Contempt Continued: Rubio, Bondi Attempt To Stonewall Court Inquiry With Bullshit ‘State Secrets’ Response
In Mike’s thorough post yesterday on the topic of the Trump administration’s naked contempt for judicial oversight, the main theme and takeaway from it was a simple one: this authoritarian regime would much rather waste everyone’s time trying to play procedural and semantic games with the courts than actually participate in honest deliberations with them. This is no small thing and it portends so much more about how this adminisration is going to behave across the government. Trump and his complicit cabinet, some members of which will inevitably be hung out to dry eventually when things go wrong enough, have no time for process. No time for rules. Or truth. Or honest dialogue. There is only the end goal that has been demanded by the mad king. Any norms or rules that get in the way of the goal are to be routed around in as contemptious a manner possible.
So it goes in the ongoing case before federal judge James Boasberg. This is the case in which the court ordered what the administration calls “deportations” — though since they are without any form of due process it’s more accurate to call them human trafficking — conducted as a result of Trump’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Boasberg issued verbal and written orders that the rendition flights be stopped and that any planes that hadn’t arrived at their destination, including those in the air, be returned until Boasberg could evaluate the legitimacy of the use of the centuries old law.
But some of the planes didn’t stop, and not all in the air were ordered to turn around. With no due process, there is no assurance that the government’s claim as to who the people on these planes are is accurate. Even as the judge demanded information on the timelines at play to determine if his orders were violated or ignored, administration officials as high up as the Secretary of State Marco Rubio jeered gleefully on social media sites with retweets and the like. Boasberg, a decidedly conservative judge, was falsely mocked as a “radical left lunatic.”
But the contempt doesn’t stop there. Several days ago, the court was adamant that it would determine whether its order was violated.
US District Judge James Boasberg vowed on Friday to find out whether officials in the Trump administration violated his orders temporarily blocking the use of an 1798 law for deportations by refusing to turn two flights around last weekend.
“I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order – who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” Boasberg said near the end of an hourlong hearing over whether he should lift the pair of orders he issued last Saturday.
Rather than participate with a coequal branch of government, however, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi have instead decided to play more childish games. Transparently childish, too, by any honest reading of their response. As had been speculated in previous news on the case, the government has decided to attempt to invoke state secrets privilege over the information the court has demanded. Which, again, is solely information about the timing of the order for the takeoff and the eventual landing of deportation flights that the court had temporarily ordered to be ceased. And because this administration can’t help itself, it did so with the vocabulary of a teenager refusing to go to bed on time.
The Court has all of the facts it needs to address the compliance issues before it,” Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top DOJ officials wrote in a filing to US District Judge James Boasberg. “Further intrusions on the Executive Branch would present dangerous and wholly unwarranted separation-of-powers harms with respect to diplomatic and national security concerns that the Court lacks competence to address.”
“The information sought by the Court is subject to the state secrets privilege because disclosure would pose reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs,” the officials wrote in the 10-page filing.
Among the questions Boasberg wanted the Justice Department to answer are ones concerning the exact timing of when the two planes took off from US soil and left US airspace that day, as well as the specific times individuals deported under Trump’s proclamation were transferred out of US custody that day.
Since the CNN post couldn’t be bothered to be so direct, allow me to: the Trump administration is full of shit. They know they’re full of shit. They know we know they’re full of shit. But they also are more than happy to wield what they think is a power card, believing they’ve found some procedural loophole. We just make this claim, they seem to think, and it lets us do whatever we want!
But that isn’t how asserting this privilege works at all. The judge will now have the opportunity to review whether the government’s assertion is warranted.
He told the government last week that it could submit the information under seal or invoke the privilege, though he said if DOJ decides to shield the information, he “is obligated to ‘determine whether the circumstances are appropriate for the claim of privilege.’”
The Trump administration appears to want it both ways. It wants to claim it has not violated any court order while also blocking the information to validate that it had not. There is nothing about what the government previously falsely called routine deportations that should have any play in state secrets. When did the planes take off, when did they land, and who did they contain? If those are state secrets, then anything can be a state secret.
And that’s the danger here. It’s the reason the administration must lose this game. If any judicial oversight can be routed around simply by putting a few complicit signatures on a piece of paper that says “state secrets,” then there simply is no judicial oversight.
And, in that negation of a coequal branch of government, you have the end of our Republic.