Back in July, the Department of Justice escalated its public attacks on James Boasberg, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, by filing an ethics complaint against him. DOJ’s complaint charged that Judge Boasberg had made “improper public comments about President Donald J. Trump to the Chief Justice of the United States and other federal judges that have undermined the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” The complaint charged specifically that at a March 2025 session of the Judicial Conference of the United States Judge Boasberg “attempted to improperly influence Chief Justice Roberts and roughly two dozen other federal judges by straying from the traditional topics to express his belief that the Trump Administration would ‘disregard rulings of federal courts’ and trigger ‘a constitutional crisis.’”
DOJ’s complaint was manifestly frivolous from the outset. Even the anonymous source it relied on said only that Boasberg “raised his colleagues’ concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts leading to a constitutional crisis.” (Emphasis added.) There is no reason to think that concerns about disregard of judicial orders ares beyond the “traditional topics” of concern to the Judicial Conference. The comments were not “public,” as the charge falsely alleged. And it’s difficult to see how Boasberg’s private relaying of “his colleagues’ concerns” could “have undermined the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” It’s also puzzling that the complaint purported to include an attachment as evidence of Boasberg’s remarks but it did not in fact include an attachment.
None of this, of course, stopped Attorney General Pam Bondi from trumpeting the ethics charge against Judge Boasberg.
As we learned over the weekend, the outstanding conservative Sixth Circuit chief judge Jeffrey Sutton ruled in December (shortly after the D.C. Circuit transferred the matter to him) that the complaint was meritless. An excerpt from Judge Sutton’s opinion:
A key point of the Judicial Conference and the related meetings is to facilitate candid conversations about judicial administration among leaders of the federal judiciary about matters of common concern. In these settings, a judge’s expression of anxiety about executive-branch compliance with judicial orders, whether rightly feared or not, is not so far afield from customary topics at these meetings—judicial independence, judicial security, and inter-branch relations—as to violate the Codes of Judicial Conduct. Confirming the point, the Chief Justice’s 2024 year-end report raised general concerns about threats to judicial independence, security concerns for judges, and respect for court orders throughout American history.
As Judge Sutton also pointed out, the D.C. Circuit invited DOJ to submit the missing attachment that its complaint referred to, but DOJ did not do so.
(Disclosure: Judge Sutton and I have been friends since we clerked together for Justice Scalia more than three decades ago.)