I’m only about half-through reading this, and already know everyone else needs to see this, too. It’s important to keep up with the attacks on the judiciary. Only a decent-sized snippet here, but do go finish it. This is well written, and it informs. -A.

207. The Justice Department Beclowns Itself (Again)

The denouement of DOJ’s misconduct complaint against Chief Judge Boasberg provides useful lessons relating to both the Department’s continuing misbehavior and the emptiness of calls for impeachment.

Steve Vladeck Feb 02, 2026

There is, as ever, too much court- (and Court-)adjacent news to cover, including this morning’s New York Times double-feature on the Chief Justice’s move to have Court employees sign non-disclosure agreements and on the Times’s own expanding coverage of the Court. But I wanted to use today’s “Long Read” to come back to a post I wrote last July—shortly after the Department of Justice submitted (and then Attorney General Bondi tweeted about) an unprecedented judicial misconduct complaint against the chief judge of the D.C. federal district court, James E. Boasberg. As I wrote at the time, DOJ’s complaint was “almost laughably preposterous.” The gravamen of its charge was that Boasberg had violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges by relaying (at a private breakfast with the Chief Justice and a group of other district judges before a meeting of the Judicial Conference of the United States) that several of his colleagues were worried about the Trump administration potentially defying their rulings.

That complaint is back in the news because late last week, we finally learned about its outcome. After a bit of procedural shuffling that I’ll explain below, it was dismissed, quite cursorily, by Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton in a … brusque … seven-page memorandum and order. Not only did Sutton pour cold water on DOJ’s theor(ies) of Boasberg’s misconduct, but he also expressed understandable frustration with the fact that DOJ never produced the document that it claimed memorialized Boasberg’s alleged misconduct—even after it was specifically told that it needed to do so to substantiate its claims.

In other words, after filing an unprecedented complaint against a sitting federal judge, making a big public stink about it (which, by the way, was itself a violation of the law), and having its complaint invoked as one of the grounds for the proposed impeachment charges against Chief Judge Boasberg, DOJ … never followed through. It turns out, it was never about adjudicating Boasberg’s behavior; it was about making splashy headlines and fueling right-wing attacks on the judiciary without regard to whether DOJ’s specious charges would withstand meaningful scrutiny.

The obvious takeaway is that the Department of Justice has once again beclowned itself. I’d say it has shredded even more of its credibility, but when you’re publicly soliciting for new lawyers to apply via Twitter (with the primary qualification being that they “support President Trump”), there may not be any credibility left to shred. Instead, the more significant takeaway is that this really ought to be the final nail in the coffin of congressional Republicans’ breathless efforts to gin up impeachment charges against a judge whose only actual sin, as it turns out, was to decline to roll over when the government defied one of his orders, and then lied about it.

(snip-graphic of pleading filed; just click through to see it. Then there is info on other cases of which we may want to be at least aware, then back to this one; a bit more below. Use this link to skip the other cases and get back to this.)

The One First “Long Read”:
The Denouement of the Boasberg Misconduct Mess

My post from last July walked through the background and details of the Justice Department’s judicial misconduct complaint against Chief Judge Boasberg (and why it suffered from four independently fatal defects). I’d encourage folks to refer back to that post if you could use more context.

In a nutshell, DOJ’s chief accusation was that Boasberg had violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges by publicly suggesting that he had “pre-judged” the merits of specific cases involving the Trump administration (even though, in fact, Boasberg had only privately relayed concerns that his colleagues had raised about how the Trump administration might behave in unnamed future cases). Indeed, at the time Boasberg made the relevant comments, the lawsuit in which his interactions with the Trump administration have been most visible—the J.G.G. Alien Enemies Act case—hadn’t even been filed yet. Nonetheless, DOJ decided to make hay out of Boasberg’s alleged misbehavior, and six Republican senators have since piled on by urging D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan (who, by law, was the recipient of DOJ’s misconduct complaint) to suspend Boasberg while the complaint (and a potential impeachment investigation) was pending.2

The process created by the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 is supposed to be almost entirely confidential (which is why Attorney General Bondi’s tweet announcing the complaint was itself likely a violation of the act). But we often learn about the dispositions, at least, once the complaint has been fully resolved. That’s why we learned last week about the result of DOJ’s complaint; not only had Chief Judge Sutton dismissed it, but the 30-day period within which DOJ could have sought further review of Sutton’s decision (by filing a “petition for review” with the full Sixth Circuit Judicial Council) had expired.3

As for how DOJ’s complaint made its way to Sutton, Sutton’s memorandum explains the procedural history:

On November 26, in view of several appellate challenges to the judge’s rulings in the underlying case [J.G.G.] and of concerns that the judges on the D.C. Circuit might have to recuse themselves from any proceedings before the Judicial Council, Chief Judge Srinivasan asked Chief Justice Roberts to transfer the judicial misconduct proceeding to another circuit. On December 5, the Chief Justice transferred the matter to the Judicial Council of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit for resolution.

Sutton, who I have to think the Chief Justice did not pick at random (Roberts could have referred the complaint to any of the chief judges of the other circuits), made quick work of DOJ’s complaint—dismissing it just two weeks after he received it. His seven-page ruling is worth reading—not just for its thoroughness, but because, if you’re not used to reading these kinds of rulings, it is all-but-dripping with contempt for the Department of Justice’s behavior.

In short, Sutton found four different problems with DOJ’s complaint:

(snip. Yup, you know you want to know, so go read his piece and give it a like if you care to, after you finish.)

https://open.substack.com/pub/stevevladeck/p/207-the-justice-department-beclowns?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web