Judge Kicks Out Prosecutor Until He Gets Answers on Alina Habba

A federal judge ejected a top prosecutor from the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office out of his courtroom Tuesday, accusing the government of “operating unlawfully” in light of recent reports that Alina Habba, a former personal lawyer to Donald Trump, was still illegally involved in the office’s functions.

U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi was markedly frustrated as soon as Tuesday’s proceeding began, grilling the office’s head of appeals, Mark Coyne, for failing to provide proper documentation prior to his appearance before the court. As a result, Quraishi ordered Coyne not to speak, though he allowed Coyne to remain in the room “for moral support.”

But Coyne would not comply with the mute order—particularly as Quraishi’s conversation with Coyne’s more junior colleague, Daniel Rosenblum, turned to the office’s current triumvirate leadership structure and Habba’s rumored involvement.

Habba resigned from her position atop the office in December, when a federal appeals court ruled that her appointment was unlawful. Last week, the office’s trio of replacement leaders were also found to be occupying their positions unlawfully. Habba has since been serving as a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing myriad U.S. attorneys’ offices and reportedly stepping back into the New Jersey office.

Rosenblum, the line prosecutor on the case, told Quraishi that he had been with the office for just two and a half years and that he was “not aware of” Habba’s involvement in the office’s operations—but that response was not as clear cut as the judge wanted.

“All right. So she could be operating the office?” he asked.

That’s when Coyne could no longer stay silent.

“She is not,” Coyne said, which Rosenblum repeated.

“Sit down, Mr. Coyne. If you speak again, I’m going to have you removed. I already told you not to speak,” Quraishi said.

Coyne then started to speak again, though Quraishi cut him off.

“You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to blindside the court and do whatever it is you guys want to do. So if you continue to speak, you can leave,” Quraishi stated.

As Coyne continued to interrupt, Quraishi ordered the guards.

“I’m directing the court security officers to remove Mr. Coyne,” Quraishi said. “Mr. Coyne, I told you not to address this court. You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to blindside this court. I’m going to ask you to leave … or I’ll have you removed.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday called for an end to “personal hostility” toward judges, a not-so-subtle message that came just two days after President Trump went on a long diatribe about courts ruling against him.

“It does come with the territory.… When any of us issue an opinion, it’s often a dissent,” Roberts said when asked how he handled criticism at a Baker Institute for Public Policy panel. “It’s important that our decisions are subjected to scrutiny, and they are. The problem sometimes is that the criticism can move from a focus on legal analysis to personalities. And you see—from all over, not just any one political perspective on it—that it’s more directed in a personal way. And that, frankly, can be actually quite dangerous.”

“Judges around the country work very hard to get it right. And if they don’t, their opinions are subject to criticism,” Roberts continued. But personally directed hostility is dangerous, and it’s got to stop.”

On Sunday night, Trump raged against “the courts,” including the Supreme Court, for ruling against his tariffs. He also took time to personally attack Judge James Boasberg—who axed his attack on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last week.

“They openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and go out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how ‘honest,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘legitimate’ they are,” Trump wrote about the Supreme Court. “The Democrat Justices just vote Democrat—They always stick together! Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization.”

He then went on to attack Boasberg with similarly inflammatory language:

The Courts treat Republicans, and me, so unfairly, always seeming to protect those who should not be protected. They are highly politicized. Cases don’t matter, the Judge does! As an example, how is this absolutely terrible Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell, not even allowed to be investigated for the horrible job he does? I strongly criticized Jerome ‘Too Late’ for his horrible performance throughout his tenure, which is either gross incompetence, total dishonesty, or both, and, in return for this well justified criticism, get viciously and wrongfully blamed by, as usual, a Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge, named James Boasberg, a man who suffers from the highest level of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), and has been ‘after’ my people, and me, for years.

Trump has long singled out judges who deliver rulings he doesn’t like. Just last month, Trump called Roberts, as well as Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Comey Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor, “FOOLS and ‘LAPDOGS’ for the RINOS and Radical Left Democrats” for striking down his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Democrats are increasingly confident that they will win the House of Representatives come November. But even a blue wave doesn’t mean Hakeem Jeffries would receive a natural promotion to House speaker.

Jeffries, a Democrat representing New York’s 8th district, has been House minority leader since 2023. He was the first Black person to head a party in either chamber of Congress, and has generally enjoyed strong standing in his caucus. In 2024, he led the charge to pass a foreign aid bill to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific, which had been stalled in the House for months.

But his stature has fallen greatly since, largely due to his persistent support of Israel despite the country’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, his acceptance of money from foreign lobbying groups, and for mounting what some Democrats have seen as weak and ineffective resistance to the Trump administration. Now, Axios reports, he faces increased opposition to his leadership from within his own party.

Mai Vang, a progressive House primary challenger in California, told Axios that “the Democratic Party and its leadership—Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—have failed to mobilize meaningful opposition to Trump’s illegal war and their silence as AIPAC and corporations flood Congressional primaries with millions of dollars is deafening.”

”I cannot support this kind of leadership,” she concluded. ”If we want to defeat Trump and rebuild trust with working Americans, we need new leadership and a new direction.”

