Despite writing in a February letter that it had a pending investigation into Lindsey Halligan, the Florida Bar now says that it’s not currently investigating the Donald Trump-allied lawyer after all.
“In response to an inquiry from a complainant, The Florida Bar wrote a letter to the complainant erroneously stating that there is a pending Bar investigation of member Lindsay Halligan. There is no such pending Bar investigation of Lindsay Halligan,” the bar said Friday. “In this case, The Florida Bar received a complaint against Lindsay Halligan and, consistent with standard practice, the Bar is monitoring the ongoing legal proceedings underlying the complaint.”
The statement follows a report published by The New York Times on Thursday that said Halligan was under investigation, citing the February letter that was sent to the Campaign for Accountability watchdog group, which had filed a bar complaint against the lawyer who brought criminal cases against Trump targets James Comey and Letitia James. Those cases were dismissed due to what a judge found to be the illegality of Halligan’s temporary appointment as the Eastern District of Virginia’s top federal prosecutor. The administration is appealing, and Halligan has since left the post.
Campaign for Accountability had said Thursday that it shared the February letter with the Times following its reporting on the Justice Department “trying to stall state bar investigations of their lawyers.”
After the Times report, I wrote a piece analyzing the news, such as I understood it at the time, and what it could mean for Halligan facing professional discipline. Even then, being under investigation wouldn’t have meant that she would necessarily face any discipline in the end.
With the bar’s statement on Friday, the situation is still murky but for different reasons, given the internal inconsistency within the bar itself. When I asked the bar on Thursday what the status of the investigation was, as I noted in my Thursday post, they said that it was an “open case,” which, combined with the February letter saying she was under investigation — which the bar didn’t question on Thursday — left the implication that there was still an investigation.
“This is a matter that is being monitored (as explained in the statement below), it was a mischaracterization in the letter to use the word investigation. We apologize for the confusion,” they told me Friday after I inquired further about what’s going on here.
So, after all the back and forth, it seems the bottom line is that we are still in the same position of waiting and seeing what, if anything, happens next with whatever the bar may or may not do here.
On Friday, Campaign for Accountability’s executive director, Michelle Kuppersmith, said that her group “has not heard directly from the Florida Bar, but it’s hard to reconcile this latest statement with the bar counsel’s previous letter saying there is an investigation pending. If there is no longer an investigation into Halligan, the question is why not, given that three judges indicated she engaged in conduct that appears to violate ethics rules.”
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