We need to see more of this, Trump officials being held accountable! A clash between a federal judge in Rhode Island and a Justice Department lawyer escalated Thursday, as Judge Melissa R. DuBose referred the lawyer for a misconduct investigation. The judges in the district appointed a special counsel to investigate the misconduct.
Kevin Bolan, who leads the civil division of the district’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, withheld critical information from DuBose’s court on direct instruction from the Department of Homeland Security. The case centers on Bryan Rafael Gomez, a Dominican national in ICE custody who had petitioned for release. Bolan knew Gomez had an active homicide warrant in the Dominican Republic. He didn’t tell the judge. When DuBose ordered Gomez released on April 28, she had no idea about the foreign murder charge, because the government had deliberately kept it from her.
Then DHS twisted the knife. The agency published a press release calling DuBose an “activist judge appointed by Joe Biden” who had released a “wanted murderer back into American communities.” The statement strongly implied she had known about the murder warrant and released him anyway. She hadn’t. She couldn’t have. They made sure of it.
Bolan later admitted in court filings that he knew about the warrant but cited a vague “legitimate law enforcement reason” for the concealment, saying DHS had instructed him not to disclose it. That excuse has a problem, ICE had already publicly named Gomez in an April 16 press release about foreign murder suspects in custody. The information wasn’t secret. It just wasn’t shared with the judge.
DuBose said the court has to get to the bottom of it. “It’s the candor and the lack of candor to this court that has to be addressed,” she said. “And it has to be fully investigated, so we don’t have anything like this happen again.”
This is the playbook they withhold information from a judge, let her rule without it, then publicly destroy her reputation using the information you hid. DuBose saw it clearly. Now there’s an investigation.
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