CNN
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A federal judge sharply rejected a Trump administration request that she recuse herself from a case challenging an executive order targeting Democratic-tied law firm Perkins Coie, accusing the Justice Department of attacking the messenger because it could not attack the message.
“When the U.S. Department of Justice engages in this rhetorical strategy of ad hominem attack, the stakes become much larger than only the reputation of the targeted federal judge,” District Judge Beryl Howell wrote on Wednesday.
“This strategy is designed to impugn the integrity of the federal judicial system and blame any loss on the decision-maker rather than fallacies in the substantive legal arguments presented,” she added.
In its disqualification request, the Justice Department had made a variety of accusations about Howell’s conduct in other cases, as well as comments she made at a recent hearing in the law firm case, that the administration claimed amounted to a bias against President Donald Trump.
Howell’s defense of the role of the judiciary comes as Trump and his allies have gone beyond just criticizing rulings against his policies by going after the judges themselves. They have called for the impeachment of multiple judges, including Howell’s colleague at the DC federal courthouse, Chief Judge James Boasberg, who is overseeing a high-stakes deportation case. Trump in a social media post earlier this month called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic, a troublemaker and agitator.” The rhetoric prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to issue an extraordinary rebuke of the impeachment calls.
Both Howell and Boasberg were appointed by President Barack Obama.
Howell’s new opinion responded to each of those allegations, but not before making a larger point about the department’s rationale for why she should step aside from the case.
While it’s not surprising that Howell rejected the request for her to step aside, as such motions rarely succeed, she notably used her opinion to weigh in on the larger attacks on the judiciary as it navigates dozens of legal challenges brought against Trump policies.
Howell pointed to the opening line in DOJ’s disqualification motion, in which the department expressed “the need to curtail ongoing improper encroachments of President Trump’s Executive Power playing out around the country.”
“This line, which sounds like a talking point from a member of Congress rather than a legal brief from the United States Department of Justice, has no citation to any legal authority for the simple reason that the notion expressed reflects a grave misapprehension of our constitutional order,” the judge wrote.
“Adjudicating whether an Executive Branch exercise of power is legal, or not, is actually the job of the federal courts, and not of the President or the Department of Justice,” Howell wrote, adding, “though vigorous and rigorous defense of executive actions is both expected and helpful to the courts in resolving legal issue.”
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Howell’s opinion rejecting the disqualification request took issue with the Justice Department’s “blanket denigration of the merits of all the lawsuits” filed against Trump’s agenda, while noting that courts have warned that motions for disqualification should not be taken lightly.
“This larger concern about the overall damage to the rule of law and the federal judicial system from the feckless impugning of the decision-making process of individual federal judges has prompted Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., to criticize ‘regrettabl[e] … attempts’ by “[p]ublic officials … to intimidate judges,’ including by ‘suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,’” she wrote.
