Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. We started the week with more questions about the Trump administration’s compliance with court orders. The government’s answers haven’t impressed Washington, D.C.’s chief federal trial judge, James Boasberg. When President Donald Trump called for impeaching the judge, Chief Justice John Roberts made a rare public statement, reiterating that the proper response to an adverse ruling is an appeal, not an impeachment.
“Woefully insufficient” is what Boasberg called the Justice Department’s latest explanation on Thursday. He had ordered the government to halt deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that Trump invoked to summarily remove alleged Venezuelan gang members. But while the administration appeals Boasberg’s temporary restraining orders, the judge is examining whether officials deliberately flouted his orders. At a hearing Friday, he said he’ll get to the bottom of whether they were violated and what the consequences will be.
The judge gave the government until Tuesday to file a brief explaining how it didn’t violate his orders by failing to return people removed from the U.S. on planes last weekend. We’ll be following the latest compliance saga into next week while litigation moves forward on the DOJ’s bid to overturn the judge’s restraining orders, with a federal appeals court hearing set for Monday.
Calls to impeach judges like Boasberg who rule against Trump aren’t a new phenomenon in his second term. But they have escalated with the president’s backing and support from the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, who helped return Trump to the White House. And while threats to judges rise, Musk is financially backing Republicans who support judicial impeachments.
Musk’s effective merger with the government is at least one of the biggest stories of Trump 2.0. While he supports the MAGA movement, the Trump-led government supports him. Recent examples include the president touting Musk’s Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging people to buy Tesla stock and Attorney General Pam Bondi prioritizing prosecutions of people who allegedly harm Tesla property.
Meanwhile, Trump’s vengeance against disfavored law firms featured a capitulation this week. After a judge blocked the president’s order targeting the Perkins Coie firm last week, it looked like Trump’s similar order against another big firm, Paul Weiss, would meet the same fate in court. The president had targeted the latter firm for its association with Mark Pomerantz, who investigated Trump in what became his only criminal case that went to trial before the election, ending in guilty verdicts on 34 counts of falsifying business records. (The president is appealing.)
But rather than challenge the order in court, where the odds of success would have been high given Perkins Coie’s success, Paul Weiss made a deal. However little the White House gained on paper from the agreement, the mere fact of the settlement sets a precedent that the president’s overtly retaliatory actions are something to be managed rather than challenged.
At the Supreme Court, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch was the lone GOP appointee to dissent from the court’s 5-4 refusal to halt the execution of Jessie Hoffman on Tuesday. The Buddhist death row prisoner had argued that Louisiana’s nitrogen gas execution method would violate his religious rights because, he said, it would interfere with his meditative breathing as he died. Gorsuch said he would’ve blocked the execution to let Hoffman pursue his claim. It wasn’t Gorsuch’s only notable split from colleagues in a criminal case. On Friday, he dissented from Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority ruling about what technically counts as a violent crime. The Trump appointee was joined by Biden appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson, a pairing that might sound unusual at first glance but is far from unprecedented. Heading into the home stretch of the high court term, the March argument session starts Monday with a hearing over racial gerrymandering in Louisiana. The court’s regularly scheduled hearings wrap up in April, and the justices usually issue the final opinions by July. On top of those pending cases — with rulings still due on ghost guns, transgender rights and more — Trump’s executive actions could add further emergency litigation for the justices to decide. More on that subject in this week’s “Ask Jordan” feature. Have any questions or comments for me? I’d love to hear from you! Please email deadlinelegal@nbcuni.com for a chance to be featured in a future newsletter.
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.
Latest Post
Recommended
