Reporter Anna Bower Unpacks Explosive DOJ Messages

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1:21Michael Popok:Way fair, every style, every home. Welcome to a special edition of Legal AF on the Midas Touch Network. Yesterday, there were a couple of major events involving Lindsay Halligan. One, we had the Comey side, James Comey and his lawyers, filing motions to disqualify Lindsay Halligan, not because she's obscenely unqualified, but because she was illegally appointed. But later that afternoon into the evening, we got a new bombshell report coming out of Lawfare and reporting by Anna Bauer. The title, Anna, Lindsay Halligan here. I almost started this interview with Anna, Michael Popak here. And off we go in a series of text messages that that were sent to the reporter, Anna Bauer, from Lindsay Halligan about Letitia James's prosecution.

2:14Michael Popok:It looked like she had been triggered by a couple of postings that Anna had made from some New York Times reporting on the 11th of October and were off and running. And then a story got created, not one necessarily that Anna Bauer was looking for, but one that came to her through the text messages. Ones that the Department of Justice is now scrambling to fix by saying that everything was off the record when it couldn't possibly have been since that wasn't asserted until nine days after the text change started. Let's bring in the intrepid reporter, Anna Bauer. Anna, how are you? I'm good. It's been a weird week.

2:53or a weird nine days. But I appreciate you having me here. I'm good.

2:59Michael Popok:Absolutely. There were many, many things about your reporting, and we'll put a link to it down in the notes on Lawfare yesterday. And we'll read from some of the texts. They're just eye-poppingly fascinating about what Lindsay Halligan thought she was doing. And I want to ask you what she thought she was doing. But so you've done reporting about everything related to Donald Trump and prosecutions and the vindictive prosecutions that are now going on. And Lindsey Halligan, it looks like you guys met apparently at the Breakers Hotel with Jim Trustee when she was on the Mar-a-Lago case, right? Yeah, yeah.

3:37So the background here is I was covering Trump's criminal cases at the time. He had not yet been indicted. But of course, there was this search at Mar-a-Lago. documents were seized by the FBI. Trump's team, which at the time included Lindsey Halligan and Jim Trustee, filed a very unusual motion in which they sought to have the appointment of a special master to sort through these documents and to kind of stop the Justice Department's investigation of Trump's alleged wrongful retention of classified documents. So amid all of that, Judge Eileen Cannon, who was presiding over this civil case related to that motion, calls a hearing.

4:22I had just started reporting on these cases. I am in Florida and go to this hearing. Afterward, I go to eat dinner at this hotel. And who is there? But Lindsey Halligan and Jim Trustee. Was she wearing her red pantsuit? She was not. No, I think she was wearing I you know, I don't remember what she was wearing. She does have some really great court fits, though, in terms of her courtroom outfits. But we we briefly spoke. You know, I I remember it very clearly because they were very dissatisfied then with with my reporting on the hearing, particularly some of the verbs that I used. And and then, you know, since then, I have not talked to Lindsay Halligan.

5:13Of course, I followed her career. She after Trump was elected, went to the White House, was put in charge of reviewing materials at the Smithsonian museums. stadiums, um, and then all of a sudden is, you know, handpicked by Trump to, uh, prosecute his perceived political enemies in the Eastern District of Virginia, becomes the top prosecutor there, and, and then one day, out of the blue, I get a message from her, or someone purporting to be her, which I didn't believe at first, you know, I thought it was a troll, um, and, and it turns Turns out it really was her because she was able to tell me where we first met, who she was with.

5:57And then we confirmed that it was her by obtaining her phone number, which connected to the discussion. And the Justice Department eventually confirmed it.

