President Donald Trump‘s top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., has sent a letter to the nonprofit behind Wikipedia — the free online encyclopedia “anyone can edit,” according to the website — accusing it of “masking propaganda that influences public opinion” and “permitting information manipulation” in benefit of “foreign powers,” the letter says.

Ed Martin, who is the president’s nominee to oversee the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, wrote that the Justice Department would be probing the “content manipulation” to see if Wikimedia Foundation was “engaging in a series of activities” that could violate its “obligations under Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code,” which is what ultimately gives the organization its ability to operate as a nonprofit exempt from paying taxes.

“Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States,” Martin alleged.

“Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission,” the interim U.S. attorney said. “In addition, Wikipedia’s operations are directed by its board that is composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers. Again, educational content is directionally neutral; but information received by my Office demonstrates that Wikipedia’s informational management policies benefit foreign powers.”

In what might seem like a weeks-removed bout of deja vu, a lawyer representing the Trump administration was harshly quizzed — and seemingly hardly believed — by a judge on Tuesday during oral arguments over the Pentagon’s planned transgender ban on service members.

During the hearing, Circuit Judge Cornelia T.L. Pillard, a Barack Obama appointee, was obviously and audibly askance of arguments advanced by U.S. Department of Justice attorney Jason Manion.

“How can you say that?” the judge asked the DOJ attorney at the outset — scorn apparent — taking issue with the government’s perspective out of the gate.

Manion, for his part, is no stranger to judicial dressing-downs.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s weekend order that blocked the Trump administration from carrying out certain deportations under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) has been flamed by the Justice Department as an “unprecedented injunction” that is “fatally premature,” according to the DOJ, as the applicants have “improperly skipped over the lower courts before asking this one for relief,” it says.

“This Court is ‘a court of review, not first view,”” wrote Solicitor General D. John Sauer in the DOJ’s response to the Supreme Court order, which was handed down early Saturday morning.

“Yet the application insists on judicial review in reverse,” Sauer said. “It calls for this Court to be the first to resolve due-process challenges to the adequacy of notice that designated enemy aliens receive, on behalf of a putative class that no court below has certified, on a nonexistent record.”

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Ethics

Former DOJ lawyer faces disbarment for entanglement in ‘one of the largest kleptocracy schemes in history’

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 17, 2025, 3:07 pm CDT

A lawyer who worked for the U.S. Department of Justice is facing disbarment after pleading guilty for his role in an illegal foreign influence scheme that allegedly stemmed from his friendship and legal work for hip-hop artist Prakazrel “Pras” Michel.

Lawyer George A. Higginbotham, a former senior congressional affairs specialist at the DOJ, prepared fake loan documents, investment agreements and consulting agreements to hide the source of tens of millions of dollars intended to be used to lobby the U.S. government, according to the April 16 opinion by the Appellate Division’s Second Judicial Department of the New York Supreme Court.

The Legal Profession Blog published highlights.

Higginbotham’s work was intended to facilitate lobbying for the extradition of a political dissident to China and to resolve an investigation of a foreign national who orchestrated a multibillion-dollar embezzlement scheme involving a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.

Higginbotham was working on behalf of Michel, who wanted help with his dealings with the foreign national, Jho Low, according to Higginbotham’s testimony, as reported by Reuters, at Michel’s trial in April 2023.

Higginbotham entangled himself in a conspiracy to avoid prosecution “in one of the largest kleptocracy schemes in history,” the appeals court said. “Anything less than a disbarment is unwarranted.”

Higginbotham pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to make false statements to a bank in November 2018, according to a press release. He did not influence any aspect of the DOJ investigation involving the investment company known as 1MDB.

Higginbotham was sentenced to probation in November 2023 and ordered to forfeit $70,000, the amount of money that he was paid after submitting invoices for work in the scheme.

Michel was convicted of conspiracy and other charges in April 2023 for using straw donors in the lobbying campaign.

Low was convicted and sentenced in absentia to 10 years in a Kuwaiti prison, the New York Post reported in March 2023.

See also:

Despite lyrics mistake by AI, lawyer wasn’t ineffective for using tech in rapper’s case, federal judge says

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will quickly appeal a court order aimed at prying open the internal structure of the beleaguered pseudo-agency helmed by Elon Musk, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a late Thursday court filing.

