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U.S. Supreme Court - Washington, D.C.
U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington D.C.
Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan is moving to have the federal charges against her thrown out—and she's citing the very ruling that gave President Donald Trump a presumption of immunity.
Dugan, who was arrested last month after Trump administration officials alleged she helped Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican immigrant in her courtroom on unrelated charges, attempt to escape from federal arrest, was formally charged this week with concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings.
According to NBC News, lawyers representing Dugan wrote in response that the whole case was invalid due in part to Trump's win at the Supreme Court last year as he sought to undermine federal charges against him for interfering in the 2020 election.
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Hannah Dugan - Hannah Dugan for Judge
Hannah Dugan is sworn into a second term at the Milwaukee County Courthouse (2022)
“The problems with this prosecution are legion, but most immediately, the government cannot prosecute Judge Dugan because she is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts,” wrote her legal team “Immunity is not a defense to the prosecution to be determined later by a jury or court; it is an absolute bar to the prosecution at the outset.” The lawyers explicitly cited the decision by the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, which held that a president has a presumption of immunity for official acts.
The attorneys focused on the Supreme Court's holding that “In dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” Because Dugan's instructions within her courtroom constituted official conduct, they concluded, “Judge Dugan therefore has both immunity from conviction and immunity from prosecution.”
Even leaving this argument aside, legal experts who have studied the case believe it to be flimsy on the merits.
Wisconsin Elections Commission chief Ann Jacobs noted in a lengthy analysis of the government's complaint that, far from obstructing the arrest of Flores-Ruiz, the “jury door” she ordered him to go through actually led directly into a hall full of federal agents capable of arresting him, and those agents chose not to do so until much later, when Flores-Ruiz and his attorney were already on their way out of the building.
