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The federal judge at odds with the White House over its immigration enforcement and now the target of impeachment calls driven by President Donald Trump is a bipartisan appointee whose three-decade career in Washington, D.C., has included cases that have favored Trump.
James Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia since 2023, drew Trump’s ire after he temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to carry out migrant deportations by plane over the weekend under a rarely used wartime law.
During an interview that aired Tuesday on Fox News, Trump mentioned impeaching Boasberg, whom he slighted as a “local judge.” Trump earlier pressed for Boasberg’s impeachment in a social media post and branded him a “radical left lunatic, a troublemaker and agitator.”
Those who know Boasberg and his record insist he is anything but.
In 2002, President George W. Bush nominated Boasberg as an associate judge of the D.C. Superior Court of the District of Columbia. In 2011, President Barack Obama selected him to be a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and he was confirmed by the Senate in a 96-0 vote.
One Washington attorney who frequently appeared before Boasberg, 62, called him an “extremely conscientious” judge who was “very much down the center” and committed to getting things right.
“He’s known among lawyers and his colleagues to be a brilliant judge,” the lawyer said, speaking anonymously to avoid being seen as pandering to the judge.
Boasberg initially had barred the Trump administration from deporting five Venezuelan nationals in the U.S. accused of being gang members. While Trump has cited an 18th-century law known as the Alien Enemies Act as the basis for the action, the federal government did not comply with Boasberg’s order to temporarily halt any such flights or turn the flights around, setting off a tense hearing Monday between the judge and Justice Department lawyers.
“That’s one heck of a stretch, I think,” Boasberg said of the government’s noncompliance of his verbal orders requiring any deportation flights to return to the U.S.
Trump’s impeachment comments led Chief Justice John Roberts to issue a rare rebuke Tuesday of calls to impeach judges over rulings that a president may disagree with, and said targeting individual judges publicly for their decisions was dangerous for the judicial system and rule of law.
A request for comment sent to Boasberg’s chambers Wednesday about Trump’s call for impeachment was not immediately returned.
Like most federal judges in Washington, Boasberg handled a number of Jan. 6 cases and often assigned lighter sentences than those requested by Justice Department prosecutors. In one instance, Boasberg sentenced a Jan. 6 rioter who brought a Confederate flag to the Capitol and wore an “I ❤️ TRUMP” beanie before he assaulted officers with chemical spray to 2 1/2 years in federal prison, a full decade less than what prosecutors had sought.
In his time on the bench, Boasberg has also rejected the lies that drove the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
After overseeing a trial in which a Jan. 6 rioter who assaulted law enforcement officers represented himself, Boasberg said he agreed that politicians who falsely claimed the election was stolen should be “ashamed of themselves,” and the defendant should have been “more perceptive and thoughtful” about the lies he was hearing.
“You’re too smart to have been fooled by the lies on the election,” Boasberg told the defendant.
In a separate case, Boasberg said claims that the election was stolen were probably false, and an honest belief in the notion did not excuse bad behavior.
“Our society changes its leaders based on what happens at the ballot box, not because of a mob,” he said.
Boasberg also handled the case against a Trump supporter named Ray Epps, who was at the center of an unfounded right-wing conspiracy theory that held he was an FBI informant. While the government sought six months in prison for Epps, Boasberg ultimately sentenced him to probation, saying Epps had been “vilified in a matter unique to January 6 defendants“ and that the collateral consequences on Epps’ life were significant. He said Epps was the only Jan. 6 defendant “who suffered for what you didn’t do.”
Boasberg also oversaw the federal grand jury investigation into the most famous Jan. 6 defendant of all: Donald Trump.
In March 2023, Boasberg heard closed-door arguments from attorneys for Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence over Pence’s testimony in the special counsel investigation headed by Jack Smith. Boasberg ordered Pence to testify in the investigation, and Pence appeared before the federal grand jury in April 2023.
Boasberg, who goes by Jeb, is a native of the nation’s capital and earned a history degree from Yale, where he was a forward on the basketball team. At 6-foot-6, his towering presence carried over into the courtroom, where he worked as a litigator in San Francisco before returning to Washington in the mid-1990s, specializing in homicide prosecutions in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
During Boasberg’s formal investiture ceremony elevating him to a federal judge, he sat beside Brett Kavanaugh, his close friend and housemate at Yale Law School and then a federal appeals judge in the D.C. Circuit. Kavanaugh conducted the rites at the ceremony. Seven years later, Trump would select Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
“I sincerely think that Jeb Boasberg is one of the best district judges in the country, certainly one of the best in D.C.,” said another Washington lawyer who works at a major firm and knows Boasberg personally. “He’s a careful, middle-of-the-road judge. He’s not some lefty.”
In 2016, Boasberg ordered the federal government to review the release of 14,900 emails and attachments belonging to Trump’s presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, as part of an investigation into her use of a private email server while secretary of state. During Trump’s first term, Boasberg ruled in favor of the president when he declined to compel the IRS to turn over his personal tax returns.
Over the years, Boasberg earned a reputation as a fair jurist fond of sprinkling his written opinions with pop culture references.
In one Jan. 6-related lawsuit ruling against a Trump aide, Boasberg wrote: “Plaintiff may resist this conclusion, but as Star Trek’s Dr. Spock intoned, ‘Resistance is futile.’”
In a 2022 ruling in which Boasberg dismissed a Justice Department suit that sought Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn to register as a foreign agent of the Chinese government, the judge included the Fugees lyrics, “Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide.”
He even starred as a prosecutor in a 2018 mock trial of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that was overseen by Kennedy and presented by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington.
Meanwhile, his career in Washington continued to flourish. In 2020, Roberts appointed him the presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves surveillance warrants.
In 2023, he became the chief judge of the District Court in Washington. Before he was named chief judge, he had drawn criticism from Trump allies over what they believed was the lenient sentencing of an FBI lawyer in the government’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Beryl Howell, Boasberg’s predecessor as chief judge, told The New York Times in 2023 that she was confident he could handle the public scrutiny.
“Judge Boasberg has the seasoning on the bench, the legal expertise, and the ability to manage and juggle multiple matters that makes him very well suited to be the next chief judge,” Howell said.
A lawyer who’s known Boasberg personally and professionally for many years and asked not to be named for fear of harassment said his rulings speak for themselves.
“He is not a partisan in any sense of the word,” the lawyer said. “He will do what he believes the law requires without fear or favor.”
“There are people who were meant to do certain jobs,” the lawyer added. “He was meant to be a judge.”
Ryan J. Reilly is a justice reporter for NBC News.
Erik Ortiz is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital focusing on racial injustice and social inequality.
Lawrence Hurley is a senior Supreme Court reporter for NBC News.
Allan Smith is a political reporter for NBC News.
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