Rachel Smith

"Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here." Anna Bower Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:40 PM Share On: f X inK My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification.

I glanced down at the message.

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began.

So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best writers in the country. Period. At anything. The things people say to him, usually with a huff of self-satisfied indignation, are *unbelievable*.

Believing your cause to be just is not a ticket to treat other people however you want.

Most of the people I love most in this world I met between 1988 and 1990 at the University of Chicago. We all agree none of us would have gotten in today — and that the university is almost certainly delighted by that particular development.

This, this, a thousand times this.

Students at any level are trying to make sense of the world that we’ve handed them with the tools that we’ve given them. If they are struggling with that task maybe the problem isn’t with them? Grant them some grace and examine your own practice.

There is no credible progressive argument against building a ton of new homes at all income levels. Opposing making it easier to build new homes isn’t progressive. It’s super conservative & an argument for a permanent shortage & permanent high rents.

I mean, he’s “smart,” but FedSoc smart, not normal person smart. He’s “here’s a complex heavily footnoted article about why Chevron deference is the greatest injustice in the history of the United States” smart. He’s Ben Shapiro shouting at sophomores smart.

I don't really care what the "political consequences" are of fighting for the proposition that *everyone* is entitled to due process before they are removed from the United States and sent to a Salvadoran prison.

It's not really a principle if you only adhere to it when it's politically expedient.

Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph. It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time. In sum, and for the reasons foregoing, we deny the motion for the stay pending appeal and the writ of mandamus in this case. It is so ordered. For the Court Is/ Nwamaka Anowi, Clerk

Damn, this conclusion:

“We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital... This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.”

“One of the top MS-13 members”?

This woman is an officer of the court and the Attorney General of the United States.

She knows that she wields immense power and responsibility.

Yet here she is on national TV, making baseless claims about a guy her boss wrongly sent to a gulag in El Salvador.

Yes. This is an important component of my thinking. I’m a native-born USC. If I don’t recognize that _right now today_ I have protections that other people don’t, that I can use to speak out when they may not be able to, what is even the point?

the way I’ve been thinking about it is: if noncitizens face real danger for saying what they think, then it is the responsibility of citizens, who don’t yet face that same danger, to be even louder

I saw someone on here describe Super Bowl Sunday as “Chip Christmas,” so your logic seems sound.

A large orange long-haired cat is sitting on my lap.

This guy was no help.

I have yet to develop any mouse superpowers.

It’s been a week since I had a very large mouse in my slipper for a full half hour before I noticed.