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Trump’s lawyers are (finally) going on offense. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a tantalizing story headlined, “DOJ sues all federal judges in Maryland over deportation order.”

The Chief Judge for the District of Maryland entered a standing order granting automatic deportation stays for any new immigration cases filed in that district. And guess where they’re all being filed now?

Instead of backing down or enduring endless appeals, yesterday, Trump’s DOJ sued the entire Maryland bench for interfering with executive foreign policy authority. Every single judge was named as an individual defendant. I’m not sure that’s ever happened before.

It’s one thing to appeal a ruling. That’s normal. But suing every judge in the district is doctrinal civil war. Beyond legal positioning, it argues that certain judicial practices themselves are unlawful executive interference and beyond the courts’ constitutional authority.

The new lawsuit focuses just on the legality of the standing order, which grants relief to unknown future parties even before their cases are filed. Which makes it a lot more like a law than like judging.

Navarro, 75, was the first White House official in history to be imprisoned for a contempt of Congress conviction.

He served a four-month sentence in a federal prison in Miami last year.

By contrast, the very Department of Justice that set a chilling precedent with its prosecutions of Navarro and Bannon (who also served four months in a federal prison in Connecticut last year) gave itself a pass when then-Attorney General Merrick Garland similarly was held in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena to hand over embarrassing audio recordings of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.

As a senior White House adviser on Jan. 6, 2021, Navarro’s conviction should have had a higher bar than Bernal’s or any other former adviser’s.

But the Biden DOJ and one of their pet DC judges, Obama-appointed District Judge Amit Mehta, ignored Navarro’s legitimate concerns about executive privilege and punished him for his loyalty to his boss, President Trump. ...

More evidence is expected to emerge about the scheme to target Trump and his allies while covering up for Joe Biden. Internal FBI emails and documents continue to surface now that the Trump administration has access to hidden troves of information, and Republicans have control of Congress, with a newfound ruthless determination to hold wrongdoers to account.

Lawfare’s aim is to pervert due process, to use officers of the courts to act unfairly and unjustly in the name of the law, and thus, under color of law.

This is exactly what you saw in the several cases brought against Mr. Trump in New York State in 2024, a three-ring circus of process-abuse engineered by the “Joe Biden” White House, coordinated with Merrick Garland’s DOJ (through Deputy AG Lisa Monaco), with assists from NY AG Letitia James and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Ditto the RICO case attempted in Atlanta under Fulton County DA Fani Willis, a spectacular botch. And ditto, the cases brought under Special Counsel Jack Smith in Florida and DC, also badly botched.

The slovenly ineptitude of these cases was really something to behold, including the sordid romantic complications around Fani Willis and her chosen chief prosecutor, “boyfriend” Nathan Wade, a divorce lawyer with no experience in criminal law. Throw in the disgraceful, self-conflicted antics of the Judges Kaplan, Engoron, and Merchan in the New York cases, and the oafish conduct of Jack Smith and his assistants in Florida and DC — and what you get is a demonstration of how crude an instrument sheer lying actually is in the practice of law, and how easily it breaks against the people using it.

Some of these characters are just now coming to grief: Letitia James faces a DOJ action on depriving Mr. Trump’s rights, and SC Jack Smith is under active FBI investigation for evidence tampering and other crimes of process abuse. It would be fitting for all the prosecutors and the three judges in the New York cases to face similar inquiries.

The phrase under color of law establishes liability for abuse of power for officials vested with the terrible authority for upending people’s lives. The phrase “deprivation of rights” appears explicitly in federal statutes primarily focused on holding government officials and others acting with apparent legal authority accountable for willfully violating an individual’s constitutional or legal rights. The most relevant statute is 18 U.S.C. § 242, which directly criminalizes such conduct. Additional statutes, such as 18 U.S.C. § 241, 18 U.S.C. § 250, 18 U.S.C. § 2243, and 18 U.S.C. § 2244. That’s where all this is going, even if all that’s coming out of the DOJ and FBI for the moment is that ominous silence.

> While you were partying (crying about antisemitism), Rachel Bovard was studying the blade (focusing on real problems like full spectrum lawfare pointed at Trump). Funny name for a lawfare op, btw.

I literally don’t care who Tucker had on his podcast. Joe Biden’s government tried to judicially assault us all out of existence, and was very close to doing it.

> Biglaw firms are no longer going after Trump.

Biglaw let leftist impact litigators rely on their cohorts of young liberal associates looking for a break from securities litigation to help with the big cases. In the end this was a force-multiplier for the legal left, and one of its main structural advantages. It seems to be diminishing.