The E. Barrett Prettyman United States Court House in Washington, D.C.
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A federal judge on Thursday rejected the Justice Department’s bid to remove her from a case challenging one of President Trump’s executive orders, accusing the department of attacking her as part of broader campaign to try to undermine the judicial system.
The order from U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, nominated to serve on the federal bench during the Obama administration, denies the department’s effort to disqualify her from the lawsuit over Trump’s order punishing the prominent law firm Perkins Coie. Earlier this month, Howell said the order likely violated the constitution and temporarily blocked enforcement of it.
The Justice Department responded by accusing Howell, a judge at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, of repeatedly demonstrating “animus” toward Trump, and filed a motion seeking to disqualify her.
Howell’s order is a notable instance of a federal judge vocally pushing back against attempts to discredit the federal judiciary, and comes as judges who have ruled against the Trump administration this year are confronting a wave of threats.
“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,” Howell wrote in her order Thursday.
“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.”
The Justice Department has also sought to remove Judge James Boasberg from hearing a case over Trump’s invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
Trump in a post on social media early on Thursday also argued that “it is virtually impossible for me to get an Honest Ruling in D.C.,” accusing judges there and in New York of being biased against him.
“Their own version of the facts”
In her order Thursday, Howell said no judicial ruling exists in a vacuum, and that every litigating party deserves a fair and impartial hearing.
“That fundamental promise, however, does not entitle any party — not even those with the power and prestige of the president of the United States or a federal agency — to demand adherence to their own version of the facts and preferred legal outcome,” she said.
Fact finding, she stressed, is the role of the courts, and she slammed the Justice Department’s assertion about “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,” she 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, though vigorous and rigorous defense of executive actions is both expected and helpful to the courts in resolving legal issues,” she wrote.
Howell also pointed out that while she ruled against the administration in the Perkins Coie case, she ruled in favor of the government in another case that recently came before her challenging a Trump administration action against the U.S. Institute of Peace.
