Left: New York State Attorney General Letitia James attends an announcement at City Hall in New York, NY on Sept. 14, 2026, along with elected officials, on joining the Public Rights Project in filing a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s new public charge rule.(Photo by Lev Radin/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images). Right: John Sarcone, acting U.S. Attorney for Northern New York, leaves Manhattan federal court, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in New York (AP Photo/Larry Neumeister).
On the same day the DOJ tried to convince an appeals court to revive the bank fraud prosecution of Letitia James, the Trump administration on Tuesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to resurrect subpoenas targeting the New York attorney general’s office.
At stake is disqualified “acting” U.S. Attorney John Sarcone’s ability to participate in a grand jury investigation into those who investigated President Donald Trump and his family business in a state civil fraud case.
As recently as August, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling, affirmed a district judge’s decision to quash the subpoenas and disqualify Sarcone from “any further involvement in prosecuting or supervising the instant investigations, regardless of his title.”
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The 2nd Circuit’s majority said Senior U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield was correct in holding that Sarcone didn’t “validly” serve or “lawfully” exercise the duties of acting U.S. attorney.
Sarcone was initially named an interim U.S. attorney, with a 120-day limit on his service in the Northern District of New York. When his time was up and a court appointed his replacement Donald Kinsella, Kinsella was immediately fired — clearing the way, in the DOJ’s view, for Sarcone to return to the “acting” top job through titles of special attorney and first assistant U.S. attorney.
But that has not been the view of the courts. The 2nd Circuit added to the pile of other court decisions that went against ex-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s interim or acting — non-Senate confirmed temporary — U.S. attorney picks at the district court level within the 3rd, 4th, and the 9th Circuits.
Just days before the Sarcone ruling, the 9th Circuit unanimously ruled Sigal Chattah was “not lawfully serving” as acting U.S. attorney in Nevada under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA) and was rightfully disqualified from supervising her criminal defendant challengers’ indictments. The court held the statute “permits only a First Assistant already in place when the vacancy arises to become the acting officer automatically.”
The DOJ is now asking the justices to take up both cases, with the Sarcone petition hitting the high court’s docket on Tuesday.
“The recent court-of-appeals decisions are incorrect. Nothing in the FVRA’s text limits acting service to the pre-vacancy first assistant. To the contrary, the statute uses the present tense and imposes an ongoing duty on the ‘first assistant to the office of such officer’—not the pre-vacancy first assistant—to ‘perform the functions and duties of the office.’ Moreover, the Attorney General may delegate his broad law-enforcement authorities to anyone in the Department of Justice,” the DOJ said, arguing the courts “invalidat[ed] two longstanding executive-branch practices for addressing vacancies” in offices that require Senate confirmation.
The government then pointed the justices to the Chattah dispute — and the petition it filed one week earlier — as one that “cleanly presents the FVRA questions at the heart of this case” and provides “a better vehicle than this [Sarcone] case for resolving the questions presented,” because it doesn’t involve the “issuance of subpoenas[.]”
The DOJ nonetheless urged the high court to reverse three appellate courts’ holdings, claiming these “risk chaos at the next presidential transition when officers and their first assistants typically resign together, leaving the new Administration with few good options for acting officers to safeguard critical posts pending confirmation of permanent replacements.”
“More immediately, the decision below threatens to inject mass confusion into five U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the Ninth Circuit that collectively handle over 8,000 civil and criminal cases annually. This Court’s swift intervention is warranted to put that uncertainty to rest,” the Chattah petition said.
Notably, the criminal probe of James’ office was never blocked and the government “remains free” to reissue the subpoenas “through lawfully authorized officials.”
The post Trump DOJ demands SCOTUS take the wheel after probe of Letitia James’ civil fraud case stalls, points out ‘a better vehicle’ already exists first appeared on Law & Crime.
