President Donald Trump’s former defense attorney is the new top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. She was sworn into office by Attorney General Pam Bondi in a ceremony held Friday in the Oval Office as Trump looked on.
Watch the event in the player above.
Alina Habba was a partner in a small New Jersey law firm near Trump’s Bedminster golf course.
She served as a senior adviser for Trump’s political action committee, defended him in court in several civil lawsuits and acted as a spokesperson last year as he volleyed between courtrooms and the campaign trail. He later brought her to the White House with the title of counselor to the president.
WATCH: Alina Habba speaks at 2024 Republican National Convention
She lists no prosecutorial experience in an online biography.
“She counseled me very well,” Trump said. He said she’ll work “tirelessly to weed out crime and corruption and restore law and order to the Garden State.”
Habba thanked the president and said, “I would not be standing here today if it was not for the man to my right,” meaning Trump.
She promised to “make New Jersey great again.”
Camden officials said earlier this year that violent crime rates reached a 55-year low, crediting the county police department. Officials in Newark, the state’s largest city, said late last year that homicide rates had fallen but other crime levels had increased in 2024.
Habba, 41, took over the interim post from John Giordano, whom the president said he’s naming to be the U.S. ambassador for the southwestern African country of Namibia.
U.S. attorneys often have experience as prosecutors, including at the state or local level. Many, including the acting U.S. attorneys in Brooklyn and Manhattan, have worked in the offices they now lead.
Habba was one of Trump’s most visible defense attorneys, appearing on cable TV news as his “legal spokesperson.” She represented Trump in 2024 in the defamation case involving E. Jean Carroll.
But Habba has had limited federal court experience, practicing mainly in state-level courts. During the Carroll trial, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan chided Habba for botching procedure, misstating the law asking about off-limits topics and objecting after he ruled.
Habba and Trump were fined nearly $1 million in 2023 for filing what a Florida judge called a bogus lawsuit against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Habba has also represented Siggy Flicker, formerly of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” in 2021 as she sought to restore her Facebook account, which the reality star claimed had been disabled after she made a post wishing First Lady Melania Trump a happy birthday.
Habba was the plaintiff’s attorney in 2021 a defamation lawsuit against a Portuguese weekly magazine, which was later dismissed.
Associated Press writers Mike Catalini in New Jersey, Aamer Madhani and Will Weissert in Washington and Michael R. Sisak in New York contributed to this report.
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