New Jersey Judge Nukes DOJ
Bondi's "triumvirate" gambit jeopardizes every criminal case in NJ
On Monday, a federal judge in New Jersey threw a DOJ lawyer out of his courtroom after threatening to have the bailiffs remove him.
“You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to just blindside the court and do whatever it is you guys want to do,” Judge Zahid Quraishi warned, before instructing the court security officers to remove Assistant US Attorney Mark Coyne.
Instead, Coyne left on his own, abandoning his hapless junior colleague Daniel Rosenblum to his fate. The hearing ended with the judge vowing to bring in Coyne’s bosses, and their bosses, and maybe even Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to explain what the hell is going on at the US Attorneys Office in New Jersey.
Come correct
Judge Zahid Quraishi is no joke. Before being nominated to the bench by President Biden, he was a civil litigator, a federal prosecutor, a US magistrate, assistant chief counsel for ICE, and a JAG lawyer, where he earned the Bronze Star and Combat Action Badge. If you come before him, you better come correct.
But the Justice Department has not been coming correct. Thanks to the Department of Homeland Security’s insistence on misinterpreting the law, the DOJ has been forced to defend thousands of habeas cases based on the same faulty legal reasoning, no matter how many judges reject it. And since ICE routinely disregards court orders, Assistant US Attorneys are stuck explaining to increasingly pissed off judges why detainees weren’t released, or were released far from home, without their possessions.
“The undersigned will not stand idly by and allow this intentional misconduct to go on. It ends today,” Judge Quraishi wrote in February, vowing to haul in both ICE and the leaders of the US Attorneys Office if another of these crackpot mandatory detention cases landed on his docket.
“Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office [of the US Attorney of New Jersey] is now a presumption that ‘has been undeniably eroded,’” he added.
Monday’s hearing wasn’t a habeas proceeding. Instead, it involved a criminal defendant named Francisco Villafane who pled guilty to possession of child sex abuse material (CSAM). Proximately, Judge Quraishi was angry because the government appears to have botched Villafane’s prosecution in spectacular fashion. And systemically, Judge Quraishi was furious that the US Attorneys Office continues to jeopardize every case it touches by continuing to operate under a leadership structure that has been declared illegal.
Mistakes were made
On April 15, 2025, Villafane agreed to plead guilty to one count each of possession and receipt of CSAM. At that point, the FBI had not yet finished examining the defendant’s phone, on which they would later discover many more criminal images, some of which contained extreme acts of abuse. Had the prosecutors waited for the FBI, they would almost certainly have been able to charge Villafane with more than just the two counts to which he’d pled guilty. But after they inked the deal, there was nothing else they could do.
In October, Rosenblum informed Judge Quraishi that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had identified “116 known ‘series’ of CSAM—each with potential notification and restitution obligations,” and requested to delay sentencing so the US Attorney’s Office office could contact Villafane’s victims.
The judge was apoplectic over the error, as well as a proposed sentence of less than one-third of the guidelines range for the charges Villafane pled to.
“How did the screw up happen? Was it your office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI, or both?” he demanded. “How did you execute a plea agreement without knowing all the evidence on the device only later to find out, Oh, my God, there’s babies and prepubescent children and bestiality?”
Judge Quraishi was also livid that the US Attorney’s Office appears to be using the same victims it failed so completely as a shield to deflect criticism of its own defective leadership structure.
Take the lifeline
On March 10, Judge Quraishi suggested that the government might wish to postpone Villafane’s sentencing in light of the latest ruling in the never-ending saga over the appointment of US Attorneys.
That saga began in August, when Judge Matthew Brann ruled that Trump’s personal lawyer Alina Habba was not legally serving as US Attorney in New Jersey, a ruling which was later upheld by the Third Circuit. Thanks to the Senate blue slip rule, Trump can’t get his preferred hack confirmed to lead the New Jersey prosecutors’ office. And so after yelling on social media that “this Department of Justice does not tolerate rogue judges” who refuse to bless the president’s cronies, Attorney General Pam Bondi purported to divide the job between three lawyers: Ari Fontecchio, Jordan Fox, and Philip Lamparello.
On March 9, Judge Brann ruled that this “triumvirate” arrangement was also illegal. But this time, he questioned whether he’d gotten it right in August when he said that cases prosecuted by line attorneys acting under a delegation of authority from the attorney general survive, even if the supervising US Attorney was not lawfully appointed. That issue is currently being briefed, and Judge Brann stayed his disqualification order to give the government time to appeal. But he warned the Department of Justice that “a stay cannot validate an unlawful appointment. If the Government chooses to leave the triumvirate in place, it does so at its own risk.”
