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(CN) — Acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, a former personal attorney to President Donald Trump tapped to run New Jersey’s federal court, has been acting unlawfully as the district’s top prosecutor since the start of July, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
In a 77-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann said Habba cannot participate in prosecutions because her appointment was invalid.
“Faced with the question of whether Ms. Habba is lawfully performing the functions and duties of the office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not,” Brann wrote.
Brann, a Barack Obama appointee in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, was designated to deliver the ruling after federal judges in New Jersey declined to extend Habba’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney last month. Interim U.S. attorneys, appointed by the president, can only serve for 120 days unless they are confirmed by the Senate or extended by the judges in the district they serve.
Despite the judges voting Habba out, top Trump administration officials engaged in an unusual multistep maneuver to put her back in charge, circumventing the standard process.
The maneuver included withdrawing Habba’s nomination for U.S. attorney, firing the replacement approved by the judges, then appointing Habba as the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. With the top prosecutor job technically vacant, Habba was automatically appointed back to the post from which she was just booted.
Brann found the moves violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, which mandates how vacant positions in the executive branch are to be filled, and determined Habba had been unlawfully leading New Jersey’s federal court for the past month.
“After reviewing several issues of first impression, the court concludes that Ms. Habba has exercised the functions and duties of the office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey without lawful authority since July 1, 2025,” the judge wrote.
The ruling came in response to claims from federal defendants in two criminal cases in New Jersey who, amid the controversy surrounding Habba’s appointment, challenged that their indictments should be dismissed since Habba didn’t have the authority to sign off on them.
Brann declined to dismiss the cases — one of which charged defendants with drug and gun trafficking, the other with wire fraud and money laundering — but did void Habba’s involvement in them.
“And because she is not currently qualified to exercise the functions and duties of the office in an acting capacity, she must be disqualified from participating in any ongoing cases,” Brann added.
Brann stayed his ruling to allow the federal government to fight on Habba’s behalf.
Criminal cases have effectively been iced in the district for the past several weeks, as numerous defendants fought the validity of their indictments on the basis of Habba’s abnormal appointment. Thursday’s ruling doesn’t appear to offer any immediate solution to that confusion.
Outside of her questionable appointment, Habba’s tenure as New Jersey’s top prosecutor has raised eyebrows. A magistrate judge chastised and rebuked her effort to prosecute Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was arrested in May on charges of trespassing at a federal immigration holding facility.
Baraka is now suing for malicious prosecution.
No stranger to controversy, Habba has reportedly been under an ethics investigation for more than a year on claims she coerced an employee at Trump’s Bedminster golf club — who tried to sue the club over sexual harassment by her manager — into signing an illegal nondisclosure agreement in 2021.
She became a face of the MAGA movement by serving on Trump’s legal team in several high-profile cases, such as his defamation trials against writer E. Jean Carroll — cases Trump lost to the tune of more than $80 million.
Habba also played a key role on Trump’s legal team for his civil fraud case in Manhattan, another case the president lost. A judge ordered Trump to pay roughly half a billion dollars after finding that he falsely inflated the value of his assets to swindle banks into giving him favorable loans, though the penalty was overturned by a New York appeals court earlier on Thursday.
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