The worst of the worst. Brings a whole new meaning to F**k you
https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/tell-t ... irect=true
"I’m going to keep coming back to this case. It’s about the first migrant rendition flights to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, and it is essential to the rule of law.
Why? It was the first known instance where the Trump regime openly defied a federal court order.
As a refresher, back in March, Judge James Boasberg, who is the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, had ordered planes headed to El Salvador’s CECOT prison to turn around, and for no other planes to take off until he could determine of the legality of the renditions and deportations.
To get around this, the Justice Department lied to the judge about what it knew and what the government had planned, and then the White House ignored his direct order and the planes landed in El Salvador anyway. That was a fateful moment with huge consequences: all but one person from those planes—Kilmar Abrego García—remain in CECOT.
Yesterday, we saw the first documentary evidence in the form of contemporaneous texts and emails about what was going on behind the scenes as all this played out.
And they are damning.
The fate of our system could hang on this case
Ours is a system governed by the rule of law. It assumes that the executive and legislative branches, when challenged in court, will abide by the decisions of the judiciary, even if they don’t agree with them. The remedy in all cases is to appeal, and there are consequences for defying court orders.
This case tests the limits of this system. The day after learning of the migrant flights that failed to turn around, I wrote a piece called “Crossing the Line.” Here’s how that began:
Our federal courts form the last guardrail against autocratic rule in the U.S. And the Trump administration hates that about them. Because the courts keep issuing orders stopping the administration from doing whatever it wants, legal experts have warned that a clash is inevitable. The fear is the White House would one day simply defy a direct court order and plunge us into a full blown constitutional crisis.
Many don’t know this quite yet, but that day came yesterday.
We have been in a full-blown constitutional crisis ever since, but it has been a “slow boil.” By this I mean, from that moment on, and in other cases, the government went about defying court orders while pretending that it was not. To this day, for example, Attorney General Pam Bondi still denies that the government deported individuals and flights took off in defiance of a direct court order, even though we know that they did.
But pinning the government down, as one judge recently aptly described it, has been “like nailing jello to a wall.” Lawyers have made clever arguments, tried to distinguish between oral and written orders (even though there is no distinction), and passed the buck back and forth among different departments to force the courts to play Whack-a-MAGA.
But things began to unravel, rather fittingly, from the inside out. In late June, a Justice Department whistleblower named Erez Reuveni bravely came forward. In a lengthy written complaint, Reuveni alleged that Emil Bove, a senior DoJ official and Trump hatchetman who was also Trump’s personal legal counsel through his criminal cases, was one of the principal proponents of a plan within the Department to defy the courts.
Specifically, in a meeting with a number of lawyers, Bove stated that the Department might need to tell the courts “f*** you” if they tried to block deportations.
Here are the details, as I highlighted in my piece on June 27 about the whistleblower complaint, citing reporting by the New York Times:
A pivotal meeting occurred on March 14, when Mr. Bove, a senior official in the deputy attorney general’s office, spoke bluntly about the administration’s plans. He informed his subordinates that Mr. Trump would soon invoke the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly fly a group of immigrants out of the country that weekend….
Mr. Bove “stressed to all in attendance that the planes needed to take off no matter what,” according to Mr. Reuveni’s account. Mr. Bove then broached “the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated.”
“Bove stated that D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*** you’ and ignore any such order,” according to the account. “Mr. Reuveni perceived that others in the room looked stunned, and he observed awkward, nervous glances among people in the room. Silence overtook the room.”
As well it should have. A plan by Department officials to defy the courts in advance is certainly unethical and grounds for disbarment, and is quite possibly also an illegal conspiracy (though I’ll defer to criminal law experts on that one).
And if the Justice Department’s policy is to defy the courts and tell them to pound sand, that knocks the legs out of our whole system of government. Federal courts, after all, don’t have any real ability to compel a rogue executive branch to comply with the law if the Justice Department itself is on the side of the usurpers. Federal courts don’t have a police force they can call on to arrest those who break the law. Instead, they rely on federal marshals to execute their orders. And those marshals work for the Justice Department.
Even if the courts hired private attorneys to prosecute contempt cases because the Justice Department can’t or won’t do it, what would happen if the White House simply shrugged and said it wouldn’t obey the outcome?
Our system, for better or worse, relies upon 1) good faith compliance with court orders or, at the very least, 2) an uncompromised Justice Department to enforce them. But if the DoJ’s position is to say “f*** you” to the courts, our system clearly has neither.
