The president’s campaign to circumvent the Constitution’s prerequisite of Senate consent for top appointees has once again led to the disqualification of a Trump appointee to run a district U.S. attorney’s office. This time, the ousted operative is John A. Sarcone III, whom the Trump Justice Department purported to install as acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York (NDNY).
As with the November disqualification of Lindsey Halligan, who similarly was illegally installed as a de facto U.S. attorney, in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVa), Sarcone’s ouster ends, at least for now, a retaliatory probe of Letitia James, the New York State attorney general. James, of course, brought a deservedly derided civil fraud lawsuit against the now-president. Recall that Halligan’s indictment of James on dubious bank-fraud charges was thrown out in November (along with her indictment of another Trump nemesis, former FBI Director James Comey, on inscrutable false-statement charges); her EDVa office’s subsequent attempts to charge James have been rejected by grand juries.
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