Latest news with #FederalJudges
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judges oust Trump ally Alina Habba as New Jersey's top prosecutor
Federal judges declined to keep President Donald Trump's former personal attorney as New Jersey's top federal prosecutor, exercising an arcane statute to rebuff the Trump administration's wishes. New Jersey district court judges voted to not let interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba stay on the job after her 120-day interim term expires, instead picking prosecutor Desiree Leigh Grace, according to a court order posted to the judiciary's website. There is confusion about when the change is effective, with the court suggesting Grace's appointment should begin today, but leaving open it could be another day. Habba, who served as counselor to the president and as Trump's personal attorney, was Trump's pick to be New Jersey's top federal prosecutor — a position she assumed in March on an interim basis. The decision to pass on Habba at the 120-day deadline of her tenure sets up a potential showdown between the judiciary and the White House, since the Trump administration lobbied judges to give Habba the permanent slot. Federal law allows for the White House to fire U.S. attorneys, although it is unclear if Trump plans to do that to Grace. Grace is a registered Republican. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who has been critical of Habba, congratulated Grace. Fellow New Jersey Democratic Sen. Andy Kim said he was 'grateful' to see Grace on the job. The fight over Habba's fate touches on deeper issues, including separation of powers and the aims of the Department of Justice — Habba has been accused of partisan prosecutions, while her allies accuse the judges of partisanship toward her. Others in the Trump administration rushed to Habba's defense on Tuesday afternoon. Attorney General Pam Bondi said on social media that Habba 'is doing outstanding work in New Jersey' and makes the Justice Department proud. Todd Blanche, a deputy attorney general who also served as personal attorney to Trump, accused judges of trying to 'force out' Habba before Friday. It appears some are counting from March 24 when she was appointed and others the March 28 date when she was sworn in. 'Their rush reveals what this was always about: a left-wing agenda, not the rule of law,' he said on social media. 'When judges act like activists, they undermine confidence in our justice.' He was referring to the unusual process that played out this week. District court judges have a say over who fills an executive branch post because of a law about filling U.S. Attorney vacancies. The law has been around for decades with some interruption, but Congress put it back on the books after accusations that President George W. Bush's administration removed nine U.S. attorneys for political reasons. An unusual process that played out this week gives district court judges a say over who fills an executive branch post because of a law that has been around for decades, with some interruption. Congress put it back on the books after accusations the Bush administration pushed out nine U.S. attorneys for political reasons. The lion's share of the district court judges in New Jersey were appointed by Democratic presidents. Now, the Trump administration could make a countermove to remove Grace and even try to get Habba her old job back by appointing Habba to be the first assistant U.S. attorney since that official can become acting U.S. attorney if there is a vacancy. Trump-aligned lawyer James Burnham posted that Trump 'would be well within his constitutional authority to take swift action to regain control of this important US Attorneys office for the Executive Branch he heads.' At the time Habba was named to the position, few expected her to remain in the job beyond the 120-day interim window, but Trump has since nominated Habba for a full four-year term, a post that requires Senate confirmation. In the Senate, Habba is facing Democratic criticism in the confirmation process. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has previously said he wants the White House to pick someone else because he considers Habba a 'partisan warrior.' Booker's frustration with Habba includes the arrest and short-lived prosecution of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and the charges Habba filed against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) following a scrum outside a federal immigration detention facility. In May, a federal magistrate judge criticized her office's 'hasty arrest' and swift dismissal of a trespassing charge against Baraka as suggesting a 'worrisome misstep' by her office. Habba's office has reportedly subpoenaed New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy after a comment the Democrat made about potentially housing a migrant above his garage. Habba was more overtly political than the typical federal prosecutor. Shortly after she was named as interim U.S. attorney, Habba told a conservative podcaster that she may be able to help 'turn New Jersey red.' 'Hopefully, while I'm there, I can help that cause,' she said at the time. Madison Fernandez and Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.
