Donald Trump has given a New York prosecutor a new job title to keep him in power after federal judges rejected his appointment.
John Sarcone III was supposed to be removed as interim US attorney for New York’s northern district after a judicial panel refused to make his appointment permanent. Instead, the justice department has made him “special attorney to the attorney general” with the same powers and no time limit.
The appointment represents Trump’s curious pattern of working around traditional oversight mechanisms. Unlike his first term, when all 85 US attorney nominees were confirmed by the Senate, his second administration has formally nominated only about a quarter of that number, relying instead on interim appointments that bypass Senate confirmation.
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Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond trying to make sense of the appointment said the justice department is using a federal law called 28 US Code Section 515 to justify the move, but he says that’s a stretch. That law allows for “special attorneys” to handle specific cases, but this sort of application may not be intended to let someone serve as both acting US attorney and first assistant at the same time.
“It is unclear that Congress intended this code section to authorize the latter two named appointments,” said Tobias. “The historical practice has been to nominate people to be US Attorneys during the appointing president’s term subject to confirmation by the Senate.”
The move keeps Sarcone in place despite a string of problems that have raised questions about his credibility and qualifications. The Albany Times Union revealed that an address he listed as his legal residence in a police affidavit was actually a boarded-up building. When questioned, Sarcone offered shifting explanations about apartment renovations delayed by tariffs on Chinese windows, admitting he had been staying in hotels since his March appointment.
Federal law requires US attorneys to live within their district, making the residency question legally significant.
One notable issue came when Sarcone appeared on Fox News claiming an undocumented immigrant had tried to kill him with a knife outside an Albany hotel. But surveillance footage showed the two men never got closer than 20 ft, a direct contradiction of Sarcone’s story of being “chased with a knife” by “a maniac” speaking “in a foreign language”.
Based on Sarcone’s account, prosecutors at first charged Saul Morales-Garcia with attempted murder. After seeing the video, they dropped those charges. The man pleaded guilty to a much lesser charge of menacing.
When questioned about listing a false address in legal documents, Sarcone dismissed concerns: “Have you been chased with a knife and threatened? Are you saying I lied? Give me a break.”
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
