Trump faces major hurdle as lawyers throw away huge advantage with judges: analyst
President Donald Trump is quickly running into a problem in court, Politico reported on Tuesday — federal judges have lost patience and trust with the Justice Department attorneys defending his policies.
The long string of cases in which DOJ attorneys under Pam Bondi have either been caught lying to judges, or the Trump administration has simply misrepresented judges' own rulings or tried to ignore them outright, are starting to work against them, wrote Ankush Khardori.
And it's eliminating a key advantage most administrations get in federal court.
"Judges and juries alike tend to trust DOJ lawyers out of the gate — even ones they have never met before — by virtue of their positions and their obligation to uphold the Constitution and advance the public interest," said the report.
"Many federal judges were once Justice Department lawyers themselves. All day every day, in federal courthouses across the country, the Justice Department benefits from a general presumption of good faith when a DOJ lawyer walks into a courtroom because people assume that they are both honest and well-intentioned. That may be changing."
A number of judges in recent months have grown visibly frustrated and distrusting, the report continued, as they "have been unusually sharp — at times directly questioning the honesty of the government’s lawyers and the accuracy of their factual claims — and taken together, they suggest that the administration’s officials are squandering the department’s credibility just when they need it most."
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The case of Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who remains in an El Salvadoran prison despite multiple courts' demands the administration work for his return, is a clear example.
This even makes its way up to the Supreme Court itself, a body with a majority of six Republican appointees — and the problem stretches even further back to 2019, when the court struck down Trump's plan to use the Census to interrogate people about citizenship and claimed it was just an attempt to enforce anti-discrimination law.
“We are presented ... with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process,” wrote Roberts, effectively calling out the DOJ's dishonesty.
"We may get our first real sign next week of whether these credibility concerns have reached any of the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees — who are now entering a period in which they will have to directly and substantively engage with the Trump administration’s unprecedented effort to expand the powers of the presidency, and who now hold the fate of much of Trump’s second-term agenda in their hands," the report concluded.