According to MSNBC legal expert Lisa Rubin, a brief filed asserting Bondi's ability to retain the controversial Habba contains wording that Rubin called "frightening.Habba is already an utter disaster as an interim USA. Morale in the office is shattered, and defense lawyers are circling the chaos like wolves, looking to get their clients discharged.
As she noted, after Habba resigned before her interim term was up, Bondi fired her replacement, Desiree Grace, and then promptly named Habba first assistant U.S. attorney, which allowed her to retain control of the office.
As part of the battle over whether the attorney general's move was legal — placing an estimated 1500 criminal cases in doubt — the New Jersey office submitted a brief defending the move.
That brief, Rubin asserted, provides a window into the Justice Department's future plans.
"These sort of shenanigans appear to be continuing and other areas of the country," she told MSNBC's Chris Jansing. "But, Chris, there's one thing in this brief that I think is really dangerous and I want to highlight for you, which is that she says in this brief that it's okay for the attorney general to even circumvent U.S. attorneys. That the U.S. attorney statutorily can delegate the functions ordinarily served by a U.S. attorney."
She then corrected herself, saying, "I'm sorry that the attorney general can delegate the functions ordinarily served by the U.S. attorney to 'any other officer, employee, or agency of the Department of Justice.'"
"So I just want you to imagine this for a second," she prompted the host. "Pam Bondi can take a bunch of people, call them special U.S. attorneys, appoint them to the Department of Justice, without going through the conventional career prosecutor hiring process, and then sort of take away responsibilities from Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys or people who should be Senate-confirmed and essentially have them serve the same purposes."
"This, to me, seems like a guidebook to what might be to come that, what we've seen already so far in terms of circumventing the law and the Senate, may be child's play compared to what could come next," she warned.
Rubin is not wrong: if the Sinister Six shadow docket the case of how USA’s are appointed and Trump decides he wants loyalist replacements everywhere (having stumbled on the method at last), couldn’t the DOJ, effectively if not officially, go the way of the DOE? And if the Sinister Six decide DOJ is more like the Fed than the DOE, what excuse do they use to distinguish the two? The Fed is historically independent. So is the DOJ, but not in the same way. The DOJ is as important to government as the Fed is to the market. Now make that an important legal principle that distinguishes the DOE case.
The Supreme Sux could just say: “We’re the Supreme Court, bitches!” Which is pretty much what they’ve said on the shadow docket this year. That is not, however, a long term solution.
Shit could get very real if the Sinister Six so much as freeze any action in this lawsuit. And shit could hit the fan far away from New Jersey.
Odd, this far into the very obvious and serious, catastrophically serious CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS! that no one seems to be much using that once popular and fraught phrase. This is clearly more than a "Constitutional crisis," this is a failure that was always in the docuement waiting for those criminal enough and fascist enough to exploit those defects. That it is the same Court that is reinstituting Jim Crow - especially around voting - and extending that is no accident, white supremacy has always been our indigenous fascist movement, one which has had enormous power since the first Continental Congress.
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