The Hidden Cost of J.G.G. v. Trump

The D.C. Circuit took away our best chance to establish the Administration’s lying ways

Friday’s decision from a divided D.C. Circuit panel in J.G.G. v. Trump is legally shaky and may yet be reversed. But whatever its future prospects, the opinion — and its long prelude — has likely nullified the best opportunity we had to establish with certainty the Administration’s willingness to defy court orders and misrepresent facts to the courts, Congress, and the public. The stars were aligned, as they very rarely are, to bring that finding home; but now they have been eclipsed, likely for good.

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The J.G.G. case traces back to the Administration’s first and, in many ways, most pitched dispute with the federal courts. In mid-March, the Administration quietly issued a finding under the Alien Enemies Act and began rounding up hundreds of detainees to ship to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. Lawyers for the detainees got wind of the imminent action. They immediately rushed into the courtroom of D.C. Chief District Judge Jeb Boasberg, who convened an emergency late-afternoon hearing. During the hearing, he delivered an oral order that planes carrying detainees be turned around and returned to U.S. custody so the detainees could receive due process and an opportunity to challenge their deportation. Shortly thereafter, Boasberg followed up with a written temporary restraining order blocking any deportations.

As everyone now knows, the Administration did not comply and delivered all the detainees to CECOT, where they were imprisoned under allegedly inhumane conditions and subjected to brutal mistreatment.

When Boasberg, a few days later, pressed the DOJ for an explanation of the apparent violation of the order, the Department responded with a laughably threadbare set of excuses, eventually retreating to a position that could be paraphrased as: “Oh, c’mon, Boasberg, let it go already.”

The Department also leaned on preposterous legal arguments — for example, that oral orders aren’t binding or that courts lack jurisdiction over planes outside the territorial United States. Boasberg was having none of it. The underlying case, including his finding that the detainees were entitled to due process and had not received it, spun off in several directions. But he never let go of the contempt issue. He remained dogged and focused on the possible contempt, to the Administration’s growing frustration.

Boasberg proceeded to build the case with uncommon care — step by deliberate procedural step. He gave ground to the Administration more than once but never lost sight of the brass ring: the need to determine conclusively whether the Administration had knowingly violated his orders and should be held in contempt.

As the record developed, it dovetailed with whistleblower allegations that surfaced during the judicial nomination battle of Emil Bove, who emerged as the likely key player. Multiple accounts detailed Bove, a powerful senior official in the DOJ, telling DOJ attorneys that the planes to El Salvador would land “no matter what.” They further described him instructing career attorneys that “we may have to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you.’”

On April 23, after reviewing the record to date, Boasberg issued a probable-cause order finding that the March TRO had likely been violated and set further proceedings to determine criminal contempt.

The Department of Justice raced to the D.C. Circuit that same day, seeking an emergency administrative stay of the contempt proceedings. As luck would have it, the motions panel sitting at the time included two strongly conservative Trump judges, Greg Katsas and Neomi Rao. Within hours, the panel granted an administrative stay.

Administrative stays are meant to be short-term measures to preserve the status quo only until a court can make an informed decision on a stay-pending-appeal motion. Justice Amy Coney Barrett cautioned in 2024 that an administrative stay “should last no longer than necessary to make an intelligent decision” on the underlying motion; if allowed to linger, it risks morphing into a de facto merits stay without the required showing.

That’s exactly what happened here. The whole case disappeared into limbo, not emerging until last Friday — some 3½ months later. In the meantime, Bove was confirmed 50–49 to his lifetime seat.

The unusual deep freeze didn’t go unnoticed. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts expressing his “real and grave concern” about what he portrayed as the apparent stalling of contempt proceedings. Whitehouse suggested that Katsas and Rao had acted to protect Bove.

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Finally, on August 8, a little over a week after Bove’s confirmation, the panel issued a per curiam decision. The three judges unanimously dismissed the government’s appeal for lack of appellate jurisdiction, but Katsas and Rao voted to grant a writ of mandamus — an even more demanding standard, requiring, for example, that there be no other adequate means of relief — and vacated the district court’s probable-cause order.