In a 13-page ruling handed down on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, a Barack Obama appointee, directed titular U.S. DOGE Service Administrator Amy Gleason to sit for a deposition. The group was also ordered to provide certain documents and answer limited questions issued by nonpartisan government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

The underlying lawsuit is an effort to enforce Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests against the Trump administration’s intra-governmental fraud-and-waste-focused organization. DOGE, in turn, has maintained “it is not an agency subject to FOIA,” Cooper noted.

The court disagreed and entered an injunction requiring expedited processing of CREW’s FOIA requests against DOGE. The plaintiffs then moved for summary judgment on the lawsuit and, seeking a quick bit of finality, moved for expedited discovery.

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Attorney General

DOJ opposes court-ordered return of immigrant, suspends lawyer who said he shouldn’t have been deported

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 7, 2025, 2:23 pm CDT

Updated: The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay a federal judge’s order to return an immigrant mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador in Central America—a move that followed the department’s decision to place one of its lawyers on indefinite leave, apparently for his admissions in the case.

The government is asking the high court to issue an administrative stay to block the order by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of the District of Maryland and to vacate her injunction.

The Washington Post and the New York Times have coverage of the government’s April 7 filing, while the New York Times, CNN and NBC News are among the publications with coverage of the DOJ lawyer’s suspension. Additional stories are noted by How Appealing.

The government application claims that Xinis “ordered unprecedented relief: dictating to the United States that it must not only negotiate with a foreign country to return an enemy alien on foreign soil but also succeed by 11:59 p.m. tonight.”

“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error,” the application says, “that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the executive branch as a subordinate diplomat, and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.”

Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused Xinis’ deadline Monday afternoon to allow for a full review by the Supreme Court, the Washington Post reports.

Xinis is an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

The government had alleged that the mistakenly deported immigrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, is a member of MS-13, a gang designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States. Xinis said the government had offered no evidence to show that he is a gang member.

The now-suspended DOJ lawyer, Erez Reuveni, was the acting deputy director of the department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. He had conceded in court that Abrego Garcia should not have been sent to El Salvador, and he had no evidence showing why the immigrant was even arrested, according to NBC News.

“The absence of evidence speaks for itself,” he said. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”

When Xinis asked what kind of practical impediment kept the government from securing Abrego Garcia’s return, Reuveni said he asked the same question when the case was assigned to him.

“I have not yet received an answer that I find satisfactory,” he said.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told the New York Times in a statement that Reuveni did not follow her order.

“At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States,” Bondi said. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

The case is Noem v. Abrego Garcia.

Updated April 7 at 3:25 p.m. to include reporting on Chief Justice John Roberts’ order.

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A Jan. 6 defendant from Texas who ran for Congress last year and is reportedly attempting another political run has been granted permission to “examine and publish” footage, evidence and discovery from his criminal case surrounding the events of the 2021 Capitol attack — but the Justice Department says not so fast.

Ryan Zink, 35, of Lubbock, was granted access last week by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on account of the DOJ not filing a memorandum in opposition to Zink’s March 22 motion to lift a protective order keeping his case material sealed. Boasberg issued a minute order on April 9 announcing his decision, which the DOJ apparently saw and responded to Wednesday with the document in question.

“As the Government has not opposed Defendant’s Motion to Lift Protective Order, the Court orders that the Motion is granted, and the Protective Order is lifted,” a docket entry from Boasberg said last week.

In response, the DOJ’s top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, signed off on a memorandum in opposition Wednesday that said granting such a request to Zink would put people at risk and pose a threat to national security.

“Lifting a protective order in this case creates a dangerous opportunity and could potentially place sensitive information in the possession of those who would use it to harm the national security, in addition to allowing terabytes of information including individual defendants’, witnesses’, and victims’ personal identifying information to be released to the public,” Martin said. “The government has thus demonstrated that release of these materials could cause a significant hazard to others, and there is no prejudice to the defendant from continuing the protective order here.”

Fed up with the government’s “gamesmanship” and “grandstanding” over the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation case, a federal judge in Maryland tore into the Trump administration on Tuesday afternoon following yet another nose-thumbing by the Justice Department in court filings — with DOJ lawyers and administration officials being blasted for not providing proper updates and blatantly ignoring judicial orders related to the deported dad’s situation.

