Mark Wolf, U.S. district judge for Massachusetts, just resigned from his job of 40 years. His reasoning was not to spend time with family or travel the world—but to get out from under President Donald Trump’s thumb.
“I no longer can bear to be restrained by what judges can say publicly or do outside the courtroom. President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment,” he wrote in his letter.
Mark Wolf shakes hands with Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts in 2003.
Wolf is no liberal squish. For 10 years, he worked in the Justice Department, including four as the chief federal prosecutor for public corruption in Massachusetts. Then in 1985, he was appointed a federal judge by former President Ronald Reagan. And since Wolf achieved senior status in 2013, his departure doesn’t create a vacancy for Trump to fill.
Wolf’s resignation letter pulls no punches, calling out Trump demands for Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict his enemies, his destruction of oversight mechanisms, the shuttering of the FBI’s public corruption squad, the gutting of the DOJ’s public integrity section, and—of course—border czar Tom Homan’s $50,000 bribe.
And Wolf won’t let us forget about Trump’s lavish pay-for-play treatment of big donors, nor his favor to crypto fraudster Justin Sun, who invested $30 million in Trump’s company.
Wolf’s resignation will surely be met with howls from conservatives, but Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche basically proved Wolf’s point just one day before Wolf published his letter.
While speaking at a Federalist Society conference on Nov. 7, Blanche said that there is a “war” against the judiciary and called on the baby conservative lawyers in the audience to fight against “activist judges.”
“It’s hard to get the media, it’s hard to get the American people to focus on what a travesty it is when you have an individual judge be able to stop an entire operation or an entire administrative policy that’s constitutional and allowed just because he or she chooses to do so. So, it’s a war,” he said.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche
But we do know who Blanche does not feel at war with: Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, both of whom appeared at the conference the day before Blanche spoke.
Barrett sounded like every hard-right conservative woman in the Trump administration, fretting over how the “poisonous hostility that led to Charlie Kirk’s murder … still exists on campuses and elsewhere.”
She also urged the lawyers in attendance to show “strength with grace” like Kirk’s wife, Erika.
And for his part, Kavanaugh exhorted the assembled attorneys, “Don’t lose the civility.”
He also made sure to thank the audience for standing by him in his “dark days” during his confirmation. The dude showed up red-faced and yelling for that, but sure, “civility.”
In response, Wolf had some sharp, entirely correct words for the Supreme Court conservatives.
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly removed the temporary restraints imposed on those actions by lower courts in deciding emergency motions on its ‘shadow docket,’ with little, if any, explanation. I doubt that if I remained a judge I would fare any better than my colleagues,” Wolf wrote.
He’s right about that, and he’s right to step down.
