Some remarkable statements in the opinion (this is all I have time for now):.
- Judge Jackson wrote of the CFPB’s employee testifying for the agency: “He had the demeanor of an abused wife brought to court by her husband to drop the charges.”
- “The testimony and the contemporaneous documents suggest that those last minute communications were nothing more than window dressing, and that nothing has changed.”
- “Indeed, only two days after the agency’s Legal Officer – who like the police chief in Casablanca who was “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on – professed to be surprised that some employees were not working, the White House posted a message on its “Work for You Again” webpage boasting: “President Trump ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, which funneled cash to left-wing advocacy groups – to halt operations.””
- “As defendants’ many citations to Article II of the United States Constitution imply, there is an Article I.”
- “This rosy depiction of events, designed to assuage the Court, was accompanied by the February 24, 2025 Declaration of Adam Martinez, the Chief Operating Officer of the CFPB, First Martinez Decl., which was a carefully worded and highly selective account that was immediately contradicted by a second series of declarations and exhibits submitted by the plaintiffs.”
- “It is now clear to the Court that the omissions from the first declaration rendered it to be highly misleading, if not intentionally false. Defendants’ initial effort to persuade the Court in their opposition that employees were hard at work on their statutory duties even after they were ordered to stand down on February 10 has been shown to be unreliable and inconsistent with the agency’s own contemporaneous records, and the defendants’ eleventh hour attempt to suggest immediately before the hearing that the stop work order was not really a stop work order at all was so disingenuous that the Court is left with little confidence that the defense can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.”
- “The evidence reveals that: the defendants were in fact engaged in a concerted, expedited effort to shut the agency down entirely when the motion for injunctive relief was filed; while the effort to do so was stalled by the Court’s intervention, the plan remains unchanged; and the defendants have absolutely no intention of operating the CFPB at all.”
