DOJ sues DC Bar Association over ethics enforcement alleging 'blatantly partisan arm of leftist cause'

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the District of Columbia Bar over its efforts to discipline Trump administration lawyers, escalating the department’s feud with legal ethics authorities, reported The New York Times.

The lawsuit defends Jeffrey Clark, a government lawyer in the first Trump administration who sought to undo the results of the 2020 presidential race, and Ed Martin, a current senior Justice Department official. The suit was filed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Stanley E. Woodward Jr., the No. 3 official at the Justice Department.

In accompanying statements, Mr. Blanche accused the D.C. Bar of acting as a “blatantly partisan arm of leftist causes.” Mr. Woodward said that the bar would “no longer be permitted to probe sensitive executive branch deliberations,” adding that lawyers in the federal government must “be free to share their candid legal advice with their bosses and colleagues.”

That position — that lawyers at the Justice Department or other federal agencies are above scrutiny by legal ethics officials — is likely to be challenged by a host of legal profession entities.

The lawsuit centers on the long-running battle over the D.C. Bar’s effort to disbar Mr. Clark, an environmental lawyer who had no formal role in investigating elections, over his push to promote Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions of fraud in Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory in 2020.

While the lawsuit is focused on Mr. Clark, Justice Department leaders in the suit also argued in defense of Mr. Martin. Two months ago, the D.C. Bar filed disciplinary charges against Mr. Martin over what it cast as his misconduct in seeking to punish Georgetown University’s law school.

Mr. Martin has spearheaded efforts by President Trump to use the Justice Department to pursue the president’s perceived enemies — what the administration claims are corrective measures intended to end “weaponization” of law enforcement by Democrats.

Increasingly, the Trump administration has clashed with state and local bars, as interest groups and some lawyers argue that unethical conduct by government lawyers acting on behalf of the Trump administration should be investigated and potentially punished.

The Justice Department is pushing forward a proposal to try to stall or delay state and city bars from conducting ethics investigations of its lawyers, and the new lawsuit argues that the D.C. Bar is among the entities that has shown partisan bias.

To back up that claim, the lawsuit points to how the D.C. Bar handled the case of Kevin E. Clinesmith, a former F.B.I. lawyer who pleaded guilty to making a false statement when he altered an email to try to justify court-ordered surveillance of a former 2016 Trump campaign adviser. After his plea, Mr. Clinesmith had his bar license suspended for a year.

The suit called Mr. Clinesmith’s punishment a “slap on the wrist” for suborning unlawful surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and compared it to the effort to disbar Mr. Clark for “attempting to tell a lie” about the 2020 election.

The lawsuit also invokes the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision granting partial immunity to presidents, suggesting that if a president has immunity, lawyers working for him in the government are also protected from ethical discipline.

“The president’s constitutionally required immunity would provide little protection if executive branch attorneys could be targeted for internal executive branch deliberations,” the lawsuit argued.

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'Murdaugh murders' will have a redo in South Carolina

South Carolina’s top court undid the murder convictions against Alex Murdaugh, the lawyer a jury had found guilty of murdering his wife and one of his sons in a trial that captivated the country, reported The New York Times.

In a unanimous opinion, the State Supreme Court said that “shocking jury interference” by a court clerk who oversaw jurors during the 2023 trial meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions and life sentence must be overturned.

Mr. Murdaugh, 57, will remain in prison because he is also serving decades-long prison sentences after pleading guilty to stealing millions of dollars from his law firm and his former clients. While he has admitted to embezzlement, he has long maintained — including during testimony at his trial — that he did not kill his wife, Maggie, 52, and their younger son, Paul, 22.

The South Carolina attorney general's office, which prosecuted the case, will retry Mr. Murdaugh for the killings.

The surprise reversal of Mr. Murdaugh’s murder convictions followed nearly five years of whirlwind drama that began in one of South Carolina’s least populous counties and grew to capture global attention. In the end, the trial — one of the highest profile in the state — was upended by a small-town clerk who could not resist injecting herself into the spectacle.

Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers hailed the decision, Alex has said from Day 1 that he did not kill his wife and son,” the lawyers, Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, said in a statement. “We look forward to a new trial conducted consistent with the Constitution.”

The Murdaugh murders, as they came to be known, took place in June 2021 on the Murdaugh family’s hunting estate, in a rural part of South Carolina’s Lowcountry.

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CREATORS: One of the Worst Court Decisions in History

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 12, 2026

The U.S. government detained and deported 25-year-old Brian Jose Morales Garcia to Mexico in April. That doesn't sound like breaking news in 2026, except Garcia was born in Denver.

Garcia told The Texas Tribune that he explained to police and immigration agents that he was a U.S. citizen and that he had a copy of his birth certificate and his Social Security card at his home in Austin, Texas. It didn't matter; he was shipped to Mexico.

Garcia's name may not long be remembered, but the government's disregard for individual rights and contempt for human rights will not soon be forgotten.

Some would like to pretend, or maybe don't know, that this conduct is not unprecedented. There was a time in this country when the government incarcerated thousands and thousands of American citizens who were not accused of a crime with the imprimatur of the highest court in the land.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, former President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to remove over 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of whom were American citizens, from their homes and force them into American prison camps throughout the United States.

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese American Fred Korematsu tried to join the military and was turned away because of his ancestry. He was later fired from his job for the same reason.

Korematsu was arrested for failing to evacuate to a prison camp. He was convicted and Korematsu and his family were interned in Topaz, Utah, where the government had set up one of 10 prison camps.

Korematsu appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found "That there were members of the group who retained loyalties to Japan has been confirmed by investigations made subsequent to the exclusion. Approximately five thousand American citizens of Japanese ancestry refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and to renounce allegiance to the Japanese Emperor and several thousand evacuees requested repatriation to Japan."

