Despite common stereotypes of dishonest lawyers, in fact members of the bar ordinarily hold themselves to high standards of honesty when speaking in court, even while they vigorously advocate for their client’s position. Willfully lying to a judge is punishable criminally and can lead to disbarment. This makes it all the more exceptional that the Trump Justice Department is willing to be so shamelessly mendacious on repeated occasions. In some cases, its trampling of established norms provide a legal advantage, exploiting a system that depends on acceptance of basic rules of conduct.
I noted last time that the NIH directive on indirect rates looked like it was written by policy illiterates, and indeed it was written by DOGE and imposed on NIH with a one-hour time limit to post. Yet counsel for NIH shamelessly asserted in court that this was a rational action by NIH. This repeats a pattern where the government just finds out what’s a legal reason to justify an action, and asserts that reason pretextually. Such pretext is found in the NIH notice itself, and in blatantly disingenuous defenses of mass firings for “performance,” which quite obviously had no other basis than “fire whoever we can.”
The USAID-related civil suits, AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. U.S. Department of State and Global Health Council v. Donald J. Trump, demonstrate such mendacity to the point of outright defiance of court orders. Despite the imposition of a temporary restraining order (TRO) on February 13, the administration took no action to unfreeze payments. Set aside, if you can, that the payments frozen supported shelters for minors escaping recruitment into gangs in Central America, medical services for youth in Bangladesh, time-sensitive antimalaria campaigns, HIV prevention medication and clinical trials in Africa. Set aside, if you can, the sheer immorality of wanting to freeze such payments, even for work already completed and contractually obligated. Consider now the shifting reasons the government offered for failing to comply with the TRO. First, they could not even identify whether any actions had been taken, upon which the judge ordered compliance by 11:59 pm on Feb 26. Instead, on Feb 26, the government represented that it was technically impossible to comply, and that at any rate no funds were owed any longer, since the general freeze had been replaced by an individual review of all USAID contracts, and these had been duly terminated. Even if one wishes to believe it possible that such a review of thousands of contracts was conducted in good faith in such a short time, it would not absolve the government from owing payment for work through Feb 13, at the least, or Feb 26 at the latest. The government is rather brazenly defying the TRO, trying to render it null retroactively through a thoroughly pretextual assertion. The lie is so transparent, one should hardly believe anything that ever comes from a Trump lawyer’s mouth – I do not say Justice Department lawyer, for the D.C. U.S. Attorney correctly described his office as “President Trump’s lawyers,” their independence being a quaint memory. The fact that they are willing to go to such dishonest lengths just to stiff their contractors, without even the decency to honor payments for work to date, shows they are beneath the most basic form of morality necessary to any civilization, the ability to keep one’s word, or even to recognize this an obligation in principle.
In another case on the USAID shutdown, the government was rewarded for its mendacity. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols wrote that he could only rule on employment claims, since the USAID was technically “still standing.” Even here he could not give injunctive relief: “Where one side claims that USAID’s operations are essential to human flourishing and the other side claims they are presently at odds with it, it is simply not possible for the court to conclude, as a matter of law or equity, that the public interest favors or disfavors an injunction.” Because the Trump administration was willing to lie shamelessly about some nefarious secret purpose behind USAID, that muddied the waters, offsetting the claim that shutting it down would be harmful.
The entire motivation behind the USAID shutdown is that Elon Musk credulously accepts the conspiracy theory proffered by Mike Benz for years without evidence, namely that USAID is a front for CIA operations and evil left-wing propaganda. The ultimate disproof is that Elon’s team was unable to find any true fraud or abuse, only programs with ideological or policy aims he didn’t like, and even these overlapped with tangible social and medical benefits. Actual fraud would be a prosecutable crime, and it’s inexplicable that Trumps’ lawyers would decline to prosecute this.
That Donald Trump can accept such fantasy uncritically suggests mediocre intelligence and negligible curiosity. The aggression with which he has always sought to cheat and defraud his contractors exhibits low moral character. With Musk, we have a man of high intelligence, yet no social maturity, and an astonishing near-total ignorance of how government works, or even how personnel management works (or scientific research, or endowments, etc.).
What shall we say about the cowardice of their enablers, who see through these lies as easily as we, yet pretend otherwise? For lawyers, officers of the court, this is a betrayal of their vocation, especially when such deceit as in the service of those who spurn the role of law. The politicians, especially those who call themselves Christians, have committed an even deeper betrayal.