Not once, not twice, but thrice now, federal courts have found that one of President Donald Trump’s wildly unqualified attorneys is in their role illegally.
The courts have ruled that they can’t stay in their top prosecutor jobs indefinitely without Senate confirmation, and that’s a problem for Trump because some of his choices are so bad that he must know that even this GOP-led Senate won’t confirm them.
The latest is Bill Essayli, acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California. On Monday, Judge John Michael Seabright, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the administration’s attempt to instantaneously shift Essayli from interim U.S. attorney to first assistant U.S. attorney to acting U.S. attorney violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
Alina Habba, who was found to be in her role as U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey illegally.
How dare courts not buy the administration’s argument that Trump can just play cutesy games with temporary appointments to avoid putting jokers like Essayli in front of the Senate?
While Seabright ruled that Essayli is unlawfully in his position, the only remedy he granted was for Essayli to stay out of prosecutions of criminal defendants who sued. But he also ruled that Essayli could stay in the role of first assistant U.S. attorney, and he declined to dismiss the indictments, saying that other government attorneys lawfully signed them.
Essayli is a perfect Trump pick: petty, vicious, and wildly incompetent. This is the guy who referred to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s tweet about California’s new law banning ICE from wearing masks as a threat against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
And he loves to talk tough on X with ridiculous statements like, “The enforcement of federal law is not negotiable, and there are no sanctuaries from the reach of the federal government.”
While having been one of Trump’s personal lawyers is a great path to a high-level job in the Trump administration, Essayli is proof that there’s another way. Before Trump appointed him, Essayli was in the California Legislature, where he yammered about voter ID, immigration, and “parental rights.” Not exactly what qualifies someone to be the top prosecutor in the largest federal district in the country.
But the writing had been on the wall for Essayli for a while, since he was only in the job through the same string of temporary appointments that doomed Alina Habba. While the administration continues to fight that ruling, things did not go very well during oral arguments last week.
Also facing the same fate as Essayli and Habba? Sigal Chattah in Nevada. Earlier this month, a federal court ruled that Chattah, mostly known for election conspiracy theories rather than actual experience, was also not lawfully serving in her role.
Sigal Chattah, who was found to be in her role as U.S. attorney for the District of Nevada illegally.
And we can’t forget about the Eastern District of Virginia’s Lindsey Halligan, whose days are probably numbered given how things are going with her sham prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Comey had already moved to have Halligan disqualified, and once James did as well, the outside judge handling the disqualification motions helpfully consolidated those challenges—so at least Halligan will now only have to face that humiliation once.
Halligan is also having to explain why she randomly texted Lawfare’s Anna Bower to complain about Bower’s post discussing an entirely different news outlet’s reporting. Per the DOJ, Halligan was following the rules here because she was reaching out to protect her client—the government—from unfair prejudicial publicity. It’s not at all clear how whining to Bower would have accomplished this.
The administration is so eager to stick it to the libs and install trolls in top jobs that it seems to have overlooked the fact that U.S. attorneys aren’t just responsible for lying on camera and prosecuting Trump’s enemies.
None of these people are U.S. attorneys because they’re good at it. They’re simply there because they’ve proven to be spineless, amoral, and malleable—willing to do whatever Trump wants.
