Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) suggested over the weekend that a Trump administration official may have quietly contacted a federal appeals judge to stall a contempt inquiry, and the legal analyst interviewing him declared that if so, “people are going to jail.”
In a clip flagged by political video aggregator Acyn Torabi from the Legal AF podcast, Whitehouse laid out a hypothetical involving D.C. Circuit Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee.
“If some MAGA official communicated to Judge Rao or her chambers and that resulted in the administrative stay that held the door open and kept the facts from the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation and stalled investigation into misconduct by the DOJ,” Whitehouse began, “ask any judge how big a deal that is.”
Michael Popok, the MeidasTouch legal analyst who co-anchors Legal AF, replied, “As I said, people are going to jail.”
Earlier in the interview, Whitehouse said the idea that there was no contact between the judges and Trump allies at the Justice Department, “a party to the matter, seems like a stretch.”
The “his” in Whitehouse’s comment refers to Emil Bove, the former top Justice Department official now serving as a federal appeals judge. Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has spent more than a year trying to determine whether Trump officials defied his March 2025 order halting deportation flights to El Salvador. A whistleblower has alleged Bove told colleagues the department might have to tell courts “f--- you,” which Bove has insisted he does not recall saying.
In April 2025, a D.C. Circuit panel of Rao and fellow Trump appointee Gregory Katsas paused Boasberg’s inquiry over a dissent. The pause lasted more than three months, and the Senate confirmed Bove to the Third Circuit 50-49 in the meantime. Whitehouse later sought records of any communications between those judges’ chambers and political appointees at the Justice Department.
He and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) also pressed the circuit’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, about the stay. Whitehouse said they asked whether anyone had communicated with the judges, and the answer, he told Popok, was “radio silence.”
In April of this year, a panel of Rao and Justin Walker ordered Boasberg to end the inquiry. The full D.C. Circuit threw out that ruling in June and heard arguments Sept. 29 on whether Boasberg can resume. A ruling is pending.
Whitehouse also said that if Democrats win the House, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) would likely chair the Judiciary Committee, where “unlike Senate subpoenas, his can’t be filibustered.”
“We have multiple ways of getting into the information of what exactly took place,” he said.
