A federal appeals court dismissed a misconduct complaint from the Department of Justice against U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.
“A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source does not corroborate them. And a repetition of uncorroborated statements rarely supplies a basis for a valid misconduct complaint,” U.S. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote in the ruling.
Discussing the allegations against Boasberg, Sutton argued that the DOJ’s complaint “offers no source for what, if anything, the subject judge said during the Conference, when he said it, whether he said it in response to a question, whether he said it during the Conference or at another meeting, and whether he expressed these concerns as his own or as those of other judges.”
“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,” the judge added. “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.”
The Justice Department filed a complaint against Boasberg last year. According to DOJ Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle, Boasberg “first tried to persuade Chief Justice Roberts and other federal judges that the Trump Administration would not follow court orders, despite having no basis for his belief,” and then “acted on his baseless belief again and again in litigation over which he was presiding.”
