It is a pebble in the shoe of Donald Trump. Of those who work on the strict compliance and application of the laws. In recent years, James Boasberg, a judge at the Washington District Federal Court appointed by Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed, has had to work on several cases, among the most publicized, involving Donald Trump, under his current status as president as former president.
The last date of this week. This Wednesday morning, March 26, James Boasberg was selected, according to the usual random selection procedure from 24 judges of the Columbia district, to chair the Gate signal file. The case, which has been shaking Washington since Monday, was revealed by a magazine journalist The Atlanticerror in error in a discussion group on the signal encrypted application, where the highest officials of the administration (CIA, vice-president, Pentagon) spoke of imminent military operations of the United States against the Houthis rebels of Yemen. On Thursday, March 27, judge James Boasberg, nicknamed “Jeb”, ordered the government of Donald Trump to keep the messages of the conversation in which the lieutenants of the American president spoke of future military strikes in what seems to be a spectacular flaw of security. The judge also asked the American executive to show by Monday that he had “taken measures for such a conservation”.
Threat of dismissal
An injunction that does not please the Trump administration and the President itself. On Thursday morning, on his social social network, Donald Trump violently attacked Judge Boasberg, wrongly accusing him of having grasped a “fourth Trump affair which is, statistically, impossible”, but also to suffer from a “massive trump derangement syndrome” and to present “disqualifying family conflicts”, which he did not specify. He also called for “immediately investigating this rigged system” of judges.
Thursday evening, it was the turn of Pam Bondi, the general prosecutor of the United States, that is to say the equivalent of our Minister of Justice, to announce refused that an investigation is open. She even declared on the Fox News channel that Judge Boasberg was to be withdrawn from the signal case and any other concerning the powers of Trump. “Many judges must be dismissed from their duties,” she said during an interview in the program “The Ingraham Angle”. Tuesday, the Republican deputy for Texas, Brandon Gill, also filed an article of indictment against judge Boasberg, accusing him of abuse of power by going beyond his authority and interfering with the constitutional prerogatives of the president.
The allocation of the Gate signal case to the “Jeb” judge also comes two days after the Trump administration, in the Vénézuelans expulsion case, invoked the privilege of “state secrets” to refuse to share details on the calendar of expulsion flights to Salvador, stresses the site Politico. In recent days, Judge Boasberg and his court have been at the heart of the conflict on the application of migration laws with the Trump administration.
Conflict on the application of migratory laws
Last weekend, the Trump administration sent three planes carrying 238 Venezuelan migrants to Salvador, even though Judge Boasberg had ordered the deportations and the return of planes. Shortly before these expulsions, Donald Trump had signed a decree invoking the “Alien Enemies Act” (the law on foreign enemies) of 1798, which gives the president the power to expel the citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States or in a situation of invasion. Donald Trump justified these deportations by accusing migrants of being members of “Tren of Aragua”, a Venezuelan gang that he accused of “carrying out an irregular war against the territory of the United States, directly or under orders, clandestine or not, of President Nicolás Maduro Du Venezuela”. This law of 1798 on “foreign enemies” had previously been used only during the Anglo-American war of 1812 and then during the two world wars, especially against Japanese and German nationals in American territory.
On March 15, judge James Boasberg, had thus suspended the expulsions based on this law, a decision of which the Trump administration appealed. “The accelerated expulsion of a foreigner in the wake of the notification of the government informing him that he is targeted by the law on foreign enemies, without offering him the opportunity to leave the territory of himself or to challenge this order, is illegal,” he said. The lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, described the decision of judge Boasberg as “enormous intrusion unprecedented in the prerogatives of the executive power”, criticizing him in particular for having ordered, in vain, that the planes having already taken off turn back.
“Progressive judges interfere in our government”
“We have an unaduminated federal judge who is trying to control foreign policies, in particular the Alien Enemies Act, which he has no vocation to apply. And there are 261 reasons why the Americans are more safe today: it is because these people left the country,” said the general prosecutor Pam Bondi on Fox News on Wednesday. James Boasberg, she argued, “is the symbol of the defeats of the Trump administration in court”. “It’s a habit in these progressive judges,” she added. “This judge had no right to do this. They interfere in foreign affairs, they interfere in our government, and the question is why a judge is trying to protect terrorists who invaded our country to the detriment of American citizens”.
Before these two cases, judge “Jeb”, who sat for about nine years at the Washington DC municipal court before being promoted to the federal magistracy by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2011 had to deal with several polarizing cases involving Donald Trump.
Over the past two years, he has been chief judge of the Federal District Court, a mandate that has covered two of the federal surveys, now closed, on Donald Trump. In addition, James Boasberg made a decision ordering former vice-president Mike Pence to testify before a great jury as part of a special investigation into Donald Trump and the assault against the American Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In 2016, he also ordered the FBI to publish nearly 15,000 emails belonging to Hillary Clinton, former senator and president of the presidency, recalls The New York Times. However, he had rejected the proceedings aimed at constraining the State Department to recover more of its correspondence, which had annoyed Donald Trump, then candidate for the presidency in the face of the Democrat.