Alina Habba announced today that she is “stepping down” from her position as Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Which is a creative way to describe leaving a job that the federal courts have ruled she doesn’t actually hold.
Habba, the parking garage lawyer plucked from obscurity by Donald Trump to help him rack up a million dollars in sanctions, had served as Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey until the statutory 120-day limit on that post expired. At that point, without a duly confirmed U.S. Attorney, the district judges fulfilled their legal duty and appointed one. Meanwhile, the administration gave Habba the job as First Assistant and pretended that she took over as Acting U.S. Attorney at that point. The courts disagreed and most recently the Third Circuit affirmed that decision.
Habba has now pretended to resign the job she’s been pretending to have.
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Hardly the most consequential takeaway, but the decision to write, “my loyalty is not to… a ZIP code,” followed by “you can take the girl out of New Jersey, but you cannot take New Jersey out of the girl,” suggests the statement went through exactly as many drafts as you’d expect.
The Third Circuit affirmed what Judge Matthew Brann ruled back in August: you cannot play an elaborate game of musical chairs with interim appointments and “special attorney” designations to circumvent the Senate confirmation process. The whole point of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act is to prevent exactly this kind of patronage appointment of unqualified loyalists.
Now, with an appellate court confirming what we all already knew, the Habba experiment is finally over.
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OR IS IT?!?
Three minutes after Habba’s announcement, we have Attorney General Pam Bondi purporting to accept Habba’s resignation while claiming that the DOJ is appealing the Third Circuit opinion and bringing Habba back if they win. How is this not moot?
Obviously, it behooves the DOJ to keep pushing this issue since this is the same problem they’ve got in the Eastern District of Virginia with Lindsey Halligan — one of the few lawyers who makes Alina Habba look like Oliver Wendell Holmes since her incompetent handling of the Comey and James cases really could not have been scripted any better — and in the Northern District of New York with John Sarcone III. Perhaps Bondi’s suggesting the DOJ will take their chances in other jurisdictions and try to use any victory there to ramrod Habba back in? WHO KNOWS?
Thankfully for Habba, the Pam Bondi School for Wayward Lawyers still has a home for her. Like Ed Martin, the proposed U.S. Attorney for D.C. that even the Republicans refused to back, who fell backward into a made-up “weaponization working group” job in the DOJ to harass Trump’s political rivals, Habba will get a new DOJ title as a “Senior Advisor” to “drive the fight against violent crime nationwide.”
Habba leaves, much like Kramer left Brandt Leland:
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.