Trump, allies ramp up attacks on judges as Musk calls for judicial impeachment

13/2/2025 6:08

Donald Trump and his supporters on

Wednesday continued to ramp up their criticism of judges who

they say have stymied the Republican U.S. president's

second-term agenda, with billionaire ally Elon Musk calling for

"an immediate wave of judicial impeachments."



Those statements came a day after federal courts forced U.S.

agencies to restore health-related websites taken down in

response to one of Trump's executive orders and declined to lift

a judge's order barring the administration from freezing federal

funding.



Those and other legal setbacks have prompted Trump, key

members of his administration and Musk to attack judges who have

blocked major pieces of his agenda, in some cases arguing judges

have no power to intrude on the president's authority.



Such comments have fueled concerns about whether the Trump

administration would abide by court rulings. The American Bar

Association on Tuesday condemned such comments, saying they

presented "serious risks to our constitutional framework."



White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a press

briefing on Wednesday accused judges of "abusing their power"

and said the "real constitutional crisis is taking place within

our judicial branch."



She said the administration would "comply with the law in

the courts, but we will also continue to seek every legal remedy

to ultimately overturn these radical injunctions and ensure

President Trump's policies can be enacted."



Trump in his first term appointed a near-record 234 judges

and pushed the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal judiciary

overall to the right.



In a social media post earlier on Wednesday, Trump repeated

Musk's unsubstantiated claims that his Department of Government

Efficiency, a team focused on reducing the size of the

government, had found "massive" amounts of fraud and waste.



Yet "even knowing this, a highly political, activist Judge

wants us to immediately make payment, anyway," Trump said.



His post appeared to be a reference to Providence, Rhode

Island-based U.S. District Judge John McConnell, who on Monday

found Trump's administration had defied an earlier ruling he

issued at the behest of Democratic-led states by continuing to

withhold billions of dollars in frozen federal grant funding.







CHECKS AND BALANCES



The U.S. Department of Justice quickly asked a federal

appeals court to lift McConnell's Monday order enforcing his

earlier decision unfreezing the funding, but the Boston-based

1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to on Tuesday.



Democratic lawmakers and even some members of Trump's

Republican Party in Congress have come to the defense of the

judges. Federal judges, who are appointed for life, have the

authority to decide the constitutionality of federal laws and

resolve cases involving federal laws and policies.



They can only be impeached by the U.S. House of

Representatives for treason, bribery and other high crimes and

misdemeanors and must be convicted by the Senate to be removed.



Only 15 judges have ever been impeached, and only eight have

been convicted by the Senate, most recently in 2010.



"Thuggery toward judges is not the way courts work in

rule-of-law countries," Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of

Rhode Island wrote on Tuesday in response to one of Musk's posts

on his social media platform X.



U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News the Justice

Department would keep defending Trump's policies in court and

appeal rulings from "outrageous, overzealous, unconstitutional

judges trying to control federal spending."



Musk, the CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, on X called

McConnell, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack

Obama, a "scammer," and described a different judge in

Washington who ruled against the administration as "evil" and

someone who should be fired.



"There needs to be an immediate wave of judicial

impeachments, not just one," Musk said.



The Washington-based jurist is U.S. District Judge John

Bates, who on Tuesday issued an order requiring the restoration

of various government health websites that were scrubbed in

response to an executive order requiring the removal of "gender

ideology extremism."



Bates, an appointee of Republican former President George W.

Bush, had in a different case delivered one of the rare wins for

the administration when he on Friday declined to block DOGE from

the U.S. Department of Labor's systems.



McConnell declined to comment. Bates did not respond to a

request for comment. The Administrative Office of the U.S.

Courts, the judiciary's administrative arm, declined to comment.