It was a rare instance of potential consequences for Trump administration officials back in April, when U.S. District Judge James Boasberg raised the prospect of criminal contempt over Alien Enemies Act flights to El Salvador in March. But two Trump-appointed appellate judges just vacated his probable cause order, granting the administration extraordinary relief over dissent from an Obama appointee.
Each of the three judges on the appellate panel in Washington, D.C., wrote their own opinions, contained in a document published Friday spanning over 100 pages. The upshot is that accountability is not likely to come for anyone in the administration who violated Boasberg’s order.
“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote in April, finding probable cause that government defendants had violated his order.
That sentiment was echoed by the dissent on Friday, with Judge Cornelia Pillard backing her fellow Obama appointee in writing that the panel majority “does an exemplary judge a grave disservice by overstepping its bounds to upend his effort to vindicate the judicial authority that is our shared trust.”
Yet it was Boasberg who overstepped, according to the Trump-appointed judges in the majority, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao. While noting that the trial judge “was placed in an enormously difficult position” in dealing with fast-paced litigation, Katsas wrote that the government’s conduct “clearly and indisputably was not criminal.” Rao wrote that Boasberg “used the threat of criminal contempt to coerce the Executive Branch to comply with an order it had no authority to enforce.”
Pillard closed her dissent by citing legal principles regarding obeying court orders and the fair administration of justice. “The rule of law means those principles apply to officials in the executive branch just as they apply to all of us,” she wrote. But practically speaking, Friday’s ruling is the latest evidence that that might not be so.
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