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Sigal Chattah, the Israeli-born acting U.S. attorney in Nevada, who declined to prosecute an Israeli government official arrested last month for attempting to go on a date with an undercover agent posing as a 15-year-old girl, has drawn attention for her seemingly bottomless online footprint of unapologetically genocidal social media posts, text messages likening a political opponent to Hamas, and a campaign ad featuring a photo of Rep. Ilhan Omar engulfed by flames.
But a shallow dive into the long list of donors who contributed to her 2022 Nevada attorney general campaign gives a fuller picture of Chattah, and by extension the emerging Mafia bureaucracy comprising Trump’s Department of Justice.
Chattah is just one of five U.S. attorneys the Trump administration has repeatedly appointed on an “interim,” “acting,” and/or “assistant” basis in order to sidestep the Senate confirmation process, the best-known of whom is Marc Jacobs marketer turned parking garage general counsel turned Trump defamation lawyer Alina Habba, whom a Republican federal judge (and card-carrying Federalist Society member) just ruled had been illegally operating as New Jersey’s lead federal prosecutor since July 1. The other three—former assistant U.S. attorney Ryan Ellison of New Mexico, 39-year-old former state assemblyman Bilal Essayli of the Central District of California, and John Sarcone III, a 62-year-old Westchester, New York–based former General Services Administration employee who claimed to live in a boarded-up house in Albany whose mortgage is owned by a former client to nab the job of U.S. attorney for New York’s Northern District—are mostly obscure or inexperienced figures, likely chosen for their amenability to the Trump agenda.
Chattah, by contrast, is higher-profile: a prolific social media user whose personal X profile had 27,500 followers until she deleted it in the aftermath of the pedophile sting fallout. She was invited to the inauguration, ran for statewide office in a cycle that was initially expected to be a GOP blowout, and has been prominent in conservative Zionist circles for years in a town with no shortage of competition in that realm. As chairwoman of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network in 2019, Chattah even lobbied for federal legislation that would have recognized “Israeli Americans” as a protected class.
And while she came up 80,000 votes and eight points short of victory in the general election against incumbent Aaron Ford, after a Democratic operative who had been working as an undercover organizer of far-right activists in Nevada shared text messages in which the Israeli-born attorney opined that her (African American) opponent “should be hanging from a fucking crane,” Chattah raised more than a million dollars from a colorful collection of deep-pocketed donors, many of whose lengthy rap sheets might have scared off a more traditional candidate for the state’s top law enforcement post. |
