Trump Fires Court-Appointed US Attorney Hours After It Replaces His Illegally-Appointed Former Campaign Lawyer
It’s all well and good that we have a system of laws and rules in place. For the most part, the bumpers on the bowling lane help keep a lot of stuff on the field of play (to mix metaphors), even if powerful politicians would rather have the rules apply to everyone else but them.
This simply isn’t working during Trump’s second term in office. The rules and laws (and the oft-referenced “rule of law”) are still in place. But they don’t mean much when there are no meaningful methods of enforcement.
Trump continues to staff the DOJ with prosecutors who have never been subjected to the legally required confirmation process. To be fair, it’s always been a struggle to staff Trump’s DOJ. Those who haven’t quit because they refuse to engage in vindictive prosecutions are being fired because they either won’t engage in vindictive prosecutions or they’re simply not doing it as hard and as fast as Trump would like.
Plenty of people who used to serve Trump personally as his attorneys have been elevated into top-level prosecution roles, despite their complete lack of relevant experience. None of these people have been appointed legally.
Judges have been pushing back, which has led to Trump’s former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan being unceremoniously ousted from her role as a US attorney. Alina Habba spent most of a year generating massive conflicts of interest after being quasi-appointed to the position of US Attorney. She did this while still employed by Trump as his personal lawyer. Last December, she resigned from the position she never held legally and is now just another Trump lawyer who gets to hang around in the West Wing.
John Sarcone — Trump’s former campaign lawyer — was disqualified by a judge in January because he, too, had not been legally appointed to his position because Trump (and AG Pam Bondi) decided anyone who Trump wanted to be a US attorney could be one, even if that meant skipping the confirmation process entirely.
That didn’t bode well for Trump’s revenge fantasies. Sarcone being benched by the bench meant that all of his subpoenas targeting NY state attorney general Letitia James were no longer valid.
If the president decides he doesn’t want to subject his prosecutorial appointees to the confirmation process, that’s fine. But they only get to serve for so long (120 days) before they have to be replaced with a confirmed nominee. If that doesn’t happen, the court system gets to appoint a prosecutor to the now-open position.
The courts did this. And here’s where it gets supremely sticky. It didn’t take, as Brendan Lyons reports for the Times Union:
The White House on Wednesday evening fired a new interim U.S. attorney in New York’s Northern District less than five hours after a panel of federal judges had appointed Donald T. Kinsella to the position.
The swift termination of Kinsella, a former longtime federal prosecutor, underscored the ongoing tensions in federal districts where the administration of President Donald J. Trump has clashed with judges who have declined to appoint his interim appointments of U.S. attorneys who have not been confirmed by the Senate.
That’s insane. It probably took more time to discuss the appointment than it did for Trump to fire Kinsella. Kinsella was the court-appointed placeholder — one that could only be replaced by a nominee confirmed by the Senate.
But that’s not happening here. Not only did the administration fire Kinsella, but it immediately declared John Sarcone was still the acting US Attorney, no matter what the court had declared. And rather than caution the administration against ritually abusing the process to keep former Trump lawyers in positions of government power, Trump’s high-level officials got up on the socials to make sure everyone knew this president is actually a king.
On Wednesday evening, after the Times Union first reported Kinsella’s appointment as well as his subsequent firing by the White House, the U.S. deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, posted on X: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella.”
Hopefully, the court will just appoint someone else and force the administration to keep showing its autocratic ass until one of the White House bumblefucks says or does something that can’t be walked back. Attrition is the name of the game here. And I think there are more than enough qualified prosecutors available to outlast Trump’s revolving door of personal lawyers willing to accept government positions in lieu of a personal check from Trump.
And let’s not forget that Sarcone was probably picked not just for his allegiance to Trump, but because Trump is always willing to help out a fellow grifter.
Sarcone ran for Westchester County district attorney as a Republican in 2024 but lost to eventual winner Susan Cacace, a Democrat. He was later nominated by the Trump Administration to be U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, which covers the Capital region, North Country, Central New York and parts of the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley. But neither the U.S. Senate nor federal judges confirmed him, so the Trump Administration made him a special attorney for the region, devoid of term limits and traditional oversight.
Questions were eventually raised about his residence, since he had lived and campaigned in Westchester just a year before being named U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York. The Times Union reported that Sarcone’s listed address was a boarded-up building. Following that report, Sarcone ordered his staff to remove Times Union journalists from the office’s press distribution list.
That’s who Sarcone is. And that’s who he is going to be. If the courts are serious about standing up to abuses of executive power, it might be time to engage in a war of attrition.