Even When It’s Pointless, the Trump Admin Automatically Ignores Judge’s Rulings

Back at the end of November, which no doubt feels like a lifetime ago in MAGA-land, in a time when the U.S. hadn’t yet, say, deposed the head of state of Venezuela and threatened to invade a bunch of other countries, there was a news cycle in which it seemed like the judicial branch of our federal government had taken a principled stand against the second Trump administration’s constant overreach. A federal judge, Cameron McGowan Currie of South Carolina, had dismissed the Justice Department’s spurious and vengeance-based indictments of Trump enemies James Comey, the former FBI director, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, on the grounds that Lindsey Halligan, the newly appointed “interim” U.S. attorney of the Eastern District of Virginia, had been appointed illegally, and thus possessed “no lawful authority to present the indictment.” It was a rebuke of the Trump-era Justice Department’s modus operandi to subvert the law by simply doing things like making appointments in ways that were never intended, such as appointing multiple “temporary” or “interim” U.S. attorneys in a row in order to bypass the Constitutional directive that those appointments be confirmed by the Senate. It was the kind of precedent that anyone with respect for the law would want to see set. And then the Justice Department simply ignored the ruling.

Yes, they ignored the ruling, and it’s indicative of the administration’s constant flood-the-zone strategy of offenses and grievances that frankly, I hadn’t heard anything about it until now. For the last month and a half, Lindsey Halligan has simply continued to serve as the U.S. district attorney as if Currie hadn’t ruled that her appointment was invalid. One group paying significantly more attention to the Justice Department’s recalcitrance, however, is other federal judges, who are have unsurprisingly been rather peeved. This situation came to a head this week, when another federal judge in Virginia, David J. Novak (a Trump appointee!) of the Federal District Court in Richmond, issued an unusual order in the context of another case in which Halligan’s name appeared on documents as U.S. attorney: Explain immediately why you think you can continue using that title for yourself.

Judge Novak’s order gives Halligan seven days to respond in writing, “explaining the basis for … identification of herself as the United States Attorney, notwithstanding Judge Currie’s contrary ruling. She shall also set forth the reasons why this Court should not strike Ms. Halligan’s identification of herself as United States Attorney from the indictment in this matter.” The order also says that Halligan “shall further explain why her identification does not constitute a false or misleading statement,” and instructs her to sign her response, making official whatever previously unspoken bullshit narrative the Justice Department is attempting to cook up here. Basically, they’re looking to put her on the record for the fact that the department has been ignoring the previous ruling.

Judge to Lindsey Halligan: Explain yourself.

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— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) Jan 6, 2026 at 10:28 PM

As for why the Justice Department has been ignoring Judge Currie’s ruling, which stated that Halligan’s appointment was “defective” and that all of her actions were thus “unlawful exercises of executive power,” it feels like a combination of technicalities and “because we don’t think anyone will stop us,” which is par for the course when it comes to the Trump administration’s constant testing of the boundaries of whether they can be constrained by any kind of law. The Justice Department announced in mid-December that it would appeal the dismissal of the indictments against Comey and Letitia James, but notably it did not ask for a stay of Currie’s ruling that found Halligan had been appointed illegally. Doing so would have acknowledged that Currie as a federal judge had effectively told Halligan to step down from the position–it seems the Justice Department thought it would be easier to simply have Halligan continue operating as if nothing had happened, under the absurd dream logic that because Judge Currie’s ruling had not expressly ordered Halligan removed from office, she could simply keep the job under the letter of the law, and the presumed assumption that no other judge would step up to order her removal.

It may fall to Judge Novak to do exactly that. In his own ruling this week, he acknowledged that the Justice Department had appealed the dismissal of the Comey and James indictments, but said that because the order had not been paused during appeal, Currie’s ruling on Halligan remained “the binding precedent of the district, and is not subject to being ignored.”

This particular case represents a precedent in terms of how much federal judges, even those appointed by Trump himself, are willing to allow the Justice Department to ignore their rulings even in relatively low-stakes scenarios. At the same time, it also demonstrates the Trump administration’s apparent preference for further legal entanglement and seeing how blatantly it can ignore the law, rather than simply working within its boundaries in a legislative branch that they also control. Why is it preferable, or less of a headache, for the administration to insist on keeping Lindsey Halligan on as the fake U.S. attorney in Virginia, rather than simply ramming another appointee through the still Republican-controlled Senate, which would give that U.S. attorney legal legitimacy? The answer, presumably, is that Donald Trump chose Halligan, and thus until he removes his divine mandate, the Justice Department is willing to break every conceivable precedent to slavishly perform the will of the executive branch.

Every day, the Trump administration systematically tests what it can get away with in this fashion, slowly eroding the powers of the courts, and of judges, to interpret the law. An examination this past summer from The Washington Post concluded that in at least a third of the 160 cases in which judges had ruled against the administration to that point, the ruling was ignored in a pattern of “widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system.” Ignoring and sidestepping rulings was particularly common in cases involving the administration’s pet issues, such as immigration, the firing of federal workers, the distribution of foreign aid, and cases involving LGBTQ rights. The administration has likewise taken advantage of the reticence of judges to enforce any of their orders through contempt proceedings–to date, as far as I can tell, only a single one (U.S. District Judge James Boasberg) has attempted to hold the administration in criminal contempt for willful disobedience of an order to halt deportation flights to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. That contempt finding was subsequently vacated by a divided appeals court panel that contained multiple Trump appointees, leaving it currently in limbo.

Even a DOJ whistleblower’s allegations in June that “ignoring court orders” had effectively become the official policy of the department didn’t seemingly make much of a splash. The whistleblower report from former DOJ employee Erez Reuveni stated that Emil Bove, at that time the associate deputy attorney general, frequently instructed colleagues that the administration should ignore unfavorable rulings from judges, and that when Reuveni objected he was “threatened, fired and publicly disparaged.”

Bove, subsequently, was nominated by Trump to become a federal judge in the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Despite opposition from more than 75 former state and federal judges, and 900 former Justice Department attorneys, Bove was confirmed by the Senate in July, which chose to ignore both that torrent of objections and Bove’s own clear disregard for the law. Another Trump zealot, enshrined in a lifetime judgeship appointment even after saying that the administration should ignore the rulings of judges. When questioned about the (il)legality of Trump potentially attempting to run for a third term, Bove … refused to respond. He was confirmed anyway.

Whether or not justice in the United States is ultimately blind quickly becomes irrelevant in a setting where the federal government doesn’t recognize the power of its own judges to make rulings. If we simply accept this, at some point the only ones who can be described as blind are ourselves.

Everyone, in and out of America keeps hoping/assuming that surely, eventually, something or someone will stop Trump. Some constitutional guardrail. Some court ruling. Some level of corruption, scandal or abuse too big to be ignored. We wait, and wait in vain. Better to act for ourselves.

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— Alex Hall Hall (@alexhh.bsky.social) Jan 5, 2026 at 5:56 AM