[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 10 (Wednesday, January 14, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S223-S225]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ORDER FOR ADJOURNMENT

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come 
before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous 
order following the remarks of Senator Whitehouse.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Rhode Island.


                           U.S. Supreme Court

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here on the floor for the 36th 
speech in my ``Scheme'' series, calling attention to the rightwing 
scheme to capture our courts and justice system.
  It has morphed from stacking the Court with billionaire-selected 
Justices to now putting pressure on sitting judges to try to get them 
to do what the Trump political operation wants. It turns out that the 
rightwing interests don't always like it when the courts they worked so 
hard to capture just don't deliver.
  Last week, the Judiciary Committee's Federal Courts Subcommittee held 
a hearing on impeaching rogue judges, it was called. My Republican 
colleagues argue that Federal judges should be impeached and removed 
from office for ruling in ways that MAGA doesn't like.
  Over the past year, there is a backdrop to this, which is that 
Federal judges and their families--and their families--have been the 
victims of a campaign to smear and attack judges who rule against the 
Trump administration. It is pretty clear that many of these calls for 
impeachment are just a tactic in that intimidation campaign.
  There are some tells.
  Tell No. 1: It is rare for a Senator to call for a judge's 
impeachment because the Senator would be a juror, and it is hard to be 
an impartial juror later if you already called the defendant guilty.
  Tell No. 2: Impeachment isn't a remedy for judges getting decisions 
wrong. Appeal is that remedy, as the Chief Justice has clearly stated. 
Impeachment is a remedy for actual misconduct. Virtually everyone has 
agreed on that for almost 200 years.
  When Senators start saying the almost 200 years of law history is 
wrong, that is a pretty big hint they may have another agenda.
  Tell No. 3: If Republicans were serious about rooting out judicial 
misconduct, we probably would have gotten answers about Clarence Thomas 
paying his taxes. There is evidence that Justice Thomas may have broken 
criminal statutes. We know he failed to report on his financial 
disclosures more than a quarter of a million dollars in income from a 
forgiven loan, not to mention the undisclosed boondoggles of private 
jet and yacht travel.
  Well, that raises a very obvious question: If income wasn't declared 
on his judicial disclosure report, did he also not report it to tax 
authorities? I have asked that question. Thomas has refused to answer 
it. Whether, when, and by whom his taxes on that income were paid are 
all unanswered questions. None of my Republican colleagues seem 
interested in that misconduct even though ordinary people are regularly 
prosecuted for tax violations and false statements.
  Tell No. 4: My Republican colleagues don't seem at all interested in 
how their impeachment threats egg on more nefarious and dangerous 
threats against judges and their families. The campaign of threats 
under the shadow of which the Federal judiciary is now operating is 
unlike any time in memory.
  Also, there is significant evidence that this campaign is being 
orchestrated. Yet the Marshals Service and our MAGA DOJ have repeatedly 
refused to confirm that they would investigate for orchestration or 
conspiracy or enterprise. That is worth looking into. That might have 
been a good subject for the hearing, but that is not what it was about.
  Tell No. 5: This is a big one. One of the judges my Republican 
colleagues want to impeach--the prime target, in my view--is Chief 
Judge James Boasberg of the DC District Court. Few judges have been 
singled out more for MAGA attacks than Chief Judge Boasberg.
  What are his sins? Well, he sentenced January 6 rioters who President 
Trump unleashed on this building 5 years ago. MAGA world has since 
decided that no crimes were committed that day. That is new. At the 
time, Senator Cruz, who called the hearing to impeach Judge Boasberg, 
described those crimes as a ``violent terrorist attack on the 
Capitol.'' That was then.
  The campaign against Chief Judge Boasberg very much involves the MAGA 
DOJ. What are his sins there? Well, first, FBI Director Patel tried to 
scapegoat Chief Judge Boasberg as the person stopping Patel from being 
honest with the Judiciary Committee about his grand jury testimony in 
the Mar-a-Lago classified records case.
  I asked him what he told the grand jury. It is black letter law that 
a witness is allowed to disclose his own testimony to a grand jury, and 
Patel had testified before that grand jury. He did so only after he had 
asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and was 
given immunity from prosecution.
  The obvious implication is that whatever Director Patel told that 
grand jury put him at risk of prosecution, and we wanted to know what 
crime Patel thinks he might have committed. It is kind of relevant when 
he is now the Director of the FBI.
  Director Patel lied to us in the committee that he couldn't describe 
his testimony based on a supposed court order from what he called the 
DC district chief judge.
  Guess who that is. Chief Judge Boasberg. Chief Judge Boasberg later 
exposed that lie in a related proceeding, saying that Patel could 
``divulge the contents'' of his own testimony and ``nothing was 
preventing him from doing so before the committee.'' So he blew up Kash 
Patel's lie. That meant, when Patel came back, he had to invent a new 
lie to avoid answering that question.
  Second is another MAGA DOJ sin.
  When the MAGA DOJ wanted to illegally jet people out of the country 
in the dark of night to an El Salvadoran prison, Chief Judge Boasberg 
was on duty, and he ordered that stopped. This infuriated the MAGA DOJ. 
Then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told DOJ 
lawyers that if courts stopped these deportations, they would need to 
be ready to tell those judges ``f you,'' using the full four-letter 
word. Chief Judge Boasberg became the target of that Bove ``f you.''
  In that matter, considerable evidence of contempt of court by DOJ 
officials caused Chief Judge Boasberg to notice probable cause and 
schedule contempt proceedings. That, I think, is the heart of this 
whole messy situation.
  One of the subjects of that contempt proceeding was now-Judge Bove. 
As that contempt proceeding went forward, two Trump judges on the DC 
Circuit stepped in, and they blocked that contempt hearing. They 
blocked it using something called an administrative stay, which is the 
procedure that usually lasts for hours, days, or at most a week or 10 
days. They blocked that contempt hearing using an administrative stay 
for 4 months. Guess what happened during that 4 months. Republicans 
hustled none other than Emil Bove onto the Third Circuit Court of 
Appeals with no factual record from any contempt proceeding for the 
committee to see. Bove's judiciary hearing

