The Now: Anna Bower's Signal Exchange with Lindsey Halligan

[Intro]

Benjamin Wittes: It is Lawfare Live: The Now. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare. On October 20th, I sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor Anna Bower, to discuss her remarkable article about how interim United States Attorney Lindsey Halligan reached out to her on Signal–and the conversation that followed. We were live on YouTube.

[Main Podcast]

Anna, you've had quite a week?

Anna Bower: Yeah, it's been a week.

Benjamin Wittes: And so if you are watching this, you probably know that the reason it has been a week is that Anna has been texting with the one and only Lindsey Halligan who, approached you apropos of nothing last Saturday. So let's just start at the beginning. How did your correspondence with Lindsey Halligan begin?

Anna Bower: Yeah, so it was a Saturday afternoon around 1:20. I was, it was one of those rare days when I actually was taking some time off and I'd been kind of reading the news tweeting a little bit. I was doing some tweeting and catching up on the Letitia James indictment, which had just been handed up on Thursday. And of course the prosecutor handling it is Lindsey Halligan, the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia.

And as I'm sitting there, you know about to take a break and, and watch some tv, I get a Signal DM request from someone who is calling themselves. Lindsey Halligan. Now Ben, I don't know about you, but it's not every day that I get messages on Signal unsolicited from the top prosecutor in Virginia, who the president who has, seems to have installed to prosecute some of his perceived political enemies.

But for me that was very surprising. I thought it was a hoax at first. I assumed that it was not the real Lindsey Halligan because on Signal you don't necessarily see someone's phone number. You can call your–

Benjamin Wittes: On the internet nobody knows you're a dog and on Signal–

Anna Bower: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Nobody knows if you're really Lindsey Halligan or not.

Anna Bower: No one knows who you really are. So, but, but what I did know is that I had met Lindsey Halligan about three years ago when I first started covering the Trump criminal cases at the time for Lawfare. I had gone to a hearing in West Palm Beach before Judge Aileen Cannon.

For folks who are the real nerds who are listening, you might remember the special master hearing before Judge Cannon, which was over documents that were seized at Mar-a-Lago during the FBI's search there. And I went to dinner that night and happened to run into Lindsey Halligan and Jim Trusty, who were on Trump's legal team at the time. So I introduced myself to them, you know, we briefly chatted.

Years later when this supposed Lindsey Halligan person got in touch with me. I thought, oh, that's something that maybe the real Lindsey Halligan would, would remember. And that's a way I could authenticate or at least get a good sense of whether or not I'm dealing with someone who is a real person here.

And so I asked where did we first meet? And immediately the person on the other end responded and, and said the correct answer of who they were with, where we met. And so that gave me a sense that, oh, maybe I really am dealing with the real Lindsey Halligan here.

And so we, we started talking and it turns out that what she wanted to talk about was some tweets that I had posted about an hour before that were about the Letitia James case. It was a, about a New York Times article that was about grand jury testimony in the Letitia James case. And I had summarized, you know, that testimony in a tweet. And then Lindsey Halligan was apparently not too happy with some of the, the tweets and the way that I summarized that testimony as reported by the New York Times.

Benjamin Wittes: So there's so much here that I don't quite know where to start. But let's start with something you just said at the end, which is that she approached you because she didn't like, it wasn't reporting you’d done. It was your tweets about the New York Times' story about the Letitia James grand jury testimony. Did she approach the New York Times to complain about the story?

Anna Bower: Yeah, Ben, look there, there's a few really unusual things about this whole interaction. And, and, you know, in other circumstances, the pure fact of a prosecutor approaching a reporter or initiating a conversation on Signal isn't necessarily unusual, right? That is, that that kind of thing happens.

But one of the first things that was really unusual about this is that, as you mentioned, it wasn't even my own reporting that she was approaching me about it was tweets that I had posted about someone else's reporting, specifically the New York Times's reporting of this grand jury testimony. So that's one of the really strange elements here. She, she was clearly not pleased with what I had tweeted. One of them was pure summary and then another one, which I, you know-.

