A federal appeals court has dealt another blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to install loyalist prosecutors across the country’s top law enforcement offices.
A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel unanimously affirmed that Sigal Chattah cannot lawfully supervise prosecutions in the District of Nevada, having never been validly installed as acting U.S. Attorney.
The opinion was written by Judge Eric Miller, a Trump appointee, and joined by Judge Sidney Thomas, a Clinton appointee, and District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld, another Trump appointee sitting by designation.
Two of the three judges who ruled against Chattah owe their lifetime appointments to Donald Trump himself, undermining the administration’s narrative that such rulings reflect partisan judicial interference.
At the core of the dispute is whether automatic succession under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act allows the Attorney General to designate a new first assistant long after a vacancy has already arisen.
The panel found it does not, ruling that automatic succession applies only to whoever was already serving as first assistant when the vacancy arose, which was Sue Fahami back in January 2025.
Judge Miller wrote that the statute “does not permit the executive to fill an existing vacancy by designating a new first assistant,” directly rejecting the Justice Department’s legal reasoning.
The court also rejected the argument that newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche could effectively grant Chattah full authority by delegating powers under a separate statute, calling such a distinction “meaningless.”
The Ninth Circuit, referring to Chattah as the “putative Acting United States Attorney,” gave “no weight” to the Justice Department’s reliance on an Office of Legal Counsel opinion from 2001.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of several individuals indicted under Chattah’s tenure, with lower courts declining to dismiss those cases outright but barring her from overseeing them.
The appeals court agreed Chattah could not supervise the prosecutions but ruled it lacked jurisdiction to determine whether the underlying cases could be nullified altogether.
The ruling follows a similar legal defeat in New Jersey, where an appeals court invalidated the appointment of Trump’s former personal defence attorney Alina Habba as U.S. Attorney in December.
The Trump administration has now suffered comparable legal setbacks in several states, including Virginia and California, as courts repeatedly scrutinise its methods for installing sympathetic prosecutors.