Alina Habba, President Donald Trump’s embattled pick as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey, said Monday that she is resigning after a protracted legal battle over the legitimacy of her appointment.
Habba disclosed her decision a week after a federal appeals court panel ruled that she has been serving unlawfully as acting U.S. attorney. She will transition to a new role as a senior Justice Department adviser and could return to lead the New Jersey prosecutors’ office if that court decision is overturned on appeal, Attorney General Pam Bondi said.
“Do not mistake compliance for surrender,” Habba said in a statement. “This decision will not weaken the Justice Department and it will not weaken me.”
Despite her defiant tone, Habba’s departure served as a rare acknowledgment from a Justice Department official of the growing number of courts that have ruled against the Trump administration and its efforts to install loyalists in key prosecutorial positions across the country while bypassing Senate confirmation.
The same day Habba tendered her resignation, Bondi and her chief deputy, Todd Blanche, lashed out at federal judges in Virginia, accusing them in a statement of waging an “unconscionable campaign of bias and hostility” against Lindsey Halligan, whose appointment as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was ruled to be illegitimate last month.
That disqualification led to the dismissal of high-profile cases against former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. But Halligan has shown no signs that she intends to step aside. She has continued to use the title of U.S. attorney in court filings, drawing questions from some of the district’s judges — questions Bondi and Blanche dismissed Monday as “undemocratic judicial activism.”
In a separate statement, Bondi referred to the ruling declaring Habba’s appointment illegitimate as “flawed” and vowed that the Justice Department would seek “further review” of the decision, which was issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. However, officials had not filed notice of an appeal to the Supreme Court as of Monday afternoon.
“The court’s ruling has made it untenable for [Habba] to effectively run her office,” Bondi said, adding later, “These judges should not be able to countermand the president’s choice of attorneys entrusted with carrying out the executive branch’s core responsibility of prosecuting crime.”
Habba, 41, described her decision to step aside as motivated in part by her desire to ensure that the office’s work could continue unimpeded and “to protect the stability and integrity of the office which I love.”
It was not immediately clear whether Trump would seek to name another appointee to replace Habba, who was one of his former personal attorneys and who had no prosecutorial experience when he named her to lead the New Jersey prosecutor’s office in March.
For now, the office’s work will be overseen by a trio of attorneys who were already serving in the office and who will divide oversight of its work. The Justice Department said Philip Lamparello and Ari Fontecchio, two close Habba advisers, will oversee the office’s criminal division and administrative matters, respectively, and Jordan Fox, Blanche’s former chief of staff, will oversee the civil division.
Typically, U.S. attorneys are nominated by the president and confirmed or rejected in a Senate vote. Trump has faced pushback on Capitol Hill against some of his more controversial nominees, prompting the Justice Department to deploy novel tactics to keep his picks in their jobs.
Habba quickly emerged as a partisan lightning rod, pledging in a TV interview days after she was appointed interim U.S. attorney that she would use her job to help “turn New Jersey red” and quickly aiming her prosecutorial powers at Democratic officials in the state.
She initiated investigations of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Attorney General Matthew Platkin over their immigration enforcement policies and filed felony assault charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-New Jersey) over a scuffle with immigration authorities. McIver has pleaded not guilty and has vowed, if necessary, to take her case to trial.
New Jersey’s senators — Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats — pledged that they would not support Habba. Under a long-standing Senate custom known as the “blue slip,” the home-state senators for any U.S. attorney appointee can effectively veto a nomination.
With Habba’s nomination in doubt, New Jersey’s federal judges this summer voted not to retain her in the position under a provision of the law that limits interim U.S. attorney appointees to 120-day terms. They appointed her chief deputy, Desiree Grace, a career prosecutor, to replace her.
But the Justice Department fired Grace and installed Habba in the office’s No. 2 role instead. Officials then argued that because there was no one serving in the office’s top job, Habba could effectively assume the title of U.S. attorney on an acting basis. The administration has deployed a similar playbook to retain other controversial prosecutors in Los Angeles, Nevada and New York.
Since then, three U.S. district court judges have declared that the maneuvers to keep Habba and the others in their posts violated federal laws governing U.S. attorney appointments.
Before Monday, Habba had given no indication that she was willing to accept the consequences of those court decisions. Her determination to continue leading the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office had prompted some of the state’s federal judges to place pending cases on hold while the questions over her authority remained unresolved.
The disqualification of Halligan in Virginia hinged on a slightly different question of law. A judge’s ruling two weeks agodetermining that she, too, had been appointed in violation of federal law has left her office in limbo.
That decision was issued in response to a push from Comey and James to have the indictments filed against them dismissed. While the court deemed that Halligan had been illegally appointed and the indictments she secured must be thrown out, the judge did not specifically order her to vacate her post.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — a division that provides legal guidance to executive branch agencies — recently issued a legal opinion arguing that Halligan could remain at the helm of the U.S. attorney’s office, according to a person briefed on the opinion. As with Habba’s case, the Justice Department vowed an appeal but has not filed the necessary paperwork to pursue one.
The guidance advised attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia to continue to sign Halligan’s name on all legal filings from that office. So far, that hasn’t gone over well with federal judges in the district.
On Thursday, at an unrelated immigration-related plea proceeding, a defense attorney asked the judge overseeing the case to strike Halligan’s name from a government court filing in light of the lingering questions over her authority.
U.S. District Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff agreed, saying he found it “difficult to reconcile” Halligan’s continued use of the “U.S. attorney” title with the ruling disqualifying her. Nachmanoff had previously been overseeing the criminal case against Comey, though he was not the judge who issued the ruling on Halligan’s legitimacy.
“Lawyers have a responsibility to submit pleadings that are in conformity with the rules of the Court,” the judge said, according to a transcript obtained by The Washington Post.
The statement Bondi and Blanche issued in Halligan’s defense on Monday pushed back on that criticism.
“Lindsey and our attorneys are simply doing their jobs: advocating for the Department of Justice’s positions while following guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel,” they said. “They do not deserve to have their reputations questioned in court for ethically advocating on behalf of their client.”
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