At Senate hearing, Trump Justice Department nominees are cagey on whether they'd follow court orders
Two of President Donald Trump's nominees for senior Justice Department positions – including his former personal attorney – deflected questions Wednesday from senators on whether they would adhere to all court orders against the administration.
An overriding question of the Trump administration, already facing a raft of litigation against the president's executive orders, is whether it would abide by court decisions. Trump and some of his top advisers have suggested they might not be constrained by adverse court rulings.
'There is no hard and fast rule about whether in every instance a public official is bound by a court decision,' Aaron Reitz, who has been tapped to serve as the head of DOJ's Office of Legal Policy, said in response to repeated questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
'There are some instances in which he or she may lawfully be bound and other instances in which he or she may not lawfully be bound,' Reitz added.
Reitz appeared alongside D. John Sauer, Trump's former personal lawyer, nominated to be the solicitor general, the government's top lawyer before the Supreme Court. Some of the tensest exchanges between Sauer and Judiciary Committee Democrats were over Sauer's defense of Trump's claim of immunity that went to the high court last year.
'There's a great fear among many people — academics and people in the legal profession – as to whether or not this president would defy a court order, which basically would put him above the law, at least in his own eyes,' said the panel's top Democrat, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin.
Sauer rejoined, 'I've represented President Trump for the better part of two years, and I just think that that's not a plausible scenario.'
Sauer, 50, is a Harvard law graduate and Rhodes scholar who served as a law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Before his began representing Trump in late 2023, Sauer was the state solicitor general of Missouri. He supported efforts to overturn Trump's election defeat in 2020 and was at the lead of much of the red-state litigation against the Biden administration.
His earlier representation of Trump concerned some of his Democratic critics.
'You took the position as Donald Trump's lawyer that he could order Seal Team Six to assassinate a political opponent and not be prosecuted for it unless he was impeached first,' said Sen. Adam Schiff of California. 'Will that continue to be your position as the lawyer for the United States? Will you represent to the court that any prosecution should be dismissed if the president is not first impeached?'
Sauer noted that the Seal Team Six scenario had been raised by a judge, and emphasized that he indeed said, 'that the president may be prosecuted for an action like that but under the plain language of the Impeachment Judgment Clause he must be first impeached and convicted by the Senate.'
Schiff persisted in asking whether if Trump used his office to assassinate a political opponent and was not impeached for it, 'Would you defend against any prosecution as solicitor general?'
Responded Sauer, 'The hypothetical you've offered, respectfully, is so outlandish I don't know if I'm in a position to address it.'
But Sauer, overall, seemed on a glide path to confirmation in the Republican-controlled Senate. If so, as the new US solicitor general he would soon be positioned to take the lead in defending Trump's second term agenda before the nine justices.
Durbin also pressed Sauer on whether a government official should 'be allowed to defy an official court order.'
'I don't want to speak to hypotheticals,' Sauer responded, 'especially hypotheticals that might come before me in an official capacity if I were confirmed by the Senate. Generally, if there's a direct court order that binds a federal or state official they should follow it.'
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