Habba la Vista..Politico’s Matt Friedman has the last word on Alina

By MATT FRIEDMAN, Politico, 12/09/2025

Alina Habba has resigned as New Jersey’s Acting U.S. attorney, a week after the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed she was serving in the post illegally.

She did not help turn New Jersey red.

But while Habba in her goodbye message took credit for Camden’s first murder-free summer in 50 years, her eight and a half months in the post will likely be remembered for her brazenly political approach to the job, and the extraordinary measures the Trump administration used to keep her in it after she was rejected by New Jersey’s U.S. senators and its district court judges. Or perhaps for the stunning trespassing arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and the quickly dropped charges, followed by the still-standing felony assault charges against U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver.

Habba will remain in President Donald Trump’s administration, she said, as a “senior adviser to the Attorney General for U.S. Attorneys.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department “will seek further review of this decision,” with plans to put Habba back in charge of the office if it’s overturned. Meanwhile, Trump complained about blue slips — the tradition that requires home-state senators to sign off on certain nominees. “If I put up George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to be U.S. attorney in New Jersey or to be U.S. attorney in Virginia, we have Democrat senators, they will not approve them,” he said.

Normally, Habba would have been temporarily replaced by her first assistant U.S. attorney. But last I checked, Habba was the first assistant U.S. attorney — a job Habba took thanks to Trump’s firing of widely respected career prosecutor Desiree Grace, in the effort to stay on as acting U.S. attorney. Four federal judges have now rejected that strategy.

The Department of Justice did not mention a new temporary U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Instead, they listed a trio of lawyers — Philip Lamparello, Jordan Fox and Ari Fontecchio — who will take over core office functions. As far as I can tell, all three have pretty strictly legal backgrounds, though Lamparello’s father, Ralph, at whose firm he worked until taking a job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office this September, is well-known for his work for Democrats in Hudson County. No word on whether Trump will seek a U.S. attorney nominee who might have a chance at approval by New Jersey’s senators, though he’s already ruled out George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

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NYC’s new trash plan land comes under fire

Trash bag mountains are being banned across the city, but recycling piles like these are permitted.

By Liam Quigley, Gothamist

A new report argues the sanitation department isn’t going far enough in its effort to containerize all the city’s trash, noting the plan pushed under Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t cover the heaps of recycling that are still allowed to pile up on sidewalks.

The report, which the Center for Building in North America and the Center for Zero Waste Design published on Friday, gives city officials credit for mandating that all the city’s businesses and small residential buildings put out their garbage in secured bins. But it also points out that paper, plastic, and glass recycling continues to clutter up walkways.

The group wants the city to eventually require recyclables and compost to be put out in the city’s new “Empire Bins,” which are slowly being rolled out in parking spaces to store trash from large buildings.

Clare Miflin, executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design, said the city was too narrowly focused on removing garbage bags from sidewalks and failed to account for recycling.

“When you’re going to do something this big and expensive, I think you need to think bigger,” she said, laying out a vision where the vast majority of the city’s waste and recycling is stored in bins sitting atop parking spaces. “ We think that it shouldn’t be trash only. It should be for both recycling streams and compostable waste. All of them should be alongside each other in the street.”

The sanitation department plans to install those street-side bins in front of every residential building with more than 30 units over the next seven years. Owners of buildings with 10 to 30 units can either request for one of the bins to be installed or rely on wheelie bins that are set out for collection. Landlords with fewer than 10 units are already required to put out their trash in the smaller containers.

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NJ gives final approal needed for gas pipeline under Raritan Bay

By Benjamin J. Hulac, Julie Daurio | NJ Spotlight

WASHINGTON — A fossil energy company now has all the government approval it needs to expand a pipeline across New Jersey, through Raritan Bay, and into New York City after the Murphy administration late last week issued an essential permit.

Approving the project is a parting act by Gov. Phil Murphy, a term-limited Democrat, who, after President Donald Trump last year won a second term, said he would “not back down” on climate, no matter the administration.

New Jersey signed off on the project, called the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project, hours after New York authorities issued their permit — the final two steps needed for work to commence.

Environmental groups are challenging the project in federal and state courts.

Northeast pipeline project allowed to disrupt marine wildlife

In an interview Friday with NJ Spotlight News, Shawn LaTourette, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, said his agency approved the project because the U.S. government has exclusive jurisdiction over pipelines that cross state lines.

The state, he said, has the power to approve or deny permits on a project’s impact to air or water. “We’re not approving a pipeline,” LaTourette said. “We’re only evaluating its adverse environmental impacts and ensuring they are avoided or mitigated for.”

New Jersey environmental regulators twice denied environmental permits for the project, including in 2019, when the state blocked the project, saying dredging in the bay would stir up sediment contaminated with mercury, arsenic and PCBs — cancer-causing human-made compounds — impairing water quality. LaTourette says the most recent proposal addresses those concerns.

Approvals from both states follow sign-offs from a pair of federal bodies — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent body that regulates pipelines, which issued their own permits for the project.

The firm behind the project, the Oklahoma-based Williams Company, plans to build a 23.3-mile pipeline underneath Raritan Bay to bring gas from Pennsylvania, east through New Jersey and to Queens.

Specifically, the pipeline would link Sayreville to the Rockaway peninsula in Queens. Williams proposed drilling 163 piles into the bay floor with mechanical hammers and pistons to “liquefy” the earth below and mount the pipeline, which will be 26-inches in diameter.

The project also includes 3.6 miles of new pipeline to run through Middlesex County and about 10 miles of new pipeline in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

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