Trio named to replace Alina Habba as US attorney is also serving illegally, judge says
A federal judge upended the leadership of New Jersey’s U.S. attorney’s office again Monday, ruling for the second time in less than a year that the Trump administration had illegally sought to bypass Congress and install its own picks to head the prominent prosecutorial outpost.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann said that a trio of Justice Department lawyers who have been leading the office since late last year had been unlawfully serving in their positions. Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed them after Brann disqualified Alina Habba, President Donald Trump’s previous choice for U.S. attorney in the state, in August amid similar questions over the legality of her appointment.
“One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top aides have chafed at the limits of their power set forth by the law and the Constitution,” Brann wrote, though he immediately stayed his ruling, allowing the administration a chance to appeal.
Still, his sternly worded 130-page opinion ended with a warning to the government that if it chose to leave that triumvirate in place, “it does so at its own risk.” He added that any further attempts to illegally appoint new leadership to the office would “result in dismissals of pending cases.”
Brann’s decision escalates a battle that has been brewing across the country and among all three branches of government over who has the ultimate authority over U.S. attorney picks.
Typically, U.S. attorneys, who have broad authority to oversee all federal criminal and civil cases in their districts, are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate. But Trump, facing pushback over some nominees, has adopted several legally questionable tactics to keep his unconfirmed picks serving in their roles.
Brann, in his ruling Monday, dismissed such maneuvering as “an enormous assertion of presidential power” that has imperiled dozens of pending cases and flies in the face of laws governing U.S. attorney appointments.
The judge said the Trump administration’s efforts to circumvent those statutes—even after his ruling disqualifying Habba last year—suggested that officials there care “far more about who is running” the New Jersey’s U.S. attorney’s office “than whether it is running at all.”
“As long as the president is willing to find compromise, there is no reason that someone cannot always be performing the functions and duties of the office in complete conformity with the law,” Brann wrote.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not return requests for comment as of Monday evening. Habba, who left the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office in December and is now serving as a senior adviser to Bondi, called the judge’s latest decision “ridiculous.”
“Judges may continue to try and stop President Trump from carrying out what the American people voted for, but we will not be deterred,” she said in a post on X. “The unconstitutionality of this complete overreach into the Executive Branch, time and time again, will not succeed.”
Across the country, courts have disqualified a half-dozen of Trump’s picks to lead U.S. attorney’s offices on an interim or acting basis, finding that each had served well beyond the statutorily defined limits of their temporary appointments or were never legally appointed in the first place.
In New Jersey, Virginia and New York, federal judges have named their own replacements only for the Justice Department to swiftly fire those picks—in some cases via social media posts, which Brann described as unnecessarily “combative.”
Bondi’s decision to name a trio of lawyers to replace Habba marked a new evolution of the administration’s strategy. The attorney general said Jordan Fox, a former adviser to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche; Ari Fontecchio, a career prosecutor in the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office; and Philip Lamparello, a senior counsel who came in under Habba, would each oversee aspects of what would normally be the U.S. attorney’s portfolio.
In splitting the job, the government argued, Bondi had found a way to legally delegate authority to subordinates of her choosing while getting around laws that said only a Senate-confirmed nominee or an appointee named through other legally valid means could oversee all aspects of the U.S. attorney’s job.
Brann, a Republican and member of the conservative Federalist Society appointed to the federal bench in Pennsylvania by President Barack Obama, was appointed to weigh in on the matter after criminal defendants in New Jersey challenged the arrangement and sought to have their indictments dismissed.
Though Brann did not immediately agree to throw out any criminal charges brought under the new leadership team as the court battle over its legitimacy moves forward, he questioned why such a complicated structure was necessary at all.
“Why does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this district potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure?” he asked. “The government tells us: the president doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.”
See also:
Appeals court rules Trump prosecutor appointment violates law
Trump loyalist Alina Habba resigns as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor
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