'Absurd': Lawyer tears apart Trump DOJ's case for arresting judge

The Justice Department's case for criminally charging a Wisconsin county judge for allegedly interfering with the arrest of an unauthorized immigrant is "absurd" and manufactured out of whole cloth, an attorney who chairs the state's Elections Commission wrote in a lengthy thread on X.

Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested by the FBI on Friday and accused by federal prosecutors of instructing Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national charged with misdemeanor battery, to leave through a jury door, which allowed him to briefly evade federal agents before his recapture.

But observers who examine the complaint and know the layout of Dugan's courthouse will see the allegation falls apart, wrote lawyer Ann Jacobs. And it appears the judge sent Flores-Ruiz into a public hallway full of six federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and Drug Enforcement Administration.

And they failed to arrest him as they should have, she said.

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"Starting at around ¶20 there's a lengthy discussion about Judge Dugan's demeanor - 'visibly angry' and 'walking quickly,'" wrote Jacobs. "Have they never met a judge? Do you think they like having their calendar messed up? Would the same words have been applied to a male judge?"

Later in the complaint, Jacobs continued, is "a discussion about Judge Dugan 'forcefully' and 'stern[ly] instructing the man in question to go out the jury door.' BUT! It is not only a door to the jury room. It is *also* an exit to the *public* hallway. You know, the hallway where law enforcement is waiting ... Then what happens? The two DEA agents SEE him and do [checks notes] nothing. They don't arrest him, they don't do anything. They watch him?"

Then the complaint argues that it's suspicious that Flores-Ruiz went to a bank of elevators further away from the courtroom than the immediate set of doors, apparently arguing he was doing so on the judge's orders to evade capture.

"Here's why this is absurd - there are 2 banks of elevators in the courthouse: 1 goes to the ground floor, and 1 goes to the 9th street exit which is where the parking structure is. In fact, there are even SIGNS telling you which bank of elevator goes where," wrote Jacobs. "So - yes - you sometimes walk past one set of elevators so you can get where you want to go. If you are not going to the parking structure (which most people are), you take the other set of elevators because they are less crowded. Suspicious? No - literally something hundreds of people do daily in the courthouse. This attempt to make it into something is just dumb (especially since they claim to be familiar with the elevators - clearly not)."

The complaint then admits a DEA agent got into the elevator with Flores-Ruiz, noted Jacobs, and "They then have some sort of keystone cop moment where the man is at the ground level but the agents go to the lower level and have to race around to find him. They chase him and arrest him. Which they could have done in the public hallway but chose not to."

"All of which is to say - the attempt to make this into something criminal on the part of the judge who sent him to the public hall where law enforcement was waiting requires a lot of reaching and a lot of work and a lot of pejorative statements designed to taint the complaint," Jacobs concluded. "The further attempt to sensationalize the matter by arresting Judge Dugan - instead of simply asking her to appear - was wholly unnecessary and certainly appears to be designed solely to intimidate. Very unfortunate."