Judge Matthew Brann, center, has issued a ruling that rejects President Donald Trump’s pick of Alina Habba as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney. (Photos by Andrew Harnik/Getty, Gage Skidmore, and C-SPAN)
Trump administration officials last month bashed the federal judges who ordered Alina Habba off the job as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, and they did it again Thursday when U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann ruled Habba’s reappointment was “unlawful.”
“We will protect her position from activist judicial attacks,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said on social media, in announcing plans to appeal.
Habba weighed in too, vowing on Fox News: “We will not fall to rogue judges. We will not fall to people trying to be political when they should just be doing their job, respecting the president.”
Brann, though, doesn’t fit neatly into the narrative of Trump allies who deride him as an Obama appointee driven by politics to remove Habba as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney.
He’s a longtime Republican and member of the conservative Federalist Society and the NRA. While former President Barack Obama named him to the federal bench in 2012, his nomination was part of a bipartisan deal, which is common in states where senators are from both parties. (Brann, whose court is in Williamsport in northcentral Pennsylvania, was tapped to take the Habba case because of a venue change.)
During his confirmation hearing, then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, called him “probably the most Republican judicial nominee from the Obama White House.” Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania’s Republican senator from 2011 to 2023, described him as “a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist.”
Brann himself told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the most important attribute of a judge is “complete impartiality in the application of the law to the facts before the court.”
“A United States district judge should be fair, impartial, cordial, timely, calm, and dignified,” Brann said. “I believe that I possess the appropriate temperament to effectively serve as a federal district judge.”
He acknowledged he had “basically conservative views,” but that politics would not have a place in his courtroom — and should not, to protect public confidence in the courts, he told the senators.
“I have, I think, fairly firm political views on a variety of issues,” Brann said. “My job is to factor that out, and I think that is actually the most difficult role as a judge, frankly, to not bring your own personal views to bear, because, frankly, what confidence would the public have ultimately if you did that? I mean, they would think this person should not really be a judge, they do not have the temperament, they do not have the wisdom to be a judge.”
He added: “I hope that I would ultimately have those traits on the bench, and I give you as much assurance as I can that that is what I would seek to do.”
Confirmed in December 2012, he took the bench in Pennsylvania’s Middle District in January 2013 and became chief judge there in 2021. When he started, Williamsport had been without a full-time federal judge for several years, according to WNEP-TV.
Previously, Brann, a native of Elmira, New York, had been a private-practice attorney for two decades in Bradford County, a largely rural, mountainous area that borders New York.
“I’m a country lawyer,” Brann told the TV station.
Brann has been in Trump supporters’ crosshairs before.
In November 2020, he dismissed a lawsuit in which the Trump campaign tried to delay the certification of election results in Pennsylvania. That decision briefly turned him into a media darling among liberals, with Philadelphia magazine gleefully reporting that Brann “absolutely eviscerated” Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
Last week during oral arguments in the Habba case, Brann seemed keen to consider the challenge to Habba’s authority, noting repeatedly over four hours of questioning the “interesting” issues the case raised. He also wryly hinted that he fully expected the blowback that his ruling generated on Thursday.
“I have a feeling that someone is going to be unsatisfied with my ruling,” he said.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX