“The Very Importance of Facts Is Dismissed, or Ignored:” Todd Blanche Whines about Women Judges, Again
Yesterday, just ten minutes after the last career AUSA, Terry Henry, dropped off the Perkins Coie case (using a letter purportedly authored by Doug Dreier, who dropped off the case Tuesday), DOJ filed a motion to disqualify Beryl Howell from the case.
Fair proceedings free from any suggestion of impartiality are essential to the integrity of our country’s judiciary and the need to curtail ongoing improper encroachments of President Trump’s Executive Power playing out across the country. In this case, reasonable observers may well view this Court as insufficiently impartial to adjudicate the meritless challenges to President Trump’s efforts to implement the agenda that the American people elected him to carry out. In fact, this Court has repeatedly demonstrated partiality against and animus towards the President.
The motion is packed with allegations that don’t even make sense. Beryl Howell sinned by:
- Questioning Twitter’s motives for defying a lawful warrant.
- Upholding the gag order in the Twitter case for reasons other than what DOJ claims.
- Disagreeing that Trump’s pardon of an accused cop assailant corrected “a grave national injustice.”
- Finding that Trump had attempted to get Evan Corcoran to break the law for him.
- Correcting Chad Mizelle’s false claims about the Steele dossier by saying, “you cannot be saying that there was nobody involved in the 2016 Trump campaign that had any connection with any Russian; you can’t say that.”
- Noting that Trump lost a lawsuit against Perkins Coie.
The recusal motion says nothing about the fact that Howell oversaw the grand jury investigation of Michael Sussmann, permitting repeated subpoenas to law firms, including Perkins Coie. Beryl Howell treated Trump no better or worse than she did Sussmann.
Perhaps the craziest excuse given for demanding that Howell recuse, though, regurgitated an Elise Stefanik complaint that at a public appearance in 2023, Beryl Howell quoted Heather Cox Richardson about propaganda, without mentioning Trump at all.
This historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose book I’ve been reading . . . cautions in her book’s opening line . . . “America is at a crossroads teetering on the brink of authoritarianism” and she echoes this thought in her closing line, that we are at a time of testing and how it comes out . . . is in our own hands.
(This video was originally posted by one of Steve Bannon’s propagandists.)
In other words, DOJ’s political appointees, including Todd Blanche, are demanding that Beryl Howell recuse from this case because she warned about precisely the kinds of disinformation that DOJ spews in this court filing.
Blanche’s involvement is not just symbolic. This filing was authored by someone in the Deputy Attorney General’s office — Blanche’s office.
Blanche’s involvement matters for two reasons.
First, this is a ploy that Todd Blanche pulled before, back before taxpayers were on the hook to pay him to serve as defense attorney for Donald Trump. Back in September 2023, he moved to disqualify Tanya Chutkan in Trump’s January 6 case because she had already had to deal with multiple January 6 defendants who compared their own conduct to that of Trump (though the complaint would have stood for any DC judge).
President Donald J. Trump, through undersigned counsel, respectfully moves to recuse and disqualify the Honorable Tanya S. Chutkan pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 455(a). Fairness and impartiality are the central tenets of our criminal justice system.
Both a defendant and the public are entitled to a full hearing, on all relevant issues, by a Court that has not prejudged the guilt of the defendant, and whose neutrality cannot be reasonably questioned.
Todd Blanche, when he’s trying to defend Trump’s abuse of power, is making a habit of impugning women judges.
The other reason Blanche’s personal involvement matters is that most of the things he complains about are his own gripes carried over from serving as Trump’s defense attorney. Evan Corcoran testified that Trump deceived him about the classified documents his client was hoarding. Twitter ultimately turned over Trump’s account information, which proved that Trump was holding the weapon — the Twitter account — that almost got Mike Pence murdered. The way that Trump’s false claims led thousands to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power remained at the core of the prosecution of Trump even after SCOTUS had their way with the case.
Central to Perkins Coie’s argument is that Trump’s punitive Executive Order targeting the law firm amounts to a mulligan, an attempt to win legal battles he already lost, including the prosecution of Sussmann.
I think the government admitted to you that this was punitive. That makes a big difference, too, because in the separation of powers analysis, one thing you will look at — we submitted to you — that what they have done is just a mulligan from the things that happened in the judicial system.
Sussmann was indicted and acquitted. President Trump, as a private citizen, sued the law firm; and he lost. The punitive portion, courts mete out punishment, not the Presidents; and courts adjudicate, not Presidents.
Now, Blanche has done the same himself, making his own losses as a defense attorney the business of the United States.
It does nothing but prove that he has a conflict, not that Beryl Howell does.
Because I wouldn’t want anyone to think someone in the Justice Department stayed late to do these, I want to make a minor point about the timestamps in your screen caps. The PDF viewer that you’re using has adjusted those to match your current time zone. The embedded metadata shows the timestamps like this
The current UTC offset for Washington, DC is -04:00 (EDT), so the timestamps show that these were just normal Friday afternoon shenanigans at the Trump DOJ.
[In case anyone is even more pedantic than I am about time zones, the reason that the dates are displaying in UTC is that Dr. Wheeler’s current time zone happens to be +00:00 during Daylight Saving Time]
Thanks, WO. [Good to see you!]
So, the filing for Henry dropping off:
3/21/25 Created: 2:38:53 PM ET // Modified 2:49:21 PM ET
And the Recusal request filing was at:
3/21/25 Created 2:44:40 PM ET // Modified 2:57:13 PM ET
[huh-Henry drop-out was modified after the Recusal request was first created]
Your DST, but not mine yet.
uggg. So does that make my numbers above wrong?
Nope. WO was right, 4 hour time difference now. It’ll be five again in April. Then four again for a period in the fall. Then five again.
The really confusing thing is scheduling Fridays w/Nicole since she’s in AZ which doesn’t switch.
Deny, attack, reverse onto the victim/other person.
Maybe Blanche is not as comfortable deploying standard emotional/intellectual abuse tactics against men – ? Or doesn’t think they will work – tactics for male judges are of course different in someone like Blanche’s world view.
Sigh. It’s all so… unoriginal.
Helpful reminder to keep calling out the behavior.
This goes right along with DOJ asking the DC Apellate Court to order a writ of mandamus against Chutkan for her request that DOGE and Musk hand over details concerning the structure of DOGE, Musk’s role and records about who and how decisions to ax things were made.
A request for mandamus over That? That just advertises juicy details DOGE is actively hiding and is completely, dramatically, overkill.
DOJ knows the DC courts well. Completely ingenious to get their panties bunched and run to the Apellate Court over the dumbest things or try to jump over them and head straight to the Supreme Court.
The actions of DOJ seems really poorly thought out and I’m confused by their ostensible four dimensional legal chess.
Is it that Trump assumed SCOTUS would carry him over the heads of the DC courts and that just isn’t happening?
This is an interesting filing…Seems Musk’s private attorney are saying in a letter to the court that Musk is indeed in charge of DOGE.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.276598/gov.uscourts.dcd.276598.30.0.pdf
This is a great find and tremendously sloppy lawyering I think this is from a twitter employment Lawsuit
In the thread just below this one you’ll see more of that low grade of lawyering. The pool of potential, even marginally competant Trump-friendly lawyers in Justice and elsewhere is shallow, polluted, and wildly overworked at this point. They are in over their heads in every respect. That’s why financially supporting the teams driving these suits is important.
Just checked Just Security’s litigation tracker, and we’re now up to the 133rd “Honeymoon period” case, with only a couple closed so far. I don’t see it slowing down, and this unreal caseload on top of everything else DOJ has to deal with will become a major factor in the attempt to making the wheels come off of the Trump 2.0 juggernaut.
And this site is an important part of that; highlighting weaknesses, flaws, and the catastrophes of this fascist onslaught (both for the sake of historical record and for developing oppositional strategy) is critical work. There’s a “support” box to click above, if you haven’t already.
So on Friday evening The Felon Guy signed an EO targeting big law firms (among others) that do mucho pro bono work to prevent ‘frivolous’ lawsuits. How rich.
To quote Morpheus in The Matrix “fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony”.
If it is as you state that the talent pool at DOJ is ‘shallow, polluted, and wildly overworked at this point’ then why in the AF are the big law firms (at least one at this point) bending the knee when there may be a chance to throw a metric fuck-ton of sand in the gears and at least *slow this madness down?
Are they afraid of having their government tit contracts ‘reviewed’? And can such contracts really account for that sizable a share of their annual income? Order 66 comes to mind – might as well have them attack their own, pro bono of course.
For this strategy of loading up cases (legitimate as I see it) to happen we need to be able to count on the courts to not play politics and not be the partisan hacks I believe a good number to be.
Thanks Addison. It will take decades to clean up our system of Justice, unless it is broken and enough dismantling occurs and makes it impossible to correct. That is the plan of course – disarray and confusion – gluts and backlogs. And unlike Asimov’s Second Law no amount of saying “stop” will work – so is loading up cases the strategy to follow or is it playing into their hands?
Again, I believe it will be up to the courts and I for one am not reassured the system will hold given the appointments made during the mango Mussolini’s first term.
As an aside apperently patel has pulled huge numbers of fbi agents off cases to rush to redact the epstein files. Meanwhile doj released jfk files unredacted with social security numbers. Incompetence seems to be a feature of the trump regime.
Is the latest late Friday night Trump memo an indication of the success of this litigation – the success forces an attempt to slow it down or derail it? IAsuperNAL, but that’s how this reads to me.
WaPo: “ …orders Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to pursue ethics challenges against lawyers who they accuse of bringing meritless cases or making arguments that are not backed up by fact, including in immigration courts.
The memo told Bondi to consider taking actions against law firm partners for perceived misconduct by junior attorneys and to review cases against the government from the past eight years to look for “misconduct that may warrant additional action.””
Sounds like Trump all right – judgements untainted by any hint of impartiality is exactly what he wants. Judgements “free”, it would seem, only of any obligation to the Constitution he only recently swore to defend. “Fair”, only in advantage to himself to the exclusion of all others.
It’s only a Congress packed with the GOP spineless that is between him and an eventual third impeachment.
Good catch; I saw it too. I think it’s a Freudian slip by Blanche’s flunky Chris DeLorenz (although in this DOJ, it could be intentional). Impartiality is to be studiously avoided in Trump’s DOJ and in the judicial system, so that all rulings can be partial (favorable) to Trump’s interests.
The same word choice “error” was repeated in the conclusion of the DOJ motion, in case anybody didn’t get the message: “In order to remove the possibility of any impartiality to these proceedings, Defendants respectfully request that this Court recuse itself…”
Blanche and Co. want Beryl Howell out of the way, because the “possibility of any impartiality to these proceedings” is too dreadful for them to contemplate, because Trump would lose!
Maybe there’s an honest man inside DeLorenz desperately trying to get out…? {grin}
(Playing it straight) I think not. The first two paragraphs of the motion are laden with ludicrous pro-Trump, anti-Howell hyperbole; there’s little pretense of trying to present a dispassionate, well-reasoned, factual argument. DeLorenz is now a full-on Trump zombie lawyer.
And then they go on for a page about how the legal standard is to avoid “even the appearance of impropriety whenever possible”, a standard that the conservatives on SCOTUS have almost completely scuttled.
As long as we are giving close readings, prejudge means to judge before a court process has completed. Many ordinary folks do not understand the time dimesnion of pre- in this word, but I would have thought that a lawyer would use this word precisely.
Marcie’s obsession with detail is why we drop by every day. So, yeah.
We are all living in UTC, just with varying offsets. Marcie’s is zero because she is living in GMT. I am living in the equivalent of Tulsa Time, but much further south and without the nostalgia.
UTC timestamps are large integers- the number of 100 nanosecond intervals since midnight of January 1st, 1601. Microsoft sometimes includes the offset, sometimes not. Timestamps in the registry are QWords that require a bit of a gyration to translate. I find the string format with the “T” in the middle a bit odd, but that is probably just me.
Linux/Unix/Posix timestamps are not so large integers- the number of seconds since midnight of January 1st, 1970. Since even Microsoft uses Linux servers, your OneDrive timestamps in the registry will be a DWord, not a UTC QWord.
Hmm. It seems “pedantic” is a bit of trigger word for me.
Then you have IEEE-1588 time which counts in nanoseconds and also started midnight Jan. 1, 1970. Regarding zones – I live in Hawaii and run a business in California. Hawaii does not do DST, CA does. I’m constantly confused about time. Links to meetings/zooms sometimes correct for my time zone, sometime don’t. I literally have to text people to verify times. Then they answer “yeah, it’s 9AM.” D’oh.
I find the World Time on my iPhone to be quite useful for keeping track.
Me too. Very handy.
I’ve been struggling in deciding where to put this comment. But because it fits with how important facts are, I’ll put it here. It also has me rethinking that weird comment Trump made to Roberts at the SotU address(“Thank you. Thank you again. I won’t forget.”) I know it doesn’t necessarily refer to this, but 3 of the DOGE (sic)s clerked or will clerk for SCOTUS.
To see almost 60 people on the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization, click on the wiki tab for Executive Office of the President and scroll to the bottom of the chart. James Burnham is listed as the General Counsel (Footnotes 44 and 50 give useful info about others and other lawyers: Keenan Kmiec, Jacob Altik, all 3 having clerked or will be clerking for either Roberts or Gorsuch.)
Interestingly, Vince Haley does not show up on the chart for the Executive Office, even though Executive Order 14,170 “directs the USDS Administrator to consult with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy” which I believe is referring to Vince Haley. And I still think it is possible Haley wrote the declaration that Amy Gleason signed on March 14.
Also, the chart does seem to indicate that Marko Elez was rehired as Marcy suspected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_appointments_of_the_second_Trump_administration
“Political appointments of the second Trump administration”
Thanks for this and the link. Hard to wrap my thick skull around this stuff. Hard to believe some of it.
I looked at the chart again and I see Vince Haley now. He’s below Doug Burgum and above Paula White. The links in the chart say he has a staff of 25 in the Eisenhower Bldg. But something else I saw said he’s in the WH. So, it’s hard to know the facts. I think people keep editing or retconning the story.
I am intrigued by your post. You seem to be saying that Roberts is already “in” on the DOGE takeover based on the DOGE team members who clerked for him or Gorsuch, and that Trump knows it, and that Trump is thanking him for that instead of for the Immunity ruling. Is that correct? If so, we are are very deep water indeed,
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There’s a lot of people in this maladministration with connections to Roberts and the RW justices.
I think the immunity ruling is the most likely thing Trump was referring to when thanking Roberts. But I think it is worrisome that DOGE (sic)s have clerked or will be clerking for SCOTUS. However, it is useful to know about this.
The wiki below is also helpful. Under the Resources tab, scrolling to the bottom, there is a chart listing 89 people as Organization Members.
It gives brief details about backgrounds, assignments, and relationships. For example, just as commenter Charlie_on_the_MTA previously suggested, Steve Davis seems to run day-to-day operations. And Steve’s wife, Nicole Hollander, was tasked to cancel leases on thousands of federal buildings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency#Known_DOGE_employees
“Department of Government Efficiency”
Similar – you tube – MSNBC, Laurence Tribe slams Trump’s attack on judges
Sorry but I’m not sure who Reposted this THREAD from
Adam Bonica [Professor of Political Science at Stanford]:
https://bsky.app/profile/adambonica.bsky.social/post/3lkommsirqk2q
March 18, 2025 at 5:32 PM
It’s a shame the GOP legislature isn’t doing it’s constitutional duty.
Watching NC Senate and House reps flail about, particularly Tillis who has long leaned into a contrarian persona, makes me wonder if “judiciary” or “judge” is a very strong group ID, strong enough to overcome the normal human cognitive anchoring to other identity areas like “Republican”, whereas “congress” is weaker than other identities. So now we see “judiciary” identity kick in, while R legislature = walk up to the line of breaking with an identity [this is a very strong internal state, not a reality state – the actual R identity was hollowed out by parasitic wasps a while ago], then can’t do it. Or maybe it’s just the death threats.
The GOP legislature is ensconced within the executive branch, either silent or cheering it on, while the executive branch pushes against the fence that separates it from the judicial branch — a fence substantially weakened by the US Supreme Court’s Immunity ruling. Meanwhile, outside the fence, law firms, media organizations, and universities are complicit in the dismantling of the fence, further extending the reach of the executive, and ultimately the power of the GOP.
Is that one way to look at it?
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:
https://bsky.app/profile/whitehouse.senate.gov/post/3lktaodvpn22u
March 20, 2025 at 1:42 PM