New Jersey Judge Nukes DOJ
Bondi's "triumvirate" gambit jeopardizes every criminal case in NJ
On Monday, a federal judge in New Jersey threw a DOJ lawyer out of his courtroom after threatening to have the bailiffs remove him.
“You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to just blindside the court and do whatever it is you guys want to do,” Judge Zahid Quraishi warned, before instructing the court security officers to remove Assistant US Attorney Mark Coyne.
Instead, Coyne left on his own, abandoning his hapless junior colleague Daniel Rosenblum to his fate. The hearing ended with the judge vowing to bring in Coyne’s bosses, and their bosses, and maybe even Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to explain what the hell is going on at the US Attorneys Office in New Jersey.
Come correct
Judge Zahid Quraishi is no joke. Before being nominated to the bench by President Biden, he was a civil litigator, a federal prosecutor, a US magistrate, assistant chief counsel for ICE, and a JAG lawyer, where he earned the Bronze Star and Combat Action Badge. If you come before him, you better come correct.
But the Justice Department has not been coming correct. Thanks to the Department of Homeland Security’s insistence on misinterpreting the law, the DOJ has been forced to defend thousands of habeas cases based on the same faulty legal reasoning, no matter how many judges reject it. And since ICE routinely disregards court orders, Assistant US Attorneys are stuck explaining to increasingly pissed off judges why detainees weren’t released, or were released far from home, without their possessions.
“The undersigned will not stand idly by and allow this intentional misconduct to go on. It ends today,” Judge Quraishi wrote in February, vowing to haul in both ICE and the leaders of the US Attorneys Office if another of these crackpot mandatory detention cases landed on his docket.
