Friday Round Up! 6/27/25

Imagine Watergate, but where the criminals get appointed to federal judgeships instead of going to jail.

A lot has happened this week on the legal front, between the Supreme Court granting the Trump administration a stay in the third-party removals case, to yesterday’s ruling barring the use of nationwide injunctions in federal court. More on those issues in this week’s Ask Asha.

What I have been focused on is the whistleblower complaint that was submitted to the Justice Department’s Inspector General and the chair and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of Erez Reuveni, the Justice Department lawyer who was fired because he (truthfully) admitted in federal court that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been wrongfully deported.

You probably heard a lot about this whistleblower complaint this week because a central player mentioned in the document is Emil Bove, the current Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department, whom the Trump administration has nominated to be an appellate judge for the Third Circuit. Bove’s confirmation hearings took place last week, and a huge focus of the questioning centered around one of Reuben’s claims, namely, that Bove allegedly told a roomful of lawyers that he anticipated the courts pushing back on Trump’s immigration policies and that the Department would have to consider telling the courts “fuck you” — and ignore such orders — if that happened.

I get that a senior Justice Department official suggesting that the agency’s lawyers tell the courts to f-off is shocking, and it should be. But this wasn’t even the worst of it.

Folks, this whistleblower complaint is full-on, Watergate- and Iran-Contra-level crazypants. Bottom line up front: According to the complaint, not only did Bove tell DOJ lawyers that the Department should tell courts to f-off, he also coordinated with Justice Department leadership, the White House, and the Department of Homeland Security to actually do it. Repeatedly. In multiple cases. AND THEN TRIED TO COVER IT UP.

Here’s the quick and dirty:

Case #1: This one you probably followed on the news — it’s the case in which three planes took off for El Salvador and were allowed to land despite the district court’s order that they be turned around. Reuveni details his belief that Justice Department officials made knowing misrepresentations regarding the status of those flights to the court, and that “it became clear to Mr. Reuveni that DHS and DOS were receiving contrary directions from someone else to take actions in violation of court orders.” (emphasis mine.) When the district court scheduled a show cause hearing to determine why the government did not comply with its orders, Reuveni notes that it was made clear that “DOJ leadership” intended to stonewall the court’s efforts to get to the bottom of when the flights took off relative to its order.

Case #2: This is another one you also are familiar with — the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was on one of the flights that was not turned around and wrongfully removed to El Salvador. Reuveni’s complaint details how the Senior Counselor to the Secretary for Homeland Security wanted a brief to the court to include allegations that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13. However, when Reuveni asked for evidence of this claim, DHS could not provide it; in fact, that declarant that DHS itself produced, an ICE field director named Robert Cerna, “could not personally confirm and declined to attest to Mr. Abrego Garcia's gang membership, let alone his status as an MS-13 ‘leader.’” Reuveni notes that his efforts to try to secure Abrego Garcia’s removal were not only resisted, but that his leadership at the Justice Department told him “to stop asking for facts supporting any possible defense of the case.” (!) When he later truthfully represented to the court that Abrego Garcia was removed in error, he was reprimanded for not representing to the court that Abrego Garcia was a terrorist, despite the fact that this was not a claim that had been made in the briefs nor substantiated by the facts. When the Justice Department asked him to sign a brief containing these unsupported allegations, Reuveni refused, stating that he “did not sign up to lie.” Shortly thereafter, he was placed on administrative leave, and then fired.

Again, the above cases are probably familiar, because both cases were covered in the news and dribs and drabs of this drama were leaking out. They are bad enough. But the outright f-you to the courts is detailed in a third case — the same case for which the Supreme Court issued a stay of a lower court injunction this past Monday.

Case #3: This case involved the Department of Homeland Security’s policy of “third country” removals — deporting people to countries to which they have no “meaningful connection.” I go into the details of the court’s ruling in my Ask Asha video this week, but here I want to focus on Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, which expresses disbelief that the Court was basically rewarding the government even after it had repeatedly — and to her bewilderment — had appeared to continually violate the lower court’s injunction without explanation.

There’s a great British farce called Noises Off which involves a play where the audience sees the play being performed, and then the stage rotates and you see what is going on behind the scenes during the performance. Reuveni’s complaint is basically the backstage version of what Sotomayor was observing from her perch.

To wit, after the lower court (Judge Brian Murphy of the District of Massachusetts) issued a nationwide injunction, Reuveni details how he followed the normal practice of trying to ensure that guidance of how to comply with the injunction was passed on to line ICE agents through DHS. However, Reuveni was blocked from doing so; he “learned that DHS was directed by someone within the administration unknown to Mr. Reuveni not to issue guidance to its officers concerning the fact of and terms of the injunction.” (emphasis mine.) In short, the “DOJ leadership” had no intention of ensuring that DHS, or ICE agents, complied with the injunction. (Reuveni was eventually ordered to “stop asking” about the status of internal guidance to DHS.)

