Todd Blanche Went After Minnesota’s Judges for Talking to the Times

By Rachel Hurley October 1st, 2026

Do I have a Todd Blanche Google alert?

Maybe.

Blanche just filed a misconduct complaint against nearly the whole federal bench in Minnesota.

Their crime, according to the Justice Department: talking to the New York Times.

Blanche says the judges violated their ethical duties by commenting on cases, some of them still pending, and showed what he called an “obvious bias” against the Department of Homeland Security. He wants them recused from every DHS case while the complaint sits with the 8th Circuit.

So what did the judges actually say?

Last December, the Trump administration launched Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities. The court got flooded with habeas petitions, more than a thousand of them, people challenging their detention.

And ICE kept violating the court orders that followed. One judge counted at least 96 orders ICE violated in January alone. Nearly a hundred.

That judge was Patrick Schiltz, and he is not who Blanche wants you to picture.

Schiltz was nominated by George W. Bush. He clerked for Antonin Scalia. He taught at Notre Dame, where one of his star students was Amy Coney Barrett.

At an American Enterprise Institute event honoring Scalia, he joked that he was glad his old boss wasn’t alive to see him branded a “progressive activist” judge.

The room laughed, cause the whole thing is absurd.

Schiltz wrote that the list “should give pause to anyone - no matter his or her political beliefs - who cares about the rule of law.” He mostly blamed chaos and short staffing, not some grand plan to defy the courts. Didn’t matter. An order is an order. He told the Times that what happened was a grave threat to the rule of law. Now the Justice Department says talking about it was judicial misconduct.

Now, judges talking to the press about cases, some still working their way through the courts, is genuinely unusual. The DOJ has a real rule it can point to. Judges aren’t supposed to comment publicly on the merits of pending cases. If Blanche had stopped there, he might have a point.

But the judiciary had already weighed in.

Back in February, the ethics panel that writes the rules for federal judges said judges can speak up on “core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law and judicial independence.”

Threats to defy court orders were specifically on the list of attacks judges can speak out about. The judges quoted in the story put their names on it. One of them, a Trump first-term appointee named Nancy Brasel, told the Times: “We are allowed to speak out about judicial independence. And so we should, in order to keep it.”

So the judges say they followed the written guidance, put their names on it, and said what their own court orders already said.

Blanche’s answer is a misconduct complaint and a demand they recuse from DHS cases.

I’ll give Blanche this much. The optics of judges giving interviews are bad, and some of those cases are still alive. But the bar for disqualifying a judge is sky high, and the last two DOJ misconduct complaints against judges went nowhere. Both got dismissed.

This isn’t coming out of nowhere, either.

Last November, Grassley and Jim Jordan wrote to Chief Justice Roberts asking him to rein in judges talking to the press.

Is this a coordinated effort? Who knows?

It would not surprise me.

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Todd Blanche Went After Minnesota’s Judges for Talking to the Times

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