The Department of Justice filed a grievance against all two named and bizarrely the rest anonymous judges in the District of Minnesota with the Judicial Council for the Eighth Circuit, complaining of judges giving an interview to the New York Times on September 17, 2026, about the Department of Justice failing to comply with court orders. The complaint is that these judges violated the Canon of Judicial Conduct by engaging in political speech by condemning the DoJ’s disregard of court orders and discussing cases that had not as yet been concluded.

Ironically, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, Attorney General Todd Blanche, went on to admit that his department disregarded the orders of the court.

“I’m allowed to get really fired up when, for example, judges in Minnesota complain about us violating court orders but the reason why, that we are, quote, violating court orders is because these judges are violating Supreme Court law, OK, in allowing these cases to be filed,” he said, apparently referring to a case that clarifies which courts have jurisdiction to hear detention challenges.

Blanche noted that he’s allowed to do what he contends the judges did because he’s not a judge.

Mr. Blanche drew a distinction between the criticism leveled against his department by judges and the public criticism he has leveled against them. He noted that he is not a judge and not bound by judicial ethics.

It’s certainly correct that he’s not a judge, although it would come as little surprise that he gets nominated for a judicial appointment before Trump leaves office given Trump’s desire to load the judiciary with reliable allies who will do as he commands. Then again, not being a judge does not mean Blanche is under no ethical constraints. As an attorney admitted to practice in New York in 2004, Blanche is subject to the New York Code of Professional Conduct, even as attorney general. That includes a prohibition on “engag[ing] in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” such as failing or refusing to comply with court orders.

But whether or not Blanche comes to his grievance with dirty hands doesn’t answer the question of whether Judge Schlitz and Tunheim engaged in impropriety when being interviewed by the Times.

The violations needed to stop immediately. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” Judge Schiltz wrote in his Jan. 28 order.

Judges around the country took notice, not only of the scale of the allegation but because such a harsh reproach was coming from the pen of Judge Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee with almost 20 years of experience on the bench. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the 1980s and has enjoyed close ties to the conservative legal establishment for decades. This was not the profile of a judge likely to engage in a high-stakes standoff with the White House.

While that may not sound like the resume of a radical left lunatic, as Trump tends to characterize judges who rule against him, even if he was the president who appointed them, this too doesn’t answer the question of whether it was improper for Judge Schlitz to talk to the Times.

What happened in Minnesota’s federal court, he said, “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”

He said he thought the violations were largely the result of incompetence and staffing shortages, but also worried that the Justice Department had not taken their corrosive effect seriously enough.

“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” he added, referring to the violated orders and other unusual behavior by the Justice Department.

Fair game or partisan bias? And Judge Schlitz was not alone in viewing the DoJ’s failure to abide court orders as “creating a grave threat.”

The seven judges who spoke to The Times were appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. They included six of the seven judges who held active status in Minnesota last winter.

“We are allowed to speak out about judicial independence,” said Judge Nancy E. Brasel, whom Mr. Trump appointed in 2018. “And so we should, in order to keep it.”

Indeed, the flagrant failure to comply with orders of the court was not merely a “grave threat” to judicial independence, but a relatively novel one. As Judge Schlitz accurately noted, “this just never happens,” or at least happens very rarely. But what distinguishes what was happening with the orders of the Minnesota judges is that their orders were not merely slipping through cracks because the immigration cases overwhelmed the capacity of the DoJ to handle them, but that the judges were being openly attacked by both the president and attorney general for not ruling the way they wanted.

That said, it’s generally unseemly for active judges to be interviewed at all, and particularly about matters that will almost certainly be coming before them over and over again. Judges speak through their decisions, and their extrajudicial statements are invariably ripe for criticism when they address matters pending before the court. Unfair as it may seem, judges don’t get to go public to fight back against spurious attacks by political actors.

Then again, the concomitant duty of political actors, particularly those subject to the ethical rules of being a lawyer, is to comply with court orders and, if you think they’re wrong, appeal them rather than take to the airwaves to attack the judges who issued them. Whether the District of Minnesota judges crossed the line by being interviewed by the Times seems highly unlikely, even if somewhat unseemly.

But the actions of the Trump administration and the Blanche DoJ have changed the rules of propriety. Before, “this just doesn’t happen” was a fairly solid statement. Now, “this happens all the time” changes the equation, and puts the judiciary in the awkward position of having to take a stand in defense of the judicial independence and the rule of law.