According to a Politico report, former Acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger said President Donald Trump's tweets calling his executive orders "travel bans" raises questions about the president's motives and makes the job of Justice Department lawyers defending the orders more difficult.
"Either they have a client who can’t control himself," said Dellinger, who was solicitor general during Bill Clinton's presidency, "or a client who is trying to sabotage the case.”
According to Dellinger, Trump's "travel ban" tweets not only make the constitutionality argument harder for the Justice Department lawyers arguing his case in appeals court -- they also make their insistence that his campaign statements don't belong in court proceedings obsolete.
" Trump has rendered moot the debate in the litigation over whether campaign statements should be inadmissible by incorporating by reference all those statements and turning them into presidential proclamations," Dellinger told Politico.
The president's lawyers, Politico writer Josh Gerstein noted, called the executive order banning refugees and migrants from Muslim-majority countries a "temporary pause" as early as Monday, but the president's repeated use of the phrase "travel ban" complicates that argument.
Read the entire report about GOP lawyers criticizing Trump's "travel ban" tweets via Politico.
