President Donald Trump’s top civil rights attorney got into a petty back-and-forth on X with a prominent conservative lawyer who stepped in to defend the propriety of a judge who had given money to the immigrants’ legal relief.
U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee who got his start clerking for the late right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, drew outrage from MAGA world this week when he threatened to hold the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons, in contempt for ignoring court orders to give hearings to arrested immigrants.
This was followed by Fox News dropping a report that Schiltz was a former donor to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which Trump supporters immediately characterized as a conflict of interest.
Ed Whelan, a right-wing legal scholar who is also a former Scalia law clerk, stepped in to point out that it was no such thing.
“A judge may contribute financially to legal service associations that provide counsel for the poor. A judge need not recuse merely because lawyers who accept appointments by such associations are also counsel of record in cases before that judge,” Whelan posted to X. “A federal appellate judge informs me that’s the official advice to federal judges (set forth in a nonpublic Compendium of Selected Opinions, § 4.2-3(g)).”
Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s civil rights chief at the Justice Department, then lashed out at Whelan, triggering an increasingly personal back-and-forth exchange on Tuesday evening.
“Ed, do you have any clients? Do you actually practice law— in COURT? Serious question, related to this post,” she wrote.
Whelan then replied, “Do you know what a non sequitur is? I can’t conceive how your question has any bearing on the official ethics advice that I quoted. To answer your question: I have spent the last two decades promoting originalism and textualism, working to transform the courts, and promoting conservative legal causes.”
Dhillon shot back, “I majored in Ancient Greek and Latin at Dartmouth. Your pretentiousness merely underscores your utter lack of street cred.” (In reality, as users reported in the Community Notes, Dhillon majored in “classical studies,” which includes ancient languages but is not a major specifically about them.)
“Are you drunk?” Whelan replied.
On Wednesday morning, Whelan quoted Dhillon’s last post and added, “This is perhaps my favorite in a very weird series of tweets late last night by Harmeet Dhillon, AAG for Civil Rights. I’m glad that she, having studied Latin, knows what non compos mentis [of unsound mind] means.”
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