The one she seemed to be focused on was the summary one, but then also it's possible she was focused on a different one that was kind of more of an analytical point in which I you know, said, I think that this testimony is would, you know, something to the effect of, would tend to be exculpatory for Letitia James, because it shows that one of the central claims in the indictment, you know, may not be as alleged, which was that she intended to, to use the home as a rental investment property, as the indictment puts it, as opposed to what she said she was using for, which was second home.

I thought that the testimony as reported by the New York Times, which was about her niece testifying that she'd lived there for many years and did not pay rent. I thought that kind of undermined the idea that Letitia James was primarily using this to collect rent money. And, you know, look, I, I am a reporter, but also legal analyst, so I make these kinds of point points about other people's reporting and, and how they affect may affect the legal case all the time. So I just didn't think anything of it.

The second thing, in addition to the fact that this was about someone else's reporting that I'll mention that was unusual is that the story for the New York Times I was tweeting about and that I was really focused on, was about grand jury testimony. And it's quite unusual for a prosecutor to even get anywhere near conversations around grand jury matters because of, of various policies and laws that prohibit the disclosure by a prosecutor of grand jury matters.

Benjamin Wittes: There's another unusual thing, which is normally, it's one thing if you know a prosecutor and a reporter have a preexisting relationship.

Anna Bower: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Or if you're talking about a policy matter, I mean senior Justice Department lawyers and reporters talk all the time about policy, questions about internal Justice Department infighting or disputes. Nobody would think twice about her say, texting you about her battles with Todd Blanche, for example, but–

Anna Bower: Right, whereas this was about an ongoing prosecution.

Benjamin Wittes: This is about a specific, it's about a specific case. It's about somebody else's reporting, about a specific case. Did she ever tell you what the New York Times supposedly got wrong and why she was talking to you about it?

Anna Bower: No, so, so she approached me and is objecting to something that I have said in this tweet in which I'm summarizing this New York Times reporting.

You know, Ben, it's, it's a complicated thing to parse, but I will say that I, you know, it's not clear to me exactly what she was saying was wrong. You know, I, I have a, a few maybe ideas of what it could be about though. It, it seemed to me that she was responding in some way to the, the summary of the grand jury testimony, which was that the niece said she had lived at the home for many years without paying rent.

You know, she, she points me at one point to the indictment and says, you should look at the indictment. It says that Letitia James reported thousands of, of dollars in rental income on our tax forms. That's what she was alluding to in, in the indictment. And so that seemed to me to be a, a, a way of directly responding to the, what I had summarized in the tweet.

Beyond that, though, I'm, I'm frankly not entirely sure what she was trying to tell me. I, you know, I kept following up to say, what specifically is wrong? Because if it is wrong, like, 'cause look, if it is wrong, I am happy to fix it. You know, we all care about accuracy. I, whenever I make a mistake on something, even if it's like a typo, I will, you know, be, I get so mad at myself.

And I would've been happy to correct it, but she never told me what it was that was wrong. And, and so that was strange.

Benjamin Wittes: And it was never I gotta say it was never clear to me from reading the texts whether she was upset at you about something, some factual matter that she thought the New York Times had gotten wrong or whether she was upset at you because you had described it as an analytical matter, as exculpatory, right?

There's, there's a, there's an ambiguity to me as to whether she was upset at you about a factual question or whether she was upset at you about your characterization of it.

Anna Bower: I mean, I, I think that maybe that's right. I will say, though, I did directly ask her at one point I, I said, you know, I, I made it clear I was basing my tweet off of what the New York Times reported, did they get something wrong?

And she responds, yes, but you went with it without fact checking anything. So I, I, I took it to be a fact, that she was quibbling in some way with the factual assertions that were being, being made as opposed to analytical assertions.

But then you're right, like she does at times, kind of more broadly seem to refer to my reporting and say that I am, am in particular, you know, just really off. And, you know, my credibility is going to be on the line because the evidence is gonna come out and, and prove me wrong.

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

Anna Bower: Which, like, that may be. Like, I, you know, I, I'm very clear that I don't know everything in this case, but part of a prosecutor's role is to communicate to the public sometimes through an indictment, through something like speaking indictment, maybe when you have a high profile case that's against a public official like Letitia James.

