The Justice Department unconstitutionally retaliated against the American Bar Association by terminating grants for a program aimed at helping victims of domestic violence, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
Five grants from DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women to the ABA’s Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence totaling $3.2 million must be reinstated and fully paid out, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled.
“The ABA has made a strong showing that Defendants terminated its grants to retaliate against it for engaging in protected speech,” Cooper wrote.
The grants at issue were terminated on April 10, one day after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo laying out new DOJ policy that severely limits the ability of department employees to attend or participate in ABA events or programs. The memo was sent to all department employees after the ABA joined an earlier lawsuit challenging a freeze on foreign aid grants via the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The ABA, the largest national association of lawyers in the country, then sued the Justice Department on April 23 over the canceled grants.
“The ABA is free to litigate in support of activist causes, including by inserting itself into pending litigation as an amicus curiae,” Blanche wrote in the memo. “But ‘public service is a public trust.’ The Department of Justice must, consistent with the Constitution, be careful stewards of the public fisc, represent all Americans regardless of ideology or political preferences, and defend the policies chosen by American’s democratically elected leadership.”
DOJ failed to show a sufficient motivation for terminating the grants other than retaliation, Cooper ruled.
“The government claims that it had a nonretaliatory motive for terminating the grants: They no longer aligned with DOJ’s priorities,” Cooper wrote. “But the government has not identified any nonretaliatory DOJ priorities, much less explained why they were suddenly deemed inconsistent with the goals of the affected grants.”
Other Office on Violence Against Women grant recipients have not had their funding disrupted and continue to conduct similar programs to the ABA’s, Cooper noted. Losing this funding would require the ABA to lay off almost all of the staff at the Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence, the group’s chief counsel said in a declaration.
“The government has offered no nonretaliatory explanation for why it continues to fund these other OVW grantees after terminating the ABA’s grants, or why these other grantees’ projects still effectuate DOJ’s priorities while the ABA’s do not,” Cooper wrote.
Wednesday’s order doesn’t prevent DOJ from terminating the grants for “permissible and truly nonretaliatory reasons,” though any further action to cancel the payments would be subject to more legal challenges. The order also doesn’t require DOJ to renew the grants once the funds have been paid out.
The ABA has joined with other bar associations in recent months to criticize the Trump administration’s efforts to punish lawyers and firms that represent certain clients, saying they are “designed to cow our country’s judges, our country’s courts and our legal profession.”