L.A.'s Top Federal Prosecutor Isn't Senate-Confirmed. Public Defenders Want Him Out.

Bill Essayli has led the Los Angeles U.S. attorney's office as first assistant since a judge found his acting appointment unlawful.

Two deputy federal public defenders asked a judge on September 5, 2026, to bar Bill Essayli, Southern California's top federal prosecutor, from their client's case. The Los Angeles Times first reported the motion, which argues the Justice Department has kept Essayli atop the office without ever sending him through Senate confirmation. A hearing before Senior U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright is set for October 13, 2026, the newspaper reported.

The client is Jaime Ramirez. His lawyers, James Anglin Flynn and Ayah A. Sarsour, wrote that Essayli's exercise of prosecutorial power has violated Ramirez's constitutional rights for more than a year. Defense lawyers in several criminal cases have made a version of that argument, the Times reported, contending that charges brought under Essayli's supervision are invalid and should be thrown out.

The public defender's office accused the government of “playing shadow games with the most consequential powers a government can wield against its population.”

The filing leans on an August ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Jackson. That court held that the Justice Department can't leave someone the Senate never confirmed in charge of a U.S. attorney's office by relabeling the job and handing over its full powers. The case came out of Nevada, where the department designated Sigal Chattah, the state's top federal prosecutor, as “first assistant” with nobody above her.

Essayli, 40, holds the same title in the Central District of California. He was sworn in as interim U.S. attorney in April 2025, and when he reached that role's 120-day ceiling he stepped out of it and was permitted by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to keep running the office as first assistant. He was also made a special attorney, a designation Chattah shares.

Seabright has already disqualified him once, from the acting U.S. attorney role, finding he wasn't lawfully serving in it. The same order said the court had no basis to stop him from doing the lawful work of a first assistant, which is the opening he's been operating in since.

The Justice Department didn't appeal that ruling.

Prosecutors say the theory holds. In a filing last month, Assistant U.S. Atty. Alexander P. Robbins argued that being the highest-ranking department lawyer in the office and supervising other lawyers doesn't make Essayli a de facto U.S. attorney, and that he doesn't claim to exercise all of that office's functions. The Times reported that the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles didn't immediately answer its request for comment, and that the Justice Department, which disagrees with the 9th Circuit and plans to take Jackson to the Supreme Court, didn't respond to questions about what the ruling means for Essayli.

At an August 28, 2026 hearing held over Zoom, Seabright signaled he wants more from the government than it has filed so far. “I think there's going to have to be more in-depth briefing than the government has given me to date,” he said, according to the Times.

The defenders say the problem isn't local. Their review, set out in the motion, counts at least 16 federal districts where, by their reading, someone has been serving unlawfully. In each one, they say, the person is running the office either as an acting U.S. attorney or as a de facto one.

Essayli is a former Republican member of the California state Assembly from Riverside. The Times reported that he has brought charges against demonstrators, activists and immigrants. He has also dropped prosecutions of people allied with the administration, the newspaper reported, and has thrown the office behind lawsuits challenging California policy on transgender issues and the environment.

The renewed push started a week before the public defenders joined it, when defense attorney H. Dean Steward asked Seabright to revisit his earlier ruling. The judge takes both up on October 13, 2026.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 5, 2026.