Federal Judge Threatens to Throw Out Alina Habba’s Successors Too

A federal judge has rejected President Trump’s new appointees to the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office, ruling that the president is illegally trying to get around Senate confirmation.

Chief U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann ruled Monday that the three-prosecutor team running the office is leading “unlawfully,” as the Trump administration tries to cite “enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”

“Why does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this district potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure?” Brann wrote in his ruling. “The government tells us: The president doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.”

Several criminal cases in the district could be thrown out, with “scores of dangerous criminals” possibly able to escape punishment, Brann wrote, because the Trump administration doesn’t want to appoint U.S. attorneys legally—not just in New Jersey, but all around the country.

“The Office of the United States Attorney for at least five other Districts is currently vacant and in each case it appears that the Government is running the office through a delegation of authority to an individual of the Attorney General and President’s unilateral choice,” Brann wrote, noting that in two cases, judges used their legal power to appoint an attorney to fill the vacancy, and Trump fired their picks too.

“In both cases the President fired their selection within hours and [Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche] made combative (and legally incomplete) posts clearly indicating that the Department of Justice would not permit anyone to hold any United States Attorney’s office if that person was not handpicked by the President,” Brann continued.

The whole reason that the New Jersey office was being run by three attorneys was because Trump’s appointment of his personal lawyer, Alina Habba, as U.S. attorney was found to be illegal. Habba, who was set to lose her nomination vote in the Senate, unlawfully stayed past her interim term. She now works for the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., and called Monday’s ruling “ridiculous” on X.

“Judges may continue to try and stop President Trump from carrying out what the American people voted for, but we will not be deterred,” Habba wrote. “The unconstitutionality of this complete overreach into the Executive Branch, time and time again, will not succeed. They would rather have no U.S. Attorney than safety for the people of NJ.”

Ridiculous or not, absent the Senate, Trump’s handpicked prosecutors are going to keep getting rejected by federal judges. Unless the president starts appointing them legally, every federal prosecution is going to be in jeopardy.

The Iranian Assembly of Experts named Mojtaba Khamenei the country’s new supreme leader just a week after the U.S. and Israel assassinated his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with other senior officials. Now President Trump wants to kill him too—unless he capitulates to his demands.

“President Trump has told aides he would back the killing of new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei if he proves unwilling to cede to U.S. demands, such as ending Iran’s nuclear development,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing current and former U.S. officials.

“The U.S. has now established an operational doctrine of assassinating a foreign head of state with no congressional declaration and threatening to kill his successor if the successor doesn’t comply with U.S. policy demands,” Christine Villaverde, chair of the advocacy group Anchoring Democracy, wrote on social media.

“‘We’re just gonna keep assassinating a country’s leadership until they appoint someone we like’ is a really novel precedent in international relations and statecraft which I hope the geniuses running the show in DC and Israel fully understand the implications of,” national security analyst John Schindler wrote on X.

Trump has called the younger Khamenei “unacceptable” and “a big mistake.” But killing leader after leader until one decides to bend the knee is far from a plan at all.

The Department of Homeland Security is trying to hide hundreds of ICE-mobiles they can’t actually use to detain immigrants.

ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan, wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on 2,500 vehicles custom-wrapped to say “ICE” on the side, three sources told the Washington Examiner. The gaudy cars feature massive ICE logos, red stripes, and a golden decal of President Donald Trump’s name on the back window.

The vehicles first appeared in a DHS video intended to make ICE look cool. But a fleet of ostentatious cars are useless to Trump’s masked militia, which typically disappears people using unmarked vehicles.

“It’s ridiculous because you don’t want to advertise what you’re doing,” one person told the Examiner. “We’re just hiding them in a parking garage somewhere because we don’t want to drive them. Who wants to drive the marked vehicles?”

A second person familiar with the matter said the marked cars are being used for custodial pickups and transfers. That’s really all they’re good for.

It seems that the 28-year-old Kristi Noem handpicked to oversee ICE’s billion-dollar budget may have wasted millions of dollars. DHS spent $1.5 million on 25 new sports utility vehicles in November, and later paid an additional $174,000 to $230,000 to get them delivered. Sheahan went so far as to request an upgrade for most of the agency’s fleet from unmarked cars to the flashy new ones. Perhaps she had imagined that ICE would act as a kind of police, and not the president’s untrained extrajudicial paramilitary.

