Ninth Circuit Rules Trump Administration Illegally Kept Sigal Chattah as Nevada's Top Prosecutor

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that Sigal Chattah has no legal authority to serve as Nevada's top federal prosecutor, upholding a district court decision that found the Trump administration tried to sidestep Senate confirmation through a title swap.

A three-judge panel, writing through Circuit Judge Eric Miller, a Trump appointee, said the Justice Department cannot make someone an acting U.S. attorney by naming them "first assistant" to an office that's already vacant. The panel included Miller, U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr., also a Trump appointee, and Circuit Judge Sidney Thomas, appointed by Bill Clinton. The ruling was unanimous.

"Nor can the Attorney General create a de facto Acting U.S. Attorney by delegating all of the functions and duties of the U.S. Attorney to someone else," Miller wrote.

Here's how the maneuver worked. Chattah, a former Nevada Republican National Committee member, was appointed interim U.S. attorney effective April 1, 2025, capped at a 120-day term under federal law. As that clock ran out in late July 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi resigned Chattah from the interim post and immediately redesignated her as "first assistant" U.S. attorney, the No. 2 job. Bondi's office argued that title let Chattah automatically become acting U.S. attorney under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act once the top job was vacant. Bondi also stacked on a "special attorney" designation for good measure, according to the Nevada Independent and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The court didn't buy it. Under the Vacancies Reform Act, a first assistant can only slide into an acting role automatically if they already held that first-assistant job at the moment the vacancy occurred. Chattah didn't. Nevada's previous U.S. attorney, Jason Frierson, stepped down three days before Trump's inauguration, well before Chattah ever held any title in the office, the Review-Journal reported.

Federal public defenders in Nevada challenged Chattah's authority across multiple unrelated criminal cases, arguing the appointment was unlawful and the indictments tainted. U.S. District Judge David Campbell agreed with them in September 2025, disqualifying Chattah from three specific cases while leaving the underlying indictments intact. The Justice Department appealed, and lost again Monday.

DOJ isn't backing down rhetorically. "We disagree with the 9th Circuit's decision, and we plan to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court," a department spokesperson told the Review-Journal. But that promise deserves some skepticism. The administration has lost nearly identical fights in New Jersey, California, Virginia, New York and New Mexico over the same appointment tactic, according to Ground News, and hasn't taken any of those cases to the Supreme Court either. In New Jersey, an appeals court ruled in December that Alina Habba, Trump's former personal lawyer, was also unlawfully serving as acting U.S. attorney, per Tippah News.

Nevada's two Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, wasted no time declaring victory. "Sigal Chattah has always been unfit to serve as Nevada's U.S. Attorney, and I'm glad to see the Ninth Circuit agree her appointment is illegal," Rosen posted on X, adding it's "past time for her to vacate the position." Cortez Masto called the ruling a reaffirmation that Chattah is "holding her position illegally" and said "she needs to go, now."

The administration's actual argument is not frivolous. The Vacancies Reform Act exists precisely to let agencies keep functioning when Senate confirmation stalls, and Rosen and Cortez Masto's opposition would have blocked Chattah's nomination outright, according to the Review-Journal. The White House's position is that Congress gave the executive branch legitimate tools to bridge vacancies, and using a first-assistant designation isn't inherently a trick. It's a mechanism written into the same statute the courts are now citing against them. The problem the Ninth Circuit identified isn't that the tool is illegitimate, but that DOJ applied it to someone who never actually held the first-assistant job before the vacancy existed. That's a technical, sequencing-based objection, not an argument that Chattah is personally corrupt or unqualified.

Democracy Docket and the Nevada Independent both note that Chattah, in her time running the office, sought FBI investigations into unproven 2020 election noncitizen-voting claims and opened probes touching political adversaries. These are allegations, not proven misconduct, and not the basis of the court's ruling, which turned entirely on appointment mechanics.

Practically, Chattah likely keeps working in the office as first assistant, just without the full authority of acting U.S. attorney, according to Democracy Docket. She remains disqualified from the three cases at issue, and that disqualification could ripple into other prosecutions she's touched. Trump nominated Las Vegas attorney George Kelesis for the permanent Nevada U.S. attorney post in February 2026. Rosen's office says her review of that nomination is ongoing, according to Just the News. Whether the Supreme Court ever takes up the underlying vacancy-law question, given the administration's pattern of losing and not appealing, remains an open question.