Another front has opened in the Trump administration’s battle with the federal district courts, this one arising out of the president’s efforts to circumvent the constitutionally mandated Senate confirmation process for top officials, including federal prosecutors. This week, Alina Habba, who was among Trump’s most notoriously combative criminal defense lawyers, is a likely casualty: Judges in New Jersey are nearly certain to nix any extension of her expiring interim term as the district’s U.S. attorney.
In the president’s mind (and he certainly does have his reasons), the Justice Department, at least in the first two years, tried to derail his first administration, and later demurred when pressured to politicize law enforcement for his purposes — declining to go public with the Hunter Biden investigation and to support the fiction that the 2020 election had been stolen by fraudulent voting. Then, in the Biden years, the DOJ was the engine of the lawfare campaign against Trump — indicting him twice, pushing hard (though failing) to get him tried and convicted during the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, and assisting partisan Democratic district attorneys who brought cases against him in New York and Atlanta.
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