The Trump administration can’t stop lying to the courts

[Thiệu Ngô]

Almost a year into the president’s second term, he appears to be crossing a new Rubicon when it comes to the courts.

By Rachel Maddow

Do you remember Kilmar Abrego Garcia? The man whom the Trump administration was forced to return to the United States after it admitted that it had wrongfully, illegally — and according to the federal government, accidentally — sent him to a weird black-hole terrorism prison in El Salvador.

It’s now been a little over five months since the administration had to bring Abrego back from that prison, and ever since, the government has been fighting in court to deport him again.

First, the government proposed Uganda, for some reason. Then Eswatini, which is almost 2,000 miles south of Uganda. Then it proposed Ghana, 5,000 miles north. Now the administration’s latest gambit is Liberia, 600 miles to the west.

Why do they want to send him to those places? Who knows. But lawyers for Abrego have said he would accept deportation if the Trump administration would send him to Costa Rica. However, the administration rejected that idea and told the court that it wouldn’t be possible because Costa Rica would not accept him.

Justice Department lawyers wrote to the judge, “It is now the assessment of the Department of State that the Government of Costa Rica would not accept Petitioner at this time without further negotiations and, likely, additional commitments from the United States.”

But that doesn’t appear to be true. On Friday, Costa Rica’s minister of security, Mario Zamora Cordero, told The Washington Post his country would accept Abrego. “That position that we have expressed in the past remains valid and unchanged to this day,” he said. “Costa Rica’s offer to receive Mr. Abrego Garcia for humanitarian reasons stands.”

This kind of thing has become a pattern for the Trump administration in court. Take the federal government’s attack on Chicago. During a recent appearance in court, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official overseeing the administration’s Operation Midway Blitz in the city, said he had thrown tear gas into a crowd because protesters had become violent and he had been hit in the head with a rock.

However, he was unable to stand by his own story in court. In an order released last week, the judge in the case wrote that Bovino had “admitted he lied multiple times about the events … that prompted him to throw tear gas at protesters.”

On Monday, the Justice Department’s cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James fell apart. In the case against Comey, Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, committed embarrassing error after embarrassing error during the grand jury process.

The Justice Department told the court not to worry, that Attorney General Pam Bondi had reviewed the grand jury material and signed off on it. But now, the judge in the case has effectively accused Bondi of lying and said it was “obvious” that “the attorney general could not review the grand jury testimony.”

At the beginning of this administration, we were all watching to see if Donald Trump would defy court orders. While we have seen the administration do just that, almost a year in, the federal government also appears to be crossing a different Rubicon: blatantly and repeatedly lying to judges about what it is doing and how it’s doing it.