A legal expert was stunned on Thursday after a federal judge tried to save President Donald Trump's Department of Justice from legal peril in a case involving transgender children.
Liz Dye, a legal commentator, discussed the Trump DOJ's scheme to get medical records of transgender youths from a hospital in Rhode Island on a new episode of the "LegalEagle" podcast. Recently, a federal judge in Rhode Island accused lawyers from the Trump DOJ of making several misrepresentations to the court, which Dye said is an "extraordinary thing for a federal judge to say about a lawyer from the Justice Department." Those misstatements put the entire trial in jeopardy, Dye added.
But instead of admitting their mistakes, lawyers from the Trump DOJ sought relief from a friendly court in Texas. A judge from the court issued a ruling on Monday that sought to prevent the hospital from seeking relief in any other jurisdiction than his courtroom.
That ruling caught Dye by surprise.
"Excuse me? I was under the impression that the First Amendment protects freedom of association and the right to seek redress of grievances from the government, and aiding and abetting is criminal language," Dye said. "Filing a lawsuit is definitionally not a crime. It's not even a tort. So that order is lawless. But federal judges have a lot of power even when they're acting in ways that are not consistent with the law."
Dye said the case seemed to be part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to "park" anti-transgender cases in Texas because they found a friendly judge.