Alina Habba politicized her job as US attorney. Team Trump politicizes her exit.
President Donald Trump and the crew of cynical sycophants surrounding him can seem pretty unpredictable until you start spotting the patterns.
On matters of law and order, expect the inversion of what Trump claims to be true. If he says he's ending the "weaponization" of the Department of Justice, you better believe he'll use that legal power like a blunt instrument to pound away at his perceived enemies, no matter what the law allows, no matter how inept his agents are.
That's why the kerfuffle about Trump's pick for U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba, feels so predictable.
Habba was widely seen as inexperienced when she represented Trump in a 2024 New York defamation case, which he lost. But she played the part of a lawyer in a passable way while lavishing Trump with loyalty on Fox News so, of course, he made her the top prosecutor for the entire state of New Jersey.
And, of course, she made a mess of it, politicizing the office from the get-go in a set of fits-and-starts prosecutions against Democrats in the state who are critical of Trump's deport-them-all approach to immigration.
But Habba faced two roadblocks that Trump and her DOJ cheerleaders, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, couldn't push her past.
Alina Habba was clearly not experienced enough for US attorney job
Federal prosecutors are nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. And Senate protocol gives the two senators from any state significant yay-or-nay say over those picks.
Cory Booker and Andy Kim, the two Democratic senators from New Jersey, jointly announced on July 2 that Habba "in her short tenure as interim U.S. Attorney ... has degraded the office and pursued frivolous and politically motivated prosecutions."
So, that was a nay from them.
Habba had another chance. The federal judges of the District of New Jersey could have voted to keep her on the job, past the 120-day limit of her interim capacity as U.S. attorney. That deadline expired July 22. But the judges also said nay to Habba.
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In an order at the deadline, Chief Judge Renee Marie Bumb named an experienced prosecutor who had been serving as New Jersey's first deputy U.S. attorney, Desiree Leigh Grace, as Habba's replacement, effective the same day.
What came next was as predictable as the rest of it.
Trump's MAGA administration wasted no time attacking the courts
Bondi and Blanche accused the judges of playing politics because they would not rubber-stamp Habba, who was so clearly playing politics with her role. And Bondi removed Grace from the job she had just been given, whining that "rogue judges" had impeded Trump's presidential power.
So an experienced prosecutor got bounced from the job that Habba just got bounced from for being inexperienced and using the job like a political activist. Experience is really a red flag to a crew trying to invert the meaning of justice.
Grace's removal injected yet more chaos into the office of a federal prosecutor, which had already been a mess under Habba. Booker and Kim, in a joint statement on July 22, pointed to a pattern of Trump's DOJ attacking judges and the rule of law.
"The firing of a career public servant, lawfully appointed by the court, is another blatant attempt to intimidate anyone that doesn't agree with them and undermine judicial independence," Booker and Kim said.
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Here's what comes next: Habba will play the victim, with Bondi and Blanche sobbing along. Then Trump will sneer about "activist judges," a favorite villain in the trite emails he sends out all the time, pleading with his supporters to give him money.
And then Trump will find another spot for her, probably at the DOJ, definitely not in a post where the Senate has to weigh her qualifications. That part's not too difficult to predict, because we've already seen it.
Habba isn't the only Trump loyalist to secure a position in this administration
Trump picked Ed Martin, a devoted supporter with scant legal background and zero experience as a prosecutor, to be the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, DC, on Jan. 20, right after the inauguration.
Martin got right to work on Trump's inversion of justice, serving as one of the early inquisitors of how federal agents and prosecutors investigated the rioters who invaded and ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump refused to admit that he had lost the 2020 presidential election.
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Martin's nomination stalled in the Senate in May and, facing the same 120-day deadline problem as Habba, Trump had to hand the gig off instead to one of his most fervent Fox News supporters, Jeanine Pirro.
Martin wasn't sent packing. He landed another DOJ gig in the new Weaponization Working Group, which Bondi claims was set up to stop the politicization of the agency.
But, remember, inversion is always at play here. So Bondi, with Trump's blessing, is really using the group to weaponize justice as a tool for political power.
If Habba travels the same route, and that does seem likely, she'll finally be in a post she's qualified for ‒ using the levers of power at DOJ to punish anyone Trump feels is out of line.
See her potential job description this way: Think of what an experienced, professional, principled lawyer would do ‒ and then wait for her to invert that expectation.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.
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