Biden stuck with lawsuits against Trump

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden took office this week amid a crushing legal entanglements left by former President Donald Trump.

Every presidential transition involves decisions about how to unwind policies the new administration does not support, but the Trump era was unusual in how many steps the last administration took – not to mention Trump’s personal legal messes – still stand. in court with the government lawyers in the mix. Less than a day after Biden was sworn in, judges in those cases began issuing orders asking the Department of Justice to explain what will happen next.

In many cases, it won’t be as easy as government lawyers raising their hands and saying the department messed up under Trump. Biden and his new political members may disagree with Trump’s policies, but Justice Department lawyers will hesitate to officially say that the former president and administration officials had no legal authority at all to adopt them and that the DOJ was wrong to defend Trump individually against the courts. show while in office. The department has long fought to protect the flexibility of any given White House to exercise power, as well as to protect the president.

“Your first instinct as a new politician [appointee] is right to say, ‘Forget it, we were wrong’, and get rid of this litigation, and you’re immediately struck by the career people who say, ‘You can’t do that’, ”said Ian Gershengorn , who headed the Federal Programs Branch of the Department of Justice at the start of former President Barack Obama’s first term in 2009. “They argue that our job and the job of the Department of Justice is to defend the presidency and not the president.

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The Biden administration supports cases that arise from Trump’s extensive exercises of executive power over everything from immigration to the regulation of social media platforms, as well as mixing his personal legal issues with his position as President. The Biden administration will now have to decide what to do.

Weeks after Trump lost the election, the Justice Department appealed a decision refusing to take over Trump’s personal defense against a libel lawsuit brought by a writer who accused him of rape. Last year, then-candidate Biden criticized the DOJ’s involvement in the libel lawsuit against writer E. Jean Carroll, saying Trump was trying to turn the department into his “own office.” lawyers ”. A judge refused to let the government take over Trump’s defense against Carroll’s trial, and the Justice Department filed an appeal Nov. 25, along with Trump’s private attorney; the department argued that there were broader institutional interests, beyond Trump’s personal stake in the case, as to when federal agents can be prosecuted. Do you want a conversation? Yes. How is it going? Me dai cest excéllant, it is hot.

There is also a long-standing litigation in federal court in California on behalf of families separated at the border by the Trump administration. A judge will continue to oversee and enforce government efforts to locate parents, reunite families, and determine what is happening with children who remain in the United States. The Biden administration will also have to respond to new lawsuits from plaintiffs alleging they have been harmed by these Trump policies – on Friday, a complaint was filed on behalf of a father and son separated at the US-Mexico border in 2018, seeking damages from the US government for this trauma.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment on how the new officials sort through the pending cases of the Trump era.

Some cases will be easier to conclude than others. Biden this week revoked a series of Trump executive orders that are still the subject of active litigation; this could render these cases moot and offer the Department of Justice a clean solution. During his early days in office, Biden rescinded Trump’s policies, including the declaration of national emergency that allowed him to redirect federal funds to build a border wall; exclude undocumented immigrants from census data; the travel ban that applied broadly to Muslim-majority countries; and restrictions on diversity and racial sensitivity training for federal employees and government contractors.

Biden signed a memo on his first day in office calling on the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to “preserve and strengthen” the delayed action program for child arrivals; the Supreme Court had relaunched the program after Trump tried to end it. But a lawsuit challenging the DACA filed by the Texas attorney general’s office is ongoing, and it’s unclear what effect Biden’s memo will have on that – in a hearing last month, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas signaled that he didn’t think Biden was taking would change the legal stance of the case.

“How can they change what happened eight years ago,” Hanen said, according to Politico’s hearing coverage.

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Biden’s immediate shutdown of Trump’s policies is also already sparking legal action – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, announced on Friday that he had filed a lawsuit for the temporary freeze on deportations from Biden as the new administration reviews the immigration policies they inherited.

For rules and regulations that Biden cannot quickly remove through executive action, the Justice Department will likely ask judges to stay the prosecutions, as officials are going through normal channels to overturn them, which could take time. months or even years. There are dozens of cases in federal courts across the country challenging Trump-era policies and staff decisions, including a slew of immigration restrictions; Trump’s rollback of rules protecting LGBTQ people, consumers and the environment; the layoffs of Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, former senior FBI officials involved in the Russia investigation; its decision to label New York, Seattle and Portland as “anarchist jurisdictions”; and its revival of the federal death penalty.

The Department of Justice can turn the tide and change its position in the middle of a case; it happened under Obama and under Trump. But this approach can create a whole new set of problems. There is the risk of conceding a point or making an argument that could be used against Biden in the inevitable legal challenges of his administration; the risk that judges will wonder how to give weight to conflicting government positions; and the risk of Republican state attorneys general and other outside parties stepping in to defend Trump-era policies once the federal government has pulled out.

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat who has filed numerous lawsuits against the Trump administration over the past four years, released a statement on Thursday making it clear his office will continue to press the actions Trump until the policies in question are formally withdrawn or won in court.

“It is too early to know how Biden’s administration or Congress intends to approach each subject, but you can be sure that we will not give up on this work until we have full resolution.” Ferguson said in a follow-up statement to BuzzFeed. New.

Acting officials hold senior Justice Department positions until Biden’s candidates are confirmed; the Senate has yet to schedule hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, Biden’s candidate for attorney general, and a handful of other high-level positions. No candidate has yet been announced to head the Civil Division, which handles most of the litigation against the government; employees learned this week that Brian Boynton, who had served in the department under Obama, would take over in the meantime.

And then there are the cases that involved Trump on a personal level, including Carroll’s libel lawsuit. Justice Department officials under Biden will have to decide whether they want to withdraw from these cases and, if so, how to do so.

The Justice Department has a pending petition asking the United States Supreme Court to reconsider rulings against Trump in the fight over whether he violated the Constitution by retaining his business interests during his tenure, and there is more active cases in which the DOJ supported Trump’s challenges to subpoenas. released by Congress and the New York District Attorney’s Office for his financial records and the testimony of former White House officials during the first impeachment inquiry. It was not immediately clear what would become of these cases, and the role of the Department of Justice in them, now that Trump is no longer president.

On January 19, Trump’s last full day in office, the Justice Department filed a brief to the Supreme Court saying that an ongoing case over whether Trump, as president, could block criticism of Twitter would become moot once Biden takes office. But the department also asked judges to always overturn the lower court’s ruling against Trump, arguing it would keep a precedent on the books “harmful … to the presidency itself and other government officials.” This brief was signed by Jeffrey Wall, who had served as Acting Chief of the Solicitor General’s office during the final months of his tenure; On Wednesday, Wall was replaced by the lawyer Biden hired to become the new Acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.

Lawyers who sued Trump filed documents on Thursday, arguing that the previous ruling was upheld, claiming that any future lawsuits over how Biden and his administration handled Twitter would be judged on its own terms, but that opinion in the Trump case provided “a reasonable framework. »For the use of the platform by future presidents. The judges were to consider whether to take up the case at their conference on Friday.