You know, to me, looking at the indictment, it's really hard to have much confidence in the case that was built because it just doesn't tell you much. And there's a lot of public evidence that very much suggest that it is not a, a particularly strong case.

Benjamin Wittes: All right, so let's talk about how you verified that this was Lindsey Halligan. Let's go through a little bit the forensic process. You described step one, which was ask, giving her effectively a challenge question and trying to demand that she identify the circumstance in which you and she had met.

That got us through most of the week in the sense that we were then working on the assumption that we were actually dealing with Lindsey Halligan. But it's not really good enough to go to press with, right? Because I don't know, the Russians could have hacked her email and posed as her right? The, and maybe from the emails known about her one interaction with you. How did we know that this was Lindsey Halligan?

Anna Bower: Yeah. So the way that we knew that this is Lindsey Halligan, is that we obtained her phone number–her real phone number, not just, you know, Signal username or whatever–and I put it in my phone contacts.

And for people who are familiar with Signal, which is a application for messaging that journalists often use to communicate with their sources. It has a function where you can, for example, set disappearing messages, which notably is one of the things that Lindsey Halligan did here immediately when we started the conversation.

But with Signal, you know, you people can reach out to you through a username, you don't exactly know if it's linked to their phone number. But if you get their phone number and put it in your phone. And then you go back to your messaging and you have an existing conversation with them, it'll then show their phone number, you know, associated with that conversation.

And so that's exactly what we did here where we got her phone number, I put it in my phone, went back to our existing conversation, and suddenly her phone number showed up. So, we were, we were very confident that by the time we were ready to publish this story, that it really was Lindsey Halligan.

Benjamin Wittes: So there were two more pieces of evidence that cropped up today in response to your approach to the Justice Department. The first is that the Justice Department confirmed it. And if you look at the Justice Department statement, they acknowledge that these are her that this is an exchange between you and Lindsey Halligan.

And the second is that shortly after you sent that, the Lindsey Halligan, who had been ghosting you for the last several days that thread suddenly came alive. And so you sent a, you sent a, an email to the United States Department of Justice and you got a response on this Signal thread from Lindsey Halligan, which is pretty conclusive.

So what did Lindsey Halligan say when she you know, rose from obscurity to to chat with you again?

Anna Bower: Yeah. So I, I guess this kind of brings you back to one of the other surprising things about this conversation that we missed earlier when we were discussing, which is that the, the whole of this conversation, the entirety of it, you know, after she approached me she never even attempted to have a discussion about the basis on which we're speaking.

And what I mean by that is that, you know, for people who are, are used to engaging with the media as Lindsey Halligan, surely is, you know, she was on Trump's criminal defense team for several years. She was his personal lawyer. She, I, I believe she has a degree in broadcast journalism. She, beyond that, you know, worked in the White House and then now is one of the most high profile prosecutors in the country.

You, you really like, I look, I don't know, but I, I, I would find it. Really surprising beyond belief if Lindsey Halligan is not aware of how media relationships work, and usually the, the rule is that, you know, if you wanna talk off the record, which means that you wanna talk in a way that is confidential so that the reporter doesn't use your name, doesn't use the information in their story then you say, hey, is it okay if we talk off the record?

There are different variations of this. You know, on background means you can talk but they can't like specifically use your name, although they can allude to or, or use the information. Regardless the rule is you have to have an agreement. Everyone who works in this space knows this. For, you know, sophisticated media engagement, people know this. And yet Lindsey Halligan never had a discussion with me about it. So we were on the record as far as I was concerned.

And, and then we, you know, go, are about to publish this story. We get a response from the Justice Department. Then we get Lindsey Halligan, who reinitiate our Signal conversation after several days of, of silence. And she says, by the way, everything that I said was off the record. And that is just simply not how it works Ben. You and I both know that very well. You know, you don't get to retroactively say that something was off the record. You have to have an agreement with the journalist.

And, and so, you know, I said I'm sorry. That's not how this works. And she continued to insist that things were off the record. At one point she said, you know, it was obvious that it was off the record, it was on Signal and disappearing messages were, were set.

