MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A federal judge has ruled that one of President Trump's former personal attorneys, appointed as New Jersey's top federal prosecutor back in March, has been in that position without legal authority for several weeks. Alina Habba was supposed to be an interim U.S. attorney. By law, that's supposed to mean a 120-day limit to her term. A panel of federal judges picked a veteran prosecutor to start leaving the office last month. But Attorney General Pam Bondi fired that prosecutor, and Habba has stayed on. Now U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann has said Habba should be disqualified from all active cases.
Journalist Ry Rivard has been following this story for Politico, and he's with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning.
RY RIVARD: Good morning.
MARTIN: How did Habba manage to stay in this position so long?
RIVARD: The Trump administration used this multistep process after her four-month interim stay expired. They fired the prosecutor you talked about, who was selected by a panel of judges. Then they named Habba a special attorney. Then she became the first assistant attorney, which then allowed her to become the acting U.S. attorney. And that's what the court was asked to examine. And so far, one judge has said, you can't do that.
MARTIN: So the judge delayed his own order in this decision to let the government respond. Has the government responded?
RIVARD: Yeah. Attorney General Pam Bondi said last evening, on Thursday night, that they would immediately appeal. That will go to the Third Circuit. There are some interesting questions that, you know, if the Third Circuit decision is appealed, you know, the Supreme Court would take a look at.
MARTIN: So - but - so given that there's this - a little uncertainty here, how much could this affect criminal cases in New Jersey, especially now that the judge has said her actions of the last several weeks may be declared void?
RIVARD: They're - he was looking at just a couple of defendants who had filed kind of complaints and lawsuits saying, hey, you know, Habba can't be involved in our case. His formal order only applies to them, but the ruling that he had applies to basically every criminal case in New Jersey that's a federal criminal case. And so you can expect to see a lot of people saying, hey, this affects me. Hey, this affects me. And the judge said the person that Trump put in charge of this office can't be involved in running the office. So that's a big wrench in how you'd run a U.S. attorney's office.
MARTIN: So what are they doing? I guess they're - are they still trying cases? Are they putting somebody else's name on the cases, or - how is this working?
RIVARD: Yeah, we've seen the No. 2 at the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, starting to kind of co-sign some of the legal filings. And we think that might be a way that the Justice Department thinks it can keep going while there's this uncertainty around Habba's authority - to sort of muddle through in the meantime.
MARTIN: Do you have any sense of what this ruling could mean for other appointees in other states where the Trump administration has tried to sidestep Senate confirmation for prosecutors?
RIVARD: Yeah. We've seen this happen in Los Angeles. We've seen it in Nevada, New Mexico and Upstate New York, where the administration has tried to find ways around these limits and around having to have a Senate-confirmed person running a U.S. attorney's office. There's about 93 U.S. attorneys nationwide. And so if what happened for Habba could happen in other places, you could really see an undermining of the Senate's typical authority, which is advice and consent in who gets to run these offices, who is the top prosecutor.
MARTIN: That is Politico reporter Ry Rivard. Ry, thanks so much.
RIVARD: Thank you.
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