In Trump’s legal world, the president is always right

From immigration fights to defending President Donald Trump’s federal government cutbacks, the Justice Department has responded to more than a hundred emergency lawsuits in the first hundred days of the presidency with surprising consistency.

From immigration fights to defending President Donald Trump’s federal government cutbacks, the Justice Department has responded to more than a hundred emergency lawsuits in the first hundred days of the presidency with surprising consistency. The approach: Defend whatever Trump wants. And when that’s not working, muddy the waters. At times, that includes skipping or fast-tracking the established order of when cases can be appealed in federal civil cases, with the Justice Department pushing some ongoing disputes from trial-level courts up to the Supreme Court or other appellate courts as soon as it can. At other times, it’s included an approach filled with “fallacy,” or a very selective reading of a court order, as Judge Paula Xinis of the federal court in Maryland wrote recently in an immigration case. In the Xinis case, regarding the mistakenly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the administration was told by the Supreme Court that Xinis at the trial level could order the US to “facilitate” his return. Xinis has said the way the Justice Department interpreted that order – by doing nothing except stating they would be willing to send a plane to Latin America to retrieve him – is “redefining ‘facilitate’ contrary to law and logic.” “The administration appears to be driven not by any legal theory but by a theory of power,” one former Justice Department official from Democratic administrations told CNN.