Vang is not alone. Last fall, 57 Democratic House candidates said they were neutral on Jeffries’s leadership and 25 said they were opposed to it, out of 113 who responded to a poll by Axios. His popularity has only lessened since, the site reports.

“I think we need to have a new type of leadership that’s ... going to fight back significantly harder against the Trump administration,” New Hampshire primary candidate Heath Howard told Axios at the time.

Maryland primary candidate Harry Jarin said, “The anger of the base right now is not being matched by Democratic leadership ... and that is going to have to change one way or another.”

Jeffries’s supporters cite the fact that he has steered his party through multiple government shutdowns with House Democrats generally unified.

“Leader Jeffries is focused on addressing the affordability crisis, stopping the bombing in the Middle East, reining in ICE and taking back the House to stop Republican extremists from destroying America,” Jeffires spokesperson Justin Chermol told The New Republic in a statement. “Beyond that, we have zero interest in a frivolous story from [Axios,] the same outlet that once sensationally claimed Leader Jeffries was going to face a serious primary. How did that work out?”

Oddsmakers continue to make Jeffries the favorite for next House speaker, providing Democrats win in November. But there’s always a chance that someone else gets the nod instead—Anabel Mendoza, a progressive candidate in Illinois, specifically touted Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib.

This story has been updated.

The state of Arizona has filed criminal charges against the online prediction market Kalshi for allowing people to bet on elections and “operating an illegal gambling business” in the state.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed 20 misdemeanor counts in Maricopa County Superior Court in the state Tuesday, saying in a statement that “no company gets to decide for itself which laws to follow.”

“Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s actually doing is running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law,” Mayes said.

The New York–based Kalshi said in its own statement that Mayes’s case is based “on paper-thin arguments,” arguing that its business model is not like a casino or a sportsbook and that it “should not be overseen by a patchwork of inconsistent state laws.” Instead, the company says it serves as a conduit for federally regulated swaps, putting it under the federal jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

“States like Arizona want to individually regulate a nationwide financial exchange, and are trying every trick in the book to do it,” Kalshi’s statement said. The company faces fines of between $10,000 and $20,000 for each violation if found guilty.

Kalshi’s foray into political betting has raised questions about whether politicians and other insiders are betting on certain events and elections to cash in. They allow people to profit off predicting war and the destruction that comes with it, as was the case with the Iran war or the decision to strike Venezuela. Kalshi recently announced partnerships with CNN and the Associated Press, while its competitor Polymarket has partnered with The Wall Street Journal, Substack, and X.

Arizona’s criminal case will be watched across the country to see if prediction markets can be reined in or regulated. At the very least, hopefully the fate of America’s leadership and human suffering around the world won’t be the focus of wagers from the depraved.

Within hours, the Trump administration has already turned on the top U.S. counterterrorism official who resigned from his post over the war with Iran.

Powerful Republicans and key Trump officials have spent the day impugning Joe Kent, who resigned from his position as the National Counterterrorism Center director Tuesday morning.

Kent was a well-known political extremist who had to disavow associations with far-right figures, including white nationalists and a Nazi sympathizer, a character trait that should have put him right at home within the ranks of the Trump administration. Yet MAGA world—including some of Kent’s former colleagues—was nonetheless all too eager to disparage the outbound security chief.

Former White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich ripped Kent as a “crazed egomaniac,” who he claimed “rarely” produced “any actual work.”

“He spent all of his time working to subvert the chain of command and undermine the President of the United States,” Budowich wrote on X. “This isn’t some principled resignation—he just wanted to make a splash before getting canned. What a loser.”

Kent argued in his resignation letter that he could not “in good conscience” support the war in Iran. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he wrote.

Trump, who nominated Kent himself in the early days of his second presidency, practically shrugged off his appointee’s politically motivated resignation, claiming Kent was never strong on security.

“It’s a good thing that he’s out because he said that Iran was not a threat,” Trump said while speaking with reporters at the White House. “Iran was a threat. Every country realized what a threat Iran was.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt plainly objected to Kent’s letter, arguing on X that the Iranian regime “is evil” and that any assertion that Iran did not pose an “imminent threat” to America was a “false claim.” Yet that assessment is not consistent with global intel.

U.K. national security adviser Jonathan Powell, who attended the final talks between the U.S. and Iran, said that Tehran’s proposed revisions to its nuclear program were “surprising” and significant enough to prevent the rush to war, reported The Guardian.

Yet the foreign revelation did not put a dent in the Republican messaging machine.

“We all understood there was clearly an imminent threat that Iran was very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability, and they were building missiles at a pace that no one in the region could keep up with,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday. “Iran was building up ballistic missiles … and we knew that their plan was to fire them upon Americans.

“I don’t know where Joe Kent was getting his information,” added Johnson, “but he wasn’t in those briefings, clearly, because everyone … understood that this was a serious moment for us.

“Had the president waited, I am personally convinced that we would have mass casualties of Americans,” Johnson said.

Senior administration officials told The Guardian that Kent was suspected of leaking information to the press, a suspicion that ended his participation in the presidential daily brief process and removed him from deliberations over Iran.