U.S. attorneys in five districts have become the latest targets of House Judiciary ranking member Jamie Raskin’s congressional investigation into prosecutorial misconduct, which could gain steam if Democrats retake the majority next Congress.
Letters delivered Wednesday to the top federal prosecutors in the District of Columbia, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island and the Northern District of Illinois warned those offices that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are looking at instances of Justice Department attorneys misleading judges.
Among the examples that investigators are probing: faulty subpoenas served on a Rhode Island hospital that provides gender-affirming care, and the way Illinois federal prosecutors broke grand jury rules to obtain an indictment against anti-ICE protesters only to later drop the case and try to cover up debacle by redacting transcripts.
Each letter cited what Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, called the “appalling breakdown of prosecutorial standards and ethics taking place in your jurisdiction.” And they said that House Judiciary Committee investigators are trying to determine which officials made decisions that led to federal judges expressing concern about misconduct by line prosecutors.
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“The Committee is investigating DOJ’s — and specifically your office’s — pattern of misleading the judicial branch, and by extension, the American people,” Raskin wrote.
“We also seek information as to whether attorneys in your office who questioned or rejected illegal orders have been disciplined or otherwise retaliated against by DOJ or the Trump administration,” the letters say.
Last month, Raskin demanded answers from Attorney General Todd Blanche about the incidents, but he says he never heard back. Raskin gave the five U.S. attorneys until Sept. 9 to respond.
The probe touches on what have become more frequent accusations of wrongdoing against federal prosecutors during the second Trump administration. As cited in the letter to Blanche, congressional investigators have shown heightened interest in one episode early in the Trump administration.
A prosecutor-turned-whistleblower alleged that Emil Bove — a Trump lawyer who briefly served as a top DOJ official before becoming an appellate federal judge — instructed DOJ lawyers during a March 2025 operation to take a “fuck you” approach and ignore any judge who stands in the way of rushed deportation flights.
Since then, federal judges have repeatedly criticized federal prosecutors for withholding evidence from the courts, failing to follow their orders and even deliberately misinterpreting their judicial commands.
In Minnesota earlier this summer, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz blocked the Trump administration’s subpoenas against Gov. Tim Walz over the state’s immigrant sanctuary policies. He reminded federal prosecutors that “initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action … is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process.”
And in Washington, D.C., things came to a head during the fight over President Donald Trump’s decision to tear down the White House’s East Wing. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon sided with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and ordered an immediate halt to the construction of Trump’s ballroom while leaving a narrow exception for any national security measures — only to have the White House use that as a green light for the whole project.
Leon had to issue a follow-up order two weeks later on April 16 in which he called out the federal government for trying to “turn this exception on its head.”
“That is neither a reasonable nor a correct reading of my order!” he wrote, exclamation points included. “It is, to say the least, incredible, if not disingenuous, that defendants now argue that my order does not stop ballroom construction because of the safety-and-security exception!”
Raskin’s letters were sent to Pirro in D.C.; Daniel Rosen in Minnesota; Robert Frazer in New Jersey; Andrew Boutros in the Northern District of Illinois; and Charles Calenda, who is technically the highest-ranking prosecutor in Rhode Island since his term as interim U.S. attorney expired and he was made the office’s “first assistant” to keep him in the role despite a lack of Senate approval. The letters were also sent to the DOJ’s inspector general.
The letters cite a rapid erosion in the past 18 months of the “presumption of regularity,” a legal doctrine that gives the executive branch an advantage in court when judges simply assume that government officials have done their job properly and acted within normal bounds.
That presumption is now increasingly in question, with dozens of judges across the country remarking about the way prosecutors have violated that trust by skirting the rules. The violations have become so frequent that the legal blog Just Security has updated its study on the subject four times since September, tracking the sharp rise of instances in which the government has outright ignored orders or judges have expressed distrust of government representations in court.
“Some of that misconduct is unintentional, but in many cases federal judges, including Trump appointees, have found the administration’s misconduct was wilful and flagrant,” Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief, told NOTUS.
Goodman said judges “from across the ideological spectrum have explicitly suggested that the Department of Justice has forfeited the usual presumption of regularity.”
Norm Eisen, a former ambassador who has litigated nearly 300 cases against the Trump administration, said the growing number of instances in which judges and grand juries reject DOJ attempts to criminally indict Trump’s enemies as “politically tainted decision-making” is indicative of a general awakening to the new norm.
“There’s a new legal doctrine. It’s the presumption of irregularity. And it applies when the White House intrudes on the prerogatives of independence of U.S. attorneys that have guided our nation throughout the modern era,” Eisen told NOTUS.
“What could be worse than knowingly charging innocent people because the head of the U.S. government commands it? That’s not American. That is something out of an authoritarian nightmare,” he said.
There’s some disagreement about the degree to which the Trump administration’s lawyers have gone rogue.
A conservative-tilted panel of the 9th Circuit earlier this month reversed a trial court’s decision to block an administrative subpoena the DOJ used to target QueerDoc, which bills itself as the “trans online doctor’s office.”
In October last year, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead wrote that “when a federal agency issues a subpoena not to investigate legal violations but to intimidate and coerce providers into abandoning lawful medical care, it exceeds its legitimate authority and abuses the judicial process.”
In reversing the decision, U.S. Appeals Judge Carlos Bea wrote that Whitehead “improperly disregarded the presumption of regularity.”
Meanwhile, others have been caught trying to use the Trump administration’s misbehavior in court as an excuse to cast doubt on all kinds of regulatory enforcement. When the Association of American Railroads tried to push back on a 2024 safety rule that requires more than one crew member on a train, judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an attempt to cast aspersions on the law as some kind of political ploy.
“Whatever stress the presumption of regularity may be under today, AAR petitioners need more than speculation and innuendo to overcome it,” Judge Robin Rosenbaum wrote last week.
Raskin’s letter seeks to expose to what degree, if any, the White House has exerted influence on the everyday affairs at regional U.S. attorneys offices. It warned the offices to preserve all records — including encrypted text messages, like those on Signal or WhatsApp — and demanded that they turn over any communications between the White House and DOJ leadership, as well as orders from DOJ brass to line prosecutors.
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