'Embarrassing': Trump administration fires its own lawyers for 'legal malpractice'

The New York Times reports the Trump administration is firing its own attorneys over alleged incompetence.

The U.S. Department of Transportation on Thursday made the peculiar move of replacing its federal lawyers defending it in a lawsuit over New York City’s congestion pricing program, allegedly because the lawyers undermined the department’s case.

New York wants to impose a $9 entrance fee to Manhattan to reduce gridlock, cut pollution and fund critical transit projects — but Trump called the program "illegal," and has demanded the state halt the plan or risk the White House slashing federal funding and approval for transit projects. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy wrote a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul warning she has until May 21 to explain why his department should not withhold federal funding, with a promise to begin penalizing the state May 28.

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New York sued the U.S. government over the threats in federal court, but yesterday the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office reported it had mistakenly filed a confidential memo that criticized the department’s legal strategy.

Strategy arguments are usually limited to client/attorney discussions and do not find themselves publicly submitted in court. Nevertheless, the court faced an 11-page letter suggesting the federal department build a stronger case by terminating the federal government’s approval of the tolling program “as a matter of changed agency priorities” rather than questioning the legality of the toll — which could be a difficult argument to establish in court.

The Department of Transportation raised the possibility of sabotage by its own attorneys in a statement today, calling the filing “legal malpractice.”

“Are S.D.N.Y. lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST?” a federal spokeswoman wrote, according to the NY Times.

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U.S. attorney’s office spokesman Nicholas Biase assured the filing “was a completely honest error and was not intentional in any way,” but New York University Law School professor Roderick M. Hills Jr called the filing “a gigantic, obvious, objective blunder.”

“Oh my god — very embarrassing,” Hills told the NYTimes.

Read the full NY Times story here.