Catching Bove in his lie
Until yesterday, this was just a case of competing accounts, Reuveni’s word against Emil Bove and others in the chain of command at the Justice Department. During Bove’s recent judicial confirmation hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) asked Bove directly about whether he ever said they might have to tell the courts “f*** you.” (If you can believe it, Bove is now nominated for an appellate court seat on the Third Circuit.)
Bove, clearly walking a careful line, replied that he didn’t recall. Here’s the exchange, which is quite remarkable.
Sen. Schiff was right to zero in on the fact that someone like Bove ought to know whether he said something like this at a meeting—unless he uses the phrase so frequently that he really couldn’t recall if he’d said it in that meeting. After all, no lawyer should ever, ever say such a thing about the courts. It should be easy to declare, “Absolutely not, I would never suggest openly defying the courts.”
Bove knew there were other lawyers in the room who heard him say those words, and they might one day corroborate Reuveni’s account. Bove was under oath at his confirmation hearing, so this was the best dodge he could manage without committing perjury.
Enter the hard evidence. Yesterday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, produced receipts in the form of emails, texts and documents provided to him by Reuveni. Said Durbin,
I’m releasing texts, emails, and documents regarding a Justice Department whistleblower’s allegations of misconduct by Mr. Emil Bove, a Trump judicial nominee.
Erez Reuveni was a career Justice Department attorney who vigorously defended President Trump’s immigration policies during his first Administration.
So, when this loyal public servant came forward with serious allegations of misconduct by Emil Bove, I knew it was out of principle—not politics.
Senators raised these allegations at Emil Bove’s judicial nomination hearing, and he offered only carefully wordsmithed responses.
So, I asked for documentation from Mr. Reuveni to further substantiate his claims.
That’s what I’m releasing to the public today.
What the receipts reveal
Legal writer Chris Geidner did a great job lining up key emails and texts from Reuveni against the bad faith, lies and contemptuous defiance of Judge Boasberg’s direct orders, and I am summarizing that below.
Geidner notes that when Boasberg began the hearing at 5 pm on Saturday, March 15, none of the three relevant flights had taken off. A lawyer named Drew Ensign, who was Reuveni’s superior, told Judge Boasberg that he didn’t know of any more planned deportations that weekend.
When Reuveni’s colleague heard Ensign say that, he texted Reuveni confirming, “That was just not true.” Reuveni replied, “About to enter the find out phase following f*** around.”
”I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know,” said Reuveni’s colleague. And later, “He knows there are plans for [Alien Enemy Act] removals within the next 24 hours.
“Yes he does,” Reuveni replied.
Bottom line? Ensign flat out lied to the court. And his underlings, including Reuveni, were texting each other in real time about it.
That lie caused something important to happen next. Boasberg ordered a brief recess so that the parties could find out whether there were any more flights planned. Geidner, who was following the hearing live, posted on Bluesky that the plaintiff’s lawyer’s understanding was that there were two flights leaving or already gone. Time was of the essence.
In fact, the flights had already taken off.
Judge Boasberg reconvened the hearing at 6 pm. As Politico reported, Ensign again represented, apparently falsely, that he did not know about additional flights. “I do not have additional details I can provide at this time,” he said.
Judge Boasberg then ordered the government not to deport the immigrants, telling Ensign, “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
Ensign did not ensure that at all, as I’ll discuss below.
While Ensign argued at the reconvened hearing, Reuveni and his colleague continued to text each other. They knew where the case was headed.
“This doesn’t end with anything but a nationwide injunction,” wrote Reuveni. “And a decision point on f*** you.” (Note: there’s the first contemporaneous confirmation of the “tell the courts f*** you” statement by Bove.)
“[It’s] a question if drew [Ensign] gets out without a sanction,” his colleague answered.
While Ensign didn’t do anything to ensure the flights didn’t depart or were turned around, Reuveni tried. As Geidner notes, “Reuveni acted expeditiously, sending an email…to relevant parties across the government.”
Here’s that email, names redacted but many with DHS email addresses. Note that at 6:46 pm, before the planes had landed, Reuveni was asking directly about “those involving folks in the air.”
Later that evening, it began to sink in with Reuveni that the Department of Homeland Security really was going to openly defy a direct court order. Per Geidner, “By 90 minutes later, however, Reuveni knew that flights in the air had landed—and had not turned around. He knew there was trouble.”
He texted with a colleague about it.
“Guess we are going to say f*** you to the court,” Reuveni texted, adding sarcastically, “Super.”
”Well Pamela Jo Bondi is,” his colleague replied. “Not you.”
A sad postscript followed. As Geidner writes,
Reuveni spent the next 16 hours trying to get an answer. The world learned that flights had landed and people were turned over to El Salvador. Questions swirled about what had happened.