6:05Michael Popok:So to be clear, you're when you woke up that day to her text message, you're not planning to write an article about Lindsay Halligan, particularly. And some some of her prosecutorial work on Letitia James. So when when she later says, I didn't know there was a story, there wasn't a story. The story is her communicating with you. Right. Right. And I and I want to be very clear here, Michael, because there's a lot of context here about how relationships between reporters and prosecutors work. um so a few things that people who maybe aren't familiar with that context and just like how unusual this is and why this is even a story i think it's important to keep these things in mind so one is that it is normal for prosecutors and journalists to speak to each other um you know prosecute it's it's it's the kind of thing that that's how reporting happens you know um uh so that's not strange but uh there are a few things that are really abnormal here one is that it's the sitting united states attorney who's one of the most high profile prosecutors in the country who's already under immense uh scrutiny because of the circumstances in which she was put into this job and the cases that she is pursuing against leticia james and james comey um the The other is that she is reaching out to me who, you know, I, I, it seemed that she was reaching out to me about these tweets I wrote that was summarizing someone else's reporting.

7:39The New York Times and and that New York Times story happened to be about grand jury testimony in the case that she was overseeing the Letitia James case. And it's very unusual for prosecutors to reach out to a reporter unsolicited about an ongoing prosecution concerning something that touches on grand jury matters, because as as you know, you might we might speak to later. There's rules and policies and laws around the protection of grand jury secrets.

8:18Michael Popok:Which I'll be fair, Anna, when we get into the text, it looks like she does not understand the secrecy that is around grand jury material and the way she challenges you about your reporting about not only this grand jury, but apparently another grand jury that looked into the issues and had the grand niece of Letitia James testify that while she lived in the house, this seemed to be the triggering moment for Letitia James, what she referred to as the exculpatory evidence. that while the niece lived there, Letitia James in this very modest$118 ,000 house in Virginia visited it as well. And they lived there rent free with some of her kids, which she's allowed to do under a mortgage.

9:01Right. And so before we get into that, one other thing I will mention as well is that the final thing that is really remarkable about this, in addition to it being about an ongoing prosecution. It seems to relate to something I didn't even report myself. It also concerns matters that relate to grand jury testimony. But finally, nothing at no point did she say that we were off the record. And for people who don't know what that means, everyone who is a public figure knows very well that when you engage with the media, you can set at the beginning the basis on which you wish to speak. One way that you can do it is say, hey, I'd like to go off the record.

9:49And there has to be an agreement with the reporter that that is the basis on which you speak. And then they can't publish anything that you speak about in that off the record conversation. But if there's no agreement at the outset, the assumption is that you were speaking on the record and that everything that you say is fair game.

10:09Michael Popok:And no backseat and no backseat. And there's no takesie backseat. It doesn't work where you can retrospectively as a source say to a reporter, oh, hey, by the way, that was off the record. And look, there's there's contextual situations where people might have ongoing relationships between a source and a reporter where, you know, it's understood that in certain context, you know you've agreed oh hey everything we talk about is off the record unless there's an agreement otherwise you know that's something that some reporters are willing to do but when you are a sitting united states attorney approaching a reporter you don't you don't know um and you don't at the outset set the conditions of that conversation of course it's expected that what whatever you say is on the record and that they can report that i have some questions for you that You haven't yet been asked.

11:03Okay.

11:03Michael Popok:But I want to get the audience that may be joining this story in progress, even though I have a video up about it. I want to read from some of these texts because you post them in your lawfare article. And I think it's important to set the context. And then I'll follow up with some questions. And we'll put them up on the screen. You already said she contacts you out of the blue. You're a good reporter, so you want to confirm it's her and that you're not being trolled. It starts with, as your article does, and the title, Anna, Lindsay Halligan here. You're reporting things that are simply not true.

11:36Michael Popok:Thought you should have a heads up as if it was just going to end there. Well, thanks a lot, Lindsay. And you do a confirmation process, figure out, you know, do you know the secret password? Yes, it's the Breakers Hotel with Jim Trustee. Okay. I think I've got it. I'm all ears, right? Good reporting there. Okay. Here we go. Okay. Awesome. Thanks. I'm all ears. What am I getting wrong? That's what you write. I'm waiting now. And by the way, just to short circuit it, she never tells what she's got wrong. Honestly, so much. I just can't read this without doing that voice. I can't tell you everything about your reporting in particular.

