By Nate Raymond
Jan 31 (Reuters) – A federal appeals court judge has dismissed a judicial misconduct complaint by U.S. Justice Department against a judge who clashed with President Donald Trump’s administration over its move to deport several Venezuelans to El Salvador.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi took the rare step in July of announcing the complaint against Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., alleging he made improper comments about Trump during a meeting of the judiciary’s policymaking body, the Judicial Conference.
Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in a newly-released order dated December 19 said the alleged statements, even if true, would not violate judicial ethics rules.
The Justice Department did not respond on Saturday to requests for comment. Boasberg, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, declined to comment.
Bondi announced the complaint days after Boasberg said he might initiate disciplinary proceedings against Justice Department lawyers for their conduct in a lawsuit brought by Venezuelans challenging their removal to a Salvadoran prison.
Boasberg in April concluded the administration appeared to have acted “in bad faith” when it hurriedly assembled three deportation flights on March 15, at the same time that he was conducting emergency court proceedings to assess the effort’s legality.
The DOJ’s complaint focused on comments attributed to Boasberg by the conservative media outlet The Federalist during a meeting of U.S. Judicial Conference in March that was attended by Chief U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.
The Justice Department alleged Boasberg expressed his concern to Roberts and others that the administration would disregard court rulings and trigger “a constitutional crisis.”
The DOJ argued those comments ran afoul of the judicial code of conduct, and that Boasberg wrongly acted on his belief in the litigation over the Venezuelans, who were removed from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act.
Due to potential conflicts among judges in D.C., Roberts transferred the complaint to the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit’s Judicial Council.
Sutton said the DOJ lacked proof Boasberg made such statements, which even if uttered would not be improper during the judicial policymaking body’s closed-door meeting.
“In these settings, a judge’s expression of anxiety about executive-branch compliance with judicial orders, whether rightly feared or not, is not so far afield from customary topics at these meetings—judicial independence, judicial security, and inter-branch relations—as to violate the Codes of Judicial Conduct,” Sutton wrote.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Alistair Bell)
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