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      Judge Extends Pause on Firings of Probationary Workers for 5 Days

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      The judge said he needed more time to determine whether a longer-term halt should apply to the entire country or be restricted to certain states while the case proceeds.A federal judge in Maryland on Wednesday extended a temporary pause in the Trump administration’s efforts to fire probationary workers at more than a dozen federal agencies by five days.The judge, James K. Bredar of the Federal District Court in Maryland, said he needed more time to determine whether a longer-term halt to the government’s firing of probationary employees should apply to the entire country or be restricted to certain states while the case proceeds.Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued the federal government, arguing they were irreparably harmed when the government fired thousands of probationary employees en masse in February, leaving states to face unemployment spikes without warning. Judge Bredar’s order earlier this month called for the workers’ reinstatement.During a hearing on Wednesday, Judge Bredar said he was wary of issuing a longer halt to the government’s firings that would apply to the entire country when 31 states have decided not to participate in the case. He cited recent criticism that district courts had exceeded their authority in ordering nationwide halts to Trump administration programs. Of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, all of the attorneys general are Democrats.Lawyers for the states and Washington, D.C., say that when the administration conducts mass firings, as it did in February, the harm can spill over to other states, even if they are not joining this lawsuit. This is why a preliminary injunction needs to apply to more than just the participants, one of the lawyers, Virginia Anne Williamson with the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, said on Wednesday.For example, if a preliminary injunction were restricted to the states that brought the lawsuit, the federal government could resume firing probationary employees in Virginia, which is not part of the suit. But in the case of an employee who works in Virginia and lives in Maryland, which is a party in the lawsuit, Maryland suffers from the firings, the suit argues, because it could have to provide support services for its unemployed resident.“This is murky,” Judge Bredar said on Wednesday, adding that the court “has to wade into the swamp here and figure out if it can’t draft something more restrictive than across the country.”Judge Bredar’s reinstatement order, issued on March 13, overlaps with court-mandated reinstatements of probationary employees in two other cases.Many of the agencies have reinstated employees and issued back pay for the time between their firings and the court orders. Most agencies are placing the reinstated employees on administrative leave, which the Trump administration has told the court is part of the process of returning them to their jobs.The Department of Housing and Urban Development, however, is not providing back pay to the fired workers, said Ashaki Robinson, president of the local American Federation of Government Employees union representing workers at that agency. Ms. Robinson said that could change if Judge Bredar made back pay part of a future order. More

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      Trump’s Judicial Defiance Is New to the Autocrat Playbook, Experts Say

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      The president’s escalating conflict with federal courts goes beyond what has happened in countries like Hungary and Turkey, where leaders spent years remaking the judiciary.President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power.“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”There are many examples of autocratic leaders constraining the power of the judiciary by packing courts with compliant judges, or by changing the laws that give them authority, he said. But it is extremely rare for leaders to simply claim the power to disregard or override court orders directly, especially so immediately after taking office.In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has purged thousands of judges from the judiciary as part of a broader effort to consolidate power in his own hands. But that required decades of effort and multiple constitutional changes, Mr. Levitsky said. It only became fully successful after a failed 2016 coup provided a political justification for the purge.In Hungary, Prime Minister Victor Orban packed the constitutional courts with friendly judges and forced hundreds of others into retirement, but did so over a period of years, using constitutional amendments and administrative changes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Reinstated, but Not Back to Work: Fired Workers Linger in ‘Limbo’

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      Erin Cagney was supposed to hear on Monday that she could go back to doing the job she loved — as an archaeologist with the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. But the day came and went without a word.Ms. Cagney finally learned her fate on Wednesday evening. She was being reinstated, but immediately being placed on administrative leave.“I desperately want to return to my job,” she said in an interview on Wednesday. “I don’t want to be on administrative leave, in limbo, for some unknown duration of time.”Ms. Cagney, first ensnared in the Trump administration’s purge of thousands of probationary employees, now finds herself caught in the slow-motion chaos playing out across the government as 18 federal agencies contend with two court orders requiring workers to be rehired.In interviews, more than a dozen fired probationary workers described a kind of purgatory in which information about their livelihoods and what might happen next was difficult, if not impossible, to come by. Most of the fired workers interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing for their future job prospects and citing their desire to get back to work.In some cases, fired employees say they have received emails informing them of their reinstatement. Some have seen back pay appear in their bank accounts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Is What the Courts Can Do if Trump Defies Them

