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 the editor 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.”
