Meet the judge who is drawing Trump’s ire: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, we explore the background of the judge who has drawn the wrath of President Donald Trump and his allies in recent days. Plus, Andrea Mitchell explains what we should — and shouldn’t — expect to learn from the JFK files. 

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— Adam Wollner

Meet the judge who is drawing Trump’s ire 

By Ryan J. Reilly, Erik Ortiz, Lawrence Hurley and Allan Smith

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.

In 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. 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.

A 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. 

Read more →

Related: Judge warns of possible ‘consequences’ after DOJ push back on questions about deportation flights, Gary Grumbach, Megan Lebowitz and Dareh Gregorian

What to know from the Trump presidency today

• The Trump administration and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine has agreed to move forward with a partial ceasefire with Russia, which President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had discussed a day earlier. Moscow and Kyiv accused each other of air attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure overnight. 
• A federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from enlisting or serving in the military. 
• The United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit organization established by Congress 40 years ago, asked a federal judge to immediately block the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempted forced shutdown of the organization. 
• The administration is considering giving up a NATO command that has been exclusively American since Eisenhower. 
• Trump fired two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission.
• Workers at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration this week experienced a kind of whiplash as the federal government tried to reinstate probationary employees who had been fired.

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What the JFK files do – and don’t – reveal

By Andrea Mitchell

Scholars and conspiracy theorists have spent the last 24 hours going through unannotated PDFs, including some illegible handwritten notes from the FBI and the CIA, about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

Prompted in part by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s and his own affinity for the Kennedy assassination, Trump signed an executive order on his fourth day in office to release as many as 80,000 pages of documents from the JFK files in the National Archives, unredacted, a process that began Tuesday evening. During his first visit this week to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Trump has taken over as chair, he told a reporter, “You got a lot of reading.” 

What has been delivered so far has fallen far short of the promise. In the pages that have been released, many of which involved grand jury testimony and tax filings, information was still redacted. None of the documents were catalogued or annotated. And much of what the pages contained was already known from other sources.  

The documents did include surveillance reports on Lee Harvey Oswald’s trips to the Soviet Union and Finland, his months spent in Mexico City leading up to the assassination and his anger at Kennedy when he was denied a visa to Cuba, where he wanted to defect.

And there is fascinating new material about a covert CIA operation in New York City during the Cold War to open as many as a half-million letters and packages a month to and from the Soviet Union and the United States.  

Will the release of the JFK files ultimately resolve more than 60 years of doubts about the Warren Report’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone? It’s not likely.  

Experts like the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato said the CIA withheld other documents from the National Archives that weren’t subject to the Trump-ordered release. Other materials, including FBI surveillance recordings of Oswald, have been destroyed.  

“I believe Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots. I think all the evidence points in that direction. The question that will never be fully answered is whether he received encouragement or assistance in any way from some other agent, some other organization,” Sabato said. “These documents will not eliminate that possibility. If anything, it’ll provide fuel to the fire.” 

JFK’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, added blistering commentary on X over all this, posting sharp criticism of Trump’s policies and accusing him of “being obsessed with my grandfather — but not in his life or what he achieved in it.”

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