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Judge Paul A. Engelmayer (S.D.N.Y.) on Wednesday denied the government’s motion for summary judgment on its claim that the attorney-client and deliberative process privileges shield a Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memorandum on the legality of lethal strikes of boats carrying suspected narco-terrorists from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. (Opinion.) (NYT.)
Judge Victoria Marie Calvert (N.D. Ga.) on Wednesday dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking access to Georgia’s unredacted voter registration list. (Order.) The federal government has lost all 26 of its decided suits seeking state voter lists, and four remain pending. (CBS.)
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee alleging that former special counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department violated her privileges under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause and her First and Fourth Amendment rights by subpoenaing her cell phone logs in connection with the department’s investigation into President Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election. (Complaint.) (NYT.) (Politico.)
The Justice Department on Wednesday accused two judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota of judicial misconduct for speaking to The New York Times about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota. The department asked the Judicial Council of the Eighth Circuit to investigate the judges and to order them recused from all cases involving the Department of Homeland Security. (Complaint.) (NYT.) (WaPo.)
An evaluation released on Wednesday by the Office of Inspector General for the Federal Reserve into the Board’s oversight of a nearly $2.4 billion construction project determined that the project was badly managed but found no administrative misconduct or criminal wrongdoing. (Report.) (NYT.) (WaPo.) President Trump said on Wednesday that former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell should be forced to resign from the Fed’s board or “be sued, at the highest level, by the United States Government.” (Truth Social.) For background on the Justice Department’s since-abandoned criminal investigation into Powell, see previous Roundups.
A report released on Tuesday by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General found that the reduction in operations at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which was implemented pursuant to a March 2025 executive order, undermined the agency’s “capacity to fulfill its core statutory mission of informing, engaging, and connecting people worldwide in support of freedom and democracy.” (Report.) (NYT.)
Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer discussed the legality of taxpayer-funded advertisements praising President Trump. (Executive Functions.)
Loren Voss and Natalie K. Orpett argued that the Insurrection Act does not provide an exception to a longtime federal law banning troops from polling locations. (Lawfare.)
Neil Siegel argued in a new paper that the Supreme Court in the early months of the second Trump administration moved from a “self-protective” to a “self-assertive” posture as it developed confidence that the administration would comply with its orders. (SSRN.)
Pending Interim Order Applications Involving the U.S. Government in the Supreme Court
Trump v. Kingdom: The government filed an application to the Supreme Court on September 28 seeking a stay of the district court’s August 26 order barring enforcement of the Bureau of Prisons’ 2026 policy ending hormone therapy, “sex-trait-modification surgery,” and social accommodations for inmates with gender dysphoria. The Chief Justice requested a response to the application by 4 p.m. on October 8.