Donald Trump’s new prosecutorial bulldog is showing mounting signs of impatience as she moves at breakneck speed against the president’s political enemies.
Lindsey Halligan, whom Trump last month appointed as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, made the decision to file charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James this week without letting either Attorney General Pam Bondi or Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche know ahead of time.
“[She] just wanted to get it done,” a source with knowledge of the case told the Wall Street Journal Saturday.
The newspaper adds Halligan had originally wanted to indict James in Norfolk, Virginia, where some of her colleagues believed she stood a better chance of getting a conservative jury at trial.
Her decision to file in Alexandria instead, where she may now face a more liberal pool of jurors, reportedly followed after she learned Norfolk was off the table until sometime next week.
A former insurance lawyer who, like Deputy AG Blanche, has also worked as Trump’s personal defense attorney in the past, Halligan has never prosecuted a case before. Critics have slammed her moves against both James and former FBI Director James Comey as not only a sign of her inexperience, but also her die-hard loyalty to the MAGA leader and a mounting weaponization of the DOJ, given the perceived evidentiary weaknesses of both cases.
The WSJ notes there may also be practical reasons behind the apparent urgency of Halligan’s filings against the president’s foes. Her position as U.S. attorney is technically subject to Senate confirmation, and interim officials are only eligible to serve for 120 days.
District judges can potentially vote to extend her tenure, though it’s understood both Comey and James are planning to argue her appointment was in any case invalid given ongoing questions about the legitimacy of Trump’s effective ouster of Halligan’s predecessor Eric Siebert last month.
Siebert, Also a Trump appointee, reportedly provoked the president after warning him that any charges levied against James or Comey would almost certainly not hold up in court.
Within days of assuming her post, Halligan charged Comey with lying to a Senate Committee about whether he had authorized media leaks from inside the bureau as to its probe of Russian interference on behalf of Trump’s campaign in the 2016 election, long railed against by the president and his supporters as part of a Democratic “hoax.”
It’s since transpired that John Durham, a Trump-appointed special counsel who spent four years investigating the origin of the FBI’s probe into Russian election interference, had already told Siebert’s team he’d been unable to uncover any evidence that would support charges against the former bureau chief.
Halligan’s indictment against James, who previously pursued claims of fraud against the president and his businesses, concerns similarly long-running Republican allegations of mortgage fraud against the New York prosecutor described by herself and her allies as baseless.
Siebert and his staff concluded earlier this year they had not uncovered sufficient evidence James had knowingly made misrepresentations on the relevant documents in a way that would satisfy the legal standards of criminal liability, with the New York AG’s legal team describing any discrepancies in her files as nothing more than “insignificant” errors.
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