[[Page S224]]

was so important to MAGA that Bondi and Blanche, her Deputy, came over 
to the hearing to give the eyeball to Republicans on the committee.
  Later, the administrative stay was lifted, and the full DC Circuit 
cleared Chief Judge Boasberg to resume his contempt proceedings. Well, 
that decision came down on a Friday. On Monday, a handful of Republican 
Senators sent a letter to the DC Circuit chief judge seeking District 
Court Chief Judge Boasberg's suspension while Republicans thought about 
impeaching him. Cleared to proceed Friday; the letter for suspension 
drops Monday.
  The letter itself makes no sense. The judiciary just doesn't suspend 
judges because some random Members of Congress call for impeachment. 
But anything goes to stop the contempt proceeding into Trump's MAGA 
DOJ.
  Adding to this, the MAGA Attorney General filed a misconduct 
complaint against Chief Judge Boasberg based on a private comment he 
allegedly made at a private meeting of the Judicial Conference. That is 
an administrative body. That has nothing to do with the cases judges 
hear. The AG and Members of Congress are invited--I often attend--and 
its proceedings are private. So the AG's complaint was a major breach.
  The alleged offending comment was this: that Chief Judge Boasberg 
``raised his colleagues' concerns that the administration would 
disregard rulings of Federal courts, leading to a constitutional 
crisis.''
  If you don't see the ethics violation there, well, you are not alone. 
This so-called ethics complaint looks preposterous to this Senator. It 
looks like it is a strategic device to have something to complain about 
to block the contempt proceeding.
  It gets worse.
  In November, Trump's personal lawyer--now the MAGA Deputy Attorney 
General, Todd Blanche--went before the Federalist Society to urge what 
he called war--war--against Federal judges, particularly ones who are 
``repeat players'' or ``stop an entire operation or an entire 
administrative policy.'' He did not say Chief Judge Boasberg's name 
yet, but it was clear who was in the zone of his war threat.
  But last week's Judiciary subcommittee hearing was not as subtle. The 
backdrop to last week's hearing was Republican Senators breaking norms 
and 200 years of history to call for impeaching judges because of those 
judges' judicial decisions. Those same Senators ignore proof of real 
judicial misconduct of not filing your disclosures correctly and 
perhaps not filing your taxes at all. They ignore completely the 
ongoing environment of attacks on the judiciary, which their comments 
obviously inflame. Then, of course, they are targeting a judge that the 
MAGA DOJ is hell-bent on putting out of business so that he can't 
investigate their contempt.
  That brings me to the final tell, which is that this impeachment 
bluster is really about propping up the MAGA DOJ campaign against Chief 
Judge Boasberg.
  Here is tell No. 6: Virtually none of what my Republican colleagues 
accuse Chief Judge Boasberg of is true.
  Take the letter that Senator Cruz sent to Speaker Johnson last week. 
According to that letter, Chief Judge Boasberg ``targeted'' Republican 
Senators by ``secretly authorizing and sealing'' Jack Smith's grand 
jury subpoenas for those Senators' phone records. Well, you don't have 
to be much of a lawyer to spot the issues here.

