6 events in Passaic County with a date

Alina Habba enforces Trump's vengeance agenda in NJ

By: Charles Stile
Political Stile
USA today Network

..... Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is going to need to "lawyer up."
..... So will Adam Schiff, the California senator , and Jack Smith, the former Justice Department official who investigated President Donald Trump's complicity in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. There's a good chance former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, whom Trump has flippantly accused of treason, also may need to.
..... And here is a name that may surprise you: Governor Phil Murphy. He's already ahead of them all.
..... The governor, as Politico New Jersey reported last week, [08/07/2025] retained two top-shelf lawyers - Parimal Garg, his former chief counsel, and Chris Porrino, who served as a state attorney general for former Governor Chris Christie - after Murphy was served with a subpoena as part of an investigation into New Jersey's"sanctuary state" immigration policies. both lawyers work at the Roseland-based Lowenstein Sandler firm and will be paid $450 an hour, the report said.
...... Leading this spurious inquisition is the acting U.S. attorney-in-limbo for New Jersey, Alina Habba, the eager-to-please former personal lawyer to Trump who has turned the federal plaza in Newark int circus. She is - or was, at least, when she was secure in the job - probing whether the "sanctuary state" policies interfered with Trump's immigration crackdown.
..... But according to sources familiar with matter, the subpoena apparently was more concerned with the gaffe Murphy made before a left-wing group in February. [2025] Playing to the crowd, a puffed-up Murphy suggested to the audience that he digit be sheltering an illegal immigrant at his Middletown home. He then dared the federal mitigation authorities to try to get her.
..... That annoyed Tom Homan, Trump's border czar and chief enforcer of the ICE raids, who called Murphy's remarks "foolish" and vowed to look into them. An aghast Murphy spent the newt week walking back his comments, explaining that the person in question has never been to his place, and that this unnamed person was, in fact, in the United States legally but was seeking permanent status. It was a from of crowd-pleasing fabulis, that probably overtook Murphy in the heat of the moment. ( If telling tall tales were a crime, most of the Trump administration would be on a supervised work-release program.)
..... Murphy admin station officials declined to comment on the subpoena and statue of the investigation - if there is one.

Alina Habba isn't enforcing the law. She's playing politics

..... Yet the subpoena over an abused, custom-made-for-the-right-wing-echo-chamber "investigation," and the fact that Murphy needed to go an hire two top guns - at taxpayers' expense if at some point they have to do real work - is just another milestone of the absurd Habba circus as the state's top federal law enforcement officer. It's been a debacle since she took the job earlier this year. [2025]
..... She began by politicizing the office, telling a right-wing podcaster that New Jersey is ripe for a "read" takeover. the crime fighters spoke like a political strategist.
..... Then she had Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrested in May [2025] for allegedly trespassing at Delaney hall, the federally-leased detention center in Newark, during an immigration portext, only to withdraw the charge 10 days later -and draw the withering scorn of the presiding judge, who publicly scolded her for her "embarrassing retraction."
..... Both U.S. senators from New Jersey refused to sign off on her nomination, and the state's Federal District Court judges voted not to extend her interim rein. They made their vote of no-confidence clear by replacing her with prosecutor Desiree Leigh Grace, a registered fended Habba and devised a work-around by firing Grace and installing Habba as the first assistant U.S. attorney, which would effectively put her in change of the office without needing to get approval from the Senate or the blessing of federal judges. But this piece of creative shuffling has only cerated more confusion, as lawyers for several defendants are now seeking to get their charges dismissed on the grounds that Habba was not authorized to bring the charges under this new end-around role.
..... And looming over this recent resume is an ethics infestation into Habba's allegedly improper roil in setting a sexual harassment claim of a former employee at Trump's Bedminster golf club.

Trump - suddenly - crack down on crime as his law enforcers spin political animus

..... The irony is that Trump has made a great show lately of racetrack down on crime. He authorized a military takeover of the Washington, DC, police department on Monday [08/11/2025] vowing to wipe the nation's capital of crime and homelessness - despite a drop in crime rates in the city. he has hinted that he may deploy more federal troops to Democratic-controlled cities.
..... Crime fighting doesn't seem to be his purpose in Newark. He's digging in his heels in support of Habba out of anger at being rebuffed by federal court judges. He feels his prerogative of picking the own people has been once again thwarted by unelected judges. His prerogative just ran smack into long-established institutional guardrails. and as always when he runs into guardrails or norms, he seeks to ignore them or blow them up.

Habba is simply not qualified

..... One clear reason Habba has collided with those guardrails is that she is clearly not suited for the job. The United States attorney for New Jersey is a powerful and prestigious job that was held by a long roster of venerable prosecutors: Frederick B. Lacy in the late 1960s, the first in a series of important mob-busting prosecutors, like Johnathan Goldstein, a Nixon appointee in the mid-1970s, and Robert Del Tufo until 1980. Christ Christie, who had no courtroom experience before being approved for the post in 2002, was widely accused of targeting mostly Democrats, but there was at least a focus on rooting out political corruption, and he parlayed that record into the governor's office. Regardless of his motives, he put the political class on notice.
..... Alina Habba? Is she the best that Trump can do for a state that where he raised and later bankrupted his casino empire and where he retreats from the Florida heat? Or is New Jersey not really a front in his purported War on Crime but just another battleground in his war on institutional power?

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