The U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey has been thrown into confusion as federal judges in the state move to appoint a new U.S. attorney. The panel of federal judges rejected Alina Habba’s bid to stay in the job as the state’s U.S. attorney, instead invoking a rarely used power to select a candidate of their own, Desiree Leigh Grace. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, responded with a social media post defending Ms. Habba and saying that the first assistant, Ms. Grace, had just been removed.
The deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, also attacked the judges on social media, saying that they had colluded with New Jersey’s Democratic senators, who have opposed Ms. Habba. Ms. Grace was sent an email Tuesday informing her that she had been fired, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The rapid sequence of events raises the prospect of yet another confrontation between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary.
The judges’ decision, made after a private vote on Monday, had raised the possibility that the New Jersey U.S. attorney would be an outlier in a Justice Department in which Mr. Trump has insisted on loyalty. New Jersey’s two Democratic senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, said that the Justice Department was “continuing a pattern of publicly undermining judicial decisions and showing disregard for the rule of law and the separation of powers.”
Ms. Grace has been a prosecutor in the Newark office since 2016, rising quickly in the last five years. The Justice Department would not accept the judges’ decision willingly, accusing them of executing “a left-wing agenda.”
