Left: New York Attorney General Letitia James joins elected officials at New York City Hall on Sept. 14, 2026, to announce a Public Rights Project 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 the Northern District of New York, exits Manhattan federal court on Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Larry Neumeister).
The Trump administration brought its dispute over New York Attorney General Letitia James to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, seeking to restore subpoenas issued to her office. The filing came the same day the Justice Department urged an appeals court to revive its bank fraud case against James.
The central issue is whether John Sarcone, who has been disqualified as acting U.S. attorney, can take part in a grand jury investigation involving officials who investigated President Donald Trump and his family real estate business in New York’s civil fraud case.
In August, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision in a 2-1 ruling. The decision quashed the subpoenas and barred Sarcone from “any further involvement in prosecuting or supervising the instant investigations, regardless of his title.”
The appellate majority concluded that Senior U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield correctly found Sarcone had neither “validly” served nor “lawfully” exercised the powers of an acting U.S. attorney.
Sarcone originally took office as interim U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, a role capped at 120 days. After that period expired, the court appointed Donald Kinsella as his successor. Kinsella was fired immediately, however, allowing Sarcone to return to the office in the Justice Department’s view through appointments as a special attorney and first assistant U.S. attorney.
Federal courts have repeatedly rejected that position. The 2nd Circuit’s ruling added to decisions against former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s use of interim or acting U.S. attorney appointments that did not receive Senate confirmation, including district court decisions within the 3rd, 4th and 9th Circuits.
Only days before the Sarcone decision, the 9th Circuit unanimously found that Sigal Chattah was “not lawfully serving” as Nevada’s acting U.S. attorney under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. The court upheld her disqualification from overseeing indictments involving the criminal defendants who challenged her appointment, ruling that the law “permits only a First Assistant already in place when the vacancy arises to become the acting officer automatically.”
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The Justice Department is now asking the Supreme Court to hear both cases. Its petition in the Sarcone matter was added to the court’s docket 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. The department argued that the lower courts had improperly “invalidat[ed] two longstanding executive-branch practices for addressing vacancies” in Senate-confirmed offices.
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.