Commissioner Beryl A. Howell and President Donald Trump are depicted in photos from different occasions. Howell is shown in a file photo from a U.S. Sentencing Commission meeting in 2007, while Trump is pictured speaking with reporters in the Oval Office at the White House in 2025.
The Department of Justice under Donald Trump has requested that the judge in charge of a lawsuit filed by a law firm associated with Hillary Clinton recuse themselves. The lawsuit revolves around an executive order aimed at the said firm.
President Trump issued an executive order on March 6 targeting Perkins Coie, the legal team that represented Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, which Trump ultimately won. This order suspended the security clearances and barred access to government buildings for Perkins Coie employees. It was the second executive order of its kind by Trump, the first one having been directed at Covington & Burling, a law firm accused of providing legal services to special prosecutor Jack Smith. A third executive order targeting the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP as a national security risk was later retracted.
On March 11, Perkins Coie sued the Trump administration over the order; the next day, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who was assigned to the case, temporarily blocked the executive order from taking effect.
Calling the Perkins Coie executive order “retaliatory” in nature, Howell — a Barack Obama appointee who served as Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., from 2016 to 2023 — said that its “plain purpose is to bully those who advocate points of view that the President perceives as adverse to the views of his Administration.”
In the eight-page filing, DOJ lawyers alleged that Howell had engaged in “systematic hostility” toward the president.
“This Court has not kept its disdain for President Trump secret,” the motion says, pointing to a November 2023 speech that Howell gave at a lawyers event in which she allegedly implied that a Trump presidency would lead to authoritarianism. The motion also noted Howell’s rejection of Trump’s position that the prosecution of those who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a “national injustice,” and accused her of engaging in “wholly inappropriate name-calling” by referring to Trump supporters as “sore losers” and accusing the president of perpetuating a “revisionist myth” with his blanket pardon of convicted Jan. 6 rioters.
The motion also cited an exchange with DOJ lawyers in this very case, in which Howell noted that Trump “really has a bee in his bonnet” about the investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
“The Court’s condescending remark that President Trump had ‘a bee in his bonnet’ about Fusion GPS demonstrate a concerning and dismissive approach to the entire Durham Investigation — an Investigation that touched on the Court’s role in the Mueller Report and one in which members of the Plaintiff’s firm played a primary and essential role,” the filing says.
Ultimately, the motion wants Howell to remove herself from the case and for the matter to be assigned to “a judge free from any appearance of hostility toward this Administration and [who] is otherwise unconnected with any matter related to the Mueller Report or Durham Investigation.”
The lawsuit from Perkins Coie is a decidedly different response to the executive order from the response of at least one other law firm named in a separate but nearly identical missive: on Thursday, it was announced that Paul, Weiss had agreed to provide the Trump administration with $40 million in legal services “to support the Administration’s initiatives.”
The Trump administration’s demand for Howell’s recusal comes on the heels of an effort to remove another judge from a different case against the president: on Tuesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to demand the impeachment of Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered a stop to the deportations of hundreds of migrants to Venezuela. Trump’s online invective, in which he called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator,” earned a swift rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who appeared to obliquely remind Trump that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
“The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” the chief justice added.
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