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      Are we heading toward a full-blown constitutional crisis? For the first time in decades, the country is wrestling with this question. It was provoked by members of the Trump administration, including Russell Vought, the influential director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, who have hinted or walked right up to the edge of saying outright that officials should refuse to obey a court order against certain actions of the administration. President Trump has said he would obey court orders — though on Saturday he posted on social media, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”Some have argued that if the administration is defiant there is little the courts can do. But while the courts do not have a standing army, there are actually several escalating measures they can take to counter a defiant executive branch.The fundamental principle of the rule of law is that once the legal process, including appeals and stay applications, has reached completion, public officials must obey an order of the courts. This country’s constitutional traditions are built on, and depend upon, that understanding.A profound illustration is President Richard Nixon’s compliance with the Supreme Court decision requiring him to turn over the secret White House tape recordings he had made, even though Nixon knew that doing so would surely end his presidency.If the Trump administration ignores a court order, it would represent the start of a full-blown constitutional crisis.The courts rarely issue binding orders to the president, so these orders are not likely to be directed at President Trump personally. His executive orders and other commands are typically enforced by subordinate officials in the executive branch, and any court order — initially, it would come from the Federal District Court — would be directed at them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Court Denies TikTok’s Request to Freeze Sale-or-Ban Law

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      TikTok had sought to temporarily freeze a law that requires its Chinese parent to sell the app or face a U.S. ban next month. The case may now head to the Supreme Court.A federal court on Friday denied TikTok’s request to temporarily freeze a law that requires its Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a ban in the United States as of Jan. 19, a decision that puts the fate of the app in the Supreme Court’s hands.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a filing late on Friday that an injunction was “unwarranted,” and that it had expedited its decision so that TikTok and its users could seek an emergency freeze from the Supreme Court.A week ago, three judges in the same court unanimously denied petitions from the company and its users to overturn the law. TikTok then asked the court on Monday to temporarily block the law until the Supreme Court decided on TikTok’s planned appeal of that decision, and sought a decision by Dec. 16.The court said on Friday that TikTok and its users “have not identified any case in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court.”It isn’t clear whether the Supreme Court will agree to temporarily freeze the law and hear the case, though experts say that is likely.Michael Hughes, a spokesman for TikTok, said, “As we have previously stated, we plan on taking this case to the Supreme Court, which has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech.” He said that American users’ voices would be “silenced” if the law were not stopped.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eric Adams Indictment: Read Charges NYC Mayor Faces

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      Federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Thursday unveiled a five-count indictment against Mayor Eric L. Adams of New York, charging him with bribery conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Mr. Adams, who is up for re-election in 2025, insisted he was innocent and says he intends to fight the case, which is led by […] More

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      Collector Sues to Block Investigators From Seizing Roman Bronze

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      Lawyers for the collector, based in California, said the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not have the jurisdiction or the evidence to support seizing the ancient statue.A California collector has gone to court to block efforts by New York investigators to seize an ancient Roman bronze statue that they assert was looted from Turkey in the 1960s.In a federal court filing last week in California, lawyers for the collector, Aaron Mendelsohn, 74, disputed the evidence they said investigators had presented indicating that the ancient statue of a man was stolen from an archaeological site in Turkey. The lawyers said that investigators had no jurisdiction to seize items in California and so were overstepping their authority.It was the latest in a series of recent challenges to efforts by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to seize artifacts believed to have been looted. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago are also engaged in legal challenges with the investigators over items with disputed histories.In Mr. Mendelsohn’s case, his lawyers have accused the investigators of using the threat of prosecution to pressure their client into giving up the statue. In addition, they have argued that by pursuing the statue in a potential criminal proceeding, the investigators can avoid the fuller disclosure and access to evidence that would have been required in civil court.The district attorney’s office “has invoked New York criminal process in an effort to intimidate Mr. Mendelsohn into relinquishing the Bronze Male, without affording Mr. Mendelsohn a legitimate opportunity to fully explore the evidence that DANY claims casts doubt on Mr. Mendelsohn’s ownership or to litigate its true ownership,” Marcus A. Asner, a lawyer for Mr. Mendelsohn, wrote in court papers filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.The Manhattan district attorney’s office responded with a statement that said: “Our Antiquities Trafficking Unit has successfully recovered thousands of stolen antiquities that came through Manhattan from galleries, homes, and museums around the country. We will respond to this filing in court.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Tries to Move Hush-Money Case to Federal Court Before Sentencing

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      The long-shot request, which the former president made Thursday night, is an attempt to avoid sentencing in his criminal case, scheduled for Sept. 18.Former President Donald J. Trump sought to move his Manhattan criminal case into federal court on Thursday, filing the unusual request three months after he was convicted in state court.The long-shot bid marks Mr. Trump’s latest effort to stave off his sentencing in state court in his hush-money trial, in which he was convicted of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal.He is scheduled to receive his punishment on Sept. 18, just seven weeks before Election Day, when he will square off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.“The ongoing proceedings will continue to cause direct and irreparable harm to President Trump — the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election — and voters located far beyond Manhattan,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, wrote in the filing.Their filing came even as the Trump legal team is awaiting the result of a separate effort to postpone the sentencing; it opened a second front that could complicate the first.On Aug. 15, Mr. Trump asked the state court judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan, to delay the sentencing until after Election Day. Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that they needed more time to challenge his conviction on the basis of a recent Supreme Court ruling granting presidents broad immunity for official acts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More