DOJ Threatening the Judicial Branch with a Constitutional Crisis

trump refusing to comply with order to compel OBM chair to testify in lawsuit re: firings.

DOJ says if you try and force him to testify we will refuse and you will have a constitutional crisis. Time for the judicial branch to bow up.

reads like an abuser telling the abused to not make me mad so I won't have to hit you again

for all you trumpettes, many division heads have testified in lawsuits before. this is just another attempt at a stall to avoid a decision...see a pattern?

'Protect the government': Trump DOJ urges judge to stop upcoming courtroom showdown with OPM director in mass firings case

The Trump administration is attempting to stop an evidentiary hearing that’s scheduled to happen on Thursday in its Office of Personnel and Management mass firing case and is now asking the judge to rescind “any order” requiring OPM Director Charles Ezell to testify, just days after the Justice Department’s Civil Division claimed it would “not produce” the high-ranking agency leader in court.

Ezell, who was appointed by Trump to be acting director on his first day in office, is accused of unlawfully firing thousands of government workers still in the probationary period of their employment and was ordered by a federal judge in California to appear in court Thursday to testify. Attorneys for the DOJ’s Civil Division allegedly said last week that they would not let Ezell take the stand, so the plaintiffs suing the OPM — five labor unions and five nonprofit organizations — moved to get a status conference scheduled Thursday, March 6, to argue the matter. At that hearing, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the DOJ to provide a statement to the court that it “intended to produce Mr. Ezell as well as four other individuals from whom plaintiffs sought testimony” at the upcoming evidentiary hearing by Monday, along with a motion for relief from the court’s original order that required Ezell to appear — to which Trump’s DOJ complied, according to court filings.

“At bottom, the interests of justice, party resources, and judicial economy do not warrant the creation of an inter-branch constitutional controversy by compelling the acting head of an executive agency to testify in this posture,” argued civil division lawyers in their Monday motion to vacate the evidentiary hearing and preclude Ezell’s testimony. “Nor do they warrant a full-blown evidentiary hearing on the existing record. The Court should instead vacate the evidentiary hearing, rescind any order requiring the Acting Director of OPM to testify, protect the government from overbroad and unduly burdensome deposition practice, and convert its TRO into a preliminary injunction to allow the parties to move in orderly, expedited fashion to the next stage of this litigation.”