A Court Filing Revealed Todd Blanche’s Office Closely Oversaw the Prosecution of Abrego Garcia

Top brass at the Justice Department personally oversaw the post hoc effort to slap criminal charges on Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia after he’d been deported to a Salvadoran prison — a disclosure made by defense lawyers in a sealed court document that was mistakenly revealed in an unredacted filing over the weekend.

The Trump administration first deported Abrego Garcia in violation of a court order, then indicted him on charges upon his return to the U.S. while it seeks to deport him to one of several nations where he’s never been. But the government’s efforts have been stymied at every turn. Now that Abrego Garcia is finally back in Maryland with family and his criminal case is at risk of collapsing, these new details shed light on the way the DOJ made his prosecution a priority.

Facing public pressure to return him to the United States earlier this year, the White House claimed that Abrego Garcia was a “criminal” who did not deserve due process before his deportation. Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security repeatedly swore he’d “never walk America’s streets again.” Then the DOJ made the decision in the spring to create a criminal case against him, alleging human smuggling. Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty.

The DOJ has since defended the move as an independent decision by prosecutors in Tennessee not mired by politics.

A court filing from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in the criminal case points to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former defense lawyer to President Donald Trump who now co-leads the DOJ. Blanche had those in his office drive the effort to build a criminal case against Abrego Garcia, according to a sealed Dec. 3 court order written by U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr. that was cited in a court filing chock full of redactions on Friday.

Blanche’s deputy, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, played a “leading role in the government’s decision to prosecute,” defense lawyers wrote, citing the judge’s order.

However, that line has since been redacted. Defense lawyers re-uploaded the memo on Saturday, this time with that line blacked out — an indication that it had been mistakenly left in the open the first time around. Lawyers explained in both filings that they’d blocked out portions of the memo because they reference internal documents that DOJ shared under a court protective order.

The filings from defense lawyers detail how Blanche’s deputy Singh was in touch with the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, Rob McGuire, in April, nearly a full month before the indictment — sending a flurry of emails in which McGuire offered updates on timing and they discussed legal strategies. The pair stayed in close contact for weeks, with Singh even asking for what appears to be an update on the effort the day before Abrego Garcia was indicted. Defense lawyers cite DOJ emails by file name and the judge’s sealed order, but much of what they described remains redacted. The emails themselves were not posted on the public court docket.

For months, DOJ officials have claimed Main Justice did not direct Abrego Garcia’s prosecution.

In an effort to stop Abrego Garcia’s lawyers from reviewing internal DOJ communications or subjecting officials to testify in court, in October the DOJ claimed it would be a fishing expedition that would go nowhere.

“Given that undisputed evidence shows that there is no link between the office of the deputy attorney general and the decision to prosecute, there is no basis for subpoenas seeking to compel testimony from high-ranking officials in that office, including the deputy attorney general himself,” prosecutors wrote at the time.

The DOJ pointed to a sworn statement by McGuire, who asserted he was not in contact with a long list of Trump administration officials.

A closer read of McGuire’s sworn statement in October shows that he claimed he had “no correspondence” with “any personnel” at the White House, the attorney general’s office, and the Department of Homeland Security secretary’s office — but he separately specified that he hadn’t corresponded with “the deputy attorney general,” leaving open the possibility that he had talked to Blanche’s staff.

McGuire’s signed affidavit also claims he “received no direction from anyone at … the Department of Justice, or any other source on the question of whether to seek or not to seek an indictment in this case.”

The DOJ did not respond to questions about the case Monday morning. McGuire did not immediately reply to an email asking whether he worded his affidavit to not encompass the many discussions he apparently had with Singh about the case.

Other emails referenced by Abrego Garcia’s lawyers also show that Singh had emailed about Abrego Garcia with the Homeland Security Investigations acting assistant director overseeing domestic operations in April, yet another indication that DOJ brass was coordinating the effort from the top.

Singh, who previously spent time as a federal prosecutor in North Carolina, has been described by The Guardian as the top DOJ official who directed “aggressive prosecutions of minor crimes in Washington.” The newspaper discovered that Singh had himself pleaded guilty four years ago to driving under the influence.

“The only ‘independent’ decision Mr. McGuire made was whether to acquiesce in [the deputy attorney general office’s] directive to charge this case, or risk forfeiting his job as acting U.S. attorney … for refusing to do the political bidding of an executive branch that is avowedly using prosecutorial power for ‘score settling,’” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote, quoting the bombshell Vanity Fair article published last week with an inside look at the Trump White House.