The Brief

U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann has ruled that the three-person team Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed to lead the New Jersey federal prosecutor’s office is unconstitutional, finding violations of the Appointments Clause, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and statutes governing job duties. It is the third time in seven months a court has found the administration broke the law in its attempts to staff that office — a pattern now replicated in at least five states.

The Report

Judge Brann issued a 130-page opinion on Monday disqualifying the three officials Bondi installed in December to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey: Philip Lamparello over the Criminal Division, Jordan Fox over the Civil Division, and Ari Fontecchio heading administration. The structure — splitting the authority of a single Senate-confirmed position among three officials with new titles — had never been used in U.S. history to run a federal prosecutor’s office.

The ruling found three distinct legal violations. The triumvirate arrangement circumvented the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which governs temporary appointments to positions requiring Senate confirmation. It violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, which requires principal officers to be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. And it exceeded the Attorney General’s authority under statutes governing job duties within the Department of Justice.

“The Justice Department dresses its argument in sheep’s wool of administrative necessity, while this wolf comes as a wolf,” Brann wrote. He characterised the government’s legal theory as claiming the Attorney General could “appoint anyone to any subordinate position in the Department of Justice and delegate them the authority to act in any other subordinate role, no matter how significant” — an argument he called “an enormous assertion of Presidential power.”

The decision is the latest chapter in a year-long dispute over the New Jersey office. Bondi’s predecessor arrangement — placing Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney, as interim U.S. Attorney in March 2025 — was disqualified by Brann in August 2025 and upheld by the Third Circuit in December. Habba subsequently resigned. The triumvirate was Bondi’s second attempt at staffing the office without Senate confirmation, prompted by opposition from New Jersey’s Democratic senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim to the administration’s preferred candidates.

Habba, now serving as Senior Advisor to the Attorney General for United States Attorneys, called the ruling “ridiculous” and wrote on social media: “Judges do not fire DOJ officials, AG Pam Bondi and POTUS do — get in line.” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche responded: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution.”

Brann stayed his order pending appeal to the Third Circuit, meaning the triumvirate continues to function for now. But he warned explicitly: “any further attempts to unlawfully fill the office will result in dismissals of pending cases.” He noted that thousands of criminal prosecutions in the district — including a $100 million healthcare fraud conviction awaiting sentencing — rest on the legitimacy of the office’s leadership. Federal judges in New York, Virginia, California, and Nevada have issued similar findings against administration-appointed interim U.S. attorneys.

The office remains without a Senate-confirmed leader. Under the current order, district judges now have the authority under federal law to appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney — though in the New York case, the administration fired the judge-appointed replacement within five hours.

The Angle

The administration’s response tells the story more precisely than the ruling itself. “Judges do not fire DOJ officials.” “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does.” These are not legal arguments. They are assertions of a theory of executive authority that the courts have now rejected three times in a single jurisdiction — and in at least four others besides. The administration is not adjusting to the rulings. It is treating them as illegitimate, which is a different kind of project.

What Brann’s opinion actually documents, across 130 pages, is something specific: a government that tried one workaround, had it struck down, tried a second, had it struck down, and responded to both by questioning the authority of the institution doing the striking. The constitutional argument Blanche and Habba are making — that Article II gives the President unilateral appointment power — has been tested and rejected repeatedly. They continue making it. The question worth asking is whether the argument is still intended to persuade a court, or whether it has become the justification for ignoring one.

The New Jersey case is the clearest example because it has the longest record, but the pattern is national. Five states. Judges finding the same violations. An administration that, in one documented instance, fired a court-appointed replacement within hours of the appointment. The structural picture is not ambiguous: the executive branch has decided that Senate confirmation is an obstacle to be engineered around rather than a process to be satisfied, and it is running the same play in every jurisdiction where its preferred candidates cannot clear that bar.

Brann’s warning — that further unlawful appointments will result in case dismissals — is the part that will matter most in six months. Thousands of federal prosecutions in New Jersey now carry an asterisk. Every conviction secured, every plea negotiated, every indictment filed under the triumvirate’s authority is structurally vulnerable. The administration has framed this as judges obstructing law enforcement. The 130-page opinion frames it differently: an executive branch that cares more about who is running the office than whether the office can function at all.