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An irate judge tossed a top New Jersey prosecutor from a pedophile’s sentencing and claimed the US Attorney’s office was “screwing up” a plea deal — as he raged that the office had descended into chaos since Alina Habba was forced out.
Judge Zahid N. Quraishi, who was appointed to the bench by President Joe Biden in 2021, threatened to call security on Mark Coyne of the NJ US Attorney’s Office Monday because he didn’t formally declare he was going attend the sentencing of a man who admitted to having an online relationship with a 13-year-old.
“Are you here for moral support? Because you’re not going to speak,” Quraishi told Coyne, who had accompanied case prosecutor Daniel Rosenblum to the hearing, a transcript obtained by the New York Times showed.
“If you want to sit there for moral support or hand Mr. Rosenblum Post-its or whisper in his ear, I’ll let you do that,” the judge added, barring Coyne from speaking.
But after several interjections from Coyne — the Attorney’s Office chief of appeals — Quraishi threw him out of the courtroom.
“I’m going to have you removed. I already told you not to speak,” Quraishi said, accusing Coyne of trying to “blindside this court” and giving him a chance to leave or have security escort him out. Coyne left of his own accord.
The ejection came as Judge Quraishi had been haranguing Rosenblum over how his office had been run since President Trump’s acting US Attorney pick — the president’s former personal lawyer, Alina Habba — resigned in December.
Habba is just one of several Trump-appointed US attorneys who have been ousted from office after judges ruled they had been illegally appointed.
US Attorneys are typically picked by the president and then approved by the US Senate, but attorneys like Habba were put in office under the role of “acting US attorney” to avoid the confirmation process.
Dissenting judges have accused the Trump administration of exploiting loopholes to circumvent the law.
Several judges then appointed their own US attorneys — but the Department of Justice ousted some and again appointed their picks.
New Jersey’s US Attorney’s Office has been run by a trio of attorneys — Ari Fontecchio, Philip Lamparello and Jordan Fox — since Habba stepped down.
Quraishi blamed the confusion of Monday’s sentencing on leadership chaos.
“Who is currently running the US attorney’s office today as you stand before me?” Quraishi asked, while pressing whether Habba had any role in running the office.
Quraishi also implied that such confusion led to an error in the pedophile’s plea deal, which saw defendant Francisco Villafane plead guilty to child pornography charges nearly a year ago in return for a 7 to 9 year prison sentence recommendation — only for federal investigators to uncover a vile slew of additional evidence.
“The FBI was still searching the devices that you executed a search warrant on. You executed a plea agreement, and later the FBI told you, ‘Hey, there’s a bunch of babies in this device. There’s a bunch of prepubescent children committing sexual acts.’ You saw all that, right?” Quraishi said.
“How did the screw up happen?” he asked, calling the plea deal Villafane was given “so deficient.”
The judge finally called off the day’s sentencing hearing — and ordered the three lawyers currently leading the US Attorney’s Office to testify before the court about how their department was being run.
“They’re going to testify, and this court’s going to figure out who is currently operating this office before I proceed with today’s sentencing hearing,” Quraishi fumed, scheduling that hearing for early May.
“Generations of assistant US Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy it within a year,” the judge added.
Quraishi said if the NJ Attorney’s Office leadership couldn’t answer his questions that he would compel Habba to appear herself.
Habba has been serving as an advisor to US attorneys across the country since she stepped down, and has been occasionally seen at New Jersey’s office since she left, according to the Times.
But she insisted she has had no control over the office since she resigned.
“I’m not the US attorney anymore,” she told the Times. “I left my post.”
New Jersey’s US Attorney’s Office also insisted at the hearing that the new evidence against Villafane would not have affected their plea agreement — even though he faced decades of prison time before the deal.
Villafane’s criminal defense lawyer decline to comment, but a rep for the Department of Justice called Quraishi’s behavior “courtroom theatrics and constitutional overreach.”
“It is an especially troubling moment when a court chooses to sideline a case involving child exploitation,” the DOJ rep said. “There is no place for that in the justice system.”
English (US)