What happened
Lindsey Halligan, the White House aide installed as U.S. attorney in Virginia to prosecute President Donald Trump’s perceived enemies, stepped down last night amid growing pressure from federal judges. One judge in the Eastern District of Virginia yesterday threatened disciplinary action against Halligan or any other federal lawyer who referred to her as U.S. attorney in court filings, while the district’s chief judge declared the position “vacant” in a posting for Halligan’s replacement.

Who said what
Halligan’s exit “ended a bizarre monthslong standoff” during which federal judges repeatedly pressed her to “explain why she continues to identify herself” as the U.S. attorney “despite a ruling in November that she had been unlawfully appointed to the job,” The New York Times said. “This charade of Ms. Halligan masquerading as the United States Attorney for this district in direct defiance of binding court orders must come to an end,” U.S. District Judge David Novak, a Trump appointee, said in an order yesterday.

Yesterday’s “pair of extraordinary moves” by Novak and Chief Judge M. Hannah Lauck “signaled a breaking point for the federal bench” in Virginia over Halligan’s 120-day tenure, The Washington Post said. It also “intensified a battle playing out nationwide” over Trump’s efforts to install loyalists to back-to-back temporary positions as U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation. Halligan was the third such Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney to step down, following Alina Habba in New Jersey and Julianne Murray in Delaware last month.

What next?
It isn’t clear who will replace Halligan. Yesterday’s moves suggest the district’s judges plan to “select a temporary replacement,” as allowed under federal law, the Times said. But “it is likely that the president would try to fire that person and put his own choice — possibly Ms. Halligan — back in the job.”

What happened
At least two Department of Government Efficiency operatives assigned to the Social Security Administration accessed and shared sensitive data on unsecured servers, in violation of agency rules, a court order and possibly some laws, the Justice Department said in “corrections” to previous testimony made public yesterday. The disclosure was a “notable reversal by Social Security officials, who had previously claimed there was no evidence that DOGE had potentially compromised personal data,” The Washington Post said.

Who said what
Two unidentified DOGE workers were secretly in contact with an unidentified advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” DOJ official Elizabeth Shapiro said in the filing, and one of them signed an agreement with the group and may have aided it “by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.” The agency also “acknowledged for the first time that DOGE members had shared data with each other using an unsanctioned third-party service,” Cloudflare, the Post said. Social Security has been unable to access or “determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare,” Shapiro said.

The corrections affirm many of the allegations made by former SSA chief data officer Charles Borges in whistleblower testimony to Congress in August. “We have been warning about privacy violations at Social Security and calling out Elon Musk’s ‘DOGE’ for months,” Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.) and Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said in a statement. They called for the DOGE employees to be prosecuted.

What next?
Federal lawyers “referred the two DOGE employees to the Office of Special Counsel for a potential violation of the Hatch Act,” The New York Times said. Outside privacy law experts said the operatives also appeared to have violated much more serious laws, like the Privacy Act.