The Justice Department’s complaint against Minnesota’s federal judges has a feature you will not find in most of the coverage: it was announced from the same podium, on the same day, as a batch of new indictments in the same state. On Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche used a press event to announce charges against 10 green card holders accused of voting illegally, and then announced that the department had filed a judicial misconduct complaint with the 8th Circuit. The complaint’s charge is that judges commented publicly on pending cases. The press event was a public comment on pending cases.
Start with what the judges did. On Sept. 17 the New York Times published “Trump’s Minnesota Surge Threatened Democracy, Judge Warns,” built on a 90-minute interview with Judge Patrick Schiltz and remarks from six other judges, according to the department’s own filing. Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee who clerked for Antonin Scalia, said the administration’s repeated disregard of court orders during Operation Metro Surge, the immigration enforcement campaign that began in Minnesota in December 2025, created a “grave threat to the rule of law”. Judge John Tunheim, a Clinton appointee, said the people being arrested were not, in his view, dangerous criminals on the street.
Now what the department says that violated. Its complaint invokes Canon 3A(6) of the judicial code, which says a judge should not comment publicly on the merits of a matter pending or impending in any court. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter called the interviews an “unethical partisan press tour.” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward wrote that public confidence cannot survive if judges “seek media attention and pander to the press.”
Here is the part the framing skips. A rule against commenting on the merits of a pending case is not the same as a rule against talking about the courts. Schiltz’s answer is that a Judicial Conference advisory opinion from February specifically allows judges to address core judicial matters such as the rule of law and judicial independence, and that legal-ethics experts agree he stayed inside it. A court spokesperson pointed to the same opinion. The department’s complaint has to argue that a judge describing whether the government obeys court orders is commenting on the merits of a case. That is a stretch, and you should notice who benefits from stretching it.
Look at the remedy. The department asks the 8th Circuit to investigate and to bar every judge who spoke to the Times from any case involving the Department of Homeland Security, civil or criminal. Seven judges spoke. Reporting from the Minnesota Reformer put the headline number as “all but one” of the state’s active federal judges, and CBS described the complaint as aimed at nearly all of them. Win this, and the government is a litigant that has removed almost an entire bench from its own cases because the bench criticized it.
Our view is plain. This is a recusal-shopping move dressed as an ethics complaint. Every litigant is entitled to a fair judge, as Blanche said, but a party does not get to pick which judges hear its cases by filing a misconduct complaint against the ones who criticized it. Judges who have watched an agency ignore their orders are allowed to say so. Prosecutors who announce indictments from a podium are allowed to say so too, and nobody is filing a complaint about that, which is exactly the point.
The 8th Circuit should dismiss the complaint quickly and say why in writing, because every week it stays open is a week in which judges deciding DHS cases know a complaint is hanging over them. What happens next is a test of whether a court of appeals will treat criticism of the executive as speech or as misconduct. If it will not decide that fast, expect the next complaint to be easier to file.