Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide and a fierce ally of President Donald Trump, has taken over as the highest federal prosecutor in Virginia’s jap district, in accordance to an individual conversant in the change.
Halligan assumed the workplace days after her predecessor, Erik Siebert, was pushed out of the job amid political stress to indict one in every of Trump’s political enemies, New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Siebert was additionally overseeing the investigation into whether or not former FBI Director James Comey lied in testimony earlier than Congress.
Halligan’s appointment places one other of Trump’s private attorneys in a place of authorized energy – operating an workplace that has been tasked to spearhead excessive profile investigations that the president has publicly demanded motion in.
The Eastern District of Virginia confronted a push from the White House underneath Siebert to convey fees in opposition to James, regardless of a conclusion that the five-month investigation into whether or not the New York attorney common dedicated mortgage fraud had not but yielded sufficient proof to indict her.
Halligan was one in every of Trump’s shut authorized advisers in current years however has no expertise as a prosecutor. She labored as one in every of his attorneys throughout the preliminary investigation into whether or not Trump was illegally preserving categorised paperwork in his Mar-a-Lago property.
Trump praised her for the work in a social media post saying her appointment over the weekend, writing that she “represented me (and WON!) in the disgraceful Democrat Documents Hoax.”
“She is extremely intelligent, fearless and, working with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, has the strength and determination to be absolutely OUTSTANDING in this new and very important role,” Trump wrote.
The White House had positioned Mary “Maggie” Cleary, a conservative lawyer who has stated she was falsely accused of being on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in cost of the workplace over the weekend till Halligan may very well be sworn in.
Trump additionally tasked earlier this yr with rooting out “woke” ideology and what the White House considers anti-American propaganda on the Smithsonian.
Halligan echoed the president’s claims final month, telling Fox News in an interview that Smithsonian museums have an “overemphasis on slavery.”
“We should be able to take our kids, our students, through the Smithsonian and feel proud when we leave,” Halligan stated. “There’s a lot of history to our country — both positive and negative — but we need to keep moving forward; we can’t just keep focusing on the negative. All it does is divide us.”