Appeals court tosses DOJ’s misconduct claim against judge who ruled against Trump

A high-ranking federal appeals judge has dismissed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) misconduct claim against James Boasberg, the chief district judge in Washington, D.C., who warned last year that Trump officials had disregarded his court orders.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the complaint last summer, claiming that Boasberg “undermined the integrity of the judiciary” and violated the judicial code of conduct by raising concerns to Chief Justice John Roberts about the Trump administration possibly ignoring future court orders.

The DOJ’s allegations against Boasberg marked a serious  escalation of President Donald Trump’s assault on the judiciary. 

The department, which rarely files formal complaints against judges, filed against Boasberg after he ruled against the Trump administration’s high-profile attempt to use a wartime law to summarily remove hundreds of people from the U.S. and fly them to a notorious prison in El Salvador. 

The complaint also took aim at Boasberg for signaling that he would open a contempt probe into DOJ officials who showed “a willful disregard” toward his orders halting flights to El Salvador.

But that complaint has held up in court even worse than many expected.

Saturday, Jeffrey Sutton, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, found in a seven-page memo that Chad Mizelle, Bondi’s former chief of staff who filed the complaint, failed to substantiate the DOJ’s allegations against Boasberg.

The DOJ’s complaint was based on a leaked memo obtained and published by a right-leaning media outlet about a March 11 meeting of the judiciary’s policymaking body, the Judicial Conference. 

According to the memo, during a private breakfast with Roberts and several other district judges, Boasberg had said there was concern among his colleagues that the Trump administration could ignite a constitutional crisis by ignoring court rulings.

The DOJ called Boasberg’s comments “inappropriate” and “prejudicial” and claimed that he was attempting to “improperly influence” Roberts and other federal judges.

But Sutton found that the complaint fundamentally lacked any substance because the DOJ refused to submit a formal copy of the memo, which was meant to be confidential.

“A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source does not corroborate them,” Sutton wrote. “And a repetition of uncorroborated statements rarely supplies a basis for a valid misconduct complaint.”

Even if the DOJ had attached the memo,  Boasberg’s comment during the Judiciary Conference could not have amounted to misconduct, Sutton concluded. He  noted that Boasberg was required by law to attend the conference, and as a chief judge, he was relaying his colleagues’ concerns to Roberts, the head of the U.S. federal court system.

“In these settings, 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.”

Sutton also said Boasberg’s comments could not have been “prejudicial” to the lawsuit over the Trump administration’s removals to El Salvador because he spoke with Roberts days before the flights were carried out in violation of his orders.

Before dismissing the DOJ’s complaint, Sutton in December dismissed two other formal complaints filed against Boasberg by conservative-alligned private organizations.

Boasberg was appointed to the D.C. District Court by former President Barack Obama, but was also appointed to D.C. Superior Court by former President George W. Bush. Since Trump returned to office, he has become the leading target of a judicial impeachment effort by the president and his allies in Congress. The effort has solely focused on judges who have ruled against Trump.

Boasberg’s contempt probe against Trump officials over the removals to El Salvador has largely been halted by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.