12:14Michael Popok:It's just way off. I had to let you know. It's clear you don't have sources that are accurately telling you what you're writing. Seems clear to me that you just jumped to your biased conclusions based off of what you read and still instead of really looking at the evidence, evidence that she never reveals to you. I mean, at one point she's insulting, right? She acts like you're like a clip accumulator and you're not a journalist. So I don't have to have this agreement with you. But of course, she's been talking to you since the breakers. She knows you're a journalist. She knows what you're, maybe that particular tweet was something that you thought was interesting to your audience from the times, but that doesn't mean you're not a reporter.

12:51Michael Popok:And then she goes off with, if it continues. She says, you're assuming exculpatory evidence without knowing what you're talking about. It's just bizarre to me. Okay, I think I made it clear, you say, that my post was based on the New York Times report. But did they get something wrong? Yes, they did. But you went with it. Like, okay, are you ever going to tell me what is wrong about the reporting? Obviously, no. And they're also disclosing grand jury info. So at that point, I'm like, oh, she sort of understands the secrecy that's required by law around grand jury. No, which is also not a full representation of what happened.

13:26Michael Popok:I guess I was surprised by you running with it. I'm happy to retract, you say, or correct anything that is untrue. But I can't do that if you don't, if I don't know what the supposed error is. Can you be more specific? This goes on for several more chains when you finally say, did you just write me to criticize my reporting? I thought you were, you know, you said ask questions. I'm asking questions and you just told me I got it wrong. So here's my question to you. Why? Let's put ourselves for a moment in her head. Why did she contact you in her best day? What was she trying to accomplish? I, you know, I have been, oh, I've been over this again and again and again in my head.

14:17I frankly cannot figure it out at all. And like, like, look, I want to be very clear. It's total speculation and just theories on my part. So I have no idea. But but but one thing that, you know, might have happened is some of the tweets that I had posted, you know, one of them, I think that was moderately, you know, popular in the sense it got like, you know, a little bit of traction. It had like a thousand likes or something. And it was the one I believe that was just that. That's the one I sent her that I took her to be directly responding to, which summarized the New York Times reporting about this testimony that was reportedly given by the grand niece.

15:08Right. I had another Thompson.

15:11Michael Popok:Right. Right. And I had another tweet in which, as you as you heard, she was seemed to be responding to. also, which was, you know, I said, I think this is exculpatory in that it this testimony in which Denise said reportedly that she lived in the house for many years. That's the subject of the indictment and that she did not pay rent. You know, I took that to be exculpatory because it tends to show that Letitia James, who is alleged to be using a home, a second home as a rental investment property was not actually using this property primarily to collect rental income because the grandniece had lived there for many years and did not pay rent.

15:54You know, it may very well be that someone, you know, at the White House on in the Justice Department sent her this tweets or these tweets and maybe, you know, they weren't too happy about it. And so then she's reacting to the to some type of criticism. That's a possibility, but I have no idea. The other possibility is just that she had a moment of frustration because she's been under immense, you know, public pressure.

16:26Michael Popok:I'm going with this one. Yeah. And and like, you know, I'm someone she could put a name to a face to because we met three years ago. And so potentially it's that I again, this is all speculation. I have, frankly, I have no idea. It can found, it's baffling to me. But those are my theories. So let me, it's lonely at the top when you're a top prosecutor and you've never had that role before. So that, my second question was, is this an example of another, yet another example of Lindsay Halligan going rogue? There's already been reporting that she obtained the indictment of at least Comey without letting Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche know in advance that they were caught flat-footed.

17:14Michael Popok:We've got the other reporting that Ed Martin seems to be playing an outsized role as some sort of shadow AG that's maybe guiding Lindsay Halligan here. She went in, you know, by herself to the grand jury. I think somebody wrote a script for her and it might have been him. That's my own speculation. But is this another example? You think she actually cleared this contact with you and the lack of off the record with anybody in Maine justice? You know, so look, if you look at the justice manual, U.S. attorneys do, are allowed to, you know, themselves without authorization talk to the media. And like I said, it's not, you know, there are examples of U.S.

