Justice Department attorneys are ignoring federal judges, claiming privileges to refuse turning over records and toying with the clock to disrupt the normal pattern of court cases — pulling straight from the playbook President Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyers used across the sprawling cases between Trump’s first and second presidencies.
The dominance of this litigation strategy coincides with two of Trump’s personal lawyers rising to power within the Justice Department: Todd Blanche, now deputy attorney general, and Emil Bove, now principal associate deputy attorney general.
“We know that Trump views the DOJ as his lawyers,” said Catherine J. Ross, a professor emeritus at George Washington University Law School. “And it almost seems as if the client is telling them, ‘Do what I did in the civil cases and earlier criminal cases: delay, obstruct, confuse, be obtuse, appeal every little possibility and just stall forever.’ That’s the strategy.”
The reorientation at DOJ has been so rapid and jarring that federal judges have taken a new tone when dealing with department attorneys.
In Maryland on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis scolded the DOJ for refusing to turn over documents concerning what are supposed to be the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to do what the Supreme Court already ordered it to do: “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from a Salvadoran prison. She pointed to what she called the administration’s lawyers’ “continued mischaracterization of the Supreme Court’s order.”
“For weeks, defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this court’s orders. Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions,” she wrote.
The episode harkens back to the way Trump continued to claim executive privilege after he left office in 2021, in order to block the National Archives from turning over internal White House communications about the Capitol insurrection to the House Jan. 6 committee.
At the time, the appeals court rejected Trump’s stalling tactic, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a scathing opinion, writing Trump’s reasoning was “premised on the notion that his executive power ‘exists in perpetuity.’ But presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president.”
In the ongoing Abrego Garcia case, the DOJ has also made light of the judge’s demands for daily updates on the Maryland man’s whereabouts and the Trump administration’s legally required efforts to clear the way for his return. The government’s status updates, which began on April 12, were initially brusque but with some detail about Abrego Garcia’s health and location. That changed last week.
“Please refer to my prior declarations for the foundation of my personal knowledge,” Department of Homeland Security acting general counsel Joseph N. Mazzara wrote, later adding, “There are no further updates.”
The strategy echoes the way Trump’s personal lawyers kept returning to state court with nebulous updates on their requirements to turn over Trump Organization business records to the New York attorney general for her bank fraud investigation. The updates were so thin that, at one point, the court appointed a digital forensics company to gather the evidence. Trump was later fined $10,000 per day for still refusing to turn over documents.
The DOJ is now regularly defending the administration while the White House openly mocks the courts — much like the way Trump’s personal defense lawyers had to keep apologizing in New York and D.C. courts every time he would post threatening messages aimed at judges, prosecutors, witnesses and jurors.
“The judges are letting Trump get away with murder,” said Pamela Keith, a lawyer who represents current FBI agents and support personnel in their effort to stop the DOJ from retaliating against them over their work in the aftermath of Jan. 6. “The judges are going to extremes to give the DOJ chances to explain the inexplicable. And this is just more indication of how successful the Trump team has been at perverting our legal system.”
The president and his administration’s handling of D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg has provided a particular throwback to Trump’s pre-presidency strategy. DOJ lawyers successfully fought to remove the underlying “alien enemies” case from Boasberg by questioning his jurisdiction, while Trump publicly attacked the judge as a “radical left lunatic” who should be impeached.
That two-pronged tactic mirrored Trump’s repeated — and failed — attempts to disqualify New York Judge Juan Merchan from overseeing his 2024 criminal trial for faking business documents, while Trump simultaneously painted him as “corrupt.”
And like the New York case, during which Merchan found Trump in contempt of court 10 times for ignoring court orders, Boasberg has now found probable cause that the DOJ committed criminal contempt of court for disregarding his own court orders.
This week, DOJ lawyers also put themselves in the position of presenting an alternative reality that directly contradicts what a government official is doing on social media. On Tuesday, government lawyers told unconvinced D.C. appellate judges that a U.S. military ban on transgender people isn’t a ban — just two days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly said on X that it is. It was similar to the acrobatics Trump’s personal lawyers did during his E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, when they defended against slander claims while Trump posted about Carroll on social media.
Solomon Shinerock, a lawyer at the New York firm Lewis Baach who previously investigated Trump for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said the “lack of compunction around asserting specious arguments” displayed by Trump’s personal lawyers from 2021 until 2025 has now become the DOJ strategy.
It’s a tactic, Shinerock said, that in the past allowed Trump’s lawyers to draw out cases and run out the clock for as long as possible, something he saw firsthand when trying to obtain tax returns and having to argue all the way up to the Supreme Court.
But that kind of maneuvering has its costs, he warned.
“There’s a degree of trust and mutual respect conferred on members of the bar. And it’s this vestigial assumption which these tactics are burning,” he said. “They’re burning the credibility of the legal profession. They’re burning the credibility of the Department of Justice. They’re burning the credibility of the judiciary.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.