Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui isn't happy with prosecutors in Jeanine Pirro's office, who have repeatedly charged people with crimes, only to ultimately withdraw their cases.
Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney flagged the statement from Faruqui, noting that he continues to sound "alarms about defective criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors in D.C." Cheney noted that in this case, the prosecutors tried to "gin up" charges against an immigrant who misread a confusing form so they could jump-start a deportation.
"The term 'unprecedented' is casually bandied about. But as Judge Sooknaan identified, these recent weeks literally have been 'unprecedented.' To contextualize how unprecedented things have been, the undersigned had the clerk's office run the numbers. Specifically, the Court pulled every motion to dismiss filed by the government in cases charged by complaint for 10 years. The results speak for themselves. Of the over 4,000 cases charged by complaint between 2014 and 2024, the government moved to dismiss less than 20 defendants' cases. In the last eight weeks, the government has charged 95 cases by criminal complaint. And in that time, the government has moved to dismiss 20 defendants' cases," the judge wrote in an excerpt posted by national security analyst Marcy Wheeler on Bluesky.
It comes after a Sept. 29 appearance in court, in which the same judge reprimanded the assistant U.S. attorney for similar behavior. While Faruqui penned a brief "bench slap," one legal analyst posted an excerpt from the court transcript that is far worse.
"There is a reason things have never been done before," the judge told the AUSA. "There are reasons there are norms. And it's the job of supervisors and management to make sure that those norms that are appropriate and have occurred for generations don't get thrown out the window to go after one charge. Before today, before three weeks ago, if this would have happened, I wouldn't even have given it a second thought, but I am now in the unfortunate situation, as I have said before, I no longer trust that when prosecutors are coming forward, they are doing things because their managers want the right thing to be done."
After the discussion and filing in that case, the DOJ filed a motion Thursday for emergency review, saying that Faruqui's comments were "legally unsupported" and "inflammatory."
Conservatives are calling for the judge to be removed and disbarred.