The United States Department of Justice is meant to be the supreme instrument of law enforcement in the American republic. It is not supposed to function as a partisan bludgeon, a procedural executioner, or a Senate-controlled choke point designed to neutralize prosecutors who dare to threaten entrenched power. Yet that is precisely what the removal of Lindsey Halligan as the Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia represents. This was not a clerical adjustment. This was not a good faith legal disagreement. This was a political purge, executed with sanctimony, cowardice, and calculated malice. Halligan, who has represented…
