Lawyer and journalist Katie Phang cheered a Minnesota federal judge's swift reply to Attorney General Todd Blanche's judicial misconduct complaint.
Phang broke down the filing in a video Wednesday on the Katie Phang News Channel. The Justice Department lodged the complaint with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals against U.S. District Judges Patrick Schiltz and John Tunheim, along with unnamed colleagues on Minnesota's federal bench. It targets comments they made to The New York Times for a September 17 article on the Trump administration's immigration enforcement surge in the state.
The complaint, signed by DOJ officials Stanley Woodward and Trent McCotter, accuses the judges of "unethical and partisan commentary" and asks that they be recused from cases involving the Department of Homeland Security. It also seeks an investigation into judges who it says "covet publicity."
In the Times piece, Schiltz, who served as the court's chief judge last winter, called the Trump administration's actions "a grave threat to the rule of law" and said Immigration and Customs Enforcement had violated nearly 100 court orders in January alone. Phang noted that Judge Nancy Brasel, a Trump appointee, was among the seven judges who spoke to the paper.
Phang then read Schiltz's response, as reported by Politico's Kyle Cheney.
"As legal ethics experts have confirmed, I was acting well within the ethical rules that apply to federal judges in speaking to the New York Times," Schiltz said. "Indeed, in February of this year, the Committee on Codes of Conduct issued an advisory opinion to emphasize that federal judges may speak and write on core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law and judicial independence. That is exactly what I did."
"That's a mic drop if I've ever heard one," Phang said.
She also played Blanche's remarks from his press conference Wednesday, where a reporter asked him to square his talk of a "war" on the judiciary with his criticism of the judges.
"It turns out I'm not a judge. It turns out I'm not bound by the judicial canons," Blanche said. "I'm allowed to fight for my prosecutors. I'm allowed to get really fired up when, for example, judges in Minnesota complain about us violating court orders, but the reason that we are, quote, violating court orders is because these judges are violating Supreme Court law."
"So, in other words, Todd Blanche just admitted that they are violating court orders," Phang said.