Reps. Jim Jordan, Elise Stefanik probe dismissal of misconduct complaint against DC judge over Trump comment
Reps. Jim Jordan and Elise Stefanik are investigating the dismissal of Stefanik’s misconduct complaint against Washington, DC federal judge Beryl Howell over potentially prejudicial statements about former President Donald Trump’s criminal case involving the 2020 election.
Jordan (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Stefanik (R-NY) wrote a letter Monday to Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals requesting further information about the status of the complaint.
The office of the DC Circuit Executive initially claimed that the complaint had been “wrongly filed,” according to a copy of the letter exclusively obtained by The Post, but the objection was still dismissed even after being resubmitted at least twice.
Stefanik and Jordan have asked for a briefing with the office of the DC Circuit Executive on the handling of the complaint.
That office did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Post.
Stefanik initiated the complaint in December after Howell, who oversaw grand jury proceedings in the case against Trump for allegedly conspiring to unlawfully overturn his loss to Joe Biden, delivered a speech at the Women’s White Collar Defense Association (WWCDA) awards gala that suggested the former president was an “authoritarian.”
In the speech, Howell broached the topic of the “big lies” surrounding the 2020 election that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot — and quoted approvingly from historian Heather Cox Richardson’s book “Democracy Awakening” that the lies “are springboards for authoritarians.”
The judge also praised President Biden’s Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who spearheaded the prosecutions of Trump in DC and Florida, where the former president was indicted last year for allegedly hoarding national security documents.
Biden, 81, was found earlier this year to have willfully retained classified documents after his vice presidency, but the Justice Department did not recommend bringing charges, in part because a jury was likely to have seen him as an “elderly man with a poor memory” rather than a devious criminal mastermind.
Biden, House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats have repeatedly denounced Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election as “the big lie” he told to his supporters.
“My DC judicial colleagues and I regularly see the impact of big lies at the sentencing of hundreds, hundreds of individuals who have been convicted for offensive conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, when they disrupted the certification of the 2020 presidential election at the US Capitol,” Howell said, according to NBC, after receiving the “champion award” alongside Monaco at the DC gala on Nov. 27.
Stefanik in her Monday letter pointed out again that Howell’s remarks “appear to violate Canon 2B of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which requires that judges ‘act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary’ and that a judge should not ‘lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance the private interests of the judge or others nor convey or permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the judge.'”
Former President Barack Obama nominated Howell to the federal bench in 2010, and she served as the DC district court’s chief judge from 2016 until 2023. She is currently a senior judge at the court.
The Supreme Court is currently considering an appeal in the Jan. 6 prosecution, as Trump’s attorneys have argued the former president had immunity to contest 2020 election results while in office.
The DC district and circuit court of appeals both rejected motions to dismiss the case based on the immunity claims.
The Supreme Court’s decision is expected by the end of June, before the high court goes into recess for the summer.
