When the Trump Justice Department moved to disqualify U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell from the Perkins Coie law firm case last week, I noted that there’s a high bar for such motions and that Howell would likely reject the attempt. She did so Wednesday, in a scathing ruling that said the government’s argument was “rife with innuendo” but that “none of the claims put forward come close to meeting the standard for disqualification.”
The DOJ filed the disqualification motion after Howell issued a temporary restraining order against one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting firms he doesn’t like. Litigation is set to continue on the Perkins Coie matter in Howell’s court in Washington, D.C., but after losing on the restraining order, the government wants a new judge. The disqualification motion argued that the Obama appointee “has repeatedly demonstrated partiality against and animus towards the President” in past cases as well as this one.
But Howell observed, citing Supreme Court precedent on recusals, that “mere disagreements with the prior legal rulings of this Court do not ‘constitute a valid basis’ for disqualification.”
The recusal bid took place against the backdrop of Trump’s early executive actions in his second term meeting resistance in courts. The executive’s reaction to that judicial resistance has been to not only stake out increasingly aggressive legal positions but for the president and his supporters to call for judicial impeachments.
The recusal bid took place against the backdrop of Trump’s early executive actions in his second term meeting resistance in courts. To be sure, trying to disqualify a judge in court is a legally permissible endeavor. But in calling a high-profile judge’s fairness toward the president into question based on rulings in politically potent cases, it inevitably straddles the political sphere. Indeed, responding to a line from the DOJ’s motion that stressed “the need to curtail ongoing improper encroachments of President Trump’s Executive Power playing out around the country,” Howell wrote that it “sounds like a talking point from a member of Congress rather than a legal brief from the United States Department of Justice.” True enough. But the DOJ probably didn’t write that line to win Howell over. That doesn’t mean the motion was solely a “political” writing even if it was never going to succeed — at least not at the trial level. In fact, the administration has pressed several appeals to the Supreme Court in which it has adopted a similar framing of stubborn trial judges unduly impeding the Trump agenda. On the judicial front, then, the justices might be the DOJ’s ultimate audience — though, so far, even that audience hasn’t been too receptive to the administration’s efforts. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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