When Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to a felony and subsequently lost her license to practice law, it seemed that the era of high-profile, under-qualified attorneys linked to Colorado and working for President Donald Trump had closed.
Someone must be holding Lindsey Halligan’s beer because she has gone above and beyond anything Ellis ever did.
The Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Halligan has made a fool of herself, her office and the Department of Justice. In her very first case, the one Trump installed her to prosecute, she has bungled the proceedings so badly that she may lose her law license years faster than it took Ellis.
Halligan spent her formative years in Colorado. She attended Holy Family High School in Broomfield before continuing her Catholic education at Regis University and eventually leaving the state to get a law degree from the University of Miami. Despite her education, it seems likely Trump viewed her years competing in the Miss Colorado beauty pageant as her most attractive attribute.
Trump does have a habit of elevating physically attractive women with no notable history of legal accomplishment well above their level of competence. It is akin to the Peter Principle, where people get promoted to their level of incompetence, only supercharged and with a quadshot of espresso.
Call it the Pageant Principle.
First Trump trotted the bubbly blonde Ellis onto the national stage. After a nondescript legal career — including mistakes as a junior prosecutor handling traffic tickets — Ellis eventually caught Trump’s eye while working for ultra-conservative organizations and praising him effusively.
He plucked her to work on his national election law team. At the time she had never tried an election law case and it baffled members of that small bar, including myself. How did someone from Colorado who none of us ever met ascend to the top of a presidential campaign?
As it turned out, it had nothing to do with her legal chops. Apparently, the other lawyers on Trump’s team must not have thought much about her courtroom prowess, either. She only escaped losing her license the first time around because the other lawyers wouldn’t let her sign any pleadings; effectively, she had not actually misled a court because she was not an official representative in any case.
Years later, while being tried for paying hush money to a pornstar, Trump went back to the well. Alina Habba had a similarly underwhelming legal resume before she joined Trump’s Bedminster golf club, bumped into him, and found herself tasked with several high-profile cases.
After getting bounced out of court attempting to sue the New York Times, Habba became synonymous with Trump’s criminal trial in 2024. After Habba’s performance, a jury convicted Trump on 34 felony charges.
However, Habba continued to fail up, became a counselor to the once and future president and eventually the Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Of course, much like everything Habba has done, even that appointment became a controversy. A federal judge found it unlawful and the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals seemed to agree during recent oral arguments.
Enter Halligan.
The former beauty queen who, like Habba, met Trump at a golf course, went from run of the mill insurance defense to high-profile defense of Trump. Halligan made it exceedingly difficult for Judge Aileen Cannon to tip the scales in Trump’s favor — she had to reject several of Halligan’s pleadings due to formatting errors a first-year associate would have caught. She only “won” the case when Trump won the 2024 presidential election and the DOJ abandoned further attempts to prosecute him.
But Halligan saved her most ignominious act for her first-ever case as a prosecutor.
When her immediate predecessor refused to prosecute former FBI head honcho James Comey, Halligan wormed her way into the appointment promising to get it done. Under the pressure of a looming statute of limitations deadline, Halligan presented the case to a grand jury alone and alone signed the indictment. Apparently, everyone else in the office refused to be complicit.
As it turns out, Halligan went from Miss Colorado to Miss Conduct.
In her effort to do Trump’s bidding, she misstated basic legal principles (including Comey’s right to silence), misled the grand jury about additional evidence, and then, to top it off, apparently never presented the operative indictment for the grand jury to vote on and approve.
A judge in the case has said the misconduct may lead to dismissal of charges and former Trump attorney (and another Denverite) Ty Cobb has said Halligan should be disbarred.
At this point, maybe the best outcome for Halligan would be if another judge voided her appointment — and the cases she brought — for a similar reason as Habba. It might spare her future judicial tongue lashings and public embarrassment.
If the case were voided due to errors in her appointment, that problem would fall on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump himself. And it would moot any future ruling on her disastrous grand jury presentation.
Hopefully Halligan will be brushed aside and Colorado can avoid any more legal embarrassments. We have already had more than our fair share.
Mario Nicolais is an attorney and columnist who writes on law enforcement, the legal system, health care and public policy. Follow him on BlueSky: @MarioNicolais.bsky.social.
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