  First, judges don't authorize or seal grand jury subpoenas. 
Prosecutors issue those subpoenas on their own, and they file them 
under seal because that is the law.
  Chief Judge Boasberg didn't target those Senators either. People 
under investigation for trying to overturn the 2020 election, in a case 
involving an investigation of that criminal conspiracy, called Senators 
as a part of that conspiracy. That is how the Senators' names came up--
not because Jack Smith chose them.
  Jack Smith said it best: He ``did not choose those Members. President 
Trump did.''
  And it gets better.
  Chief Judge Boasberg had no way of knowing that it was Senators on 
the other end of the toll records' request. A toll records' request 
only gives the phone number to the service provider so they can tag 
that phone number and then provide the requested toll records to the 
investigators. He would not have known whose records were in that 
subpoena because the DOJ's practice at the time was not to disclose 
that information.
  Some Republican Senators went so far as to falsely describe the 
subpoenas and the toll records' requests as wiretaps. Chairman Grassley 
himself has acknowledged this was not true. The requested data were 
toll records showing limited information like incoming and outgoing 
calls, not the contents of any calls or messages. People on the 
Judiciary Committee should know the difference between toll records and 
wiretaps. It is basic stuff.
  Republicans also say that Chief Judge Boasberg shouldn't have issued 
nondisclosure orders temporarily preventing the phone companies from 
telling the Senators about these subpoenas. These orders were justified 
by a finding that if the existence of the subpoenas got out, it would 
probably lead to evidence-tampering, witness intimidation, and 
interference with Smith's investigations.
  What Republican Senators say is that it is outrageous that Chief 
Judge Boasberg thinks Senators might interfere with an investigation. 
Well, that was not the problem. That is not what Chief Judge Boasberg 
said. What he and Jack Smith probably were worried about was not 
interference by Republican Senators. If you listen closely to Jack 
Smith's House testimony, it sounds like what he was really worried 
about was interference by Trump and his coconspirators. That is what 
makes sense. And if it became public that the Senators were the subject 
of that subpoena, the Trump machine would go to work on them. It is 
that Trump conspiracy that Smith was investigating, and that conspiracy 
already had a pattern and practice of intimidating witnesses, tampering 
with evidence, and interfering in investigations.
  Add to that the fact that the conspirators only called Republican 
Senators in the first place to try to pressure them to commit a crime. 
It is not a shocker that investigators were wary about even more 
pressure and interference.
  By the way, we could settle this question. We don't have to speculate 
on what the motivation was behind those nondisclosure orders. We could 
ask Jack Smith himself, who has actually requested to testify before 
the Senate Judiciary Committee. I am sure we would learn a lot from 
that. Ranking Member Durbin says they have offered to bring in Jack 
Smith multiple times, and the Republicans on the committee keep saying 
no. They don't want to hear the answer; they just want to propagate 
their supposition.
  If you go back to Senator Cruz's letter, he accuses Chief Judge 
Boasberg of violating a 2004 law protecting Senators' official phone 
records. Well, it is a little thing, but, you know, facts are important 
when you are lawyers and are talking about things like impeaching 
judges. We actually didn't pass the relevant language in 2004; we 
passed it in 2020 by amendment after, interestingly, the first Trump 
administration did the same thing to Members of Congress--took their 
records and didn't disclose.
  Now, that is a small error. The real point here is that Chief Judge 
Boasberg had no clue that these were Senators' records. It is hard to 
find fault when he doesn't have the information and when that was the 
standard practice of the Department of Justice at the time and when the 
Trump Department of Justice had done the same thing to Members of 
Congress before.
  So to make this whole thing look more nefarious, Republicans rewrote 
the law last year in that continuing resolution bill to make it look 
more like Chief Judge Boasberg did something wrong. In that bill, they 
retroactively made illegal his nondisclosure orders. They were 
perfectly legal at the time. They were standard operating practice both 
for the Department of Justice and the court at the time. He had no 
notice that these were Senators behind the phone numbers. And years 
later, here come Republican Senators in the CR bill they jammed 
through, and they throw in a provision that goes all the way back and 
makes that conduct now illegal.
  Why would you do that? Well, now it enables the rhetorical battle--
the narrative--to be ``Oh, Judge Boasberg

