Lindsey Halligan, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who was hand-picked by President Donald Trump to bring criminal charges against his political rivals, left a legal journalist befuddled earlier this month when she sent unsolicited text messages containing sensitive details about one of her highest-profile cases.
On Monday night, Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare, published the full text message exchange, which pertained to the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James, against whom Halligan brought charges for mortgage fraud earlier this month.
The case against James has been widely criticized as politically motivated, as James had previously brought a case against Trump for financial crimes, which resulted in a finding against him in a civil fraud trial in 2022.
The president appointed Halligan, a former insurance lawyer who has never prosecuted a criminal case but previously worked as a personal attorney for Trump, to take over for her predecessor, Erik Siebert, who was forced out for declining to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey on what he believed to be flimsy charges.
Halligan first messaged Bower on October 11, just two days after the indictment against James had been handed up by the Department of Justice (DOJ), accusing her of misrepresenting how she intended to use a rental property in Norfolk, Virginia, to secure a better mortgage rate in 2020, allegedly by claiming that it was for personal use as a "second home" when she was actually renting it to a family of three.
Even before Halligan's texts, Bower said she was "among the skeptics" of the case's merits, noting that the type of mortgage agreement signed by James not only allowed her to rent the property after a year, but that the indictment "provides scant details about the circumstances of the supposed rental arrangement" James supposedly made with clients in violation of her mortgage contract.
Her perception was bolstered by reporting from the New York Times, which revealed that since 2020, the home has been occupied by James' grand-niece, who does not pay rent on the property, and that James stays there several times per year.
In response to the report, Bower—an analyst who often provides commentary on legal stories that she did not herself report—posted on X that “this is important exculpatory evidence because the indictment accuses James of seeking a ‘second home’ mortgage when in reality she intended to use it as an ’investment’ home by renting it.”
This post apparently caught the attention of Halligan, who messaged Bower on Signal later that afternoon.
"Anna, Lindsey Halligan here," the first message read. "You are reporting things that are simply not true. Thought you should have a heads up."
Bower explained: "I assumed the exchange was a hoax because, while it is not unusual for lawyers to reach out to me about my reporting or commentary, it is highly unusual for a US attorney to do so regarding an ongoing prosecution—particularly in a high-profile case in which her conduct is already the subject of immense public scrutiny."
But she later confirmed it was Halligan, and asked what precisely her post had gotten wrong.
Halligan responded: "You're assuming exculpatory evidence without knowing what you're talking about. It's just bizarre to me. If you have any questions, before you report, feel free to reach out to me. But jumping to conclusions does your credibility no good."
Noting that she was not the person who reported the story, Bower asked if the Times report had gotten something wrong. Halligan brought the conversation back to Bower.
"Yes they did but you went with it!" she said. "Without even fact checking anything!!!!"
Halligan referred Bower to the DOJ's indictment of James, but Bower noted that the indictment's "odd and ambiguous" wording did not actually contradict the Times' reporting. When she asked for more clarification about what specific details were inaccurate, Halligan said "I can't tell you grand jury stuff," even though her discussion with Bower had already discussed grand jury materials.
When Bower explained that it was still "unclear" what the Times report had gotten wrong, Halligan began to launch into a personal attack against her.
"You're biased," Halligan wrote. "Your reporting isn't accurate. I'm the one handling the case and I'm telling you that. If you want to twist and torture the facts to fit your narrative, there's nothing I can do. Waste to even give you a heads up."
Bower again insisted that she'd be "happy to correct" any mistakes, but that she "can't do so without a sense of what I supposedly got wrong."
Halligan replied: "Continue to do what you have been and you'll be completely discredited when the evidence comes out."
Over the subsequent days, when Bower would continue to reach out to Halligan to ask about other aspects of the case, she was met with more insults and eventually silence.
When Bower reached out to the DOJ for comment, a spokesperson responded that Halligan was "attempting to point you to facts, not gossip, but when clarifying that she would adhere to the rule of the law and not disclose grand jury information, you threaten to leak an entire conversation."
"Good luck ever getting anyone to talk to you when you publish their texts," theDOJ added.
After sending the DOJ another set of follow-up questions on Monday in anticipation of the story's publication, Bower received another text from Halligan minutes before the story was to be posted. Bower described the exchange as follows:
"By the way—everything I ever sent you is off record. You're not a journalist so it's weird saying that but just letting you know."
I responded: "I'm sorry, but that's not how this works. You don't get to say that in retrospect."
Halligan was unpersuaded: "Yes I do. Off record."
"I am really sorry. I would have been happy to speak with you on an off the record basis had you asked," I said. "But you didn't ask, and I still haven't agreed to speak on that basis. Do you have any further comment for the story?
To my surprise, she kept going: "It's obvious the whole convo is off record. There's disappearing messages and it's on signal. What is your story? You never told me about a story."
Halligan has a bachelor's degree in politics and broadcast journalism from Regis University. And as Bower notes, she has frequently dealt with the press as a member of Trump's legal team.
"As anyone who professionally engages with the media as routinely as Halligan would know, the default assumption when a reporter speaks with a public official is that everything is 'on the record,' meaning that anything the source says can be printed with attribution," Bower wrote.
The saga is the latest in a series of gaffes that have called Halligan's credibility as a prosecutor into question.
Her indictment against Comey has been ridiculed by legal scholars for being "almost devoid of factual material," as Benjamin Wittes, the co-director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security, put it. While attempting to present charging documents to a magistrate judge, she mistakenly presented two inconsistent documents, which the judge said "has never happened before."
While attempting to have the case against Comey for allegedly making false statements thrown out of court, his attorneys argued that Halligan altered some of his testimony, including by claiming that he was speaking about “Hillary Clinton” when he was actually answering a question about “the Clinton administration.”
Following the reveal of her exchanges with Bower, Andrew Fleischman, a trial and appellate lawyer in Georgia, joked on social media that "Halligan has all the poise and butt-dialing capacity of a sober [Rudy] Giuliani."
Others, like Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, raised the possibility that Halligan’s use of “disappearing messages” on Signal could have violated federal law, which requires federal prosecutors to preserve evidence that may be favorable to the accused.
In a CNN interview with Kaitlan Collins on Monday night, following the release of the texts, Bower explained that she has spoken to other legal reporters and prosecutors in the days since her conversation with Halligan.
Her sources in the legal profession, she said, "have never quite seen an exchange like this.”
