UPDATE (July 22, 2025, 8:10 p.m. ET): Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday evening that she has fired the federal prosecutor who was supposed to replace Alina Habba, Desiree Leigh Grace. According to NBC News, the plan is to reinstate Habba, although it’s unclear how and when that might happen.

It was nearly four months ago when Donald Trump made an unfortunate announcement: The president alerted the public to the fact that he’d appointed Alina Habba, one of his controversial defense attorneys, to serve as U.S. attorney in New Jersey on an interim basis, overseeing a large prosecutorial office.

Interim federal prosecutors invariably realize that their tenures will be short-lived, but there is a way for interim U.S. attorneys to stick around for a while longer: If the federal judges in a given district vote to keep a prosecutor in place, he or she can remain at the post beyond the usual time frame.

With this in mind, as Habba’s appointment neared its end, there was still a chance that federal judges in New Jersey would allow her to hang on to her job. As NBC News reported, that didn’t happen:

Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba has been replaced as interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey after serving the maximum of 120 days on the job. Trump had officially nominated her for the position, but her nomination became stalled in the Senate. Federal judges could have authorized her to remain on the job, but they instead named her top deputy, Desiree Leigh Grace, as her replacement.

As Habba weighs her career options and her unfortunate tenure wraps up, there are a handful of angles to this story that are worth keeping in mind.

Habba never should’ve been appointed in the first place: I realize that the incumbent president tends to reward his former lawyers with powerful legal positions in his administration, but Habba was spectacularly unqualified for this position. Not only did she have no experience as a prosecutor, but Habba is 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.

Habba’s tenure was a fiasco: The New York Times reported this week that Habba, since taking office, “shattered morale inside the U.S. attorney’s office and left many prosecutors looking for a way out, according to 16 close observers.” The same report noted that Habba disbanded the office’s Civil Rights Division, killed the office’s longest-running prosecution just days before it was scheduled to go to trial, and installed three framed pictures of herself in the office’s conference room.

Habba maintained an explicitly partisan focus: “We could turn New Jersey red. I really do believe that,” Habba said in an interview with a conservative podcast host shortly after her appointment. “Hopefully while I’m there, I can help that cause.” With this goal in mind, the Republican lawyer targeted several New Jersey Democrats with threats, prosecutions and investigations.

In the American tradition, U.S. attorneys have traditionally been nonpartisan. Under Trump, those traditions and norms have been thrown out the window.

Habba is reportedly facing an ethics investigation: NOTUS reported earlier this month, “Alina Habba, once President Donald Trump’s personal attorney and now the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, has quietly been under investigation by the state’s professional regulators for more than a year — putting her license to practice law at risk.”

The same report added, “NOTUS obtained documents detailing the investigation, which since January 2024 has been probing what happened when a young waitress at Trump’s Bedminster golf club tried to sue over sexual harassment by her manager.”

Habba faces an uncertain political future: Despite (or perhaps, because of) her disastrous tenure as an interim U.S. attorney, Trump has nominated her to fill that same position on a permanent basis. That said, the Republican-led Senate has, to date, ignored her nomination, though that might yet change. Watch this space.