CNN
19 hours ago
- Politics
- CNN
Judges vote to not keep Habba as interim US attorney of New Jersey
Federal judges in the district of New Jersey declined to extend Alina Habba's appointment as interim US attorney on Tuesday, according to an order from the court. 'Pursuant to Title 28, United States Code, Section 546(d), the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey appoints Desiree Leigh Grace as the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey. This appointment is effective July 22, 2025, or 'upon the expiration of 120 days after appointment by the Attorney General' of the Interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, whichever is later,' the order signed by Chief Judge Renée Marie Bumb said. President Donald Trump appointed Habba to the position on March 24. Interim US attorneys are only allowed to serve for 120 days if they are not confirmed by the US Senate or extended indefinitely by the district court in their jurisdiction. Habba previously served as a spokesperson for the Trump campaign and as a personal attorney for Trump. She represented Trump during his civil fraud trial in 2023 and 2024. After Trump won reelection, Habba served as counselor to the president before Trump tapped her to serve as US attorney. The president formally nominated Habba to serve in the position for a four-year term on July 1. Habba's nomination is still awaiting a vote from the Senate Judiciary Committee before she would advance to the full Senate for a floor confirmation vote. It is unclear if Habba will continue to serve in the role as an acting US attorney or if the administration will appoint another US attorney while Habba awaits confirmation. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche put out a statement on X on Monday urging the federal judges in New Jersey to appoint Habba indefinitely on an interim basis while she awaits Senate confirmation, saying she has the 'full confidence' of leadership at the Justice Department. 'In light of the smear campaign, it's worth repeating @USAttyHabba has the full confidence of DOJ leadership because she's doing the job – aggressively, independently, and by the book. The district judges should not be swayed by political noise. Keep her in place,' Blanche said in a post on X on Monday. Habba is President Trump's second US attorney nominee to struggle to receive support from the district court or the Senate Judiciary Committee. In May, the Senate Judiciary Committee decided not to confirm Trump's controversial pick to lead the DC US attorney's office, Ed Martin. It is rare to have multiple candidates fail to receive support from the district court or the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is a developing story and will be updated.
Forbes
19 hours ago
- Politics
- Forbes
Trump Lawyer Alina Habba Ousted As New Jersey U.S. Attorney
Former Trump defense attorney Alina Habba was replaced as U.S. Attorney in New Jersey on Tuesday, according to a court order, failing to secure the votes needed from the state's federal judges to remain, after the Trump ally drew controversy during her tenure for charging Democratic politicians over their clashes with federal immigration agents. Alina Habba speaks after being sworn in as interim US Attorney General for New Jersey at the White ... More House on March 28. Associated Press This story is breaking and will be updated.
Bloomberg
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Trump Agenda Still Being Blocked by Judges Despite Supreme Court
Federal judges have continued to order sweeping halts to President Donald Trump's policies in the immediate aftermath of a US Supreme Court decision that limited their use of such powers. On Thursday, a federal judge in New Hampshire entered a new order blocking Trump's restrictions to birthright citizenship — the issue that prompted the Supreme Court's June 27 ruling to curb use of so-called universal injunctions. The judge greenlit the case as a nationwide class action.
CNN
02-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: The behind-the-scenes power John Roberts wields to ensure his influence with justices
Chief Justice John Roberts often laments that he has limited clout as he deals with his eight Supreme Court colleagues. 'You can't fire people if they don't follow you. You can't cut their pay,' he told a group of federal judges on Saturday, the day after the court released its final opinions of the term. 'You have to be able to communicate what you think is important, and sometimes that means doing it eight different ways.' But Roberts, in fact, has several powerful levers, perhaps the most valuable being the power to assign opinions that speak for the court. When the chief is in the majority – as he was more than anyone this term – he chooses which justice will write the opinion. That's important because the force of any Supreme Court decision exceeds its bottom-line vote. Its rationale sets a precedent for future cases. Even the rhetoric and tone can influence lower court judges. For the author of an opinion, the endeavor offers a chance to steer the law and can be a point of personal pride. Completing his 20th session on America's highest court, Roberts has routinely kept the most important cases for himself, including those involving presidential powers. Still, he has wielded his assignment power strategically over the years, to influence and reward colleagues. In some situations, his assignments have appeared intended to cut against type or disprove ideological generalizations of the court. And then there was last Friday, when Roberts