'Breaking point': Distrustful conservative judges turn up the heat on Trump lawyers
President Donald Trump is increasingly seeing his agenda slapped down by conservative judges, even judges he himself appointed, reported Politico, because the repeated dishonesty of the lawyers working for his Justice Department has "upended" the longstanding principles that give the executive branch a presumption of goodwill in its legal defenses.
"Judges are routinely skeptical of the Justice Department’s representations in court," wrote Kyle Cheney, Ben Johansen, Sophia Cai, and Irie Sentner. "They’ve called out flagrant misrepresentations, scolded prosecutors for irregular decisions and warned that the historical presumption that the executive branch acts in good faith before the court, known as the 'presumption of regularity,' has been stretched to the breaking point."
In recent weeks, jurists have refused to take DOJ lawyers' explanations on faith, "even telling them outright that the executive branch has forfeited its claim to presumed honesty," the report continued.
"One Trump-appointed judge, Tim Kelly in Washington, said the administration’s justification for deporting hundreds of Guatemalan kids 'crumbled like a house of cards' after the Justice Department admitted it had falsely characterized the effort as an attempt to reunify families," said the report. "More recently, another Trump-appointed judge, Karin Immergut of Oregon, scolded the administration for seeking to circumvent her order blocking the deployment of National Guard troops in Oregon — by bringing in out-of-state troops to do the job she previously said was illegal."
Yet another recent example is Judge William Smith of Rhode Island, a George W. Bush appointee who ruled that Trump cannot order states and cities to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a precondition of receiving FEMA disaster aid. Trump officials then continued making this demand, simply adding a qualifier that they should do it just in case Smith's order was overturned, which enraged the judge.
“Defendants’ new condition is not a good faith effort to comply with the order,” wrote Smith in a new statement from the bench. “It is a ham-handed attempt to bully the states into making promises they have no obligation to make.”
This new wave of judicial mistrust, the report noted, is likely to be a further obstacle to the DOJ's Trump-ordered indictments of FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, which have been widely blasted by legal experts as politically tainted.