Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA’

A Third of All DC District Judges Were Not Born in United States


By: Beth Brelje | March 25, 2025

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/25/a-third-of-all-dc-district-judges-were-not-born-in-united-states/

Of all the judges in the U.S. all five foreign-born judges of the D.C. court managed to get their fingerprints on controversial Trump cases.

Author Beth Brelje profile

Beth Brelje

Visit on Twitter@BethBrelje

More Articles

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the source of many of the cases interfering with President Donald Trump’s authority, has 15 judges, (Counting Chief Judge James Boasberg) and five of them were born outside the United States.

While country of origin doesn’t come up in most jobs, it is worth asking if judges with ties to foreign nations and cultures are the right ones to make decisions affecting the U.S. military or immigration.

The concept of foreign-born judges is a newer phenomenon in this district. In addition to the 15 main judges, the D.C. District has 10 older, senior judges who still occasionally hear cases in the district. This group, nominated as far back as Ronald Reagan the 1980s, were all born in the U.S.

But starting in 2014, former President Barack Obama appointed Judge Tanya Sue Chutkan, born in Kingston, Jamaica. She was in the U.S. by 1979, attending George Washington University. Before sitting on federal court, she had no experience as a judge. Chutkan is overseeing the legal challenge to DOGE’s work to slash excess government spending.    

Obama also appointed Judge Amit P. Mehta to the D.C. court. Mehta also had no previous experience as a judge. Mehta was born in Patan, Gujarat, India. He and his parents came to the U.S. when he was a baby, age one. He was raised in Maryland. Mehta will oversee four January 6 civil cases that aim to blame Trump for injuries and squeeze money, court time, and political embarrassment out of him.

The other three foreign born judges were nominated by former President Joe Biden.

Judge Ana Cecilia Reyes was nominated in 2021, also with no prior experience as a judge. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and moved to Spain, and while still a child, moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she grew up. She is the first openly LGBT Latina to be appointed to this court. Reyes presided over an objection to Trump’s executive order declaring “gender dysphoria” as “inconsistent” with the “high standards for troop readiness,” as The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood reported. Reyes blocked Trump’s order with a preliminary injunction.

The first Muslim and Arab American in the D.C. district court, Judge Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali was born and raised in Canada to Egyptian parents. According to his Questionnaire for Judicial Nominees, Ali was not required to register for the U.S. Selective Service. That is because he was not a citizen until 2019. He graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada with a software engineering degree in 2008 and then attended Harvard Law School in the U.S., graduating with a law degree in 2011. He worked as a volunteer on Biden’s 2020 transition team and for a phone bank in support of Biden’s presidential campaign. He worked for some nonprofits but never served as a judge until Biden appointed him in 2024. Amir has written extensively and negatively about Trump’s so-called “Travel ban,” a 2017 Executive Order which restricted travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days.

In his writing, he said, “prejudice and intolerance” were “the very hallmark of [Trump’s] campaign against Muslims.”

Before he was a judge, Ali spoke at the National Press Foundation and gave tips to reporters about how to cover the courts.

When confirmed, Amir was a member of the Capital Area Muslim Bar Association; Muslim American Judicial Advisory Council; National Arab American Bar Association; National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; National Police Accountability Project; and the Native American Bar Association of D.C., among others.

Ali single handedly restored $2 billion in USAID spending to foreign nonprofit contractors that the Trump Administration had paused for 90 days, in a stunning overreach of authority last month.

The newest judge on the D.C. District Court is also foreign born.

Before slinking out of office, Biden and his handlers got Judge Sparkle Sooknanan confirmed. She was sworn in Jan. 2, 2025. Born in the dual-island nation Trinidad and Tobago in 1983, she left her home country at age 16 to pursue college and graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 2010.

She was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and during the Biden Administration she was the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division for the Department of Justice before Biden tapped her for her first ever judge gig in the D.C. Court, according to her Questionnaire for Judicial Nominees.

Last week, Sooknanan dutifully did her part to slow Trump’s agenda, ordering the reinstatement of Democrat Susan Grundmann to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, a move that keeps the board in a Democrat majority.   

None of these cases have gone in front of conservative judges in conservative states, say in Missouri or South Dakota. They all happened to land in the laps of judges that have spoken out or ruled against Trump or his policies in the past.

Out of all the judges in the nation, all five foreign-born judges of the D.C. District court managed to get their fingerprints on a controversial Trump case.  

The United States is in the midst of a soft coup. Not the violent kind that takes out a nation’s leader, but one orchestrated by judicial actions that choke off executive power before our eyes.

We have seen other obvious, corrupt schemes in plain sight before. The Biden basement presidential campaign of 2019; the “insurrection” that wasn’t; the mask and vaccine mandates; the Biden is mentally competent story; the “flawless” Afghan withdrawal; the “secure” borders; and the incompetent candidate swap to Kamala Harris, made Americans realize the best chance we have to stop corruption is to vote it out.

