Bondi Eliminates ABA’s Role in Vetting Trump Judicial Picks (2)

The Justice Department won’t allow the American Bar Association to vet President Donald Trump’s picks for judicial appointments.

The Office of Legal Policy, which prepares judicial nominees, will no longer “direct nominees to provide waivers allowing the ABA access to non-public information, including bar records,” according to a Thursday letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to the association’s president, William Bay.

Nominees also won’t respond to ABA questionnaires or sit for interviews with its standing committee on the judiciary.

“Unfortunately, the ABA no longer functions as a fair arbiter of nominees’ qualifications, and its ratings invariably and demonstrably favor nominees put forth by Democratic administrations,” Bondi said.

The ABA declined to comment on the letter.

The changes represent a further diminishment of the ABA’s customary role in vetting judicial nominations, which had already shrank during several prior administrations. Trump, like George W. Bush before him, had cut off the ABA’s ability to vet candidates before they were nominated, a practice Joe Biden continued.

Robert Luther III, a former Trump White House lawyer who handled judicial nominations during his first term, called Bondi’s decision to remove the ABA completely out of the process “welcome news.”

“Under Trump 45, we let actually nominated folks meet with the ABA—but the ABA had no access to candidates or impact on our decision-making process pre-nomination,” Luther said in an email.

“Far too many exceptional judicial nominees from Republican presidents—Robert Bork, Frank Easterbrook, Edith Jones, and Kat Mizelle—have suffered inexcusable hits to their reputations based on the ABA’s partisan vetting process,” Luther said.

The ABA’s standing committee, which is independent from the larger organization, is a 15-member panel that’s helped vet judicial nominees since the Eisenhower era. Its members, including the chairman, are appointed by the association’s president to three-year terms. The ranks have included trial attorneys, law professors, and Big Law partners.

Lawyers under consideration are rated as “not qualified,” “qualified,” or “well qualified.”

Bush, Trump, and Biden limited the ABA’s role in vetting candidates in advance. Biden’s decision to continue the Trump administration’s restrictions was praised by progressives who said the ABA standing committee was dominated by corporate lawyers and would make it harder to diversify the bench.

Republicans criticized the ABA panel for the “Not Qualified” ratings it gave to several of Trump’s picks and accused the group of catering to liberals.

The Trump Justice Department has proven even more hostile to the ABA in his second term, limiting employee participation at the organization’s events and threatening its law school accreditation powers over law school diversity mandates.

The ABA, in turn, has publicly criticized threats against federal judges and joined litigation against the government, amid attacks on law firms and courts by the Trump administration.