When Donald Trump has an important personnel decision to make, the president too often looks to people he knows personally, as if he were the head of a social club and its members are entitled to certain perks — such as powerful positions in the executive branch of a global superpower.
This is especially true for the Republican’s former lawyers. Pam Bondi was part of one of Trump’s legal teams, and she’s the attorney general. Todd Blanche was one of his criminal defense attorneys, and he’s now also helping lead the Justice Department. Emil Bove represented Trump before being tapped to serve as the principal associate deputy attorney general. D. John Sauer was also a Trump lawyer, and the president tapped him to serve as the solicitor general.
In case the list weren’t already long, as NBC News reported, it just got longer.
Trump announced to Truth Social that Alina Habba, who is serving as counselor to the president, will be the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. … The move is “effective immediately,” Trump said. He said John Giordano, the current interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey, is being nominated as the ambassador to Namibia.
To be sure, Habba’s work has not been limited to serving as a member of Trump’s legal team. The Republican lawyer — who has no experience as a prosecutor, but who’ll now oversee a federal office with 150 prosecutors — also worked at the pro-Trump Save America PAC, before also working as a campaign spokesperson last year.
But Habba’s legal work is arguably the most notable part of her recent résumé. It was Habba, for example, who represented Trump in the E. Jean Carroll case, which he lost, and then again in the civil case against the Trump Organization’s civil fraud case, which he also lost.
In another notable case, Habba helped file a bizarre lawsuit targeting Hillary Clinton and several other Democrats in 2022, which proved so ridiculous that a judge imposed harsh sanctions on Habba for bringing “political grievances masquerading as legal claims” to court.
“This case should never have been brought,” the judge added. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.” Habba filed it anyway. It now appears that she’s receiving a reward. Perhaps most important of all, however, is the degree to which Team Trump is brazenly and shamelessly politicizing federal law enforcement, following years of baseless complaints about Democrats politicizing federal law enforcement. Habba is, if nothing else, a partisan brawler, one who delivered remarks at the Republican National Convention and who appears to revel in attacking Democrats during frequent Fox News appearances. The New York Times’ report on Habba’s promotion noted, “U.S. attorneys are traditionally nonpartisan.” Those traditions and norms were thrown out the window as of two months ago.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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