In Reuveni’s disclosures, we learned that, on Sunday afternoon, March 16, Yaakov Roth, the acting head of the Civil Division at the time, wrote that the principal associate deputy attorney general—Emil Bove—told Homeland Security overnight that “the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior the court’s minute order was permissible under the law and the court's order.”
This disclosure answers a long mystery about who in the Justice Department gave the go-ahead to violate the order. It was Emil Bove. He was the official who told DHS that any flights in the air and out of U.S. airspace before the written order came down could continue and deplane the passengers. But that was still a knowing violation of Judge Boasberg’s direct verbal order given to Drew Ensign.
Bove knew there was no difference between a verbal order and a minute order commemorating it, yet he still advised defiance. In fact, as the evidence now shows, that was Bove’s plan all along.
Here’s a copy of that email:
Smear campaign
One further point. Reuveni’s receipts also reveal a concerted campaign by the Trump regime to discredit Kilmar Abrego García as a criminal and a terrorist. Reuveni refused to go along, and he was fired for it.
As Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted, “DHS officials apparently were pushing to characterize Abrego Garcia as an MS-13 ‘leader’ before any evidence of this had appeared. And Reuveni expressly warned against doing this absent such evidence.”
There was one exchange on March 31 of this year, when the government was submitting briefs in the case. Per Sargent,
Up to this point, the emails show, ICE had declared Abrego Garcia was in MS-13, and officials were scrambling to pin down the basis for that determination.
In the March 31 exchange, James Percival, senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was debating with other top officials—at DHS, DOJ, and State—what could be said to the court about Abrego Garcia. One of those officials was Reuveni.
“Can we say the following?” Percival asked, listing several things he wanted the administration to say about Abrego Garcia, including, “This guy is a leader of MS-13.”
The email he referred to is below, with the MS-13 bit highlighted:
Reuveni replied that the assertion could not be made without some kind of declaration from ICE on Abrego’s status. “If we can get a declaration to that effect, yes,” Reuveni answered.
Teams within the Justice Department searched for anything that could support that statement, but they couldn’t find it.
Sargent further observed,
n the March 31 email, Percival also asked whether it was OK to assert that Abrego Garcia was not “in immediate danger” in CECOT. As Durbin’s office notes, this sought permission to make the “unsupported” assertion that Abrego Garcia was safe in the Salvadoran prison without “assurances” to that effect. Indeed, the emails show Reuveni prodding other officials for guarantees of Abrego Garcia’s safety and getting little back.
We now know from Abrego’s family’s recent filing with the court that he alleges he was tortured while in CECOT and was in immediate danger.
Reuveni continued to challenge the evidence around the underlying MS-13 claim—something one judge who looked at the evidence and ordered Abrego’s release found as unreliable “double hearsay.” Sargent writes,
According to Reuveni’s complaint, he continued raising concerns with top officials—at DOJ, DHS, and the State Department—about the lack of evidence supporting the MS-13 claim. And the emails show Reuveni sharply warning them that failing to bring Abrego Garcia back could have terrible legal consequences and would create “very bad law.”
You might recall how Reuveni’s story with this case ends. He ultimately refused to sign on to an appellate brief that characterized Abrego as a terrorist—a claim Reueveni correctly asserted was without basis. For this, he was placed on administrative leave for “failing to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.”
Why isn’t anyone being held to account?
There’s a troubling aspect to all of this, beyond the blatant lying and bad faith defiance of Trump officials. Judge Boasberg had been working hard to hold various officials responsible for violating his direct orders through contempt proceedings. So why hasn’t anything happened to anyone?
Judge Boasberg, it now seems, has been intentionally stymied in his efforts. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which against the odds had two of the only three Trump appointees in that Circuit on its panel—Judges Rao and Katsas—ruled 2-1 to issue an “administrative stay” of Boasberg’s contempt-related order.
That stay has been in place since April 18, stalling any progress with no reason provided. This is frankly unacceptable and wrong. As the dissenter, Judge Cornelia Pillard, correctly noted, “In the absence of an appealable order or any clear and indisputable right to relief that would support mandamus, there is no ground for an administrative stay.”
The new evidence produced by Sen. Durbin, now part of the public record, should be grounds enough to lift that stay. There is now clear, documentary proof that the Justice Department lied and instructed the government to defy a direct court order. Contempt proceedings are the only logical result.
It’s now been nearly two months that the proceedings have been frozen. With so much time elapsed, it’s fair to ask questions. Are these Trump judges there to protect justice or the Justice Department? How long can they refuse to act? Reuveni came forward with his allegations at great personal cost and risk, and now his clear evidence cannot be shunted aside."
David Bonn 