Sure, they said: Go take a job as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, even though you’re not qualified, they said. It’ll be fun to be Trump’s Best Little Hatchet and go after his enemies, they said.

By all measures, Lindsey Halligan is very much not having fun these days, just a month or so into her tenure at a job she holds not based on her skills, but instead on her willingness to prosecute and persecute Trump’s enemies. Sure, she got indictments against both former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, but apparently no one told Halligan that the indictment is only the beginning.

Now, to be fair, by securing indictments, Halligan is at least doing better than U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. Pirro is busy putting up unprecedented numbers of grand juries refusing to indict on the comically inflated charges she keeps bringing.

But, the way things are unfolding, Halligan might be wishing she’d gotten no-billed on the Comey indictment and could just walk away.

On Sunday, Halligan filed a comically broad demand for a protective order, basically contending that Comey could never be left alone with discovery in the case for … reasons. The thing reads like a book report about protective orders, complete with one of Halligan’s justifications being that she looked up some other protective orders in criminal cases in the Eastern District of Virginia, and this was just like those!Reader, it was not just like those.

By Tuesday, Halligan had her answer from the judge: LOL nope. The request that basically all material in the case be subject to a protective order and that Comey not be able to access it, save for in the presence of his attorneys, was far too broad, said U.S. Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff, and would hinder Comey’s ability to prepare for trial.

Halligan also tried another motion designed to slow-walk the government’s obligation to produce discovery by pushing out a standard discovery deadline, and that didn’t work out either.

Halligan would be outmatched anywhere, but no more so than EDVA, the home of the rocket docket. Cases race through this district court. It’s a whole thing. Comey’s trial is already scheduled to begin on January 5, 2026. If Comey had requested it, the court was prepared for an even earlier start date in December.

Well, at least Halligan did find some prosecutors to help her with the case. Sure, she had to go outside her own office—the office she is literally in charge of!—and get two DOJ lawyers from North Carolina assigned to the case.

At least those two have some experience in prosecution, a thing Halligan very much does not. But hopefully, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gabriel Diaz and Nathaniel Lemons have some right-wing sinecure gig lined up for after this thing crashes and burns, because baby, it’s going to crash and burn.

Comey has already said he is going to file a motion of unlawful appointment, arguing that Halligan is just as improperly in her office as two of Trump’s other top-tier picks, Alina Habba and Sigal Chattah. Both Habba and Chattah have been ruled ineligible to hold their U.S. attorney offices because the complicated machinations Trump has gone through to avoid submitting their nominations to the Senate are, well, illegal.

Given that Halligan is also in her role via a shady temporary appointment rather than Senate confirmation, Comey’s move is in no way an empty threat.

Turns out that while it’s fun to do press conferences and get indictments on threadbare nonsense, it sucks to actually do the work of prosecuting. Does anyone want to lay odds on how long Halligan lasts?

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos