US judge steps down to speak out against Trump, ‘threat to democracy’

Lower court judges have repeatedly issued rulings blocking Trump’s initiatives, provoking an aggressive response from administration officials who have accused them of engaging in partisan politics, going so far as to call for some of them to be impeached.

In many cases, those judges have seen their decisions in effect reversed on a preliminary basis by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Responding to a New York Times questionnaire, dozens of lower-court federal judges criticised the role that those emergency rulings by the Supreme Court, on the so-called shadow docket, have played in the ongoing conflict between the judiciary and the executive branch.

“There are judges who anonymously expressed concerns about the unreasoned decisions on the shadow docket, which I also expressed in this article,” he said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump-aligned legal figures were quick to criticise Wolf.

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Robert Luther III, a professor at Antonin Scalia Law School who helped choose judicial nominees as a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office during Trump’s first administration, said he hoped other judges engaged in what he called “anti-Trump activism” would follow Wolf’s lead and leave the bench. “Step right up, please!” he wrote on social media.

Wolf had a long and storied career on the federal bench. As the Massachusetts district’s chief judge, he presided over the trial of Boston mobster James (Whitey) Bulger and wrote a 661-page opinion detailing misconduct by the FBI related to Bulger, who had been a confidential informant.

In 2023, in testimony before the Senate judiciary committee, he raised questions about the judiciary’s handling of Justice Clarence Thomas’ decision not to disclose lavish gifts on his annual financial disclosure forms.

The code of conduct for federal judges requires that they “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary”, a rule that has been interpreted to limit their public statements. In a letter last week to Chief Justice John Roberts, Senator Chuck Grassley and Congressman Jim Jordan asked that the judges who responded to the Times questionnaire be investigated for potentially violating that rule.

But in the eyes of Wolf and other judges who have put warnings in their opinions, the actions of the administration deserve urgent scrutiny. In addition to claiming unilateral powers to spend, deport and kill, Trump’s administration has also undertaken a far-reaching campaign to investigate and prosecute the president’s adversaries.

Wolf, who served in the Justice Department in the years after the Watergate scandal, wrote that Trump was “routinely and overtly” doing what former president Richard Nixon had done “episodically and covertly”.

He cited a social media post by Trump that called on Attorney-General Pam Bondi to prosecute James Comey, the former FBI director; Senator Adam Schiff of California; and New York Attorney-General Letitia James. Comey and James were subsequently indicted, and investigations of senior intelligence officials from the Obama administrations were also said to be under way.

“Americans proudly say that we live in the longest-lived democracy in the world,” Wolf said in the interview. “But that should teach us that all the others failed.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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