produced a true – and tactically intriguing – surprise. As he opened the final courtroom proceeding of the 2024-25 term, he revealed from the elevated bench that Justice Amy Coney Barrett had the opinion for the court in the most awaited case. It was the case that would effectively release President Donald Trump from dozens of lower-court orders blocking his second-term policies across the country, including his effort to roll back the current birthright citizenship given all babies born in the United States regardless of their parents' legal status. The assignment was a plum one for the junior justice on the right wing – a justice who'd been lambasted by the MAGA world (and by Trump himself) for being insufficiently loyal, despite her overwhelmingly conservative record – reinforced by the decision she was about to read from the bench. The surprise was evident among some in the staid courtroom. Justice Department lawyers, seated at tables below the mahogany bench, quietly exchanged glances, as did journalists in the press section to the justices' right. Lawyers following the case had presumed Roberts would keep the opinion for himself, as he has done for all major controversies involving Trump or at least give it to a justice more senior than Barrett. Roberts' choice immediately blunted Trump's criticism. 'I just have great respect for her,' the president said of Barrett after the decision in Trump v. Casa was issued. 'I always have. And her decision was brilliantly written today – from all accounts.' For the strategic chief, the choice of Barrett also strengthened his alliance with a pivotal justice whom liberals, for their part, have been trying to entice toward the center. Barrett and Roberts did not respond to requests for comment. Like the eight associate justices, the chief holds one vote. But he dictates much of the court's agenda, as he oversees oral arguments and runs the closed-door conferences where the justices discuss and vote on cases. By tradition, the most senior justice on the majority side of a case assigns the opinion. (The chief justice enjoys seniority over all justices, irrespective of their longer tenure.) Roberts was in the majority on this conservative dominated bench more than any justice last session, and he determined who would be the author of 54 of the 56 signed opinions handed down after briefing and oral argument. This is the Roberts Court in both the colloquial and real sense; he is rarely relegated to dissent, although two exceptions are notable: the 2015 decision declaring a right to same-sex marriage and the 2022 decision striking down all federal abortion rights. All modern chiefs, to various degrees, have employed the assignment power to influence outcomes. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who served from 1969 to 1986, was known to switch his vote to ensure he would be in the majority and control the opinion. Burger, appointed by President Richard Nixon, favored colleagues who shared his right-wing ideology, often relying on then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, for whom Roberts served as a clerk during the 1980-81 term. Rehnquist, elevated to chief justice by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, gained a reputation for being less manipulative and more even-handed. Fixated on speed and efficiency, Rehnquist also rewarded associate justices who wrote fast and avoided tangents that would cause a justice to drop off. (An author needs to hold at least five justices on the opinion for a majority.) Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who had known Rehnquist since their years together at Stanford Law School, understood Rehnquist and often finished her opinions first. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the bench in 1993, she complained to O'Connor that Rehnquist's first assignment to her was a complicated pension dispute. 'Ruth, you just do it,' O'Connor admonished, 'and get your opinion in circulation before he makes the next set of assignments.' Roberts, at the recent judicial conference, implicitly acknowledged that the current justices let draft opinions pile up. They left six major decisions to the last day. 'People have their own ideas of a schedule,' he said of other justices. 'Things were a little crunched toward the end this year. We'll try to space it out a little better next year, I suppose.' Roberts, who succeeded Rehnquist in 2005 after being appointed by President George W. Bush, assigns a batch of opinions after each two-week sitting of oral arguments and the related conference votes. The public learns of the assignments only when final decisions are announced. The chief justice has usually kept the stand-out cases, especially those involving clashes with the executive branch, perhaps to bring the weight of his stature as chief. Until last Friday, he had penned the important cases centered on Trump, such as the 2018 decision upholding his first administration's travel ban on mainly Muslim countries; the 2019 decision impeding Trump's effort to add a citizenship question to the decennial census; and the pair of 2020 controversies over Trump's effort to keep his business dealings secret as he faced government subpoenas. Last session, Roberts wrote the decision granting Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. Earlier this June, Roberts authored the decision in the controversy over state bans on certain medical care for transgender youths. His decision affirmed state restrictions on puberty blockers and hormone therapy but declined to adopt a rationale of fellow conservatives, including