“We’re going to do this by the federal rules of civil procedure,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis told Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Immigration Litigation Drew Ensign and the court Tuesday at a highly-anticipated hearing on Abrego Garcia’s deportation saga, according to Politico reporter Kyle Cheney, who was in attendance.

“No press release is going to move the court the same way that sworn, under oath testimony from persons with knowledge,” Xinis said. “If you have objections, you’re going to have to make them consistent with the rules.”

The Trump administration is attempting to block an order by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., forcing it to let The Associated Press back into the White House press pool this week after the president tried barring the news outlet over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

The Justice Department filed a motion Wednesday to stay U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden’s preliminary injunction issued on Tuesday granting the AP’s request to block the White House’s ban on its access to the Oval Office, East Room and other sites of press events — saying the ban amounted to “impermissible viewpoint discrimination.” McFadden noted how the AP was likely to prove in court how it “suffered unlawful retaliation for exercising its speech rights,” despite claims by the Trump administration that it deserved the ban.

“Access restrictions must be reasonable and not viewpoint based,” McFadden wrote. “While the AP does not have a constitutional right to enter the Oval Office, it does have a right to not be excluded because of its viewpoint. And the AP says that is exactly what is happening.”

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Judiciary

Meet the federal judge labeled ‘radical left lunatic’ by Trump, derided by DOJ for ‘micromanaged’ request

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 20, 2025, 8:50 am CDT

A federal judge facing President Donald Trump’s ire because of his rulings on deportation authority was once a housemate with Brett Kavanaugh, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, at Yale Law School.

Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, 62, of the District of Columbia “has a history of bipartisan support,” the Washington Post reports, having been nominated to the District of Columbia Superior Court by a Republican president and to the federal court in Washington, D.C., by a Democratic president.

He also appears for speaking engagements at Yale with U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee, where they emphasize a commitment to rule of law, according to NPR.

But Boasberg is being targeted by Trump, who wrote on social media that the judge is a “radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator” who should be impeached.

Boasberg is overseeing a lawsuit challenging Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members. Boasberg ordered the administration not to use the law for deportations and told Department of Justice lawyers Saturday that planes carrying the deportees should be turned around.

Three planes carrying 238 immigrants reached their destination in El Salvador in Central America, the New York Times reports. Boasberg gave the administration a Wednesday deadline to provide details on the flights, which was met with a government request for a stay that said the judge’s quest for information was a “micromanaged and unnecessary judicial fishing expedition,” NBC News reports.

“Continuing to beat a dead horse solely for the sake of prying from the government legally immaterial facts and wholly within a sphere of core functions of the executive branch is both purposeless and frustrating to the consideration of the actual legal issues at stake in this case,” the DOJ said.

In a March 19 order, Boasberg agreed to provide the government an extra day to decide whether to invoke the state secrets privilege, “although their grounds for such request at first blush are not persuasive.” Rather than engaging in a fishing expedition, he said, he was seeking information “to determine if the government deliberately flouted” his orders.

Boasberg grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father worked for former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, according to the New York Times.

He attended Yale as an undergraduate, where he played basketball and also obtained a master’s degree in history from the University of Oxford. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1990.

After graduation, Boasberg worked as a law clerk for a federal appeals judge, as an associate at two law firms, and as a homicide prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. He was appointed to the District of Columbia Superior Court in 2002 by former President George W. Bush and to the federal bench in 2011 by former President Barack Obama. He also served a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

On the bench, Boasberg “is something of a stickler for footnote brevity,” according to a prior ABA Journal story. He has tossed briefs in several suits for violating a local court ruling banning excessive footnotes.

He is also known “for his booming baritone voice and for peppering legal opinions with colorful language and pop culture references,” according to Reuters. In one opinion, Boasberg “cited a Star Trek reference to the Borg catchphrase ‘Resistance is futile,’” the article reports.

He has also been involved in other cases involving issues of importance to Trump.

“In his 14 years on the federal bench,” the Associated Press reports, Boasberg “has resolved secret grand jury disputes that arose during the special counsel investigations into Trump, oversaw improvements after the Trump-Russia investigation in how the Justice Department conducts national security surveillance, and handled his share of sentencings for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

One of the rioters called Boasberg a “clown” and a “fraud” during a court hearing. Boasberg “calmly listened,” according to the AP.

The deportation suit is J.G.G. v. Trump.

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