In the wake of Alina Habba’s resignation from her role as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey – a role that multiple federal judges determined she was not holding lawfully – Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker are asking President Donald Trump’s administration to work with them on picking the state’s next U.S. Attorney.
Typically, U.S. Attorney nominations are the product of a collaboration between the president and a state’s two senators, who have the ability to block nominations they don’t like via the Senate’s blue-slip procedure. But Trump, Booker, and Kim never saw eye-to-eye on Habba, a partisan firebrand with no prior prosecutorial experience, and the two senators prevented her nomination from making it through the Senate.
Without Senate confirmation and with a 120-day limit on Habba’s interim appointment, the Trump administration took an extraordinary series of steps to keep Habba in office as acting U.S. Attorney. Her appointment, however, was found to be unlawful by both a District Court judge and a Third Circuit appellate panel; Habba resigned a week after the Third Circuit’s ruling.
In a letter to White House Counsel David Warrington today, Kim and Booker said “the time is now” for a more collaborative process; White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was also cc’ed on the letter.
“Rather than prolong this issue at the expense of the people of New Jersey and the orderly functioning of the federal legal system, we urge you to work with us to select a U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey in the manner required by the Constitution and federal law,” the senators wrote.
They also noted that similar conversations had been underway in the spring, only for Trump to blindside them by announcing Habba’s appointment via a social media post.
“At the beginning of this Administration, we engaged in good faith discussions with the White House Counsel’s Office to identify qualified candidates for the U.S. Attorney vacancy,” Kim and Booker wrote. “While those conversations were ongoing, we learned only from news reports that Ms. Habba would be appointed by the Attorney General and then formally nominated by the President.”
Though Habba is gone, the U.S. Attorney’s office remains in limbo, especially since Habba was simultaneously serving as First Assistant U.S. Attorney, the #2 official who would typically take control of the office in the event of a vacancy.
The Trump administration announced shortly after Habba’s resignation that three newly appointed officials (Philip Lamparello, Jordan Fox, and Ari Fontecchio) will each be given authority over different divisions of the office. As of today, the District of New Jersey homepage continues to list Habba as the acting U.S. Attorney, though its “Meet the U.S. Attorney” page is now blank.