Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump Blindsided by New Lawsuit as Prosecutor Destroys Evidence?!
Episode Date: October 28, 2025Trump’s novice federal prosecutor is in hot water in two ways (again), with a new lawsuit brewing accusing her of both intentionally destroying federal records and communications AND threatening rep...orters, while a South Carolina Clinton-appointed judge is going to decide whether she lives or dies as a federal prosecutor as Judge Currie decides the pending motions to disqualify Halligan. Michael Popok has the receipts, including an interview with the reporter, Anna Bower, at the heart of the new attacks on Halligan. Learn more about the Popok Firm: https://thepopokfirm.com Subscribe: @LegalAFMTN Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The substance.
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And the naked gun.
That was awesome.
Now that's a mountain of entertainment.
Lindsay Halligan and trouble just seemed to go together.
Because Lindsay Halligan, the novice prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia
handpicked by Donald Trump to go after his political enemies,
she's in trouble again in two different ways.
I'm going to cover it right here for you on the Midas Touch Network and for legal AF.
Firstly, there's a lawsuit brewing, that's a legal term,
about her use, admitted use, of the signal.
disappearing message app as a federal official about federal records, which are her messages.
And that all blew out into the open, came out into the open, because there is an article that was
written by reporter Anna Bauer, friend of legal AF, who I just recently interviewed, in which
in that exchange, Lindsay Halligan admitted a number of things. It was unsolicited. She reached out
to the reporter without going off the record. And she said,
said, I'm going to comment effectively.
I'm going to comment about the Letitia James prosecution that I alone are handling.
I'm going to comment about the grand jury.
I'm going to comment about your reporting.
And I'm going to use a disappearing messaging app to do it.
Okay.
That became the heart and soul of emotion that was filed by Letitia James saying she needs to be gagged,
Lindsay Halligan.
And because of the use of her reaching out.
the press and commenting about evidence, that has to stop. But then American oversight, who brought
a similar lawsuit against the federal government at the beginning of the Trump administration
when Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, used the signal app, the same app, disappearing
messages and all, to talk among insiders in the government about a planned attack or bombing
on the Houthis of Yemen, of Yemen, about a trade port issue going on there.
And Mike Waltz pulled together Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard and Stephen Miller and the
vice president and all these people, but he also either fat-thumbed it or he did it on purpose.
He added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Magazine, who was there like
a fly on the wall watching the signal chat about the,
the Houthi bombing attack.
Everybody got in trouble.
Mike Waltz got fired and made the ambassador to Iceland.
And there was this lawsuit about the use of the signal app.
So Lindsay Halligan knows better.
Now American Oversight, the same entity, is going after and has made a public records request,
which is the prerequisite before you bring the lawsuit and the lawsuit's coming.
Sent to listen to this.
Marco Rubio.
Why?
Because he's the acting archivist of the United States.
Donald Trump's fired all the people that know what they're doing.
He's in charge of federal public records.
He was also on the signal chat the last time around.
So here's what the letter says,
using as the basis the interaction between Lindsay Allegan and Anna Bauer,
the reporter.
And I'm going to show you a clip of my interview with Anna Bauer on this very issue.
Let's start with the letter.
American Oversight Rights to Bring to Your Attention,
the potential unlawful destruction or removal of federal records of interim United States Attorney
for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsay Halligan, in violation of the Federal Records Act.
You can't use disappearing messaging, invisible ink, for public records.
Specifically, interim U.S. attorney, Halligan, appears to have removed or destroyed messages
exchanged with a legal journalist Anna Bauer via the commercial messaging application, meaning not secure,
signal where Halligan apparently attempted to influence news coverage of a federal prosecution
and specifically referred to her role as lead prosecutor in the conversation.
In fact, let me show you the clip of my interview with Anna Bauer on this very issue.
And there's another interview that I've done of her that's up on Legal A.F. this week as well.
Let's play the Anna Bauer clip.
Yeah, so look, I mean, we knew that there was a story here.
but of course we wanted to make sure
that we were diligently fact-checking everything
we needed to confirm that it really was her
it took us a few days to obtain her phone number
and to actually you know
make sure that and confirm that it really was her
we went through the process as I said
of speaking with experts
who could speak to us about how unusual
this story is
And then also, you know, I was not entirely sure whether she was done talking to me.
And a part of, like, a part of journalism, you know, is just trying to see whether there is a possibility of a relationship there.
And we had to make a decision like, we've got something that's clearly newsworthy.
But also, does she really want to open a line of communication with me?
because at the beginning of the conversation,
even though she was expressing her dissatisfaction
with my reporting, she also said at one point,
before you report, feel free to reach out.
And that's an incredible, like, you know, opening for, you know,
I'm reporting on these cases.
So, of course, if the U.S. attorney is offering for me to reach out to her
and ask her questions about the case
that she personally is prosecuting,
of course I'm going to try to see and feel it out
and we're on the record and she's offering to answer questions.
So for a few days, I tried to see if she was serious about that.
It quickly became clear to me that she was not.
You know, she started, I don't know if maybe she just thought better
of what she was doing and the outreach,
but she started stop responding to my messages.
And so then we started going through the process, you know,
of writing the story.
But I just really want to underscore that, like,
this is the kind of thing that is so risky
for a prosecutor to do.