[[Page S225]]

issued these illegal orders'' and then leave out the bit that they were 
perfectly legal and standard operating procedure at the time.
  But if the purpose of this whole operation is to rev up the attack 
and threat machine, what I call the flying monkeys of the far right--
``Fly, my pretties. Go harass that judge. Go harass that judge's 
daughter''--then calling the orders illegal adds impetus.
  By the way, it is not just me saying Republicans are being misleading 
about what took place here. The Administrative Office of the U.S. 
Courts debunked these conspiracy theories about Chief Judge Boasberg, 
long before last week's hearing, and Jack Smith effectively did the 
same thing through letters and his sworn testimony to the House.
  At last week's hearing, I entered into the record statements from 
respected impeachment experts from the American Bar Association and 
from a group of retired Federal judges, all saying the same thing: This 
is nonsense, and cut it out before someone gets hurt.
  We even heard from one of Justice Scalia's proteges, retired Fourth 
Circuit Judge Michael Luttig, who described one of the Republican 
witness's testimony at a hearing as ``contemptible.''
  The fact that none of this deterred or discouraged my Republican 
colleagues should tell everyone listening that this is not going to 
stop. This is a pressure campaign, and they are desperate to stop the 
contempt investigation into the MAGA Department of Justice. You add all 
this together, and that is exactly what it starts to look like: a MAGA 
campaign, a coordinated strategy to bring pressure and threats to bear 
on a Federal judge--not arguments in court--outside pressure and 
threats, and to do so in an environment in which violent threats are 
prevalent, perhaps the worst environment of violent threats the Federal 
judiciary has ever seen and one in which, just to add additional poison 
into the equation, the MAGA DOJ repeatedly refuses to assure us that 
proper investigative policies will be followed about threats to Federal 
judges.
  If you have a scheme or a campaign to threaten Federal judges and you 
won't look beyond the utterer of the threat and you won't investigate 
orchestration, organization, coordination, conspiracy, enterprise--any 
of that--you are not doing your job. That is basic investigative 
procedure. And we are up to, I think, 20 times that we have asked the 
Marshals Service or the MAGA DOJ: Will you investigate behind the 
utterer for potential orchestration?
  It is an easy answer. It is like: Yes, of course we will.
  So when they won't answer that question, that is a big warning. What 
this is all about is that the MAGA DOJ wants to stop the contempt 
hearing, period.
  I hope that neither Chief Judge Boasberg nor any of the other judges 
who have been targeted by MAGA and its threatening internet flying 
monkeys are intimidated by this, but that doesn't make it any less 
dangerous. And I would sure hope that this body, the U.S. Senate, would 
be better than to play along with a scheme to amplify pressure and 
threats against sitting Federal judges--pressure and threats against 
sitting Federal judges. But here we are with MAGA Republicans leading 
the charge, obedient to an increasingly dangerous Executive.
  I have put this together. These are all the different vectors of 
pressure against the judge.
  First, there is that MAGA Bondi complaint that I talked about that I 
think is fake, strategic, pretextual, designed to give an excuse to 
criticize the judge who will be looking into the DOJ's contempt.
  The House has filed Articles of Impeachment to try to put pressure on 
him and to whip up the MAGA flying monkeys.
  The Senate just held the hearing that I spoke about.
  Two Trump judges blocked the contempt proceedings with a highly 
unusual administrative stay. It was only when that stay was lifted 
that, within days, Republicans sent the letter to the chief judge 
asking to have Judge Boasberg suspended.
  The Deputy Attorney General of the United States declared war on 
certain Federal judges using descriptors that look exactly like this 
judge.
  And we just found out that, in the appropriations bill, Republicans 
have tried to defund his office, the office of the chief judge of the 
DC District Court.
  And then, of course, you have got that stunt in the continuing 
resolution of declaring his perfectly legal conduct years ago 
retroactively illegal.
  That is eight separate vectors of pressure against one judge. That is 
not the way the Federal judicial system is supposed to operate, and it 
is particularly wrong in this environment of violent and dangerous 
threats.
  To be continued.
  I yield the floor.

                          ____________________