Hey everybody, meet Jordan Fox!
Jordan is 30 years old, began practicing law in September 2022, joined the Department of Justice in January 2025 to work as Emil Bove’s chief of staff, and does not appear to have any experience as a prosecutor. Fox and the DOJ are nonetheless sure she is qualified to serve as the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.
Well, sort of. It isn’t like President Donald Trump is going to submit Fox’s name to the Senate for confirmation as required, because come on. And she can’t be named interim U.S. attorney because both a lower court and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals already ruled that Alina Habba, Fox’s equally unqualified predecessor, used up the entire 120-day period allowed for interim appointments.
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But Fox and the DOJ have a plan, and it involves Fox calling the federal district judges in New Jersey to see if they would like to name her as an acting United States attorney, allowing Trump to sidestep Senate confirmation.
It isn’t at all clear why the Trump administration thinks this is a recipe for success. Federal district court judges do have the power to name someone as acting U.S. attorney for a district if there is no Senate-confirmed appointee. Indeed, that is what the New Jersey federal judges did after Habba’s 120-day interim gig expired.
Alina Habba was forced out of her role as interim U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey.
However, much to the administration’s chagrin, the judges actually get to pick who they want, and they chose a longtime career prosecutor for the role. Attorney General Pam Bondi then fired that person for the crime of being qualified, essentially, and shoveled Habba right back in, only backing down after the appellate court upheld the lower court’s ruling that Habba had to go.
So, the same judges who declined to choose Habba are now being chatted up by Fox, a person who has even less experience than Habba did, to see if they’d like to assist the administration in its efforts to install yet another unqualified crony.
Did we mention that of the 17 federal judges in New Jersey, 15 were nominated by Democratic presidents? Oh, and also, the DOJ can’t demand that the judges meet and vote at all, much less vote to install Fox.
Fox isn’t entirely new to the district. After Habba finally said a huffy goodbye, Bondi hit upon the truly unhinged idea of having three DOJ attorneys, including Fox, run the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office together.
This is Bondi’s latest attempt to get around the need to confirm someone as U.S. attorney. The logic appears to be that by splitting the U.S. attorney duties across multiple people, none of those three people is performing all the duties of the U.S. attorney.
Bondi no doubt thinks this is a clever way to get around the fact that multiple courts have now told her she cannot name a random person a “special attorney” who has the full power and duties of a U.S. Attorney. Why? Well, because if Bondi could do that, there would be no need for Senate confirmation ever. But hey, if no one person has all the duties, then they can magically stay in their jobs forever, unconfirmed and unbothered.
In fact, that’s exactly what the DOJ told the court in a case brought by criminal defendants challenging this bastardized holy trinity appointment. Yes, per the DOJ, there is “no express time limit” on how long Fox and Friends could serve, but apparently, even the administration recognizes this is likely a non-starter. As with the “special attorney” ploy, if the attorney general can just divvy up duties between cronies, there would be no need for Senate confirmation ever. Hence, the attempt to sort of name Fox to the role, but only by begging the judges to do it for her.
Well, at least the litigation over Fox’s role has already started, so that should move things along nicely, right?
All of this certainly highlights how little Trump thinks of the Senate confirmation requirement, but it also reveals how little the administration is interested in the actual work of the DOJ, which is prosecuting federal crimes.
Having three people run an office together, having now-departed Lindsey Halligan continuing to sign pleadings as U.S. attorney after being told by a court she very much wasn’t—all of these antics run the risk of a judge deciding to dismiss the criminal cases brought by people who aren’t legally in their job.
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That’s what happened with Halligan’s indictments of former FBI director James Comey and new York Attorney General Letitia James, which were tossed out along with Halligan. However, the administration seems to have taken away the lesson that it just needs to be more innovative about how it flouts the law rather than just naming a normie conservative experienced prosecutor the Senate would confirm.
It’s highly likely that Fox will soon join Halligan and Habba, along with Sigal Chattah, Bill Essayli, and John Sarcone as wannabe U.S. attorneys who were told “absolutely not” by the courts.
Perhaps they can all form a support group. Or open a particularly terrible law firm. The world is their oyster. Well, the world outside U.S. attorney offices, at least.
