Top DOJ officials may have been pressing to bring criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, judge says

By Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — Internal Justice Department files “suggest” that top officials in Washington, DC, worked with federal prosecutors in Nashville to prosecute Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he fought his wrongful deportation to El Salvador, a federal judge said in a newly unsealed ruling.

The December 3 opinion from US District Judge Waverly Crenshaw made public on Tuesday is the latest sign that the Justice Department is increasingly on the defense in the case. Abrego Garcia is seeking to have the charges dismissed based on his claim that he’s the victim of a selective and vindictive prosecution that is the result of meddling by officials in Washington

Such bids are extremely hard to win, but the ruling underscored the seriousness with which Crenshaw is scrutinizing Abrego Garcia’s claims. The judge ordered prosecutors to turn the documents over to Abrego Garcia’s team for review.

“The court recognizes the government’s assertion of privileges, but Abrego’s due process right to a non-vindictive prosecution outweighs the blanket evidentiary privileges asserted by the government,” Crenshaw said in the ruling.

The documents, he wrote in the nine-page decision, “suggest” that Robert McGuire, the top federal prosecutor in the Middle District of Tennessee, “was not a solitary decision-maker” in his office’s decision to bring human smuggling charges against Abrego Garcia, as the government has argued, but instead worked with others in DC “who may or may not have acted with an improper motivation” earlier this year when the case was brought together.

“The documents that must be produced connect back to (Deputy Attorney General Todd) Blanche because the documents suggest that (Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash) Singh had a leading role in the government’s decision to prosecute and Singh works in Blanche’s office,” the opinion read.

“The government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences,” Crenshaw wrote, pointing to several communications between Singh and McGuire this spring, when Abrego Garcia was still being held in the mega-prison in El Salvador he was deported to from Maryland in mid-March.

Those communications were taking place as the government resisted a Maryland judge’s order to work to return Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. At that time, his case grabbed national attention and came to symbolize the administration’s hardline immigration policies and approach to adverse court rulings.

CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

Abrego Garcia is arguing that the criminal charges, which stemmed from a Tennessee traffic stop years earlier, were brought in retaliation after he challenged his unlawful removal to El Salvador earlier this year. Though he’s a Salvadoran national, an immigration judge said in 2019 that he could not be sent back to his home country because he feared gang violence there.

In one email sent by Singh in late April to McGuire, “Singh made clear that Abrego’s criminal prosecution was a ‘top priority’ for the Deputy Attorney General’s office (Blanche),” the judge wrote.

An email from McGuire in mid-May to his staff said that Blanche and one of his deputies “would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later,” according to the ruling.

Abrego Garcia was ultimately brought back to the US in June to face the human smuggling case. He is on pretrial release in Maryland. His attorneys declined to comment on Crenshaw’s ruling.

“Judge Crenshaw is conveying that the documents he reviewed reveal that this prosecution was initiated by the DOJ,” said retired federal Judge John Jones, who added that this kind of case is not one typically initiated by department leaders in Washington.

“Although vindictive prosecution motions are rarely granted, every sign points to this one succeeding,” Jones said.

Abrego Garcia has previously argued that public statements by Blanche about the criminal case are evidence of the government’s decision to pursue him for illegitimate reasons, and Crenshaw said in a major ruling in October that those statements are problematic for prosecutors.

The documents sought by the defense, Crenshaw said in the December ruling, “must be disclosed given Abrego’s reliance on Blanche’s public statements and to allow the parties to present their arguments on how these documents may or may not support the motion to dismiss.”

A major hearing over Abrego Garcia’s effort to get the pair of charges tossed is set for late January. His trial, which had been scheduled for next month, has been postponed and a new date has not been set.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.