An appellate court slammed the brakes Monday on President Donald Trump’s bid to keep his favored prosecutors in blue states, ruling that Alina Habba is unlawfully serving as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous 3-0 decision upholding a lower court ruling that booted Habba, a hard-charging Trump loyalist and former personal lawyer, from the job.
The Trump administration can now ask the full 3rd Circuit to take another look or punt the fight to the Supreme Court.
A three-judge panel grilled administration lawyers in October over the convoluted process Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi used to reinstall Habba after her temporary appointment expired. Judges pressed the DOJ’s Henry Whitaker about the administration’s unusual maneuvering.
Whitaker insisted the White House followed the law, saying the administration relied on “overlapping mechanisms” Congress allowed. “In this case, the executive branch admittedly took a series of precise and precisely timed steps not to evade or circumvent those mechanisms but rather to be scrupulously careful to comply with them,” Whitaker said.
The panel — two judges appointed by George W. Bush and one by Barack Obama — didn’t sound convinced. One judge openly questioned whether the administration’s tactics blew past constitutional boundaries.
“Would you concede that the sequence of events here, and for me, they’re unusual, would you concede that there are serious constitutional implications to your theory here, the government’s theory, which really is a complete circumvention, it seems, of the appointments clause?” the judge asked.
Habba is one of several Trump-picked prosecutors tied up in legal battles over allegations that the administration skirted the Senate and stretched federal vacancy laws past their limits. Temporary U.S. attorneys Lindsey Halligan in Virginia and Bill Essayli in California are also fighting similar challenges.
Veteran D.C. litigator Abbe Lowell, long a thorn in the side of Trump World, represented the defendants pushing to disqualify Habba. Two groups of defendants facing routine federal charges argued that she lacked legal authority to prosecute them because her appointment was invalid.