Benjamin Wittes: Which is, by the way, a very weird thing to say because it's citing evidence. I mean, Justice Department officials are not supposed to be doing business on Signal, which is not allowed on Justice Department devices as far as I know.

And you're not supposed to be doing business on your personal device, government business on your personal devices, and you're not supposed to be, you know, using disappearing messages, which are you know, these are government records that you're supposed to be retaining.

And so she's using evidence of, you know, hey, look, I'm I'm using Signal, which I'm not supposed to be doing, and I'm using disappearing messages, which I'm not supposed to be using as evidence that you were off the record, which is not the way it works.

So, so here's my question about this, and I, I, I, you know, some people look at this and say, hey, wait a minute. Did Anna Bower burn a source here? And I just wanna say, so I have supervised this reporting from minutes after you first got a text message from her. And I was shocked that she never said a word about what basis you were talking on. And so I could only think of a couple things that are are, could mitigate it from her point of view.

One is if she knew you really well and there were an assumption, you know, sometimes you have a relationship with somebody and the relationship is deep enough and there's enough trust that you just can kind of assume that that person isn't going to use it. And and then so you forget. Do you know Lindsey Halligan well enough for her to make an assumption that she could just assume you're off the record?

Anna Bower: No, I, I mean, I wanna be very clear about this because I, I, and I haven't not even looked at the reaction to the story yet. But I just, in case there are people who are wondering, like, oh, did they have some kind of off the record relationship that, you know, isn't being disclosed here or something?

No. Quite literally the only time I've ever spoken to Lindsey Halligan in my life was the time I ran into her in the restaurant three years ago.

Benjamin Wittes: So this is like you run into somebody in a restaurant and then three years later you text them sensitive stuff out of nowhere. And you expect confidentiality?

Anna Bower: Yeah. And you're the most high profile prosecutor in the country who is already the subject of immense scrutiny. You, you know that there are at least in the case against Comey, we weren't talking about that case here. But in that case, you already know there's selective and vindictive prosecution motions that are on their way. I believe that those were due today, although I haven't had a chance to look at them yet.

And you think, and you probably think it's very likely that that's gonna happen in the Letitia James case too. And there are reasons been why prosecutors are really hesitant to make public comments about ongoing prosecutions because already of the reasons we've stated.

But there are things like, you know, pretrial publicity motions or, you know, a, a variety of other ways that defense counsel can use these kinds of missteps and incidents as ammo. And, and if you are already the subject of, you know, much criticism. And, and you know, that kind of thing and you know that the defense is looking for whatever they can to put into those kinds of motions, then you would think you'd be especially careful. And that's just not what happened here.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. So we, you and I, after a draft of this was completed, one of our editors read it and said, you know, how do we know that this kind of communication isn't actually much more common than we understand? And I kind of had an intuitive sense, you know, I've been doing this for 30 years.

I've never heard of an interaction like this. I've never, I've never met a prosecutor who. You know, who's just, you know, described having such a interaction. I've never met or described anybody else having such an interaction. I've never heard a journalist talk about a prosecutor. You know, there, people get reps, right? This person's really forward-leaning and press stuff. Never heard of somebody doing something like this.

But we decided, okay, let's spend the weekend talking to people on both sides of this relationship and just get a sense of, I don't wanna, we're not gonna talk about who we spoke to, but we talked to a fair diversity of people on both the prosecutorial and the Justice Department reporting side of the thing. Fair to say that this, nobody could cite an example of something like this, right?

Anna Bower: No, no one could cite an example of something like this. And of course, everyone, like, like we have been, everyone pointed out as far, or, or a lot of people that we spoke to pointed out things like, oh, well, yeah, that, you know, contacts between prosecutors and reporters do happen. I, you and I both know that. You know, and, and as you pointed out, there's–

Benjamin Wittes: I have met people, I have met people as a reporter who are deeply involved in Lawfare today, and I met them when they were prosecutors.

Anna Bower: Yeah.

Benjamin Witts: And I don't think there was, I there, I don't think there was anything inappropriate about those contacts either from the prosecutorial side as a journalist side.