The “risk” is that a prosecution supervised by this defective “triumvirate” will later be challenged and possibly dismissed because no one from the US Attorneys Office was acting under a lawful grant of authority. In his March 10 order, Judge Quraishi strongly implied that the DOJ should put off this sentencing until it gets its house in order, but if not, he ordered the attorney for the government to “address questions from the Court as to: the current structure of the USAO-DNJ; the legal authority for the AUSA's appearance; the AUSA's personal knowledge of the content of the 130-page opinion by Judge Brann; the legal sufficiency of a waiver if Defendant agrees to proceed despite these circumstances; and any additional inquiry the Court deems appropriate.”
Rosenblum responded with a terse, half-page letter asserting that the government was not requesting a postponement because “among other considerations, this is a victim case,” and warranted that he would be able to answer the court’s questions.
That was a very bad idea.
They’d rather drown
The hearing opened with Coyne seeking to verbally enter his appearance. He was obviously there to answer the court’s questions about the leadership structure in the US Attorneys Office, but since Rosenblum had just insisted in writing that he could and would handle it — and since Coyne couldn’t be bothered to show a modicum of respect for the court and send in his RSVP — Judge Quraishi told him to STFU.
And it was all downhill from there!
“Mr. Rosenblum, it looks like you are not taking the lifeline that I threw to you. Is that correct?” the judge began. The lawyer stammered that sentencing needed to go forward because of the victims — the ones his office utterly disregarded before accepting the bullshit plea — despite the fact that the sentencing would have no affect on their safety or potential restitution.
“There’s many victims in the case, none of which seemed to be of concern to your office,” Judge Quraishi scoffed. “But now, to proceed today, it is.”
The judge strongly implied that co-opting the victims was crass and flagrantly pretextual — a line drawn in the sand by an office that would rather risk a pedophile going free than treat Judge Brann’s ruling as binding.
Then Rosenblum tried to fob off the court with vague assurances that he heard from his superiors that Habba had actually left the building and Fox, Lamparello, and Fontecchio are the ones running the office.
Judge Quraishi was not impressed:
You don’t have personal knowledge to answer the questions that you so dismissively said you could respond to in your letter to the Court. I’m going to want Mr. Fontecchio, Mr. Lamparello, and Ms. Fox to provide that information to the Court under oath. They’re going to testify, and this Court’s going to figure out who is currently operating this office before I proceed with today’s sentencing hearing.
(FWIW, the NY Post reports that Habba got divorced and moved to Florida, and so is unlikely to be running the office in New Jersey.)
And then, belatedly, the US Attorneys Office decided to grab hold of that lifeline after all. After Judge Quraishi set a hearing for April 1 and ordered the triumvirate to show up and testify, Mark Coyne entered his appearance and requested a 30-day postponement. He reasoned that, by then Judge Brann would likely have decided whether the line attorneys are working as extensions of the Attorney General or the US Attorney (and thus whether they can legitimately carry the mantle of prosecutorial authority).
Kicking the can down the road may be a successful strategy. Indeed, every other court to consider the matter has agreed that line attorneys can try cases, irrespective of who’s running the office, and Judge Brann may conclude that his first impression was correct. But the rupture between the judiciary and the US Attorney’s Office laid out by Judge Quraishi isn’t going away:
I’m telling you, you have lost the confidence and the trust of this Court. You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public. And so you all need to start figuring out how to proceed moving forward, but it’s not going to be walking into the courtroom, making representations and us accepting it. We know now way too well not to accept those. Your folks are going to start testifying. They’re going to start speaking under oath when they tell me who’s running that office so that I have a proper factual record to determine if you’re allowed to be in this courtroom or not.
Judge Quraishi worked in the US Attorneys Office in New Jersey. He knows that prosecutors enjoy a tremendous degree of deference — or they did until 2025. This is the court effectively announcing a presumption of irregularity when it comes to the Justice Department.
To please Trump, Pam Bondi burned down the Justice Department. And she’ll probably wind up getting fired anyway. That’s the MAGA way!
To please Trump, Pam Bondi burned down the Justice Department. And she’ll probably wind up getting fired anyway. That’s the MAGA way!
From your keyboard to God’s ears.
From the MAGA Dictionary (which I just made up): To Doge - verb, for an incompetent amoral appointee to assume control of a well-functioning institution and reduce it to a smoldering ash heap of it’s former self. E.g., “He put his cousin Earl in charge and now you can’t eat there without getting diarrhea!”