Judge Zahid Quraishi of U.S. District Court ejected a federal prosecutor from his courtroom and ordered the three leaders designated to run the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey to return to court to testify.
Judge Orders Prosecutors to Testify
Submitted 2 days ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
solrize@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Can anyone explain what this is about?
hypna@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The Trump admin have been filling US attorneys offices with temporary appointments, and attempting to leave those temporary appointments in place indefinitely. This is an attempt to avoid the constitutional requirement that US attorneys be approved by the Senate.
Courts have recently ruled that this is illegal, and that some of the people currently attempting to exercise the powers of a US attorney have no such legal authority. Ms. Habba is an example of one such person.
The law allows the courts to appoint US attorneys if the position has been vacant for some period. Some courts have chosen to do so, I believe in the case of Ms. Habba specifically, and the Trump administration have immediately fired the court appointed US attorneys. I believe after firing the court appointed US attorney, they attempted to make another temporary appointment, which the law does not allow, but were hoping to muddle the issue by appointing three people as a “triumvirate.”
The courts subsequently ruled that that is also illegal, but it sounds like the ruling judged stayed their order to allow for appeals.
This judge in the transcript is attempting to discover whether the prosecutor attempting to participate in this plea deal and sentencing hearing have any legal authority to do so. It sounds like the hearing was supposed to resolve these matters of fact, but the attorney present wasn’t to say anything about who is actually running the US attorneys office.
Consequently, the judge has indicated that they will be summoning the “triumvirate” to testify in person, under oath to determine who is really running the US attorney office.
IANAL and this is all from memory of previous reporting I’ve read. Do fact check if you’re interested.
silence7@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Basically, the NJ District Attorney’s office (federal) is being run in a way that’s illegal, operating incompetently as a result, and they seem to have ignored the judge’s instruction to go fix it. So he’s calling the prosecutors in to testify about what their reporting chain actually is.