A judicial-misconduct complaint against the judge who ruled against the administration, dismissed for want of evidence

Editor's note: the court order dismissing the complaint documents its lack of evidence, but no court or official finding establishes it was filed in retaliation.

At a closed semiannual meeting of the Judicial Conference on March 11, 2025, Chief Judge Boasberg was reported by a conservative website to have relayed colleagues' concerns that the administration might disregard court rulings and provoke a constitutional crisis. Days later he ordered the Alien Enemies Act deportation flights halted, and the government proceeded anyway. On July 29, 2025, Chad Mizelle, then chief of staff to the Attorney General, filed a judicial-misconduct complaint alleging that Boasberg had attempted to improperly influence the Chief Justice and roughly two dozen other judges. The complaint asserted that his concerns had no basis because, it said, the administration had always complied with all court orders.

Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan of the D.C. Circuit asked Chief Justice Roberts to transfer the complaint out of the courthouse where Boasberg sits. Roberts sent it to the Judicial Council of the Sixth Circuit. On December 19, 2025, in a seven-page memorandum, Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton dismissed it. The complaint cited a single source, an attachment, which it did not include; when the D.C. Circuit asked the department for it, the department did not supply it. Without it, Sutton wrote, the complaint offers no source for what, if anything, the judge said, when, or whether he was expressing his own view or relaying others'. A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source, he wrote, does not corroborate them.

Sutton held that even if the remarks had been made, they would not be misconduct. The Judicial Conference exists to allow candid discussion among judges about judicial administration, and a judge's expression of anxiety about executive-branch compliance with court orders, whether rightly feared or not, falls within its customary subjects. Boasberg was required to attend and, as chief judge, was relaying colleagues' concerns. The order was released on January 31, 2026, after the appeal window closed. The Volokh Conspiracy, a libertarian and conservative legal blog, called the outcome unsurprising and the complaint lacking in substance. The underlying Alien Enemies Act litigation is documented at DEF-08.