the strategy’s foolhardiness. One veteran Pentagon reporter told The Guardian the move has made them even more “motivated”: “I’m going to go really hard now,” the journalist said, “and try to prove that we can do our jobs without being there.”
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