The judge found the DOJ’s submission today ‘woefully inadequate’ and derided prosecutors’ stonewalling.

Earlier today, I recounted that the Trump Justice Department has been stonewalling Chief Judge James Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., who has demanded that the DOJ provide him, under oath (though ex parte and under seal), with an explanation of whether the Trump administration complied with his Saturday order not to deport Venezuelans suspected of being members of the vicious Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, and to turn around any flights that might already have taken off.

It turned out that the administration did in fact deport approximately 250 alleged TdA members; that two of the flights had already taken off and were over Mexico and the “Gulf of America” (Trump’s rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico) at the time Boasberg gave his order, but were not turned around; and that a third flight took off after the order.

Judge Boasberg twice extended the deadline for the DOJ to file its sworn submission, after the Justice Department sought last-minute extensions. These requests have been petulantly framed, accusing the judge of usurping the president’s foreign relations power. (As I explained in today’s post, Boasberg is doing no such thing; he is demanding an explanation under circumstances where he colorably suspects the Justice Department misled and defied him.) The latest deadline was today at noon. The Justice Department filed . . . something, but it evidently did not answer Boasberg’s questions. The New York Times reports that the judge has issued an angry order, describing the submission as “woefully inadequate” and chiding the DOJ for having repeatedly “evaded its obligations” to candidly report to the court. (As far as I can tell, the order has not yet been posted on the court’s website.)

The order calls for a do-over: Boasberg is giving prosecutors until Tuesday (March 25) to file a new submission that answers his questions: exactly what time and from where the planes took off in the United States, what time they left U.S. airspace, and what time they landed in which countries.

Besides the likelihood that the answers to the questions would cast the DOJ in a poor light, I suspect Attorney General Pamela Bondi and her subordinates are tap-dancing because the D.C. Circuit appellate agreed to hear on an emergency basis the government’s appeal of Boasberg’s order suspending the deportations. The judge put the deportation effort on pause in order to consider whether, as the administration contends, the president had authority under the 1798 Alien Enemy Act (AEA) to direct deportations without judicial review of Venezuelan nationals he alleges are part of a foreign terrorist organization that has conducted an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” in the U.S. at the direction of Nicolas Maduro’s Marxist, anti-American regime. (For the reasons outlined here, I don’t think the president has such unilateral authority.) Trump issued an order on the first day of his new administration directing the State Department to designate TdA as a foreign terrorist organization.

The D.C. Circuit has scheduled oral argument for Monday. Ordinarily, if an appeals court takes jurisdiction of a case, the lower court may not act on it. For now, however, the circuit has not tried to stop Boasberg from demanding answers out of the government. I suspect this is because the substantive merit of the administration’s AEA deportation theory could be considered discrete from the question of whether prosecutors misled Boasberg. In any event, it is an irregular way of proceeding in what is already a fraught matter.