The Selective Outrage of Judge James Boasberg
24th November 2025
For months, District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg has been very much in the news.
This spring, he issued a 46-page decision finding that the Trump administration may be in contempt of court for violating his order to return flights of deportees being sent to El Salvador.
In that ruling, Boasberg insisted that it was essential for him to know the facts on whether “officials of a coordinate branch” had undermined judicial integrity.
After all, nothing short of the separation of powers was at stake. This week, Boasberg announced that he was moving forward without further delay to ferret out who was responsible for the alleged violation.
That message, however, has now been undermined by another Judge James Boasberg, who is in the news this week as part of the controversy over the Justice Department’s acquisition of telephone records of leading Republican members of Congress.
Boasberg had imposed a gag order on telephone companies to prevent them from informing Congress that the executive branch was snooping on who had been in contact with them.
These two James Boasbergs seem as different as the two Jeffrey Epsteins referenced this week by Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) — one a presumably respectable medical doctor, the other a deceased sex offender. However, to use Crockett’s formulation, it was indeed “that James Boasberg” in both cases.