WASHINGTON — Acting New Jersey US Attorney Alina Habba is on a potential collision course with a federal judge over President Trump’s recent order to pause cases against businessmen who allegedly engaged in bribery in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
Newark US District Judge Michael Farbiarz refused a request by Habba’s short-tenured predecessor John Giordano for a six-month delay in a case involving alleged bribery in India — and instead ordered prosecutors to choose between an April 7 trial date and a motion to dismiss.
Farbiarz, a nominee of former President Joe Biden, refused to grant a further trial delay to Giordano by citing an assurance from Biden holdover Vikas Khanna — made 11 days after Trump’s Feb. 10 order — that “the Government intends to proceed to trial” in spite of Trump’s 180-day pause.
Khanna is the brother of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) but remained acting US attorney for more than a month into Trump’s term, until March 2.
It’s unclear how Habba, who has served as a defense attorney and White House adviser to Trump, will handle the case.
Trump and his allies have clashed with other jurists seen as throwing a wrench into his agenda, including DC District Judge James Boasberg, whom Trump has urged be impeached for halting deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.
“The courts want to pretend they’re president, and they’re not president,” Trump vented Wednesday at a White House Women’s History Month event attended by Habba.
“The big question here is: Will Alina Habba honor President Trump’s executive order that reigns in over-expansive and unpredictable FCPA enforcement, or allow the continued weaponization against American executives as it was under Joe Biden’s DOJ?” said a longtime Republican operative familiar with the case.
In a March 11 ruling, Farbiarz effectively laid out only the two options between going to trial and moving to drop the pending case.
“Pursuant to the President’s Executive Order, directed to the Attorney General, the United States reviewed this case and made a ‘final determination’ that it should go forward,” the judge wrote, referring to Khanna’s filing.
“That took 10 or 11 days. The new United States Attorney [Giordano] has sought 180-day exclusion of time under the Speedy Trial Act to conduct a ‘supplemental analysis.’ An exclusion of that length is not warranted … because the supplemental analysis can be undertaken in about the same amount of time the [prior] review took.”
It’s unclear whether Habba will repeat demands for a 180-day delay — and a motion to drop the case altogether could be refused by the judge and subjected to further analysis, as occurred in the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, which the Justice Department moved to dismiss last month.
$3.6 Million in Bribes for Tech Office
The original case was brought in 2019 against two executives at Teaneck, NJ-based technology outsourcing company Cognizant who allegedly authorized $3.6 million in bribes to an Indian official to facilitate construction of a large office complex in Chennai.
Cognizant’s then-president Gordon Coburn and then-chief legal officer Steven Schwartz face criminal charges.
The alleged misconduct occurred while Trump nemesis Andrew Weissmann headed up the DOJ’s fraud division during the Obama administration. Weissmann’s involvement in the case is speculated but unclear.
Cognizant agreed in 2019 to pay $25 million to settle a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint that described alleged bribery of a Tamil Nadu state official, beginning with an initial $2 million payment in 2014.
The case is one of just a handful of FCPA prosecutions that are pending — with other cases looming in Pittsburgh and Miami.
Trump has sympathized publicly with the businessmen and bashed the law as a deterrent to international deal-making.
“It sounds so good, but it’s so bad. It hurts the country, and many, many deals are unable to be made because of it,” Trump said last month as he signed the order freezing FCPA enforcement.
“Nobody wants to do business because they don’t want to feel like every time they pick up a phone, they’re going to jail. So, we’ll sign this, and it takes courage to sign it because you only get bad publicity when you sign it. It sounds so nice.”
“The title is so lovely,” Trump said. “But it’s an absolute horror show for America. So, we’re signing it because that’s what we have to do to make it good. It’s an important one. It’s going to mean a lot more business for America.”
The order says that Attorney General Pam Bondi should review FCPA prosecutions for at least 180 days.
During that period DOJ must “cease initiation of any new FCPA investigations or enforcement actions” and “review in detail all existing FCPA investigations or enforcement actions and take appropriate action with respect to such matters to restore proper bounds on FCPA enforcement and preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”
The order says Bondi “may extend such review period for an additional 180 days as the Attorney General determines appropriate.”
Habba suggested Monday, moments after her appointment, that she intended to shake up her new office’s operations, saying she would be “making sure that we further the president’s agenda of putting America first, cleaning up the mess and going after the people that we should be going after, not the people that are falsely accused.”
The New Jersey US attorney’s office declined to comment.