You know, there can be a host of consequences
for talking to a reporter on the record
about an ongoing prosecution,
which is why prosecutors typically don't do it.
That was just a day after her published article came out
talking about it.
Now, this is a very interesting demand
here. Because it's, it is, it is arguing that as a federal official, Lindsay Halligan violated the
Federal Records Act by using a disappearing messaging platform, which makes sense for her messages.
Her interaction with Anna Bauer is not privileged. This isn't like internal, you know, litigation,
work product privilege or some other privilege that would never see the light of day. This is her
interaction with the press.
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In fact, American Oversight goes one further and suggest that this type of interaction
is an attempt to chill First Amendment speech and is also illegal.
In other words, that she's warning her in a way, that Halligan is being, that
Bauer is being warned by Halligan, which in and of itself is an improper attempt to coerce the media.
In footnote six of their letter, they say to Marco Rubio, given the subject matter of Halligan's communication,
criticizing a social media post sharing an article regarding prosecution of a critic of President Trump,
Halligan's repeated accusation that Bauer doesn't report fairly may be especially appropriate for preservation as a potential evidence of an implicit threat, citing to a case called Alwetti v. Molinari, which is about forms of government coercion for First Amendment analysis.
So they also say that she admitted, here it says on page four, Halligan's admission in her final message,
to Bauer that the signal conversation was set to disappear, suggest that she used signal
for the purposes of creating records that could not be retained. That's a flagrant violation
of the Federal Records Act. And they go through all of the messages that were screenshoted
and saved by Anna Bauer in her article. For instance, on page 3, Halligan as a prosecutor,
on the case writes to a reporter, you're assuming exculpatory evidence without knowing what you're
talking about. It's just bizarre to me. If you have any questions before you report, feel free to
reach out to me. But jumping to conclusions does your credibility no good. You should read the
indictment. It says she received thousands of dollars in rent. By the way, that's a lie.
She doesn't even understand her own indictment. The indictment doesn't say she received thousands of
dollars in rent.
It says that she got a benefit from getting a mortgage claiming to the bank that she was
not going to rent it.
She can't even get her indictment straight.
It's three pages.
I can't tell your grand jury stuff.
All right.
This letter is going to be the basis of the lawsuit.
Now, they successfully sued about the signal app that the,
government did in the beginning of the administration so i don't understand why they can't get this straight
that's trouble number one for lindsay alleghen trouble number two is that the two motions to get her
kicked as a interim u.s attorney on a violation of 28 u.s.c 546 the vacancy reform act that she was improperly
illegally appointed. One brought by James Comey, the former FBI director, an identical one brought by
Letitia James. They have now been consolidated into one hearing before a judge that's been assigned
that's outside the Eastern District of Virginia. So as I had predicted, because there's a conflict
implicit in the motion between the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia and Lindsay Halligan,
Because if Lindsay Halligan is kicked out as the U.S. attorney, it is the judges of the Eastern District, including the judges presiding over the Comey matter and the Letitia James matter, that would decide who the next U.S. attorney is temporarily until Donald Trump finally gets around to getting one confirmed through the Senate. It puts them in conflict.
So, Judge Nachmanoff, who's the judge over the Comey case,
at the urging of Comey sent the case to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge.
That's the appellate court that sits over Virginia and South Carolina and North Carolina
and said, it's got to be referred to somebody else.
Judge Diaz referred it over to a judge in South Carolina,
a Clinton appointee, senior status judge, Judge Cameron McGowan Curry.
And now she's going to be presiding over both motions
because Judge Walker consolidated Lettician James' motion
with the motion for Judge Curry
that was sent to Judge
for James Comey that was sent
to Judge McGowan Curry in South Carolina.
So now a South Carolina
Clinton appointee
who used to work in the Department of Justice
is going to decide whether Lindsay Halligan
lives or dies, at least as a prosecutor.
This is the reason
you don't appoint a novice,
inexperienced lawyer
who's never been a federal prosecutor before
to be one of the top five
prosecutors in the Department of Justice overnight.
It's not insta prosecutor, just add water, send her in.
But the thing that was interesting is Anna Bauer said it to me in a new interview that I just
did that's going up on Legal A.F.
The next few hours, she said to me, I don't even understand how Lindsay Halligan got this
so wrong.
She said she's at least knowledgeable about the media.
She'd been a media spokesperson.
She'd worked on the Mar-a-Lago case.
They trotted her out to go appear on Fox and Newsmax and friendly propaganda networks in order to talk about Mar-a-Lago.
That's how she met Anna Bauer on the Mar-a-Lago case.
They met at a hotel lobby when Anna was covering the case and the hearings that were going on up in Fort Pierce and all of that.
So Anna Bauer is like, I don't understand how she got this wrong.
she worked on the defense team the defense team for Donald Trump was notorious for taking any little
thing out of context in any of the criminal cases and using it against the prosecution and so why are they
surprised that it's happening to them now they should know better they wrote the playbook that the
defense lawyers are using now and they had an almost identical problem with signal at the top of the
administration that went to a trial or a hearing with this same American oversight.
So we're all sort of scratching our heads here about how dumb they are in their conduct and
behavior.
We'll continue to follow it all right here.
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