Attorney General Pam Bondi’s misconduct complaint against District Judge James Boasberg is “preposterous” and a “dangerous escalation” against the rule of law, wrote former federal judge Nancy Gertner and Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck for The New York Times in a scathing analysis published Monday.
And by announcing the complaint on social media, she just violated the law, they wrote.
Boasberg, the chief judge of the D.C. district court, has overseen a litany of high-profile immigration lawsuits brought against the Donald Trump administration and has threatened contempt charges against officials.
The thrust of Bondi’s complaint against him aims at remarks during a session of the Judicial Conference, where Chief Justice John Roberts gathers judges from around the country, that the Trump administration could provoke a “constitutional crisis” by “[disregarding] rulings of federal courts” — which Bondi’s DOJ argues is an “unsolicited” attempt to “persuade the chief justice and other federal judges of his preconceived belief that the Trump administration would violate court orders.”
This complaint doesn’t have any leg to stand on, Gertner and Vladeck wrote: “Even if the claims against Judge Boasberg had merit — they don’t — the attorney general’s announcement on social media is a violation of the law, which requires confidentiality. The entire exercise is an insult to the federal judiciary and cannot stand.”
To begin with, they noted, Boasberg did not make these complaints in public. “As The Federalist, a pro-Trump website, reported, the meeting was at a private ‘working breakfast.’ From our years of experience — one of us as a federal judge and the other as a constitutional scholar — we know that typically, Chief Justice Roberts invites judges to breakfast on each of the days that the Judicial Conference meets. There is no set agenda; there are no ‘traditional topics.’”
Second of all, they wrote, “In these meetings, Chief Justice Roberts often asks a general question of the judges about what they see going on in their courts” — and Boasberg was simply relaying concerns a number of his colleagues had. So “calling Judge Boasberg’s comments ‘unsolicited’ makes no sense.”
“The notion that it is somehow improper for judges on lower federal courts to raise a general concern about the prospect of their orders being ignored simply beggars belief,” they wrote — particularly since a recent analysis by The Washington Post revealed the Trump administration has been accused in “a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling” of defying or threatening to defy courts in some way.
“The real issue here is why Ms. Bondi decided to make such a spectacle out of an obviously frivolous complaint against a highly respected Federal District Court judge,” they wrote, concluding it’s a move to intimidate the federal bench and juice up Trump’s supporters. “Her Justice Department is attempting to undermine the integrity of the judiciary and the rule of law.”