A judge on Monday declared the three-person leadership team of the New Jersey federal prosecutor’s office to be unlawful and said President Trump’s insistence on handpicking U.S. attorneys showed that the White House cared more about personal control than public safety.
The judge, Matthew W. Brann, was ruling on whether the three prosecutors who have led the New Jersey office since December were doing so lawfully. He also addressed the national trend in which the Justice Department fires judicially appointed prosecutors as soon as they take office.
Using italics that demonstrated the heightened tenor of his ruling, he wrote that the Trump administration had shown through its statements and actions that it cared far more about who was running the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office “than whether it is running at all.”
Judge Brann pointedly said that the president’s continued reliance on unlawful mechanisms to appoint top federal prosecutors meant that “scores of dangerous criminals could have their cases dismissed or convictions eventually reversed.”
He said that any additional attempts “to unlawfully” direct the leadership of the office would require judges to throw out pending cases, a grave threat underscoring his frustration. Judge Brann said he would pause his own decision to allow the government to appeal.
U.S. attorneys, who lead prosecutors’ offices in more than 90 districts, are typically nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. But a number of Mr. Trump’s favored nominees, including Alina Habba, his choice to lead the New Jersey office, have been blocked by senators in their states, in some cases leading judges to fill vacancies by selecting candidates for the position on their own, as permitted by law.
During Mr. Trump’s second term, when judges have installed a U.S. attorney, the Justice Department has fired them. After it did so with an interim U.S. attorney in upstate New York recently, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, wrote on social media: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution.”
Judge Brann, a federal judge who typically sits in Pennsylvania but was designated to handle the matter in New Jersey, referred to that statement and others like it as “combative (and legally incomplete).” He said that such assertions clearly indicated that “the Department of Justice would not permit anyone to hold any United States attorney’s office if that person was not handpicked by the president.”
Ms. Habba, a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump who now works at the Justice Department in Washington, responded on social media to Judge Brann on Monday, calling his ruling “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 wrote. “The unconstitutionality of this complete overreach into the Executive Branch, time and time again, will not succeed.”
Judge Brann joins a growing collection of district court judges in New Jersey and around the country whose rulings are increasingly colored by their frustration with what they have consistently characterized as the lawless behavior of the Trump administration.
In several such rulings, judges appear to be seeking strategies to address frequent violations of the law. At least three in New Jersey have proposed new processes or tactics that they clearly hope will curb the administration’s conduct.
At the same time, the administration has grown more and more belligerent toward the judiciary. Top officials ridiculed the Supreme Court after it ruled against Mr. Trump’s tariffs, and Justice Department lawyers began an appeals court brief last week by saying: “Courts cannot tell the president what to say. Courts cannot tell the president what not to say.”
Since last summer, the New Jersey prosecutor’s office has been a casualty of the chaos created by the Trump administration’s moves to retain control. Dozens of seasoned lawyers have left the office, and trial court judges have been forced to grapple with the possibility that decisions they make about criminal cases could be overturned.
For a time, some judges were requiring defendants to acknowledge the uncertainty over who had authority to lead the office and to waive their rights to a future challenge. Months ago, many defense lawyers began refusing to go along with those waivers. And a growing number of defendants have moved to have their indictments voided, thrusting the court even further into disarray.
Last week, a judge, noting that the government was regularly flouting judicial orders in the cases of migrants who had challenged the legality of their detentions, imposed new rules to try to force compliance.
In August, Judge Brann concluded that Ms. Habba had remained in office in violation of the law. After an appeals court agreed with him, Ms. Habba left the office in December and was replaced by three prosecutors: Philip Lamparello, Jordan Fox and Ari Fontecchio. Since then, they have been dividing the responsibilities of the U.S. attorney between them.
But Judge Brann said that the arrangement was legally unworkable. On Monday, he wrote that the Trump administration had again overstepped its authority, as it claimed to have discovered “enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”
“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.”
Judge Brann, the chief judge in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, was a member of the conservative Federalist Society and active in Republican Party politics before he was nominated to his post by former President Barack Obama.
He was assigned the case over the summer after two defendants charged with crimes in the District of New Jersey challenged Ms. Habba’s authority and sought to have the charges against them dismissed. After Ms. Habba quit and Attorney General Pam Bondi named the three prosecutors to jointly lead the Newark office, more challenges were filed, leading to Monday’s decision.
Joshua C. Gillette, the president of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey, applauded Judge Brann’s ruling.
“This ruling ensures that any decision about who runs a U.S. attorney’s office is based on the Constitution and the statutes Congress enacted,” he said, “not mere presidential whim.”
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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