‘Clear abuse’: Appellate court thwarts Judge Boasberg’s plan to investigate top Trump officials
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Boasberg attempted to pursue criminal proceedings against top administration officials, but the Justice Department intervened, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to ground the activist judge’s “endless fishing expedition.”
In its petition to the appellate court, the DOJ accused the district court of plunging forward “in a doubly unconstitutional manner: by conducting its own criminal investigation (contra the separation of powers) and doing so in a way that appears designed to punish Defendants for their successful mandamus petition (contra the Due Process Clause).”
The DOJ argued further that Boasberg’s order was “also incoherent on its own terms,” noting “there was no willful violation as a matter of law because the TRO did not clearly forbid the conduct at issue.”
On Monday, a three-judge panel on the appellate court, comprising two Trump appointees and an Obama appointee, crushed Boasberg’s dreams of raking Trump officials over the coals in criminal contempt proceedings in a 2-1 decision.
“The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy,” Judge Neomi Rao noted in the opinion for the court. “These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion, as the district court’s order said nothing about transferring custody of the plaintiffs and therefore lacks the clarity to support criminal contempt based on the transfer of custody.”
Rao said that Boasberg repeatedly “moved the goalposts”; suffered from an incredible lack of clarity, at least in his construction of his restraining order; “assumed an improper jurisdiction antagonistic to the Executive Branch”; and had pursued an “intrusive” and “improper” investigation that would inevitably terminate in a “legal dead end.”
Boasberg did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
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