As a result, in December 1944, the high court ruled 6 to 3 against Korematsu, declaring that the incarceration was not caused by racism — it was justified as a "military necessity."

Justice Robert Jackson, who would later prosecute war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany, complained about the lack of any evidence to justify the incarceration, writing: "the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination ... The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

It turns out that Justice Jackson was right. It wasn't just that the government didn't have evidence; the evidence that was presented was knowingly false and misleading. The real evidence was hidden from Korematsu, his lawyers and the Supreme Court.

According to the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, as the Department of Justice began searching for evidence to support the Army's claims that Japanese Americans were a threat, they "found precisely the opposite — that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, the FCC, the Office of Naval Intelligence and other authoritative intelligence agencies categorically denied that Japanese Americans had committed any wrongdoing. These official reports were never presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, having been intentionally suppressed."

Ultimately, after nearly 50 years, Korematsu's conviction was overturned based on the misconduct of the government's attorneys. In a statement as important today as it was in 1942, Korematsu told the court after his conviction was overturned, "According to the Supreme Court decision regarding my case, being an American citizen was not enough. They say you have to look like one ... I thought that this decision was wrong and I still feel that way. As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing."

The Korematsu decision was the law of the land for 64 years. The decision was generally considered one of the worst decisions in American history. The decision was formally overturned in 2018.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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NYPD no longer reviewing all stop and frisk encounters as required by court order

More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal.

But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for a key part of an aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers, reported ProPublica.

The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.

In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor.

The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams.

The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops.

The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall.

Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents.

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Snyder: A new vision of how criminal JUSTICE might work

 Rachel Louise Snyder writes in The New York Times:

The avenues that lead women to jail tend to differ from those for men. Criminologists have long understood this. What happens with women is often a layering of trauma and abuse. They might have economic instability or mental health challenges that allow them to be exploited by violent partners. They might exchange sex for food or housing, and then get arrested for any number of infractions: prostitution, trespassing, drugs. The criminal-justice researcher Stephanie Kennedy calls these “crimes of survival.”

These avenues have contributed to shocking rates of incarceration for women: Between 1978 and 2015, the number of women in state prisons has grown by 834 percent. The overwhelming majority are primary caregivers. When a woman goes to prison, the downstream effects can be staggering: children might enter foster care, itself often a traumatic system. Aging parents might be put into subpar facilities, or have to find alternative care and housing. All too often, the cost of such upheaval results in a cycle of crime, incarceration, addiction, poverty and broken families.

Courts have long struggled with how to respond. The question is: Can we create a system of justice that looks wholly different from what most of us imagine when it comes to crime and punishment, while still demanding accountability from perpetrators? What if court were a place that afforded someone the opportunity for a complete reset, with entryways to jobs, housing, education? What if instead of punishing people who’ve been broken many times over, we helped to heal them?

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Bail reform being dismantled across the country

According to the  Marshal Project, in 2021 the Illinois' legislature passed a bill abolishing cash bail and replacing it with a system in which prosecutors can seek detention based on public-safety or flight-risk findings. At the time, the rationale for the change was largely built on questioning the logic of wealth-based detention. Commenters argued that a rich person should not have a special right to leave jail compared to a poorer person accused of the same crime.

Earlier this month, after the killing of a Chicago police officer whose alleged shooter had been released on electronic monitoring while awaiting trial in another case, Republican lawmakers renewed calls to change the law, arguing in part that the state needed to come into line with President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting “cashless bail.” But the plans that have been floated have not sought to restore money bail, but rather proposed new means of revoking pretrial release, or creating a presumption of detention for people with violent convictions.

Similar legislative efforts to increase pretrial detention outright have also gained momentum across the country. In New Hampshire, a rollback of the state’s earlier bail reforms lowered the standard prosecutors must meet to deny bail, and state officials have pointed to rising jail populations as proof the new approach is working. Later this month, voters in Alabama will decide whether to expand the list of charges for which judges can deny bail. Similarly, in November, voters in Indiana will vote on a constitutional amendment that would dramatically expand judges’ ability to hold people pretrial if they determine that no conditions of release could reasonably protect public safety.

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Once vaunted DOJ needs incentives to find new talent

 

The Justice Department is taking a new tack to overcome hurdles in attracting qualified legal talent and to prevent current lawyers from leaving: offering signing and retention bonuses throughout the Civil Division, reported Bloomberg Law.

New vacancy postings show signing bonuses of $25,000 are newly available to staff offices investigating youth transgender treatments and litigating the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

The financial enticements are an apparent first for a department that in previous years would be inundated with resumes from lawyers willing to take significant salary reductions compared to private sector legal practice. Padding lawyers’ biweekly paychecks signals a division growing more desperate to stave off further departures of valuable legal minds, including those who’ve expressed discomfort with defending the president’s policies from a slew of lawsuits.

Further, the head of the Civil Division—which plays a crucial role advancing and protecting the president’s policies in court—informed all his attorneys Monday that they’ll begin receiving a “retention incentive allowance” ranging from around $60 to $220 every pay period through Thanksgiving, according to an internal email reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

Trial attorney vacancies posted on DOJ’s website Tuesday for the Civil Division’s recently created enforcement and affirmative litigation branch describe in bold print “a signing bonus of up to $25,000" that may be awarded to “well-qualified candidates.” The job advertisements, which would support a DOJ team that’s been repeatedly losing in court over efforts to subpoena pediatric hospitals for sensitive data on minors prescribed drugs for gender dysphoria, instruct applicants that time is of the essence.

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