A federal judge used her rejection to a Justice Department request that she recuse herself from a case involving President Donald Trump to issue a stinging take down of the administration’s escalated attacks on the judiciary.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell shot down the disqualification request on Wednesday after the Trump DOJ accused her of showing a bias against the president based on her conduct in past cases as well as comments she made at a recent court hearing, CNN reported.
“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 ruling Wednesday.
“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 judge added.
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Howell’s ruling made clear she would not step aside from the case triggered by Trump’s executive order targeting law firm Perkins Coie, which she temporarily restrained the president from moving forward on.
The ruling challenged the Justice Department’s “blanket denigration of the merits of all the lawsuits” filed against Trump’s policies, while also pointing out that courts have warned that motions for disqualification should be taken seriously, according to CNN.
“This larger concern about the overall damage to the rule of law and the federal judicial system from the feckless impugning of the decision-making process of individual federal judges has prompted Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., to criticize ‘regrettabl[e] … attempts’ by “[p]ublic officials … to intimidate judges,’ including by ‘suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,’” the judge wrote.