Lindsey Halligan, the attorney who tried and failed to prosecute James Comey and Letitia James on behalf of President Donald Trump, is under investigation, according to a report.
The New York Times cites a letter from the Florida Bar Association to the nonprofit Campaign for Accountability after the latter filed complaints in the Sunshine State and Virginia over Halligan’s actions during her short-lived stint as acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia last year.
“We already have an investigation pending,” the bar association states in its letter to the group in response to its complaints.
The probe opens the prospect of the former Miss Colorado contestant-turned-home-insurance litigator being disbarred, though the process is rigorous and can take years.
The bar has the authority to operate as a fact-finder and to make recommendations to a grievance committee based on its conclusions, which in turn has the power to determine whether an attorney is guilty of misconduct.
Should it reach such a conclusion, its recommendations are then referred to the state court, which could result in the lawyer in question losing their licence to practise law.
According to the NYT, the Florida bar’s Halligan investigation is examining her conduct in the Eastern District of Virginia, where she sought grand jury indictments against Comey and James, accusing them of making false statements to Congress and bank fraud, respectively.
Her predecessor in the role, Erik Siebert, had been forced out of office by the Trump administration after he refused to bring criminal charges against the duo.
Halligan took the interim position in September despite having almost no prosecutorial experience (just three cases to Siebert’s 675) and quickly secured the indictments, only for District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie to rule that they were invalid because her appointment had not been lawful.
Several district judges subsequently expressed concern that she continued to sign court documents as a U.S. attorney even after the judge’s ruling, which could be a violation of that order.
District Judge David Novak, for one, accused her of engaging in a “charade” by “masquerading as the United States attorney for this district in direct defiance of binding court orders.”
She finally stood down on January 20, but not before Attorney General Pam Bondi, her deputy Todd Blanche, and others had fired off an angry letter accusing Novak, himself a Trump appointee, of a “gross abuse of power” in questioning Halligan’s authority.
The Campaign for Accountability has argued that the conduct of which Halligan is accused breaches a number of fundamental ethics rules for the profession, including prohibitions on false statements, misleading communications, dishonest conduct and knowingly disobeying a ruling.
The Department of Justice last month moved swiftly to fire James Hundley, selected by judges to be Halligan’s replacement as Virginia’s top prosecutor, further dragging out the saga.
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