By MIKE CATALINI TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — President Donald Trump on Monday named his one-time defense attorney and current White House counselor Alina Habba to be the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. Habba, who turns 41 Tuesday, takes over the interim post from John Giordano, whom the president s aid he’s naming to be the U.S. ambassador for the southwestern African country of Namibia. A partner in a small New Jersey law firm near Trump’s Bedminster golf course, Habba served as a senior adviser for Trump’s political action committee, defended him in court in several civil lawsuits and acted as a spokesperson last year as he volleyed between courtrooms and the campaign trail. She lists no prosecutorial experience in an online biography. Habba, a New Jersey native, graduated in 2005 from Lehigh University in Bethlehem with a bachelor’s degree, majoring in political science. She went on to earn a law degree from the Widener University Commonwealth Law School in Harrisburg in 2010. Habba frequently accompanied Trump on the campaign trail during the 2024 election, and spoke at his rally at PPL Center in Allentown a week before Election Day. She was introduced to Trump after joining his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in 2019, he told Bloomberg in 2022. Habba has Iraqi ancestry and is Chaldean, which is Iraq’s largest Christian denomination and one of the Catholic Church’s Eastern rites. Habba said she looked forwards to working with Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue the president’s agenda of “putting America first,” and going after the people “we should be going after.” She criticized Democrats Sen. Cory Booker and Gov. Phil Murphy for their stewardship of the state. “If you look at what happened in crime, what’s going on in Newark, what’s going on in Camden, this has been a neglected state. It is one of the most populated states for its size and it needs to stop. We’re gonna do a bang up job,” Habba said Monday. Spokespeople for Booker and Murphy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Camden officials said earlier this year that violent crime rates reached a 55-year low, crediting the county police department. Officials in Newark, the state’s largest city, said late last year that homicide rates had fallen but other crime levels had increased in 2024. Habba was one of Trump’s most visible defense attorneys, appearing on cable TV news as his “legal spokesperson.” She represented Trump in 2024 in the defamation case involving E. Jean Carroll. But Habba has had limited federal court experience, practicing mainly in state-level courts. During the Carroll trial, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan chided Habba for botching procedure, misstating the law asking about off-limits topics and objecting after he ruled. Habba and Trump were fined nearly $1 million in 2023 for filing what a Florida judge called a bogus lawsuit against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Giordano was sworn in as New Jersey’s interim U.S. attorney earlier this month. He previously served as a counselor to the assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division. Giordano also served as a federal prosecutor in Virginia. ___ Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Will Weissert in Washington and Michael R. Sisak in New York contributed to this report. ...read more read less