17:58attorneys having relationships with the media. Again, And typically that would be off the record and it would not be about an ongoing prosecution. But what what I what I think is interesting is that, you know, again, it's a reporter that you're on the record with. You don't go through public affairs, which is kind of even though she is technically authorized, is my understanding of the justice manual to go reach out to a reporter herself because she's the U.S. attorney. you would typically go through public affairs. You would then also report the contact, you know, to higher ups, particularly because here it related to matters concerning an ongoing prosecution and grand jury or, you know, reported grand jury testimony.

18:47I would be really surprised if the people of the Justice Department knew about this beforehand and had kind of cleared it or even after the fact. I don't know. I just can't speak to those facts. But what I will say is I think it's really interesting and telling that in the Justice Department statement, when we went to them for a request for comment, they suggested that I was tattletailing on Lindsay Halligan. And that to me indicates that maybe they did not know about this communication. But I don't know.

19:28Michael Popok:Plus, they spelled her name wrong. Yeah. Which is ironic, given she's got problems with spelling and geolocations like Brooklyn, New Jersey. in some of them. Oh, right. I forgot about that. Yeah, they reached out a few hours after the story published and realized the spelling error. But I have never seen the United States Justice Department call a reporter a tattletale for reporting. It's a badge of honor. Yeah. I mean, reporting something that was on the record and clearly newsworthy. We, in the course of reporting this story spoke to multiple former officials from the Justice Department and also reporters who cover legal affairs.

20:13And no one was able to tell us of something that came to mind that was even remotely similar to this type of contact with a U.S. attorney. So, you know, it was clear to us this was newsworthy and it was on the record. And I and I think that it was completely fair game.

20:34Michael Popok:I want to read our audience here at the end of the interview with the exchange about on the record and off the record. This is nine days after the initial contact. This is the backseas we were talking about. She just writes you out of the blue. Nine days later, there's nothing in the chain. Boom. By the way, everything I ever sent you is off record. You're not a journalist. We're just insulting you for so no reason. So it's weird saying that, but just letting you know. And you write back, I'm sorry, but that's not how this works. You don't get to say that in retrospect. Yes, I do. Off record. I'm really sorry, you write back.

21:10Michael Popok:I would have been happy to speak with you on an off the record basis had you asked, but you didn't ask. And you still haven't agreed to speak on that basis. Do you have any further comment for the story? Now it dawns on her. It's obvious the whole convo is off record. And here's one of my favorite parts. They're disappearing messages. And I use Signal. And it's on Signal. Again, the Trump administration already got in trouble with The Atlantic and Jeffrey Goldberg and Mike Waltz adding him accidentally to the Houthis and Yemeni attack, right, with J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller. Have they not learned about disappearing messages?

21:52Michael Popok:And then you say, She says, and what is your story? You never told me about a story. Lindsay, you contacting Anna is the story. Now, here's the question here at the end. There was a bit of, as I want people to understand the nitty gritty of journalism, there was a bit of a gap between the text exchange until you released the story yesterday. So what were you doing as a journalist about the story before you decided to time it for yesterday? um yeah so look i mean we we knew that there um was a story here um but of course we wanted to make sure that we were diligently fact-checking everything we needed to confirm that it really was her we it took us a few days to obtain her phone number um and and to actually you know uh 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.

22:57And 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 So does she really want to open a line of communication with me? Because at the beginning of the conversation, even though she was, you know, 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.

23:42So, 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 we're on the record and she's offering to answer questions. So it 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 of what she was doing. and the outreach, but she started, uh, uh, stopped responding to my messages. Um, and, and so then we started going through the process, you know, of writing the story.

24:22Um, but I, I just really want to underscore that, like, this is the kind of thing that is so risky for a prosecutor to do. Um, you know, it, 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. It can result in, you know, all kinds of ammo for the defense. She clearly knows that she is, you know, every misstep, every minor mistake or error is going to be picked apart by Abby Lowell in the Letitia James case, who is Letitia James's defense counsel. So it's still just as shocking to me that this happened.

25:09But we'll see. I don't know what's going to happen, but it'll be interesting to see, you know, kind of the response to the story as the next few days play out.