It is proper for there to be contacts. It is not proper or normal for there to be contacts on active investigative matters outside of the normal. I mean, I, you know what they'll, propriety line is, I, you can debate, but there's a, a caution about stuff that involves pending cases, active matters, grand juries, you know, things that that implicate investigative or privacy equities.

Anna Bower: Yeah, exactly. And, and, and, and no one that we spoke to could point to a similar example or having heard of or heard of something like this or having experienced something like this.

I will add too, that in the time since we've published the story you know, I've gotten feedback from other legal journalists, other former officials who we didn't speak to in advance of publishing the story, who also had the reaction of, wow. And, and I ask them, you know, have you ever seen anything like this? And they're like, no, this is wild. You know, so that's kind of the gist of obviously, you know, it's, it varies people's reactions.

But the, the gist of it is that people have not seen something like this. I certainly had not before now

Benjamin Wittes: One more question and then we'll let you go. So, one of the weird things about this interaction is this sense that on, on her part, which seems to go back to your first meeting that. You know, you kind of have to sit there while she whines about your integrity as a journalist. You know, like she doesn't like the way you covered the stuff with her and Jim Trusty in Florida and she doesn't like the, your tweets.

She really doesn't seem to like you very much, Anna. I, I, I hope that doesn't bother you too much. Why? But yet she feels sort of. Intimate enough with you, connected enough to reach out. And so I'm just curious for your sense of what she thinks your relationship is.

Anna Bower: I, Ben, I, I have, honestly, I have no idea. I mean, yeah, I don't wanna over, you know, speculate or psychoanalyze. So I honestly have no idea. I just can't speak to it. I, you know, she, I mean–

Benjamin Wittes: She says at one point in the thing, yeah, the New York Times got it wrong, but I expect that of them, I didn't expect it of you. It's the first, like, she's never said a nice thing about you in any, or to you. Like where did this expectation come from?

Anna Bower: Frankly, again, I don't know. I mean, look like I, you know, I think she had just joined the Trump criminal team around the time that I started reporting on those cases. You know, were both 30 something year old women who have kind of are in these like, I mean, very different, thrown into extraordinary circumstances kind of thing.

She joins the former president's criminal team. I am covering it. Maybe there was some again, this all just feels so speculative that it, it, it's, I have no idea. But, you know, maybe, maybe there's just something of, you know. It's, it's someone that you've met, although briefly. You, you feel while you're in this situation that you've been thrust into that it's someone that you know, you wanna reach out to for some reason.

I, I really can't speak to it. I don't know. But, but what I will say is that I, I, you know, I think it's interesting because at times she seemed to suggest that she expected a lot of me or a lot more of me. But then at other times–

Benjamin Wittes: More of you, Anna. You've disappointed her.

Anna Bower: But, but then at other times, it, it was really unclear to me if she, if she had ever even read, You know what I, what kind of reporting I do, because, you know, my reporting is not access based.

You know, I'm not a reporter who's really trying to get the, you know, access based scoop or, you know, whatever. I, I, that's just not the core of my work, although it is sometimes a part of my work where I talk to sources and, you know, get information. But really I'm going to court and reporting on the proceedings, and a lot of my work is based on public records and documents.

And it seemed to me that, you know, at one point she encouraged me to outcompete other media outlets you know, find my own sources. But that suggests to me that there's not really much of an understanding of what kind of reporting and work I actually do. And then she came back around and, and said that I'm not a, in fact a journalist.

So, right. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe, maybe one day. Lindsey Halligan and I'll sit down for an off the record conversation and we'll find out.

Benjamin Wittes: Well, so the last line of your piece in the epilogue is that you're gonna text her a link to the story. Have you done that yet?

Anna Bower: I have not, I'm going to do it right now whenever we get off of this phone call.

Benjamin Wittes: We're gonna do that right now, Anna. It's been a long week. Get some rest and and if Lindsey Halligan sends you any thoughts on the piece. You know, make sure she knows what basis she stopped speaking on.

Anna Bower: Alright, thanks.

Benjamin Wittes: This conversation is part of Lawfare's new live stream series Lawfare Live: The Now. Subscribe to Lawfare’s, YouTube, and Substack to receive an alert the next time we go live.

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