DOJ Attacks Judge, Claims Judicial Immunity For Itself
Stunt, man
This weekend Chad Mizelle, the (former?) chief of staff at the Justice Department, invited anyone with a bar card to hit him up on Twitter if they want to be a federal prosecutor. All you have to do is “support President Trump” and his “anti-crime agenda.”
The least weird thing about this is that Mizelle (theoretically?) left the DOJ last year to become general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security. Kristi Noem’s crackpot legal memos aren’t gonna write themselves!
Serving as a federal prosecutor was once a prestigious position, open only to high achievers with strong academic and professional records. Now the agency’s reputation is in shambles, it’s bleeding experienced lawyers, and they’re so desperate for bodies they’re begging randos to slide into their DMs. And it shows!
Putting the nation’s prosecutorial apparatus in the hands of a bunch of meme-brained hacks has produced some spectacularly bad lawyering in the past year. In one episode, the DOJ filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Chief Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court in DC over comments he made in March at a closed-door meeting of the Judicial Conference.
“Judge Boasberg attempted to improperly influence Chief Justice Roberts and roughly two dozen other federal judges by straying from the traditional topics to express his belief that the Trump Administration would ‘disregard rulings of federal courts’ and trigger ‘a constitutional crisis,’” huffed Mizelle, who hand-delivered the nastygram to Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan of the DC Circuit. The DOJ insisted that Judge Boasberg had violated his ethical obligation of impartiality and demanded that he be removed from all cases involving the Trump administration.
Of course, the administration has disregarded hundreds of rulings of federal courts since then — 96 in January alone, just in the District of Minnesota. But the only evidence offered by the DOJ of Boasberg intimidating poor, defenseless Chief Justice Roberts was a footnote referring to “Attachment A at 16,” which appears to be a summary of the comments recorded by an attendee.
The complaint slipped to reporters in July contained no such attachment, and for good reason. As Law and Chaos was first to report, “Attachment A” was never there at all, and the government ignored Judge Srinivasan’s request to hand it over.
In July, this website filed a FOIA request and then a lawsuit with the help of National Security Counselors’ Kel McClanahan. The DOJ’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) first insisted that it needed more time because our request for a single document was “complex.” Then they simply denied it, claiming that “Attachment A” is a judicial record, not an executive one, and thus not subject to FOIA.
In the meantime, the actual ethics complaint was working its way through the judicial system, alongside a similar one lodged by the Center to Advance Security in America, a rightwing astroturf group. The wingnut welfare dudebros based their complaint on a story at The Federalist by the OG agent of agitprop, Margot Cleveland, who first reported Judge Boasberg’s supposed perfidy — but at least they didn’t fake an attachment.
Judge Srinivasan promptly picked up the two flaming sacks of dogshit that had been dropped on his doorstep — metaphorically, of course! — and handed them off to Chief Justice Roberts. That’s how they wound up dumped on Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit, who dutifully held his nose and dumped cold water on the putrid flames.
“One does not lightly launch a misconduct investigation based on vague allegations premised on an anonymous source in a news article,” Judge Sutton scoffed at the conservative turf-surfers.
“Stripped of its conclusory accusations, this attack comes down to a critique of the judge’s rulings on the merits” he warned. “But complainants, to repeat, may not use the judicial-misconduct process to relitigate the results of hearings and investigations.”
Naturally the dudebros appealed, racing to the Daily Caller to collect their earned media winnings.
Judge Sutton also dismissed the DOJ’s complaint, confirming Law and Chaos’s reporting:
The Department identified one source of evidence, Attachment A, for the judge’s statement and for the setting in which it occurred. The complaint, however, did not include the attachment. The D.C. Circuit contacted the Department about the missing attachment and explained that, if it failed to submit the attachment, the circuit would consider the complaint as submitted. The Department did not supply the attachment.
He added that, even if the government’s characterization of Boasberg’s comments was accurate, “a judge’s expression of anxiety about executive-branch compliance with judicial orders, whether rightly feared or not, is not so far afield from customary topics at these meetings—judicial independence, judicial security, and inter-branch relations—as to violate the Codes of Judicial Conduct.”
And, not for nothing, but judicial councils “do not have authority to reassign specific cases to other judges.” If the DOJ wants Boasberg out, the appropriate remedy is to file a motion for recusal, not to tweet out a press release disguised as a misconduct complaint. (As they bloody well ought to know.)
Thus endeth the DOJ’s big takedown of Judge Boasberg. But that’s not the end of the matter, since we at Law and Chaos are still trying to kick loose “Attachment A.”
The DOJ’s motion to dismiss warns darkly that “If the Court accepts Plaintiff’s novel conclusion that Attachment A is an ‘agency record,’ then FOIA would be transformed from a tool to shed light on the activities, operations, and structure of federal executive branch agencies into a device to circumvent the independence of the judiciary and its ability to safeguard its confidential information.”
Vanessa Brinkmann, senior counsel at OIP, attests that the Administrative Office of United States Courts “conveyed to OIP, in no uncertain terms, the Federal Judiciary’s strenuous objection to the Department’s release of ‘Attachment A.’”
Gosh, you wouldn’t want those nasty podcasters pawing through your emails, would you, Judge Abelson?
But we’re not asking the judiciary for anything. We’re asking the Justice Department to turn over a document Attorney General Bondi herself trumpeted as proof of judicial misconduct. And her office is working overtime to hide where it got this supposedly smoking gun.
Brinkmann pinky swears that “Searches conducted of DOJ leadership office officials’ Departmental email accounts using e-discovery software revealed no electronic trail indicating transmission of ‘Attachment A’ into the Department, nor has OIP’s point of contact within OAG been able to identify how ‘Attachment A’ was received by the Department.”
Shocker! The Signalgate administration has no record of receiving this document and won’t say where it came from. It just spontaneously appeared on DOJ’s servers!
But Chad Mizelle certainly knows how it fell into his hands ... or his DMs. Someone in the judicial branch leaked this to the Trump administration, which weaponized it to attack a sitting federal judge. Understandably, the judiciary would like to mitigate the fallout by ensuring that those confidential minutes never see the light of day. But that’s not the law. Chad Mizelle and Pam Bondi and Margot Cleveland and God knows who else got to see those records, and so should everyone else.
Oh, and PS, Mizelle’s wife is a sitting federal judge in the Middle District of Florida.
Totally normal for the <cough> independent <cough> DOJ to advertise AUSA job openings targeted to individuals who are both anti-crime and steadfastly loyal to the occupant of the Oval Office, especially when that occupant has 34 felony fraud convictions. Happens all the time. Nothing to see here.
I would like to become an AUSA. I am not pro crime, but I hesitate to agree to support Donald Trump when it appears he is capable of supporting himself to the tune of 4 billion dollars he made off of being president!