Learn more about my upcoming interview with former prosecutor Mimi Rocah about the Cornell rape probe, New York’s “voluntary intoxication loophole,” and why she called for the current DA to recuse himself in favor of a special counsel at the end of tonight’s newsletter.
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The Trump administration must produce a memo containing the legal justifications for boat strikes that have killed 234 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean for a federal judge’s private review.
In a 66-page order on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer gave the government two weeks to send him the memo for him to determine whether to publicly release it.
The judge’s opinion also rejected the Trump Justice Department’s claims that deliberative process and attorney-client privilege prevented its disclosure.
Jeffrey Stein, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, called the ruling a “a huge step in the right direction of ensuring that the government does not get to summarily execute people based on secret law.”
“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of civilians,” Stein said.
The ACLU, the ACLU Foundation, and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking the memo’s release.
Created in September 2025, the Trump Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel memo purported to justify strikes on boats suspected of being involved in drug trafficking.
Judge Engelmayer found that the Pentagon had treated the memo “as its effective law and policy governing the boat strikes,” making it “working law.”
“It reflects that other components of the Administration, including the White House, have held out the Memo in a similar manner,” he added.
The judge declined to rule yet on the government’s assertion of presidential communications privilege pending his review of the document.
Attorney Baher Azmy, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, described the importance of the memo’s release.
“No president can arbitrarily assassinate people from the sky based on their sole say-so,” Azmy said in a statement. “If the OLC opinion seeks to dress up the obvious illegality of these serial murders in legalese to provide Trump cover, the public needs to see that analysis and ultimately hold accountable all those who facilitate murder in the United States’ name.”
You can read Judge Engelmayer’s ruling in full here.
Blanche goes to war with a district court’s bench
Earlier this month, the New York Times published an extraordinary interview with the chief judge for the District of Minnesota, who warned that the Trump administration’s defiance of nearly 100 court orders during the federal invasion of the Twin Cities posed a “grave threat to the rule of law.”
Weeks later on Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche responded in characteristic form: by filing complaints accusing nearly every judge on the district’s bench of judicial misconduct.
The judge who sat down for the rare, 90-minute interview with the Times was U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee who once served as a clerk for Antonin Scalia.
During the interview, Judge Schiltz warned that the administration’s “disregard” of court orders put the “constitutional order at risk,” and the problem may have more to do with “incompetence” than a “conscious” flouting of the court’s directives. The story made clear that he was not alone: Six other members of Minnesota’s federal bench agreed to speak to the paper for the investigation.
The complaint, filed with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, claimed that the interviews violated an ethical rule forbidding judges from commenting on pending cases and creating a public perception of bias.
But Judge Schiltz said he did nothing of the kind.
"As legal-ethics experts have confirmed, I was acting well within the ethical rules that apply to federal judges in speaking to the New York Times,” he said in a statement. “Indeed, in February of this year, the Committee on Codes of Conduct issued an advisory opinion to emphasize that federal judges may 'speak[] and writ[e] on core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law and judicial independence.' That is exactly what I did."
The U.S. Judicial Conference, the administrative body for federal courts, relaxed the rules for judges to publicly respond as the Trump administration ratcheted up its unprecedented attacks on the judiciary, including by filing a formal complaint against a federal judge in another district.
Blanche’s predecessor Pam Bondi tried that gambit before with a misconduct complaint against the District of D.C.’s Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, which was swiftly dismissed.
Judge Schiltz has gotten under the Trump administration’s skin before: He was one of two judges who refused to sign off on criminal charges against Don Lemon before a grand jury issued an indictment. The judge also summoned former Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Todd Lyons to his courtroom in January for a contempt hearing.
The latter order, issued during the height of the federal occupation of the Twin Cities, declared: “This Court has been extremely patient with [the government], even though [the government] decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result.”
“The Court’s patience is at an end,” he wrote at the time.
Read the Times interview with Judge Schiltz here.
Jane Doe to Cornell police in 2024: ‘I was raped’
Responding to national outrage over the Cornell gang rape investigation, District Attorney Matthew Van Houten released a highly unusual 9-page statement claiming that the alleged victim told police that “her participation in drug use and sexual conduct” was “voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”
On Wednesday, CBS News uncovered a transcript of Jane Doe telling police exactly the opposite in 2024.
“I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,’ Doe told campus police nearly two years ago, according to the network.
Van Houten told CBS News that he hadn’t read the transcript of Doe’s interview at the time, only the sworn statement summarizing the conversation. But the DA’s defensive posture, apparent lack of a prior investigation and comments undermining the credibility of the alleged victim while simultaneously reopening a grand jury investigation struck many observers as unusual.
One of the people questioning Van Houten’s handling of the case is former federal and local prosecutor Mimi Rocah, who recently served as a Westchester District Attorney.
“There are a number of serious flaws in Van Houten’s response,” she wrote in a just-published op-ed for MS NOW. “I say this as someone who has spent over 20 years as a prosecutor at the federal and state level, including four as the DA in Westchester County, where I handled dozens of investigations and prosecutions involving sexual assault, rape and sex trafficking.”
Writing that the “Cornell rape case was set up for failure,” she called for Van Houten to recuse himself and proposed that a court appoint a special prosecutor to take over the investigation.
“I am not saying that the DA should or should not have charged this case in 2024,” she wrote. “I don’t have that answer, and anyone without all of the facts who claims to is doing a disservice to justice right now. However, in my view, the Tompkins County DA’s office failed Jane Doe, the accused and the community in its handling of this case, then and now. One path forward would be for Van Houten to recuse himself from the investigation and ask the court to appoint a special prosecutor in his stead so that Jane Doe, the accused and the public can have more faith in the outcome.”
On Friday at noon, I will speak to Mimi Rocah on a Substack Live with a deep dive into Van Houten’s statement, evidence that has since emerged, and what she believes to be the best path forward for the probe.
Thank you Adam for this report. It’s got to be illegal to kill all those people on the boats. I’m disgusted they keep doing it. In the end, this should be very high on the list for accountability…from the top.
Putting noon Friday on my calendar for your chat with Ms. Rocah.