Judge tells Trump's critics: Don't comply with DOJ subpoenas

A federal judge is so annoyed with the Justice Department that she's advising those opposing the top agency to try to kill any subpoena submitted because she no longer believes they can be trusted.

U.S. District Court Judge Mary S. McElroy said at the end of a hearing over involving a pediatric hospital attempting to avoid handing over medical records of transgender minors that the DOJ “should be prepared to field thousands of motions to quash, tens of thousands maybe, because I don’t know how any party can rely on a conversation with the Department of Justice that they’re working on compliance” given the track of this case.

Bloomberg Law reported that the transcript of the case was only recently added to the docket.

“I’m not a practitioner, but as a judge I would say to anybody you should be filing motions to quash in every case where the Department of Justice is seeking information and you’re trying to negotiate it,” McElroy said, according to the document.

She said that the case was "a cautionary tale."

McElroy ultimately sided with the Rhode Island Hospital in a scathing ruling that involved removing the medical privacy of minors. She then blasted prosecutors for trying to withhold information and misrepresent the facts of the case. The exchange in court goes further, as the judge condemned Civil Division officials representing the government's case.

One, Jordan Campbell, is a deputy assistant attorney general, and is overseeing a nationwide investigation into children with gender dysphoria. The DOJ is endeavoring to end the practice of gender affirming care altogether, it confirmed in a press release. In many cases, a first step in gender affirming care is talking to a psychologist, the Gender Affirming Health Program at the University of California, San Francisco outlines.

The Justice Department was trying to "forum shop the investigation," Bloomberg reported. Judge McElroy said that the DOJ knowingly misled the judge in the North District of Texas, falsely claiming that the Rhode Island Hospital, had ignored the subpoena for months. In fact, lawyers for the hospital tried to meet with DOJ lawyers to narrow the search terms in their extensive demand for medical documents. The Justice Department never responded.

“You ghosted them,” McElroy said in court to the DOJ attorneys. She said that the DOJ lawyers never told Fort Worth-based Judge Reed O'Connor that before he agreed to enforce the Rhode Island subpoena.

The head of the DOJ's Civil Division, Brantley Mayers, was shredded by the judge as she demanded to know specifics about his experience. Mayers confessed that he's only spent one month in legal practice. He's done three clerkships in the past, but only joined the DOJ in November. The report cited his LinkedIn page showing that he clerked for a Donald Trump-appointed judge in Florida after graduating from the University of Florida in 2022.

Campbell, however, helped co-found “the first and only firm dedicated to exclusively representing detransitioners and victims of radical gender ideology,” his government bio reads. He has sued the Rhode Island Hospital previously while he was practicing in Dallas, Texas.

Eric Olshan, a lawyer representing the hospital, said that the lawyer's background is important because “we’re left wondering, given the nature of our communications with the government, how we wound up in this situation that we’re currently in.”

When Justice Department “attorneys came to this court to explain their conduct, the senior attorney—who was present at many of the events that took place in this case—sat silently by as his counterpart, a junior attorney who has been practicing law for approximately six months and had no relevant information, was forced to answer questions about DOJ’s blatant disregard for the proper course of negotiations,” the judge wrote in her final ruling.

McElroy is one of the federal judges who has been critical of the Justice Department under President Donald Trump. The Obama appointee has particularly taken issue with the use of conservative-friendly Texas courts to go after other states in which they have no jurisdiction.

“At least be honest enough to admit that,” McElroy said, according to the transcript.

“Admit what, your honor?” Mayers responded.

“That you chose Fort Worth where there’s two judges intentionally knowing that you were going to get a forum, since you had lost seven of these—every single one of them that were filed in other cases—right?” the judge replied.