U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s finagling to keep former Donald Trump lawyer Alina Habba in her spot as a U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey came with a new claim that could make all Senate-approved U.S. attorneys irrelevant.
According to MSNBC legal expert Lisa Rubin, a brief filed asserting Bondi’s ability to retain the controversial Habba contains wording that Rubin called “frightening.
As she noted, after Habba resigned before her interim term was up, Bondi fired her replacement, Desiree Grace, and then promptly named Habba first assistant U.S. attorney, which allowed her to retain control of the office.
As part of the battle over whether the attorney general’s move was legal — placing an estimated 1500 criminal cases in doubt — the New Jersey office submitted a brief defending the move.
That brief, Rubin asserted, provides a window into the Justice Department’s future plans.
“These sort of shenanigans appear to be continuing and other areas of the country,” she told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing. “But, Chris, there’s one thing in this brief that I think is really dangerous and I want to highlight for you, which is that she says in this brief that it’s okay for the attorney general to even circumvent U.S. attorneys. That the U.S. attorney statutorily can delegate the functions ordinarily served by a U.S. attorney.”
She then corrected herself, saying, “I’m sorry that the attorney general can delegate the functions ordinarily served by the U.S. attorney to ‘any other officer, employee, or agency of the Department of Justice.’”
“So I just want you to imagine this for a second,” she prompted the host. “Pam Bondi can take a bunch of people, call them special U.S. attorneys, appoint them to the Department of Justice, without going through the conventional career prosecutor hiring process, and then sort of take away responsibilities from Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys or people who should be Senate-confirmed and essentially have them serve the same purposes.”
“This, to me, seems like a guidebook to what might be to come that, what we’ve seen already so far in terms of circumventing the law and the Senate, may be child’s play compared to what could come next,” she warned.
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