Sigal Chattah, left, attorney representing Guard the Constitution Project Founder Shawn Meehan, and Monti Levy, right, attorney representing Nevada Republican Party delegate Eileen Rice, appear in court in Las Vegas Monday, March 4, 2024. A judge pushed back to January 2025 the trial date for six Republicans who submitted certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of Nevada”s 2020 presidential election. (Wade Vandervort/Las Vegas Sun via AP).
One of several acting U.S. attorneys controversially installed by the Trump administration to sidestep the U.S. Senate is apparently prepared to keep relitigating President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, even as Nevada criminal defendants insist she should be disqualified from prosecuting cases just like former Trump personal attorney Alina Habba.
The latest update on Sigal Chattah’s activities in recent months comes from Reuters, which reported that she has asked Director Kash Patel’s FBI to “investigate debunked Republican claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election, a probe she hopes will influence congressional races and ensnare Democrats[.]” According to the report, Chattah additionally aims to “exonerate” Republican fake electors, raising ethics and conflict of interest issues because she represented one of the accused and both the Nevada GOP and the Republican National Committee.
Chattah has made waves in office since she was named acting U.S. attorney, after she resigned from her interim role but before her 120-day limit technically expired. Trump and the DOJ put her right back in place under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act — sidestepping, “potentially in perpetuity,” the constitutional requirement that permanent U.S. attorneys be appointed with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate and, in the examples of Habba in New Jersey and John Sarcone in New York, evading federal courts’ refusals to appoint them in the meantime.
Bilal “Bill” Essayli similarly faces a challenge of his authority in California, and questions have been raised about whether former Trump personal attorney Lindsey Halligan was lawfully appointed to prosecute ex-FBI Director James Comey in Virginia.
Senior U.S. District Judge David Campbell as of Sept. 24 had heard the challenge against Chattah, and the group of criminal defendants seeking her disqualification awaits a written ruling, the court docket reviewed by Law&Crime says.
To date, Chattah has claimed that those resisting her authority are doing so not for legal reasons but political ones, given her previous job as a defense attorney.
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In August, Chattah told local CBS affiliate KLASÂ that her critics are “scared” that she knows “where all the bodies are buried” due to her work in private practice.
“You know, a lot of these people, I know that they’re scared because I know where a lot of the bodies are buried because I come from the defense world,” Chattah said after her resignation and reappointment. “Without saying too much about my previous experience as a defense attorney, but when you played that side, you know where all the bodies are buried. Sometimes we even choose the location to bury them.”