Sheahan left her role last month to pursue a congressional campaign. Since her departure, DHS has been scrambling to receive the rest of the vehicles unwrapped. Sheahan’s apparent mentor Noem was unceremoniously fired last week.

The White House is working to dredge up another election conspiracy with eight months on the clock until midterms.

The Trump administration subpoenaed records related to the 2020 presidential election Monday from Maricopa County, Arizona.

Arizona Senate President Warren Peterson wrote on X that he had complied with a federal grand jury subpoena to turn over records of the county audit to federal authorities.

“The FBI has the records. Any other report is fake news,” Peterson wrote, responding to a post in which Donald Trump said the development was “great!” Peterson is currently running to be Arizona’s attorney general, though his candidacy is reportedly in doubt due to the state’s “zombie laws,” which require candidates to have recently practiced law before they announce their candidacy.

Officials in Maricopa County, however, had no idea what Peterson was talking about.

Jason Berry, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, told the Phoenix-area radio station KJZZ that the board had not received a subpoena.

“Maricopa County runs elections in accordance with the law. We have not received a subpoena at this time but will cooperate if that were to occur,” Berry said.

The Maricopa County recorder’s office also said it had not received a subpoena, referring questions back to Peterson.

It’s the second state at which the administration has recently taken aim as it continues to sow doubt over Donald Trump’s major political loss. In December, Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Fulton County officials in Georgia, demanding that they turn over “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files.”

Weeks later, the FBI raided an elections office outside of Atlanta.

The Georgia suit was filed the same day as the DOJ announced legal action against four more states—Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada—in a sweeping national effort to access sensitive voter data.

Since Trump first planted the seeds of doubt about the results of the 2020 election, a litany of his allies have continued to tend and water the theory—so much so that within a handful of years, refusing to admit that Trump ever lost to Joe Biden has become a fealty test for MAGA membership.

Both Maricopa County and Fulton County have played major roles in Trump’s political conspiracy. But there is no doubt: Trump lost that election by a landslide, coming up short by 38 electoral votes. More evidence that Trump did not win includes the fact that he was not inaugurated in 2021, and did not serve a day as president until he was reelected in 2024.

But for anyone still in doubt, know that the theory has been thoroughly debunked by the president’s own appointees. Trump’s last attorney general, Bill Barr, announced in 2022 that despite an intensive, multi-agency investigation, no evidence of widespread fraud had been discovered that supported the president’s wild claims.

Yet the theory—and Trump’s vast cadre of yes men—persist. Late last year, Trump granted “full, complete, and unconditional” pardons for dozens of the alleged co-conspirators that helped fuel the scheme, including disgraced New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Boris Epshteyn, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, and 72 others.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has fired a Republican member of the National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, accusing him of misconduct on the job.

J. Todd Inman was fired late last week and said he was given no explanation why. On Monday, the White House released a statement accusing him of “inappropriate alcohol use on the job, harassment of staff, misuse of government resources, and failure to attend at least half of NTSB meetings,” saying he was “lawfully removed” due to “highly concerning reports.”

“The Trump administration remains committed to maintaining safety and security for Americans in the air and on the ground,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement.

Inman, meanwhile, told The Washington Post that it was all made up.

“I categorically deny the false allegations made in the White House statement,” Inman said. “It has become increasingly obvious this action was a political hit job. While not my original intent I look forward to defending my reputation against those responsible with every legal means possible.”

Inman didn’t tell the Post why he said his firing was political, but he had represented the NTSB at news conferences since an American Airlines flight crashed in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of Trump’s second term.

Last May, Trump fired another member of the NTSB, vice chair Alvin Brown, who was appointed by President Biden. Brown is suing the Trump administration over his ouster, arguing that Trump didn’t have the authority to fire him, even as the Senate confirmed his replacement, John DeLeeuw, last month. The Supreme Court is expected to rule in favor of the Trump administration. Will Inman sue as well?