Barrett, that would further disadvantage bias claims brought by transgender individuals. Roberts has rewarded restraint (relatively speaking on this hard-right court) and crossover votes from ideological camps. In some situations, his assignments cut against type or dispel the notion that the dueling sides cannot come together. He assigned liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court's first African American woman and a jurist vigilant regarding anti-bias protections, the court's decision in a 'reverse discrimination' case. The court unanimously sided with a straight woman in Ohio who wanted to sue her employer after her gay boss refused to promote her. In a separate case issued on the same day, Roberts tapped liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor for a church-state clash that favored religious interests. Decided on a unanimous vote, the case reversed a Wisconsin court's ruling and opened the door for a Catholic Charities chapter to obtain an exemption from state unemployment taxes because of its religious status. The high court decision added to its series favoring religious conservatives. Roberts appears to try to distribute cases evenly among the nine. Although the politically charged disputes, in which liberals frequently find themselves in dissent, draw most of the public attention, there are plenty of low-profile, non-ideological cases to go around. Statistics on SCOTUSblog compiled by Jake Truscott and Adam Feldman show that of the total 56 opinions doled out, Barrett and fellow conservatives Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh each had seven; Roberts, Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch had six; and Jackson had five. On the left, senior Justice Sotomayor controls who writes the main dissent when liberals lose. She held onto the dissenting opinions in what many viewed as the three most significant cases and took the dramatic step of reading portions of all three from the bench. A former Notre Dame law professor, Barrett became Trump's third appointee during his first term. She was named in 2020, during the final weeks of his administration after Ginsburg's sudden death. Barrett's cautious but effective approach has given her an outsized role among the nine. Barrett sometimes casts the decisive vote or drafts the compromise rationale, as she did in an Idaho abortion controversy last year. Liberals have tried to entice her toward middle ground in other cases. During oral arguments, they often pick up on her questions as they make their own points. Roberts, too, has appeared especially attentive. When it comes to coveted decisions in high profile cases, a junior justice typically must wait years for a big opinion at this institution that prizes seniority. But in 2023, he conspicuously assigned her the decision in a major dispute over Native American rights. Barrett wrote the opinion upholding a 1978 law that prioritized the placement of Native American children with Native families or tribes in custody proceedings. Some commentators viewed the decision endorsing Native rights, on a 7-2 vote with only Thomas and Alito dissenting, as a surprising progressive turn. Gorsuch, the court's most vigorous defender of Native American rights, signed all of Barrett's opinion even as he wrote separately to further detail detail the cruel history of tribal children removed from their families and to press for greater Indian sovereignty. In more recent years, Barrett has guided compromises as the crucial fifth vote. Yet in Friday's Trump dispute, her vote was one of six and her approach was one that Roberts himself might have adopted if he'd held onto the case. The majority restricted the authority of US district court judges to impose nationwide injunctions to prevent arguably unconstitutional government policies while litigation proceeds. It was a resounding victory for Trump's legal team, although the court left open the possibility that people challenging the administration could obtain broad remedies through class action lawsuits. In her written opinion and oral summary from the bench, Barrett took a page from Justice Antonin Scalia and his 1999 decision in Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo v. Alliance Bond Fund, involving a dispute over equitable remedies between a Mexican holding company and an investment fund. Barrett was a law clerk to Scalia during that 1998-99 session as he was drafting the opinion. Adopting her mentor's originalist method, Barrett in the new case looked to early American history for an analogue to the universal injunctions judges have used to block Trump's policies and those of presidents before him. 'Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding, or for that matter, for more than a century thereafter,' she wrote, repeatedly citing Scalia's opinion. 'Thus, under the Judiciary Act (of 1789), federal courts lack authority to issue them.' And in a footnote targeting liberal dissenters' argument, she invoked a choice Scalia line: 'It is precisely because the universal injunction is a new, potent remedy that it poses new, potent risks. Our observation in Grupo Mexicano rings true here: 'Even when sitting as a court in equity, we have no authority to craft a 'nuclear weapon' of the law.'' Scalia, with his incendiary rhetoric and unyielding conservatism, sometimes had trouble holding a majority. He was not a safe bet for a difficult opinion assignment. Barrett is proving otherwise. Although some conservatives wrote separately to expound on their individual positions, all signed her opinion in full.
