The Florida Bar said Friday it is not investigating former Justice Department attorney Lindsey Halligan, walking back an earlier statement saying a probe was underway.
In early February, a Florida Bar official responded to a request for a probe into the Trump loyalist over her time in the administration by writing, “We already have an investigation pending.”
A day after NBC News and other outlets reported on the letter Thursday, the Florida Bar said that while there is a “monitoring file,” there is no investigation into Halligan.
“In response to an inquiry from a complainant, The Florida Bar wrote a letter to the complainant erroneously stating that there is a pending Bar investigation of member Lindsey Halligan,” a Florida Bar spokeswoman said in a statement Friday. “There is no such pending Bar investigation of Lindsay Halligan.”
The bar said it received a complaint against Halligan and then followed what it called standard practice by “monitoring the ongoing legal proceedings underlying the complaint.”
The complaint to the Florida Bar came from the Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog group. The group said that by falsely claiming to be a U.S. attorney, Halligan committed a variety of ethical violations.
Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience before leading unsuccessful cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, left her role as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in January after a judge said she was “masquerading” as the district’s top federal prosecutor.
The Campaign for Accountability filed complaints with both the Florida and the Virginia bars in November, and it followed up with the Florida Bar last month.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously served as Florida’s attorney general, criticized the earlier news reports of an investigation.
“The Florida Bar ‘investigation’ of Lindsey Halligan is totally fake news,” she said Friday in a post on X. “Lindsey not only did nothing wrong — she did a great job!”
Asked for comment on the Florida Bar’s reversal, Halligan responded to NBC News Friday by writing, “Where’s my apology?”
She also sent a screenshot of a Trump post on Truth Social where he reposted Bondi’s defense of Halligan.
