Tonight in Your Rights: Trump's Constitution Day defeats

A pressure campaign to prosecute Letitia James is exposed, and another court rejects a GOP political operative as Delaware's top prosecutor.

Bill Pulte, Trump’s U.S. Federal Housing director, speaks to the press at The White House on Thursday, July 24, 2025. (Photo by Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

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Exactly 238 years ago, delegates gathered to sign the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia. Today, the U.S. judiciary provided multiple reminders of the Constitution’s limits on Donald Trump’s power to use the Justice Department as a weapon against his targets.

This morning, ABC News published a bombshell investigation exposing that Trump administration officials pressured federal prosecutors to charge New York Attorney General Letitia James with mortgage fraud, despite their investigation failing to produce sufficient evidence of a crime.

Trump campaigned on themes of retribution, and his vendetta against James has been long established after she successfully pursued a civil fraud case against him at the trial court level. A New York appeals court waived Trump’s half-billion dollar penalty in the case, but it affirmed the findings of liability.

According to ABC News, two of Trump’s loyalists, Federal Housing director Bill Pulte and so-called “special attorney” Ed Martin, have been pushing a reluctant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, to indict James. Pulte encouraged Trump to fire and replace Siebert with a prosecutor willing to bring charges.

The billionaire heir of a homebuilding fortune, Pulte appears to style himself as a mortgage fraud sheriff, a job that mainly consists of accusing Trump’s favorite targets of fraudulently claiming to have two primary homes. Those allegations, rarely prosecuted to begin with, keep collapsing under scrutiny: Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook disclosed that one of the two properties was a vacation home, and a Michigan property tax authority cleared her of wrongdoing, according to Reuters.

Investigative reporting also showed that three of Trump’s cabinet members and two of Pulte’s close relatives had similar primary-residence discrepancies in their paperwork.

Martin, a supporter of the Jan. 6th rioters who previously praised a Nazi sympathizer, notoriously stood outside James’ New York home in a trench coat on a hot summer day. Sources gave ABC News an insider perspective of Martin’s pressure campaign inside the Justice Department.

While Martin's investigation of James' Virginia properties has failed to yield clear evidence of fraud, sources said, he has taken aggressive steps to publicize the allegations and leapfrogged multiple steps usually taken by prosecutors. Last month, he sent James' attorney a letter asking that she resign from her role as the New York attorney general, arguing it would "serve the 'good of the state and nation'" for her to leave office.

Read the article in full here.

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The willingness of the Eastern District of Virginia’s top prosecutor to resist political pressure to bring an unsupported indictment points to a broader trend inside Trump’s second-term Justice Department.

It shows a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney holding the line against a partisan political operative rejected by Congress. Here, Siebert — who had bipartisan approval — reportedly resisted pressure from Martin, who lost his job for failure to win support on Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday, a fifth Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney failed to receive support for Senate confirmation or to persuade the judges in her district to extend her term.

This pattern means that those five top federal prosecutors across the United States might be serving illegitimately: in the District of New Jersey (Alina Habba), Northern District of New York (John Sarcone), District of Nevada (Sigal Chattah), Central District of California (Bill Essayli) and now, the District of Delaware (Julianne Murray).

A federal judge already found that Habba, who was once sanctioned as Trump’s personal attorney, has been serving unlawfully.

The other four are longtime Republican and MAGA operatives known for their right-wing politics. Sarcone previously worked for Trump’s campaign and accused Joe Biden of treason. Chattah was a failed GOP candidate for Nevada attorney general, whose campaign imploded over her racist or incendiary remarks, including about a former political rival. Essayli was a former California assemblymember who supported anti-transgender legislation, and Murray is a former state GOP chair described by Trump as “MAGA all the way.”

When the District of Delaware declined to extend Murray’s term today, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche lectured the chief judge to “revisit our Constitution, particularly Articles II and III.”

“The responsibilities laid out there make clear that appointments of United States Attorneys are first and foremost the duty of the President, not the courts,” Blanche wrote on social media.

Blanche skipped over two other portions of the Constitution: the Appointments Clause, which requires Senate confirmation of principal officers; and Article I, which assigns Congress the power to make laws such as the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. That is the law a federal judge found prohibited Habba from remaining in her position.

The Trump administration’s insistence on keeping these five figures in these roles has wrought chaos over criminal dockets across the country. Judges have postponed jury trials, sentencings, and guilty pleas over concerns about the legitimacy of the U.S. Attorneys, and that shroud has sparked defense motions in the underlying cases.

Meanwhile, Trump appealed the ruling disqualifying Habba to the Third Circuit, and Blanche remains defiant in his support of the unconfirmed, partisan U.S. Attorneys, no matter how many times the co-equal branches of the federal government reject them.