President Trump’s Department of Justice has responded to more than 100 lawsuits in less than 100 days of his presidency. Two CNN analysts claim the DOJ’s approach is clear: “Defend whatever Trump wants. And when that’s not working, muddy the waters.”
“That includes skipping or fast-tracking the established order of when cases can be appealed in federal civil cases,” the analysts wrote, “with the Justice Department pushing some ongoing disputes from trial-level courts up to the Supreme Court or other appellate courts as soon as it can.”
They allege, another way Trump’s DOJ is responding includes “an approach filled with ‘fallacy,’ or a very selective reading of a court order,” and pointed to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
After the Supreme Court ruled that the Maryland man should be brought back to the United States, the DOJ interpreted the ruling by “doing nothing except stating they would be willing to send a plane to Latin America to retrieve him.”
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Judge Paula Xinis, who initially called for Abrego Garcia’s return, called the DOJ’s move a way to redefine “‘facilitate’ contrary to law and logic.”
Ty Cobb, who previously represented Trump during his first term in the special counsel investigations, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the Justice Department lawyering in the immigration case before Xinis was filled with “obfuscation and bad faith.”
He’s not the only republican to express concern, noted the analysts. “A federal appellate judge this month, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who has been on the bench in Richmond, Virginia, since the Reagan administration, sounded this alarm [on Trump] as well in a recent opinion.”
“Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around,” Wilkinson wrote. “The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions … We yet cling to the hope that it is not naive to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”