ACLJ Urges Justice Department to Hold its Attorneys Accountable

As we reported last week, a United States District Court issued a scathing rebuke to the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ).

The court exposed the DOJ attorneys’ intentional misrepresentations on over 100,000 occasions and the government’s violation of the court’s injunction on over 2,000 occasions.

Today, the ACLJ sent a legal letter to the DOJ office tasked with internal investigations of attorney misconduct. In our letter, sent on behalf of thousands of our members representing all fifty states, we demanded accountability and expressed the critical importance of the DOJ taking concrete action to restore its credibility.

This is the court that rejected President Obama’s attempt to “change the law” to match his immigration policy preferences, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court – and this is the case in which the ACLJ has filed numerous briefs representing Members of Congress and over 337,000 of our members. ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow also addressed the executive lawlessness underlying this case in congressional testimony.

Given our heavy involvement in this case, and the fact that we frequently litigate with (or in opposition to) the DOJ, the ACLJ was uniquely positioned to tackle the DOJ attorney misconduct head on. And that’s just what we did.

As we recounted in our letter to the DOJ, the court described the misconduct this way:  

The Government’s “admissions make one conclusion indisputably clear: the Justice Department lawyers knew the true facts and misrepresented those facts to the citizens of the 26 Plaintiff States, their lawyers and this Court on multiple occasions.”

Jay Sekulow recently reported on the court’s stern rebuke in a Fox News piece, and quoted a key finding made by the court:

The misconduct in this case was intentional, serious and material. In fact, it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.

In its Order, the court squarely addressed the “unseemly and unprofessional conduct” of multiple DOJ attorneys with six specific sanctions. The sanctioned behavior centered on “the series of misrepresentations made by the attorneys from the Justice Department to the Plaintiff States and to this Court” wherein the DOJ attorneys “misled the Plaintiff States into foregoing a request for a temporary restraining order or an earlier injunction hearing” and “misdirected the Court as to the timeline involved in the implementation of the 2014 DHS Directive.”

The DOJ must act swiftly to correct misconduct by its attorneys – at every level in the Department. We agree with the court that  “[s]uch conduct is certainly not worthy of any department whose name includes the word ‘Justice.’” In our letter, we addressed how important it is for the DOJ (the nation’s representative in court) and the Attorney General (the nation’s chief law enforcement officer) to correct the misconduct and restore trust. The stakes are high.

Our letter reviewed the numerous rules violated by the DOJ attorneys, as well as the federal regulations the DOJ is bound to follow in correcting the misconduct. We urged her to:

(1) undertake a thorough investigation pursuant to your authority and responsibility; (2) ensure that your investigation will address any supervisor or office head misconduct and look beyond those attorneys who made the misrepresentations to the Court; and (3) take and all action to require complete cooperation, regardless of a particular attorney’s rank.

Stand with us in our mission to protect the rule of law and demand accountability from the DOJ. It is our Justice Department, and justice must be done.

Join the cause by signing our Petition.