The Justice Department small error earned a brutal correction on Wednesday over the appointment of interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan.
Lawfare reporter Anna Bower made national waves this week after Halligan texted her to correct her comments made on social media characterizing a New York Times report. Bower spent 33 hours exchanging messages where the two argued over legal specifics.
Halligan is overseeing the prosecution of a former FBI director and the New York attorney general in the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan confirmed the Times' reporting in her conversation with Bower, and confirmed a slew of other details about the grand jury, which must remain secret.
The messages were all posted online after Halligan never demanded that the conversation be off the record with the reporter. It wasn't until after she learned their conversation was becoming a story that she demanded that it be off the record.
Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre lent her voice to the report, sending Bower a comment on the exchange with Halligan.
"You clearly didn’t get the response you wanted—which was information handed over to you without having to dig into the facts of the case to craft a truthful story—so you thought you’d 'tattletale' to main justice. Lindsay [sic] Halligan was attempting to point you to facts, not gossip, but when clarifying that she would adhere to the rule of the law and not disclose Grand Jury information, you threaten to leak an entire conversation. Good luck ever getting anyone to talk to you when you publish their texts," Baldassarre said in a written message.
Baldassarre misspelled Halligan's name, which Bower included in her disclaimer for the piece days after it was published.
"Hours after Lawfare published this article, Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre provided the following additional comment: 'Thank you for including my statement in your story. I just realized I spelled Lindsey’s name wrong in the initial response, would you mind correcting?'" the disclaimer reads.
Bower noted in her report about the Halligan messages, "It is not uncommon for federal prosecutors to communicate with the press, both through formal channels and sometimes informally. My exchange with Halligan, however, was highly unusual in a number of respects. She initiated a conversation with me, a reporter she barely knew, to discuss an ongoing prosecution that she is personally handling. She mostly criticized my reporting—or, more precisely, my summary of someone else’s reporting. But several of her messages contained language that touched on grand jury matters, even as she insisted that she could not reveal such information, which is protected from disclosure by prosecutors under federal law."
