The war on judges is erasing the Justice Department instead

The attorney general calls it a war ^[1]. For a year the Justice Department has waged it against the federal judges who block the administration, and the score is not what the word implies: not one of the judges with life tenure has been removed. Impeachment stalled short of a vote ^[2][3]; the one misconduct complaint that reached a ruling was dismissed for want of evidence ^[4]; and this week the campaign moved to strike eight judges from its cases outright ^[1]. The judges the administration did remove were never the real obstacle. Immigration judges sit inside the executive branch, hired to hear deportation cases, without life tenure — and there the purge worked. More than fifty were dismissed since January 2025 through brief emails giving no reason ^[5], at least one, allegedly, for releasing a migrant whom Kristi Noem had falsely accused of threatening the president. Add resignations, retirements and transfers, and 106 are gone against a backlog of 3.5 million cases. Impeachment died without a vote. A November resolution against Judge James Boasberg, who oversaw the special counsel's Arctic Frost probe, went nowhere in the House ^[2]; in January Ted Cruz pushed the Senate toward impeaching Boasberg and Judge Deborah Boardman, with Eric Schmitt branding Boasberg the embodiment of a rogue judge, and no votes were held ^[3]. Chief Justice Roberts restated the point: impeachment is not the remedy for disagreeing with a ruling. The misconduct route fared no better, and its failure rerouted the campaign. The complaint against Boasberg — filed over his supposed private warning to Roberts that the administration would trigger a constitutional crisis — was dismissed in December by Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton ^[4].

And a repetition of uncorroborated statements rarely supplies a basis for a valid misconduct complaint. — Jeffrey S. Sutton

Rather than end the effort, the dismissal pointed it somewhere new: in February Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered all 93 U.S. attorneys to compile the most egregious examples of judges impeding the agenda, explicitly to feed impeachment referrals to Congress ^[6]. The Minnesota complaint showed where the machinery aimed — not at rulings but at speech. After Judge Patrick Schiltz found that ICE had violated nearly 100 court orders in an operation that killed two U.S. citizens, Blanche filed against seven judges for giving interviews to the New York Times, arguing their conduct had undermined public confidence in the judiciary; Schiltz's answer was that ICE is not a law unto itself ^[7]. And this week the campaign took its latest form: motions to disqualify eight judges in Washington and Minnesota, sought case by case, inside the cases themselves — disqualification where impeachment stalls ^[1]. The one thing the war did destroy was smaller than a judgeship and more useful than any of them: the presumption of regularity, the courts' default assumption that the government acts in good faith when it appears before them. Three federal judges have now said on the record that the department has lost it ^[8]. Judge Paula Xinis put it plainly.

You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you've destroyed it. — Paula Xinis

Judge Mary McElroy went further.

The government has proven unworthy of this trust at every point. — Mary S. McElroy

And the department earned the loss in filings of its own making. In November it confirmed that Noem deported 100 Venezuelan men to El Salvador in defiance of Boasberg's explicit order, on guidance from Blanche and Emil Bove ^[9]. In July it missed a federal judge's deadline to release the unredacted Epstein files and appealed to block disclosure ^[10].

We have released everything … We are not sitting on a single piece of paper. Nothing that should be released. — Todd Blanche

Its own watchdogs thinned at the same time: the Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates the department's own lawyers, fell from 29 to 16 people and hit a 20-year low in new investigations, while the inspector general's office shed 99 employees ^[11]. The prosecutors who refused to run the machinery were gone early, removed or resigned ^[12]. Danielle Sassoon resigned over the Eric Adams deal.

the orders I received were inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts. — Danielle Sassoon

Hagan Scotten's letter was shorter.

I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. — Hagan Scotten

Where the department still spends its force, the direction has shifted. The criminal division now guarantees non-prosecution letters to companies that self-report and cooperate ^[13]. The fraud division created to chase an estimated half-trillion dollars in annual losses fell into an internal turf war, criticized for claiming credit for cases begun before it existed ^[14]. A real fraud case does still surface — in October 2025 SDNY prosecutors opened a probe into the First Brands bankruptcy and the billions that vanished from it ^[15]. But the process now points mostly outward. Early this year prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro ran subpoenas against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and Judge Boasberg quashed them ^[16].

The Government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the President. — James Boasberg

He found the probe a pretext to pressure Powell into resigning or cutting rates. A criminal probe into the funders of E. Jean Carroll's lawsuits against the president drew a different answer from Reid Hoffman ^[17].

The attorney general and myself, every day, seven days a week, are focused on bringing justice. And it will come. — Todd Blanche

And now the department is reaching back to Watergate itself, weighing a two-hour presentation alleging that the original special prosecutors, Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, committed misconduct — a deep-state frame for a prosecution settled half a century ago ^[18].

that presentation does not constitute an investigation. — United States Department of Justice

The department set out to remove the judges who stood in its way and instead spent a year dismantling the standing it needs before them.