In a piece published yesterday, I documented how anti-Trump activist Judge James Boasberg was assigned a series of “Trump cases” in the early weeks of the second Trump administration. He then blocked and stalled part of the president’s first wave agenda.
So, how did one left-wing judge get assigned so many sensitive cases? Part of the answer is the legal tactic known as “judge-shopping,” which was patented by lawfare general and activist attorney Marc Elias.
In an exclusive interview I conducted as part of my research for Breaking the Law, President Trump has called out the practice and warned that “judge-shopping is rampant at levels never seen before. You know the outcome of a case as soon as the judge is picked.”
“And the radical left is using this, their final weapon, to take down America,” the president told me.
Judge-shopping is a straightforward idea: A politically interested party will bring a case to a court with mostly favorable judges to make it likely they get their desired outcome. For example, some courts have only one judge, so it can be easy to anticipate how a judge will rule if you bring the case to that judge’s court. Other powerful courts, such as the D.C. District Court, is composed of mostly of judges who appear to be ideologically on the left. The venue rules for federal cases (28 U.S.C. § 1391) make it so that virtually every case brought against the federal government can be filed in that court since it is often where the defendant resides or where the relevant events occurred.
Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer credits Marc Elias, a high priest of lawfare if there ever was one, with popularizing the venue-shopping tactic. According to Schweizer, Elias was able to swing the highly contested 2008 Minnesota senate race for Democrat Al Franken over Republican Norm Coleman by finding a specific court to legitimize over a thousand ballots that had previously been rejected because they had potentially been cast by convicted felons.
(…) The left has used Elias’s tactic to great effect, politicizing the courts and ensuring there is no equal justice under the law for political conservatives.
It is imperative we move to end judge and forum-shopping immediately. The damage a politicized judge can do goes beyond injunctions and TROs. These judges decide the rules of the court, who and what goes in and out, what decisions juries can and can’t make, etc. As was the case in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, the jury instructions and other peculiarities of a particular judge’s courtroom can determine the outcome of the case. (Read more: Breitbart News, 8/17/2025) (Archive)