The number of U.S. judges who have either barred, delayed or criticized actions made by the Trump administration in the almost six months since President Donald Trump returned to the White House is an extensive list. And Trump appears to be at his wits’ end about it.
A week ago, in a post on Truth Social, Trump used choice words to go after conservative and libertarian legal organization The Federalist Society and the chairman of its board of directors, Leonard Leo.
Leo and the Federalist Society were deeply influential in judicial nominations during Trump’s first term, including on Judge Timothy Reif — who recently, on a three-judge panel, ruled against Trump’s tariff agenda.
In his post, Trump said that during his first term, when he was “new to Washington,” the Federalist Society was recommended to him to help select judges to appoint.
“I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions,” he said.
On the same day, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a letter to the American Bar Association’s president William Bay that the Department of Justice would no longer give them “special treatment” like “some administrations, (where) the ABA received notice of nominees before a nomination was announced to the public,” she wrote. “Some administrations would even decide whether to nominate an individual based on a rating assigned by the ABA.”
Though the attack on the Federalist Society came as a shock to critics and supporters of Trump, giving the ABA the cold shoulder was not a surprise.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee has been very outspoken against the American Bar Association, accusing it of being more favorable towards Democratic policy. In a social media post on Thursday, he accused the ABA of being “practically the lawyers wing of the Democratic National Committee.”
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, he also defended his ties with the Federalist Society, arguing that unlike the ABA, “It’s an open forum for discussion among lawyers and law students. (An) open forum in which multiple viewpoints are, in fact, welcome.”
“It’s not an advocacy organization,” Lee said, “quite unlike the American Bar Association.”
In a Wall Street Journal opinion podcast on Monday, John Yoo, a law professor and former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, said Trump’s words against Leo and the Federalist Society were “outrageous.”
“That was truly outrageous to accuse Leonard Leo, one of the stalwarts of the conservative movement, of being something like a traitor and using judicial appointments to advance his own personal agenda,” Yoo said.
He also said he doesn’t understand why Trump would do something like that.
“Why would President Trump turn his back on one of his greatest, if not his greatest achievements from the first term, appointing three justices. ... Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, which reinforced Justices Alito and Thomas on the Supreme Court in building a really solid originalist majority, not a conservative majority, not politically Republican majority, but a majority that believes in interpreting the Constitution based on its original meaning.”
Despite the insults, Leo told the New York Post in a statement that he’s “very grateful” to Trump for his work in “transforming the Federal Courts, and it was a privilege being involved. ... There’s more work to be done, for sure, but the Federal Judiciary is better than it’s ever been in modern history, and that will be President Trump’s most important legacy.”