Judge Katsas argued that Boasberg’s order was ambiguous in its use of the term “removal” — did it bar transfer of custody or only physical departure from U.S. territory? Under the criminal-contempt standard, ambiguity cuts against contempt, warranting the extraordinary remedy of mandamus.

Judge Rao’s opinion focused on the conservative hobbyhorse of separation of powers. She portrayed the contempt process as an improper, coercive intrusion into executive authority over foreign affairs and national security operations. Rao — long seen in conservative legal circles as a potential Supreme Court pick and, in the eyes of many observers, effectively auditioning for the role since joining the D.C. Circuit — framed the dispute not as a narrow procedural question but as a fundamental showdown between judicial and executive power.

The third member of the panel, Nina Pillard, dissented forcefully. She argued that mandamus requires a clear and indisputable right — a standard not met when the two votes for mandamus relied on divergent theories. She also warned that brushing aside a carefully built criminal-contempt inquiry strikes at the heart of judicial authority. In a pointed passage, Pillard praised Boasberg’s calm, even-handed work under immense pressure and said the majority had done “an exemplary judge a grave disservice.”

The panel decision may not be the last word. We can expect a petition for review by the entire D.C. Circuit, which is divided 7–4 in favor of Democrats. But the likelihood of resuming Boasberg’s meticulous process has become remote.

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Whatever its origin and purpose, the D.C. Circuit’s months-long freeze of the contempt inquiry was a severely missed opportunity. This is an administration that lies promiscuously and, when it can get away with it, dodges the truth through doublespeak, prevarication, and obfuscation. Boasberg had strong reason to believe that they knowingly violated his order, and he was laser-focused on cutting through that sort of evasion.

It would have been easier for Boasberg to give the Administration a pass, perhaps coupled with a stern finger-wagging lecture. I believe his decision not to take that route was driven by his sense of responsibility to his colleagues on the D.C. District Court. In doing so, he reflected the institutional posture of a court that had spent years immersed in January 6 prosecutions — confronting the insurrection’s violence and evil up close — only to see Trump erase those convictions in a single stroke on January 20, 2025. For the D.C. District Court, that was no mere policy disagreement but a profound blow to the justice system’s hard work and sacrifice.

And, of course, Boasberg’s persistence made him a target of ludicrous name-calling by the President and Attorney General of the United States. Trump said he was a “radical left lunatic of a judge,” a “troublemaker and agitator,” and that he should be impeached. Bondi filed a judicial-misconduct complaint, widely regarded as a risible political stunt, for relaying his colleagues’ concern that the Administration might not comply with judicial orders.

To legal insiders, Bondi and Trump’s attacks merely exposed their ignorance and lack of integrity. Boasberg is universally considered a judge’s judge. In his more than a decade on the bench, he has developed a reputation for integrity, even temperament, and nonpartisan fairness, earning respect from colleagues across the ideological spectrum. He served as presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a role requiring a steady hand in cases of the highest sensitivity.

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I have often suggested that the best way to analyze the corrupt schemes of the Administration is to begin with the lie that is typically at the foundation.

It’s the Election, Stupid.

Here, the Administration has gone a step further, doubling down on its implausible defense. Attempting to dirty up Boasberg, Bondi blithely asserts that his conduct was inappropriate because the Administration never did what he was intent on determining. His conduct, she writes, was “even worse because he had no basis — the Trump administration has always complied with all court orders.”

This far-fetched insistence underscores the stakes of a single, clean, unexceptionable demonstration of the Administration’s lying ways.

The J.G.G. contempt process threatened to produce exactly what the Administration feared: a clean, authoritative finding that the Justice Department violated a federal court order. Such a finding would have been a decisive judicial check on Trump’s creeping authoritarianism — and a historical account resistant to spin.

Instead, the D.C. Circuit’s prolonged administrative stay and ultimate mandamus order denied the public and history that judgment. Bove is on the bench. The conduct in question is months old; the wind is out of the sails. Apologists for the Administration can continue to present a whitewashed version of events.

The critical question of whether the Administration came into power ready to defy the courts returns to disputed status; whereas, had the Boasberg contempt determination run its course, it likely would have produced a solid showing of Administration lawlessness and lying. Trump has again slipped the noose — and the public and history are the poorer for it.

Talk to you later.

Happy Birthday. Now Prepare to Die.