Alina Habba attends her swearing-in ceremony as interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 28, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
There was a time when wrongdoers quaked in their boots at the thought of a federal indictment. Federal prosecutors were veterans. And if they carried even the whiff of inexperience, the co-workers surrounding them and guiding their work were almost guaranteed to have whole decades of experience beneath their belts.
A federal prosecution was something to be feared — but that was before the arrival of the second Trump administration, according to Politico. Nowadays you can be on the bad end of a Trump DOJ indictment and bear witness to all manner of embarrassing courtroom stumbles, snafus and mishap.
“Some U.S. attorneys who have never worked in a federal prosecutor’s office have taken steps that would be considered unusual for anyone familiar with the customs and practices of the Justice Department,” reports Politico. “In Nevada, Sigal Chattah, who is leading the U.S. attorney’s office as first assistant after a federal judge disqualified her from holding the top job, ordered the last-minute cancellation of a plea deal that had been directed and approved by the supervising attorney in the office’s criminal division.”
It turned out the defendant in that case was seeking to disqualify Chattah from the prosecution — probably successfully — because Chattah had already been bumped from supervising four other criminal prosecutions.
Meanwhile, Politico reports the U.S. attorney for the middle district of North Carolina, a former GOP lawmaker and election denier who voted against certifying the legitimate 2020 election of Joe Biden, is now a special prosecutor in charge of pursuing “election fraud.” Politico reports Dan Bishop’s early efforts have included pushing the FBI to revisit inquiries it had already concluded were pointless.
Trump is picking people for U.S. attorney jobs who have never worked as a prosecutor because of his “tendency to value loyalty over professional qualifications,” reports Politico.
But without having worked as a line prosecutor, “they don’t have anything to compare it to,” said Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor who is writing a book on the justice system during Trump’s presidency. “It’s much harder for them to say why” the office should decline to pursue a case, she said.
With only a year and some months into his second term, Politico reports Trump already has three people who lacked prosecutorial experience losing their U.S. attorney posts: Lindsey Halligan, Alina Habba and Ed Martin.
Halligan got disqualified by U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie, who also flushed indictments Halligan obtained against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. And other judges said Halligan had bumbled the grand jury process.
“Like Halligan, Habba became U.S. attorney after working as one of Trump’s personal lawyers. Habba served in New Jersey, where a federal judge criticized her for the ‘hasty arrest’ and speedy dismissal of charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat who was detained following an incident at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. U.S. Magistrate Judge André M. Espinosa said the episode “suggests a worrisome misstep” by Habba’s office.
Martin, the former U.S. attorney for Washington, is up against disciplinary charges from the D.C. Bar for his behavior while leading the office, including threatening to withhold funding from Georgetown University’s Law Center and barring his staff from hiring its students in a bid to punish the institution for its DEI practices — a First Amendment violation, according to the Bar.