Lindsey Halligan is the Trumpworld lawyer picked by the Department of Justice to prosecute the president’s political enemies. Her appointment followed the resignation of a district attorney in Virginia, who quit rather than pursue cooked-up charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. Fortunately for them, Halligan is a moron and spend days texting a reporter, Anna Bower, regarding the James case. Bower posted everything to Lawfare.
It is not uncommon for federal prosecutors to communicate with the press, both through formal channels and sometimes informally. My exchange with Halligan, however, was highly unusual in a number of respects. She initiated a conversation with me, a reporter she barely knew, to discuss an ongoing prosecution that she is personally handling. She mostly criticized my reporting—or, more precisely, my summary of someone else’s reporting. But several of her messages contained language that touched on grand jury matters, even as she insisted that she could not reveal such information, which is protected from disclosure by prosecutors under federal law.
After Bower asked for formal comment, Halligan texted again to claim their correspondence was off the record. But Bower had not agreed to that, and Halligan had never even asked for it to be off the record.
Halligan’s glib assumption that using an encrypted chat app means that a conversation is off the record has made a quick example of her: that’s not how it works. From NBCU’s explainer
If a source asks for your conversation to be off the record, it cannot be used for publication, either as quotes or summarizations. Do not repeat this information to another source or anyone outside of colleagues working directly on the story, such as another reporter or your editor.
Reporters must agree in advance about whether the interview is off the record. For example, a source might say something on the record and then ask for it to be off the record. You are not obligated to not use that information.
It also seems possible that Halligan believed using Signal, which can be set to erase messages automatically, made it impossible to record what she was saying. In this case, Halligan is contending with both the exposé and an epistemological revelation.
A further sign of how things are now: when asked for comment, Department of Justice spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre shot out an insubstantial complaint about the question and misspelled Halligan’s name.
Discover more from Earlybirds Invest
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
