On October 1 U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian ruled that the President had unlawfully fired Roger Rogoff, a former judge and veteran prosecutor whom the 17 active and senior judges of the Western District of Washington unanimously named U.S. attorney in July after the post went unfilled by a Senate-confirmed nominee, and reinstated him. Rogoff …
The Justice Department has filed a judicial misconduct complaint with the Eighth Circuit against all but one of Minnesota’s federal district judges, after most of them spoke to the New York Times about Operation Metro Surge, last winter’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. The complaint names Judges Patrick Schiltz and John Tunheim, says they …
On September 25 eight amicus briefs were filed in support of a lawsuit by Human Rights Watch and three other organizations against the executive order authorizing sanctions on International Criminal Court officials and those who assist the court. The International Criminal Court Bar Association argued that the sanctions threaten the independence of ICC lawyers, and …
Sheri Mecklenburg, the lead grand jury prosecutor in the federal case against six protesters arrested outside the Broadview ICE facility near Chicago, has retired from the Justice Department under protest. The case collapsed when the felony charges were dropped and the remaining misdemeanors were dismissed with prejudice amid allegations of grand jury misconduct, which U.S. …
Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter filed notice on September 11 that the Justice Department will appeal to the Eleventh Circuit from Judge Kathleen Williams’s July order dismissing the President’s and his two eldest sons’ ten-billion-dollar suit against the IRS and Treasury. Williams found the case non-adversarial, collusive and jurisdictionally improper because the plaintiff …
Judge Patrick J. Schiltz and six other members of Minnesota’s federal bench gave on-the-record interviews about the winter 2026 immigration crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge. Schiltz, a former Scalia clerk who was chief judge during the operation, said the federal government’s conduct created a grave threat to the rule of law. His district received …
At a September 16 hearing on six district-court nominations, Senator Dick Durbin argued that the Justice Department has lost the presumption of regularity. That presumption is a longstanding judicial doctrine under which courts ordinarily presume that public officers have properly discharged their official duties absent sufficient evidence to the contrary; Durbin used it here to …
Attorney General Todd Blanche spoke on September 16 at an event for Republican Senate nominee Michael Whatley in North Carolina, a week after addressing the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, and held a White House press briefing on September 15. At the Whatley event he called the President the greatest of his generation and ranged …
Votebeat’s August 24 report details the mechanics of the Supreme Court’s order lifting a stay on Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mail ballot handling for the 2026 midterms. Although a second injunction kept the order from taking immediate effect, the ruling narrowed the judicial constraints on the directive and left …
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly accused the Supreme Court’s conservative majority of injecting “chaos and uncertainty” into the 2026 midterm elections after the Court, on its emergency docket, lifted one of two injunctions blocking President Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting. Jackson’s central objection was procedural as much as substantive: the Court allowed the administration …