A conservative watchdog group filed a formal misconduct complaint Tuesday against Judge James Boasberg, accusing the D.C. federal court's chief judge of improperly coordinating with Biden-era Department of Justice officials during the investigations that led to criminal charges against former President Donald Trump. The complaint, filed with the D.C. appellate court by the Center to Advance Security in America, alleges Boasberg engaged in "probable judicial misconduct" by consulting with prosecutors who were building cases against the then-leading Republican presidential candidate, and then signing nondisclosure orders that kept their targets in the dark.
The filing lands at a moment when Boasberg has already become one of the most contested judicial figures in American public life. His repeated clashes with the Trump administration, from deportation cases to contempt proceedings, have made him a focal point for conservatives who see the D.C. federal bench as a political obstacle course rigged against the right. Now, newly public internal DOJ documents suggest the entanglement between Boasberg and Biden's prosecutors may have started well before the public battles began.
CASA's complaint centers on internal DOJ meeting notes from 2023 that the Senate Judiciary Committee recently made public. Those notes, first reported by Fox News Digital, describe briefings that former special counsel Jack Smith's team held with both Boasberg and outgoing chief judge Beryl Howell while the FBI's Arctic Frost investigation and a separate classified-documents probe were underway.
One set of notes documented a briefing Smith's team gave Attorney General Merrick Garland on January 13, 2023. Those notes referenced a forthcoming meeting with Boasberg scheduled for March 18, 2023, the day after he was set to succeed Howell as chief judge. Another passage from the notes stated that Howell "liked our approach of pursuing the executive privilege litigation in an omnibus fashion."
Read that again. A sitting federal judge expressed approval of a prosecutorial strategy to Smith's team, a team that would shortly bring charges in her own courthouse. And the notes suggest the incoming chief judge was next on the briefing calendar.
Curtis Schube, CASA's director of research and policy, wrote in the complaint that the pattern points in one direction. As he put it:
"There is no world in which the statutes were designed to protect a judge meeting with prospective litigants to strategize with them on how to win a case in front of them in the future."
Schube went further, tying the meetings directly to the political stakes involved. The complaint also included this assessment:
"This is especially true when the meetings are designed for the government to determine ways to put its political opposition in jail, which is exactly what Arctic Frost was designed to do."
The complaint also targets a second layer of alleged misconduct: the nondisclosure orders Boasberg signed. Fox News Digital reported that Boasberg approved numerous orders blocking telephone and technology companies from notifying Republican targets when Smith's team subpoenaed their phone records or other data. Those orders meant the people under investigation had no idea their private communications were being swept up, and no opportunity to challenge the subpoenas in real time.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts pushed back on this line of criticism in December, saying Boasberg would not have known who the gag orders applied to because prosecutors would not have informed him whose numbers were listed on the subpoenas. That defense rests on standard court practice, the office said.
But CASA's complaint reframes the issue. If Boasberg had already been briefed on the scope and strategy of Arctic Frost, as the DOJ meeting notes suggest, then the claim that he signed those orders without understanding their political significance becomes harder to accept. The complaint asks the court to investigate whether the briefings gave Boasberg knowledge that turned routine judicial orders into something far more troubling.
Trump himself has long described the Smith investigations as a "witch hunt" and called those involved "highly conflicted." He labeled the proceedings "DISGRACEFUL." Those were political arguments at the time. The newly released DOJ notes give them a documentary foundation that did not previously exist in the public record.
CASA filed a similar misconduct complaint against Judge Howell last week. Howell, an Obama appointee who was the outgoing chief judge when the Arctic Frost briefings took place, is referenced in the same set of DOJ notes. The watchdog group appears to be working through the list of judges named in the documents, filing complaints one at a time.
The track record for such complaints, however, is mixed at best. A separate DOJ misconduct complaint against Boasberg, filed in a different context, was dismissed on December 19, 2025, by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the 6th Circuit. Sutton found the Justice Department failed to provide evidence for its allegations and did not meet the standard required for a misconduct finding. "In the absence of the attachment, the complaint offers no source for what, if anything, the subject judge said," Sutton wrote. He added: "A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source does not corroborate them."
That dismissal dealt with a different set of allegations. But it illustrates the high bar misconduct complaints face, and the institutional reluctance of the judiciary to discipline its own. CASA's complaint, by contrast, rests on specific internal DOJ documents now in the public record. Whether that documentary evidence changes the calculus remains an open question.
The broader conflict between Boasberg and the Trump administration has played out across multiple fronts. The judge repeatedly clashed with the administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants, and a D.C. Circuit panel eventually ordered Boasberg to end his contempt inquiry into the administration over deportation flights.
Arctic Frost was the FBI investigation that fed into Smith's broader prosecution of Trump. Smith, appointed special counsel by Garland, charged Trump with illegally attempting to overturn the 2020 election and with retaining classified documents after leaving office. The cases consumed years of public attention and dominated the 2024 presidential race.
Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, tossed out the classified documents case, finding that Smith was improperly appointed as special counsel. Smith was in the process of appealing that decision when Trump won the 2024 election. After the victory, Smith terminated both cases, citing a longstanding DOJ policy that advises against prosecuting sitting presidents.
Smith testified to Congress that he followed DOJ policy regarding subpoenas throughout his tenure. But the internal meeting notes now paint a picture of a prosecution team that was not simply following standard procedures. The notes show Smith's prosecutors briefing judges on strategy, receiving feedback on legal approaches, and scheduling follow-up meetings with the very judges who would oversee their cases.
Trump has publicly called for Boasberg's removal in the past, and the newly surfaced documents will only sharpen that demand among the president's supporters.
The central issue raised by CASA's complaint is not whether Boasberg broke a specific criminal statute. It is whether the judicial ethics framework, the canons that are supposed to keep judges independent of the litigants who appear before them, was violated in a way that corrupted the most politically significant prosecution in modern American history.
Schube framed it plainly in the complaint, writing that "the facts strongly suggest that Boasberg violated the canons of judicial ethics" and that an "investigation should be promptly opened to confirm." The complaint does not claim certainty. It claims enough evidence to warrant a formal inquiry.
That distinction matters. The judiciary's internal accountability mechanisms exist precisely for situations like this, where public documents raise serious questions about whether a judge maintained the appearance of impartiality. If the D.C. appellate court declines to investigate, it will send a clear signal about how seriously the federal bench takes its own ethics rules when the political stakes are high.
Meanwhile, the broader pattern of institutional accountability continues to play out across the federal government. FBI Director Kash Patel has moved to remove agents tied to the Trump investigations, and the Senate Judiciary Committee's decision to release the DOJ meeting notes suggests that congressional oversight is finally catching up to what happened behind closed doors during the Biden era.
A previous misconduct complaint against Boasberg was dismissed for lack of evidence. CASA's new filing, built on documents the earlier complaint did not have, tests whether the judiciary will look more carefully when the receipts are on the table.
The American public was told for years that the Trump prosecutions were handled by the book, independent counsel, independent judges, standard procedures. The DOJ's own internal notes tell a different story: one of briefings, strategy sessions, and judicial feedback loops that look nothing like independence. If the courts won't ask hard questions about that, taxpayers are entitled to wonder who will.