Trump Team Accidentally Uploads Memo Dissing Its Own Case Against Congestion Pricing
The internal document from the Department of Justice was uploaded and quickly removed.
https://gizmodo.com/trump-team-accidentally-uploads-memo-dissing-its-own-case-against-congestion-pricing-2000593941
Sean Duffy, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, would like to kill New York City’s congestion pricing. Donald Trump’s Department of Justice doesn’t think he has much of a case. We know that thanks to an apparent error on the part of the DOJ’s legal team, which uploaded and then removed an internal memo offering its opinion that the effort to kill the tolls is “unlikely” to win over the court.
The 11-page document—uploaded Wednesday night to the docket for the ongoing lawsuit between New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Duffy’s DOT before being taken down—was originally sent on April 11 to DOT’s senior trial attorney Erin Hendrixson, advising her and her team to change their approach or risk losing their case.
The DOT is defending Duffy’s decision to declare the project illegal. Yet the DOJ warned Duffy’s actions to dismantle the project “was contrary to law, pretextual, procedurally arbitrary and capricious, and violated due process”—none of which seems all that good if you’re tasked with defending the validity of the actions in court. As such, the DOJ’s attorneys concluded “It is very unlikely that Judge Liman or further courts of review will uphold the Secretary’s decision on the legal grounds.”
Given that the current position seems to be a loser, the Justice Department attorneys recommended DOT change tact and argue the toll doesn’t align with the agency’s goals and was canceled “as a matter of changed agency priorities”—a position that is more legally defensible under regulations set by the Office of Management and Budget. According to Bloomberg, that argument fell flat in DOT offices.
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