Alina Habba’s tenure as an interim U.S. attorney was, by any fair measure, a multifaceted disaster. It also wasn’t altogether legal.
As my MS NOW colleague Jordan Rubin explained, a federal appellate panel ruled last week that a district court was correct to disqualify Habba as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. This week, Donald Trump’s former lawyer took the next logical step and resigned from the post she never should’ve held in the first place.
But as part of her announcement, the Republican lawyer also let the public know about her next gig. From Habba’s written statement:
My fight will now stretch across the country. As we wait for further review of the court’s ruling, I will continue to serve the Department of Justice as the Senior Advisor to the Attorney General for U.S. Attorneys.
Around the same time, Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed in a statement that Habba will be “continuing with the Justice Department” as Bondi’s senior advisor on federal prosecutors nationwide.
It’s possible that this is a meaningless consolation prize, and that Habba will have few meaningful responsibilities beyond her frequent appearances in conservative media.
But if this is going to be a real job, it’s a curious choice. Even for a president who likes to reward his former lawyers with powerful legal positions, Trump’s decision earlier this year to make Habba a federal prosecutor was bizarre. Not only did she have no experience as a prosecutor, but Habba is also perhaps best known for helping 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. Now, after her brief and embarrassing tenure as an interim U.S. attorney, she’s slated to advise the attorney general on other lawyers who might hold the job she wasn’t qualified to have, that she did poorly, and perhaps most importantly, that she wasn’t legally permitted to perform. What could go wrong?
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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