Despite a panel of federal judges picking another person for the job, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba — who until the last few months had zero prosecutorial experience — is the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey. At least for now.
And she did it with the full backing of the president and Attorney General Pam Bondi even though Habba’s law license may be in jeopardy because, according to NOTUS, she reportedly remains under an ethics investigation following accusations that she advised a young woman to sign off on an illegal non-disclosure agreement after the woman claimed she was sexually assaulted at Trump’s Bedminster golf club.
Habba’s time as interim U.S. attorney has been punctuated by her attempts to wield her authority broadly. She charged Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, with trespassing and Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) with multiple counts of assault of law enforcement officers following a scuffle in May at a federal immigration center where Baraka and McIver were conducting oversight.
So how did we get here? Loopholes. Lots and lots of loopholes.
Trump named her to the post in March. Under the law, interim U.S. attorneys are allowed to serve for just 120 days pending Senate confirmation.
Habba’s nomination had languished and then stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee after Democrats questioned her lack of experience and expressed worry over her history and proximity to Trump since she represented him in his criminal hush-money case, his civil case involving writer E. Jean Carroll and the fraud case brought against him by New York Attorney General Letitia James
As the 120-day deadline approached, Habba sought to solidify her role with a vote from federal judges in New Jersey. The court rejected her, provided no comment on its reasoning and selected Habba’s next-in-line, Desiree Grace, to become New Jersey’s top prosecutor. (Habba had selected Grace in March to serve as the first assistant attorney for New Jersey.) Grace is an experienced prosecutor. She tackled violent crimes and quickly moved up the ranks starting as an assistant attorney in Newark in 2016 to becoming chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office there. She’s also clerked on the New Jersey Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
While rare, judicial appointments are perfectly legal, and since the administration had no other nominations but Habba’s in the mix, Grace was logically the next in line to take the acting U.S. attorney job. Yet within hours of the court’s ruling, Bondi fired Grace over email and unleashed a Trumpian-style missive on social media.
“This Department of Justice does not tolerate rogue judges — especially when they threaten the president’s core Article II powers,” Bondi wrote on X.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
Todd Blanche, another Trump personal lawyer-turned-Justice Department official — he is the deputy attorney general of the United States — called Grace’s appointment a “backroom vote” that would not be allowed to “override the authority of the chief executive.”
Grace acknowledged her departure as first assistant in a post on LinkedIn a day ago but said she intended to move forward with the appointment. She would follow orders from the judges “in accordance with the law,” Grace said.
But then, Habba resigned as the interim U.S. attorney and simply announced Thursday night that she was now the acting attorney for New Jersey. And acting attorneys, under the law, can stay for up to 210 days in the role. HuffPost reported at length in April about the legal strategizing the Trump administration uses to install its allies in the courts and those methods have quickly become rote.
Just last week, a panel of federal judges rejected John Sarcone, Trump’s unconfirmed pick to serve as the interim attorney for the Northern District of New York. When he couldn’t be confirmed, Sarcone was abruptly named by the Justice Department as special attorney to Bondi.
In a letter announcing the new title, the department said it meant that Sarcone was imbued with all the powers of a traditional federal prosecutor and Bondi described his tenure as indefinite. As noted by The New York Times, the title is unique and has never been given to someone who has led a U.S. attorney’s office before.
“They’re telling them: Your allegiance is not to the court, or as being an officer of the court, not to the profession or the Constitution. It’s to Donald Trump.”
– Steven Cash, former assistant district attorney in New York
Steven Cash, a former assistant district attorney in New York, onetime intelligence officer for the CIA and former senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security’s undersecretary for intelligence, told HuffPost in an interview this week that he believes Habba is just the latest example of the administration engaging in a “very deliberate play across the board to change the type of government we have.”
“To say basically fuck you to a panel of judges and then publicly call them rogues? I don’t even know what to say. It just doesn’t happen in a co-equal government. It would be as if a baseball player just started saying ‘fuck you and your strike call, I’m going to first base’ and then they go to first base… and everyone in the crowd just sort of watches the guy on first base standing there even though the umpire called a strike,” Cash said.
The gamesmanship utilized by the administration is disruptive to the work that lawyers in these important offices are doing, he added, and it raises significant questions in the minds of attorneys who stay.
“At times, they don’t know who their boss is. What they do know is they are not guided by independent actors to be America’s lawyers,” he said.
In his experience, the Justice Department often prided itself on its ability to be independent and not, in many cases, pawns for the president’s directives, he said.
Especially when those directions were politically motivated or tinged. But the message Bondi and Blanche are sending is “very clear,” Cash said.
“They’re telling them: your allegiance is not to the court, or as being an officer of the court, not to the profession or the Constitution. It’s to Donald Trump. That’s who you work for,” he said.
Neither the Justice Department nor the White House returned multiple requests for comment.
It took less than two weeks for Habba’s office to drop the charges against Baraka — and for the DOJ to receive an upbraiding over the mayor’s arrest — but McIver is still facing indictment. The Justice Department accused her of pushing her forearm into an immigration agent; McIver says the charges are purely political and are only “meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight.” Baraka has sued Habba for malicious prosecution.
Habba also launched probes against New Jersey’s democratic governor and the state’s attorney general over a policy restricting the assistance that local cops can give federal immigration agents. In announcing the investigation, Habba thundered that the probe was meant as a “warning for everybody” and she would pursue anyone — and “come after them hard” — if they “got in the way” of Trump’s immigration agenda.
Habba must still face Senate confirmation to stay in the attorney role after 210 days. And she may face an extraordinary uphill battle to convince lawmakers she isn’t a partisan hack who uses the law to meet political ends: In March, she appeared on a right-wing podcast and declared that “we could turn New Jersey red.”
“Hopefully while I’m there, I can help that cause,” she told far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correct Steven Cash’s former title.