In fact, Reuveni notes that internally, the Justice Department appeared to take the position that the injunction did not apply nationwide, even as it was approving filings that acknowledged that it was nationwide. This duplicitousness was compounded by cryptic language that was added to the government’s appeal brief, stating, “the operational effects of [the] order is [sic] ambiguous” — language Reuveni later realized was added to provide cover and plausible deniability if the government was held to account for continuing to remove people in violation of the injunction.

Meanwhile, Reuveni observed that despite representing to the court that it was complying with the injunction (or at least not in noncompliance), the government was continuing to actively remove people — without the notice and opportunity to present claims regarding fear of torture that the court had ordered — to El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay. When Reuveni tried to find out what was going on, the acting General Counsel at DHS, Joseph Mazarra, told him that the Defense Department was responsible for the removals and not to ask him (Mazarra) again about it. The Justice Department then represented the same thing to the court, as Justice Sotomayor observes (with confusion) in her dissent:

Internally, Reuveni contacted the General Counsel for the Defense Department, who “informed Reuveni that he was not aware of the injunction and appeared upset that DHS had not communicated the existence of the injunction to DOD.” In short, the “DOJ leadership,” along with senior lawyers at DHS and the WH, were enlisting other agencies to unwittingly violate court orders, then throwing them under the bus in court. (Which didn’t even help them, legally, since the injunction applied not only to DHS, but also to anyone with whom it was acting “in concert.”)

Eventually, Reuveni was sending so many emails and asking so many questions he was asked to stop cc’ing people and to take conversations offline, instructions which “Mr. Reuveni understood…to be based on leadership's aim to avoid generating written material subject to disclosure through FOIA.”

Reuveni’s complaint sums up the whole episode as follows:

The evidence demonstrates that senior DOJ leadership withheld information from DOJ- OIL, interfered with DOJ-OIL's efforts to ensure agency clients were informed about the requirements of the injunction, and provided contrary instruction to DHS and DOD, which resulted in removals in violation of a court order. This also appears to explain why McHenry insisted on the inclusion of the footnote in the brief that ‘the operational effects of [the] order is [sic] ambiguous’: though the injunction plainly had nationwide applicability, which leadership acknowledged, operators at high levels of political leadership apparently planned and implemented operations that violated a court order. In retrospect, McHenry's insistence on the footnote appears to be an attempt to suggest ambiguity where there was none. The evident goal was to provide cover for leadership's knowing violation of the nationwide injunction.

I don’t know about you, but it seems like whether Bove used the f-word should have been the least of the issues he needed to be questioned about during his confirmation…? Also, WHY IS THIS COMPLAINT NOT THE SUBJECT OF ITS OWN INVESTIGATION??? If this complaint is true, it is a full-fledged, premeditated conspiracy to obstruct justice and an attempt to cover it up. Am I missing something?? I feel like I am going insane.

I’ll leave it there for now because I have to go to bed. If you need to switch gears, my and Renato’s podcast this week featured a special guest, whom I think you will enjoy:

Ask Asha

This week I answered two questions relating to orders/opinions coming from SCOTUS and “interim relief”:

My clips this week

I joined All In With Chris Hayes to discuss Bove and the whistleblower complaint:

Upcoming events:

• THIS SUNDAY! Wine & Fries Happy Hour with Katie Phang, June 29, at 8 p.m. Awwwww yeah. My friend Katie, former host of MSNBC’s The Katie Phang Show and now fellow Contrarian, will be joining us. Katie is irreverent, hilarious, and sooo smart…I can’t wait! A link for this will be sent to Wine & Fries (founding) members three hours before the event, and will not be recorded.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

I am getting a lot of questions from friends and colleagues asking what they can do in this urgent political moment. I have three potential actions steps you can take now:

1. Pro bono lawyers are on the front lines to stop Trump and Musk’s breakdown, takedown, and shakedown of the federal government. You can contribute to this effort on the donation page of State Democracy Defenders Action

2. Read your (or a) local paper. I subscribed to my hometown paper, The Daily Press (Hampton Roads), and even just reading the headlines in my inbox every day feels so refreshingly…normal. Especially with Trump in office, it is easy to get sucked into national news, which can feel overwhelming. It’s nice to be reminded that people are working on real problems and of Tocqueville’s observation that the heart of American democracy is people coming together to solve common problems in their own communities.

3. Self care tip of the week: So family time can be hit or miss, depending on your family. But whether it’s in large or small doses, or more time with your “chosen” family, doing something that strengthens those bonds is healthy. (Summertime, in particular, always feels less fraught than the fall and winter holidays.) I know that it cane make me feel a little more anchored and secure (and full disclosure: I am a “small doses” person.) This weekend I am headed to Boston to watch a niece’s debut Indian dance performance, and headed to a larger family reunion next week. How about you all?

A heads up that there will be no Round Up next week for the Fourth weekend — Happy Independence Day!

‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’

— The Masque of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley, stanza XXXVIII