Court rules Trump’s US attorney in Nevada was unlawfully appointed
A federal judge on Tuesday disqualified President Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney in Nevada, ruling that she had been unlawfully appointed—the second court ruling in as many months to cast doubt on the Justice Department’s novel strategy for retaining the president’s most controversial appointees in top prosecutorial roles.
U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell concluded that Sigal Chattah—a GOP activist and Republican national committeewoman who was appointed interim U.S. attorney in March—had served beyond the 120-day expiration date for that role and that Trump administration efforts to keep her past that deadline did not withstand legal scrutiny.
Campbell barred her and prosecutors under her supervision from overseeing cases against four defendants who brought challenges to her authority. He did not lay out in his 32-page order who now should lead the Las Vegas-based federal prosecutors’ office or explain how his decision should be interpreted in terms of any of the dozens of other cases it oversees.
Campbell suggested Nevada’s federal judges could decide to appoint their own interim U.S. attorney or that the Trump administration could name a new acting head of the office through a process that complies with federal law.
Campbell’s decision followed a similar ruling last month from a judge who declared that Alina Habba, Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney in New Jersey, had been serving “without lawful authority.” The Justice Department had deployed a complex series of legally untested maneuvers in a bid to extend her tenure in the role.
By law, interim U.S. attorney appointments can last only for 120 days. If there is no Senate-confirmed nominee at that point, federal judges are empowered to appoint an acting replacement in their districts.
In most cases, judges opt to extend the tenure of the interim or acting appointee already serving in the job. In Habba’s case, New Jersey’s federal judges voted not to reappoint her, choosing a career prosecutor from her office instead who had been serving as Habba’s chief deputy. Attorney General Pam Bondi responded by attacking the judges and firing the successor they appointed.
Bondi then installed Habba in the newly vacant chief deputy role. Because there was no one serving at that point as U.S. attorney, Habba, as the office’s new No. 2, inherited command of the office on an “acting basis.”
Facing the possibility of similar rejection by Nevada’s federal judges, Chattah resigned her spot as the top federal prosecutor a day before her interim term was set to expire in July, before the judges could gather to vote on whether to reappoint her. She, too, was then installed in her office’s No. 2 position and reassumed control as the state’s “acting U.S. attorney.”
Legal experts have called those maneuvers, which relied on two different laws governing presidential appointments, at best unusual and at worst potentially illegal. The Justice Department has argued that the executive branch has the authority to appoint its preferred candidates to enforce federal laws in each state.
Campbell, an appointee of former president George W. Bush and the senior federal judge in Arizona, was tasked with weighing the challenges to Chattah’s authority by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which oversees matters arising from Nevada.
In his ruling Tuesday, he concluded that “the procedure used by the government to appoint Ms. Chattah was never intended by Congress.”
The Justice Department has appealed the ruling disqualifying Habba and will almost certainly do the same in Chattah’s case.
A department spokesperson declined to comment on Chattah’s appointment Tuesday evening, as did a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Nevada. The department continues to defend the administration’s embattled U.S. attorney appointees in Los Angeles and New Mexico, who were retained in a similar fashion, against legal challenges questioning their authority.
Chattah’s brief tenure in Nevada has made her a partisan lightning rod. She ran for Nevada attorney general in 2022 and drew scrutiny for comments she made during that campaign suggesting her opponent—incumbent Aaron Ford, who is Black—“should be hanging from a f—ing crane.”
More than 100 retired federal and state judges issued a letter this summer calling her unfit for the U.S. attorney role. They cited Chattah’s history of partisan attacks and “racially charged, violence-tinged” social media posts, including ones comparing Jewish Democratic members of Congress to Nazi collaborators and calling Fani T. Willis—the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, who is Black and who charged Trump with interfering with that state’s 2020 election—“so ghetto.”
“There’s a decorum that exists in federal government that does not exist in my private life,” she told Las Vegas’s KLAS-TV last month when asked about those remarks. “If you and I are out for drinks, I’m going to have a little bit of a different tone than if you and I are here in the office.”
She added: “There is not an extremist bone in my body.”
Chattah has also not shied away from controversy in the U.S. attorney role, publicly sparring with Las Vegas’s district attorney over his handling of a case against a senior Israeli government official allegedly caught in a child sex sting. Reuters, on Tuesday, reported that Chattah had also urged the FBI to launch an investigation into debunked GOP claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump has not nominated Chattah to serve a full four-year term in the U.S. attorney role. The state’s two Democratic senators—Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto—have long signaled they were no votes should he try to do so.
“Sigal Chattah is so unqualified that prosecutions of violent criminals might get thrown out, but she’s found the time to chase ridiculous conspiracies for Trump,” Cortez Masto said in a statement Tuesday. “Nevada needs a U.S. attorney who can actually do the job, and that’s not her.”
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