Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Threats against federal judges have risen drastically since President Trump took office, according to internal data compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service. In the five-month period leading up to March 1 of this year, 80 individual judges had received threats, the data shows. Then, over the next six weeks, an additional 162 judges received threats, a dramatic increase. That spike in threats coincided with a flood of harsh rhetoric — often from Mr. Trump himself…

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Leah Litman and Daniel Deacon write: America seems to be waiting for a clear indication that the country is in a constitutional crisis. Perhaps President Donald Trump will say, “I am defying a court order, and good luck trying to do anything about it.” But short of that, America’s constitutional crisis was always going to be a bit subtler—and that subtler crisis is already here. The administration is already flouting court orders. It’s just that, rather than admitting so, executive-branch…

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USA Today reports: Arresting judges. Threatening their impeachment. Routinely slamming them on social media and trying to go around them completely. President Donald Trump and his allies have led an intense pressure campaign on the judiciary four months into his administration. Both sides of the political spectrum are using the term constitutional crisis. “It’s an all-out war on the lower courts,” said former federal Judge John Jones III, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. As the clash becomes…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Amid rising tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary, some federal judges are beginning to discuss the idea of managing their own armed security force. The notion came up in a series of closed-door meetings in early March, when a group of roughly 50 judges met in Washington for a semiannual meeting of the Judicial Conference, a policymaking body for the federal judiciary. There, members of a security committee spoke about threats emerging as…

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NBC reports: President Donald Trump’s executive order against the Jenner & Block law firm is unlawful because it violates the First Amendment, a judge ruled late Friday. U.S. District Judge John Bates said going after law firms the way Trump has “is doubly violative of the Constitution” because it targets Jenner & Block due to the causes the firm champions, the clients they represent, and a lawyer they once employed. “This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation…

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New Jersey Globe reports: A federal judge on Wednesday scolded federal prosecutors and announced he will dismiss trespassing charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka related to a standoff at a migrant detention center. Interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba announced earlier this week she would drop charges against Baraka (but at the same time announced new charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver stemming from a scuffle during Baraka’s arrest). Federal magistrate judge Andre Espinosa reprimanded the federal prosecutors for…

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The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Boston said on Wednesday that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month barring officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them sufficient time to object. The finding by the judge, Brian E. Murphy, was one of the strongest judicial rebukes the administration has faced so far in a series of contentious cases arising from its sprawling deportation agenda. It was not immediately…

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Politico reports: The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to block an effort to open the inner workings of the secretive DOGE cost-cutting effort to public scrutiny. The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Wednesday urging the high court to put a hold on a judge’s orders giving a watchdog group access to documents detailing firings, grant terminations and other actions proposed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was overseen by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk….

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The Washington Post reports: Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week. Under the proposal, investigators and prosecutors would also not be required to consult with the section’s attorneys during key steps of probes into public officials, altering a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that…

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