In case anyone was wondering whether state bars would step up to hold anyone accountable if the Trump administration sends cronies to cosplay as U.S. Attorneys and fire career prosecutors so they can file bad faith criminal cases, the Virginia State Bar has helpfully answered: LOL, no.
Last month, the Campaign for Accountability filed ethics complaints in both Virginia and Florida against Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer serving as the Interim-But-Not-Legally-Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging she’d violated multiple rules supposedly governing members of the bar. In response, Virginia sent a polite letter explaining that it would pass on looking into allegations of a pattern of misconduct and would rather leave it to the courts. “Whether criminal indictments were obtained through
material misrepresentations of fact and done for political purposes falls within the authority of the court to determine and not this office.”
Folks… your professional gatekeepers in 2025!
“If, when confronted with actions as egregious as Ms. Halligan’s, a state bar, which allegedly polices the conduct of its members, claims it can do nothing more than reiterate the findings of a court, what purpose does it serve?” asked Campaign for Accountability CEO Michelle Kuppersmith. “The courts have been doing their job in recognizing misconduct when they see it. State bars must do the same.”
In fairness to the Virginia State Bar, the most egregious allegations — the ones involving Halligan’s illegal actions as a squatter pretending to be a U.S. Attorney and her shady effort to ramrod through a falsified indictment in a desperate bid to beat the statute of limitations — may well have been properly within the court’s purview. While every adult with a frontal lobe already suspected that the judge would find that Halligan’s misadventures compromised the cases, there’s nothing wrong with the state bar exercising prudence and steering clear of those allegations until the court acted. For the record, the federal judge presiding over these matters has since confirmed that Halligan possessed no more authority than “any private citizen off the street — attorney or not” and kicked the indictments as void.
The problem with the “we have to defer to the courts” excuse from the Virginia Bar is that the ethics complaint raises more issues beyond the status of the indictments. Issues that explicitly fall outside the authority of the court to determine. By shrugging off the whole complaint over the limited issue of the indictments, the Virginia Bar created a troubling zone of unaccountability.
As the administration pressure tests every guardrail against corruption and abuse, it relishes these pockets of deferment, where no authority claims responsibility. The courts can’t discipline a lawyer for generally lawless conduct, and the state bar now claims it can’t discipline a lawyer without a notarized and engraved permission slip from a judge that reads “Please Discipline This Lawyer.” Professional disciplinary authorities are supposed to have a broader portfolio than the courts because unethical lawyers can stay on the right side of the courts while still presenting a risk to the public. A state bar is designed to nip this Better Call Lindsey pilot in the bud.
The Campaign for Accountability complaint included a competent representation violation, citing Halligan’s criminal law experience — which amounts to “watched episode of Law & Order (fell asleep)” — and the very public firings and sidelinings of veteran criminal prosecutors in the office recommending against charges. This allegation is about reckless practice and wouldn’t really end up in front of a judge.
And yet it’s somehow fitting that this state cares more about bar applicants wearing suits and dresses to take the bar exam than the possibility that someone lacks the competence to run a prosecutorial office. It’s the sort of style over substance response that captures the zeitgeist of the Trump era.
It included Halligan’s disastrously hilarious Signal exchange with Anna Bower of Lawfare, where she shared what she seemed to understand to be an extrajudicial disclosure of non-public, sensitive information about ongoing matters. When she belatedly tried to pull the conversation off the record, she noted that these were disappearing Signal messages. Disappearing message apps are less a prosecutor tool and more of a drug dealer thing. Except drug dealers understand the rules of evidence better than this.
As the complaint states:
Ms. Halligan’s actions in contacting a journalist through Signal, setting her messages to disappear in 8 hours and retroactively claiming the exchange was off the record in an effort to secretly influence media coverage of the James case appears a deliberate violation of the FRAand, therefore, a violation of RCP 8.4(b).
None of this turns on the court’s adjudication of the matter. It’s an allegation that the attorney’s conduct — even if the cases weren’t born losers — breaches ethical rules. If a government prosecutor has deliberately set up a spoliation device to obscure conversations with journalists she’s having in an effort to improperly influence the public narrative… that’s a job for a state licensing authority to investigate.
Maybe the Virginia Bar will change its tune now that the court has taken action. Probably not, though. Everyone knew that the court would issue a ruling swiftly in this matter. If the bar authorities were serious about waiting to see what the court did before initiating any investigation, they could’ve kept quiet another week instead of offering the legal equivalent of a “thoughts and prayers” tweet. At this point, they’ll likely hem and haw about appeals to kick the can into oblivion.
This letter is a declaration of abdication. And it couldn’t come at a worse time for the profession.
(Virginia State Bar Letter available on next page…)
Earlier: Lindsey Halligan Officially More Stupid Than You Imagined
Lindsey Halligan Manages To Lose Two Cases At Once, Which Is Honestly Impressive
Is The Comey Case Barred By The Statute Of Limitations? It’s Complicated! (But Also Yes.)
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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