The Justice Department spent $1.1 million on an unusually large security detail for Lindsey Halligan during her four-month stint as a White House-appointed federal prosecutor last year, according to records shared with The Washington Sun.
Halligan, a former member of President Donald Trump’s personal legal defense team who had no prior prosecutorial experience, received extensive protection from the U.S. Marshals Service for at least several weeks as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. She left the role after 120 days because judges ruled she had been unlawfully appointed.
The Sun was the first to reveal the existence of her marshals security detail in October 2025, noting that it followed her everywhere — even as she made her way through the district’s offices. Sources said the detail was made up of three to six federal agents whose constant presence was making employees uncomfortable, given that it hinted at her distrust of career prosecutors whom she purported to lead.
At the time, a source with knowledge about the arrangement said her detail was a temporary assignment and a result of “threats outside” the office.
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Regular pay and benefits for Halligan’s detail cost $623,480, according to expense records from the marshals service provided to The Sun by the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward.
The marshals service also spent $191,000 on lodging and nearly $112,000 on overtime pay, according to the records. A “command post” cost roughly $11,000 and rental vehicles cost about $12,000.
Records indicate the detail was managed by the Judicial Security Division, which protects the nation’s federal judges, court officers and courthouses.
Halligan and a spokesperson for the marshals did not respond to requests for comment Monday.
Democracy Forward’s special counsel for oversight, Dan McGrath, called the detail a waste of money given Halligan’s unlawful appointment. “This tracks with the administration’s pattern of wasting taxpayer funds while engaging in unlawful activity as the failed DOGE experiment did last year,” he said in a statement.
Halligan, a former insurance lawyer, was a White House aide before then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in September 2025 appointed her interim U.S. attorney of an office that handles some of the Justice Department’s most sensitive national security cases.
Acting on Trump’s demands to prosecute his political foes, Halligan promptly convened grand juries to indict former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. A federal judge threw out the cases in November, finding that Halligan’s appointment violated laws governing the attorney general’s authority to name U.S. attorneys.
Even after that ruling, however, Halligan continued to act as the district’s top prosecutor and identified herself in court documents as U.S. attorney — a move a federal judge in Virginia criticized as a “charade.”
Halligan left the position on Jan. 20, at the end of a 120-day interim window.
It’s common for the marshals service to assign short-term protection to judges or prosecutors who have received violent threats. But it’s rarer for a U.S. attorney to be guarded like a Secret Service protectee, with a contingent of agents in tow at all times.
The marshals service was already under strain around the time Halligan’s detail began.
The agency logged a significant spike in violent threats to the judiciary in 2025, with many targeting judges who had ruled against the Trump administration in high profile cases. Marshals conducted a near-record number of protective investigations on behalf of judges in the 2025 fiscal year and assigned numerous temporary details to judges and their families, according to agency data and people familiar with the operations.
Around the time Halligan’s detail was running, officials from the federal court system’s policymaking body were also urging Congress to set aside more money for court security, citing a surge in threats. The judiciary’s security budget had been flat for two years. Congress approved a funding increase in the spring.
After losing her U.S. attorney gig, Halligan appears to have returned to Florida, where she had graduated from the University of Miami and is licensed to practice law. In February, she updated the nature of her existing corporation there into a professional limited liability company whose stated purpose was to conduct “legal consulting and related activities.”
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