Who is Lindsey Halligan, the interim US attorney prosecuting James Comey?
Before she was sworn in Monday as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, a 36-year-old former White House aide and Florida insurance lawyer, had no prosecutorial experience. Less than four days into her new role, she brought charges against former FBI director James B. Comey, despite the objections of career prosecutors that there was insufficient evidence to do so.
A federal grand jury indicted Comey on Thursday for allegedly giving false testimony to Congress about the agency’s 2016 investigation into possible coordination between Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and Russia. Comey has maintained his innocence.
Halligan also made waves this year as a White House aide tasked with eliminating “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, research centers and the National Zoo.
Here is a look at Halligan’s background and her meteoric rise within Trump’s world.
She grew up in Colorado and competed in Trump-owned beauty pageants
Halligan grew up in Broomfield, Colorado, and went to a private Catholic high school, Holy Family, where she excelled at softball and basketball. Her parents worked in the audiology industry. Halligan’s sister, Gavin, a family-law attorney in Colorado, ran for a state House seat as a Republican in 2016 in a blue district and lost.
Halligan competed in the Miss Colorado USA pageant, making the semifinals in 2009 and earning third runner-up in 2010, according to photos and records of the events. This was back when Trump co-owned the organization that puts on the Miss Universe pageant, for which Miss Colorado USA is a preliminary event.
“Sports and pageants taught me confidence, discipline, and how to handle pressure—on the court, on the field, on the stage, in the courtroom and now in the White House,” Halligan told The Washington Post in an email earlier this year.
She was an insurance lawyer in Florida
Halligan studied law at the University of Miami. She interned for a clinic in Miami that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and the Miami-Dade County public defender’s office.
Halligan was a “very smart, respectful and well-liked student,” said one of her professors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not have permission from the university to speak about a former student. The professor recalled that people often underestimated Halligan because of her good looks.
Halligan graduated from law school in 2013 and handled insurance matters in South Florida for a firm called Cole, Scott & Kissane. She made partner in 2018 and defeated a more than $500,000 property damage claim in a 2019 case about a leaky roof.
She met Trump in 2021 and joined his legal team a few months later
Halligan says she met Trump at a November 2021 event at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. She had come from court and was in a suit, which probably made her stand out from other female attendees. Trump noticed her, asked what she did and made her part of his personal legal team in early 2022.
In the president, “I saw the same thing that I saw when I interned at the Innocence Clinic: someone who was getting railroaded by the system,” Halligan told The Post in an April phone interview.
Before this week, Halligan worked on only three federal cases, all while serving as one of Trump’s personal attorneys.
She quickly became part of Trump’s inner circle
Halligan was present at Mar-a-Lago for the August 2022 FBI search of the president’s property, during which classified documents were seized. With her pageant looks, legal degree and broadcast journalism training, she became one of the president’s defenders on TV.
“They looked at God-knows-what in there, and did God-knows-what in there,” Halligan told Sean Hannity on Fox News shortly after the search. “We have no idea. What the FBI did was an appalling display of abuse of power.”
Halligan was a front-row guest in Trump’s box at the 2024 Republican National Convention. She was later a target of Iranian hackers looking to infiltrate the campaign, according to CNN.
She was behind the push to ‘remove improper ideology’ from Smithsonian museums
Halligan was the key force behind Trump’s March executive order directing Vice President JD Vance to work to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution properties.
After moving to D.C. just before the inauguration to continue working for Trump as a special assistant and senior associate staff secretary, Halligan visited local cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian museums of Natural History, American History and American Art. She didn’t like everything she saw, she told The Post in April. Some exhibits, in her view, did not reflect the America she knows and loves.
“And so I talked to the president about it,” Halligan said, “and suggested an executive order, and he gave me his blessing, and here we are.”
Halligan said she defined “improper ideology” as “weaponizing history.”
“We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad,” she said.
She replaced a prosecutor who chose not to seek an indictment against Comey
In since-deleted social media posts over the weekend, Trump urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute several of his perceived political enemies, including Comey. He also announced that he would be appointing Halligan to replace Erik S. Siebert, who resigned amid pressure from the Trump administration over his decision not to seek an indictment against Comey.
On social media, Trump described Halligan as “a tough, smart, and loyal attorney, who has worked with me for a long time” and suggested that she would “get things moving” in the Eastern District of Virginia.
She may have trouble getting Senate confirmation
Halligan can only serve 120 days as interim U.S. attorney. Siebert had been nominated to the Senate to fill the role permanently—and Trump suggested over the weekend on social media that he planned to also officially nominate Halligan. But it’s unclear whether Halligan will receive the crucial backing of Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, who both expressed concerns about Halligan’s lack of experience.
See also:
Trump’s US attorney pick could put him on collision course with Senate
Salvador Rizzo and Theodoric Meyer contributed to this report.
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