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

This is the headline of an article from Raw Story dated 04/25/25 with a byline from Matthew Chapman. I had earlier looked at the arrest affidavit of the government and raised some of these same issues as the lawyer who heads up the Elections board in Wisconsin.

Such as:

"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 further in:

"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?"

So what are we to make of the allegation of mysterious use of one set of elevators further from Dugan's court? Turns out the allegations fall apart even further:

""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)."

I had noted and commented when I read the affidavit that they could have also arrested him in the elevator because they were right there with him:

"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."

My only quibble with that last excerpt is that capitalization is appropriate for Keystone Cops. Bless the memory of actor/creator Hank Mann and producer Mack Sennett. It is an apt reference though to the courthouse scene.

Which leads to a conclusion in the article:

""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."

All taken together this raises the question of whether they set this up more or less after getting confronted by Dugan in the beginning. They chose on more than one occasion not arrest the man long before any need to "chase" him. They chose not to in the public hallway and then again on the elevator. Did they do so hoping there could be some sort of escalation and they could blame it on Dugan? It would be most instructive to see any messaging that took place among the members of that "team" and their superiors while the Chief Judge was in a lengthy phone conversation with the superiors.

An interesting question will be what will the supposed "witnesses" cited in the affidavit actually testify to as opposed to what the affiant claims they said? The afffidavit smelled of embellishment with loaded adjectives etc. describing the demeanor of Dugan and using what amounts to incomplete observations by a court deputy to make implications to support a conclusion.

As I had also pointed to in an earlier comment they ran to an arrest warrant as opposed to interviewing the judge. She is your suspect and she's right there so why not interview her and ask questions just like the FBI does for tens of thousands of people suspected of crimes every year? So they choose not to arrest the man on multiple occasions and then also choose not to do a standard move of interviewing the readily available suspect for their supposed crime of obstruction. Strange choices and it tells us that something smells in Milwaukee way beyond the fragrance of pickled herring and brats on the grill.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-judge-arrest/