A federal judge upended the leadership of New Jersey’s U.S. attorney’s office again on Monday, ruling for a second time in the span of just months that the Trump administration had illegally sought to bypass Congress and install its own picks to head the prominent prosecutorial outpost.
In a sternly worded opinion, 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, he cautioned: “If the Government chooses to leave the triumvirate in place, it does so at its own risk.” Brann 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 among all three branches of government over who has the ultimate authority over U.S. attorney picks.
Typically, U.S. attorneys are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate. But Trump, facing pushback in the Senate over some nominees, has adopted a series of legally questionable tactics to keep his picks serving in their roles in interim and acting capacities.
Brann, in his ruling Monday, dismissed such maneuvering as “an enormous assertion of Presidential power” that flies in the face of laws that govern such appointments.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately return requests for comment. 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.
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 rejected that argument.
“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.”
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