Pam Bondi Wants To Throw Hands In New Jersey

Picking a fight with federal judges is A CHOICE

Joey Sussman via Shutterstock

America’s least-qualified interim US Attorney is headed for the exit … probably. Alina Habba’s 120-day term expired on Tuesday, and the Senate has not taken up her nomination for a permanent appointment. The judges of the US District Court for the District of New Jersey could have kept Habba on the job, but instead they appointed her chief deputy, career prosecutor Desiree Grace, to fill that role. Pursuant to federal law, Grace’s appointment lasts until the Senate confirms a permanent replacement.

Or at least, it was supposed to. Later that same day, Attorney General Pam Bondi purported to fire Grace.

Every part of that is impressively wrong. Alina Habba has not been “doing a great job.” Nobody “refused to allow her to continue in her position,” least of all “politically minded judges” who went “rogue.” The Attorney General can’t “remove” a sitting US Attorney. And the President does not have “core Article II powers” to nominate anyone he wants to any position in which he would like them to serve.

But other than that, bang-up job, ma’am!

I do not think that word “great job” means what you think it means

Alina Habba is both spectacularly incompetent and staggeringly corrupt.

She was never a prosecutor, state or federal and, prior to entering Trump’s orbit, ran a boutique law firm whose biggest client was a parking garage company owned by her husband. Habba is grossly unqualified to supervise more than 150 lawyers plus 100 support staff, much less run complex criminal cases. But in Trump’s second administration, you have to be more than simply unqualified to stand out.

Habba is also singularly incompetent. She was sanctioned a million dollars by a federal court judge for “strategic abuse of the judicial process” after filing a civil RICO trollsuit against Hillary Clinton. The court derided the complaint as so bereft of merit that “no reasonable lawyer would have filed it.”