The public did its part by voting in a clear mandate for Trump’s agenda. But corruption is still visible, though court decisions by unelected activist judges. The only remedy now is for the Supreme Court to step in and this time, get its hands dirty, deliberate, and make real decisions based on the Constitution.    

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.

Category:

corruption, Hate, Law, Political

Tagged with:

DOJ Election Official Voted In Tight North Carolina Race While Claiming DC Residency, Bar Complaint Alleges 


BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | OCTOBER 05, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/05/doj-election-official-voted-in-tight-north-carolina-race-while-claiming-dc-residency-bar-complaint-alleges/

Department of Justice

Author Victoria Marshall profile

VICTORIA MARSHALL

VISIT ON TWITTER@VEMRSHLL

MORE ARTICLES

An attorney with the voting rights division of the Department of Justice — which enforces federal laws related to voting — allegedly violated election law when she voted in the 2020 presidential election in North Carolina, a new memo by the American Accountability Foundation outlines.

Longtime DOJ attorney Janie Sitton cast a ballot in North Carolina’s 2020 general election, despite being a resident of Washington, D.C., at the time. While Donald Trump ended up carrying North Carolina by just 1.3 points, the race was a dead heat until the very end. This was not the case in the District of Columbia, however, where Trump earned only 5 percent of the vote. Perhaps this is why Sitton chose to vote in the Tar Heel State rather than D.C. — and it’s a prime example of how skirting election laws can contribute to rigged elections.

On Monday, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) filed bar complaints in both North Carolina and D.C. over Sitton’s presumed misconduct. In the memo compiled by AAF, voter data shows Sitton as a resident and active voter in D.C. since Aug. 13, 2010, voting in five elections leading up to 2018. Since 2018, Sitton has claimed a D.C. homestead deduction on her tax filings. To claim that tax deduction, residents must declare that the property is their principal residence, according to the memo.

“Submitting a false statement on these property tax records can subject the applicant to criminal penalties, according to the fraud and false statement laws under 47-4106 of the Code of the District of Columbia,” according to AAF.

Sitton also owns a condominium in North Carolina, which she bought in 2002. Tax documents indicate Sitton’s mailing address for the condominium is her Washington, D.C., address. 

In August 2020, however, Sitton registered to vote in North Carolina using the address of her condo, per the state’s Board of Elections Voter Database. Shortly after Sitton registered to vote in North Carolina, she cast a ballot in the 2020 general election as well as a municipal election in November 2021. In May 2022, Sitton abruptly restored her voter registration in Washington, per D.C. Board of Elections data. 

Sitton was essentially voting in North Carolina as if that were her primary residence while claiming a homestead deduction on her apparently real primary residence in D.C. A year prior to casting her ballot in the 2020 election, Sitton even signed a mortgage agreement to keep her North Carolina condo as a second non-residence property, per AAF. 

Such behavior ostensibly violates North Carolina state statute, which, according to AAF, defines “what is and is not considered residency for the purposes of registering to vote within the state.” The statute defines residency as: 

(1) That place shall be considered the residence of a person in which that person’s habitation is fixed, and to which, whenever that person is absent, that person has the intention of returning….4) If a person removes to another state or county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district within this State, with the intention of making that state, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district a permanent residence, that person shall be considered to have lost residence in the state, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district from which that person has removed [emphasis added].

Presumably, Sitton never had the intention of making her North Carolina condo her primary residence when she cast her ballot in the 2020 election.

“Janie Sitton, a senior attorney in the DOJ Voting Section, lied about her residency to register to vote in North Carolina so she could vote in a competitive Presidential election,” AAF Founder Tom Jones told The Federalist. “If DOJ election attorneys are unwilling to abide by the most straightforward of election laws, how can we trust them to enforce voting laws in the upcoming election?” 

Sitton’s alleged partisanship is nothing new to the DOJ, which has a history of politically motivated abuse of federal law. For example, the agency is actively involved in delaying election integrity efforts in Florida, has sued both Georgia and Texas over additional election integrity legislation, and is helping facilitate Biden’s federal takeover of elections. The DOJ’s current associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, headed a DOJ lawsuit attempting to block voter ID laws in North Carolina in 2015.

Not to mention that the current head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (which Sitton’s voting rights division falls under), Kristen Clarke, led a lawsuit against then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s election integrity policies as a private lawyer, peddled the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax, and in college argued that blacks are the superior race. In other words, it’s not just Sitton that appears to be a politically motivated actor, it’s pretty much the entire DOJ.

“Instances like this show how sophisticated election lawyers can game the system,” former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell told Breitbart. And ” how easily voting laws can be leveraged by those who know how those laws are written.”

The DOJ did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment. 

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

    Category:

    Political

    Tagged with:

    Tag Cloud