After sitting on the case for months, a federal appeals court Friday shut down the contempt of court proceeding against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case.

Both of the Trump appointees on the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded U.S. District Judge James Boasberg had exceeded his authority in finding probable cause that the Trump administration had committed criminal contempt. At issue was the Trump administration’s disregard of Boasberg’s emergency order barring removals under the Alien Enemies Act. One of the Trump appointees went so far as to find that no contempt had happened at all. The third judge, an Obama appointee, dissented from the ruling.

The ruling raises the very real possibility that the Trump administration will not face legal accountability for its brazen defiance of court orders in a historic case where it set out to run roughshod over the judicial branch, setting up a constitutional clash.

The appeals court issued a “temporary administrative stay” in the case way back in April, pausing Boasberg’s contempt proceedings. The lengthy delay in the appeals court ruling was unusual. In the time it took for it to issue its ruling, the AEA detainees – all Venezuelan nationals – were repatriated from CECOT in El Salvador and Emil Bove, the Trump DOJ official who allegedly ordered the removals to continue despite Boasberg’s order, was nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate to a lifetime seat on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.

The two Trump appointees – Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao – each filed concurring opinions that offered different rationales for granting a writ of mandamus spanking Boasberg and vacating his probable-cause order.

Katsas, who concluded that Boasberg’s order was ambiguous and susceptible to multiple interpretations, was ostensibly more definitive than Rao in shutting down the entire contempt proceeding. “[B]ecause no prosecution could overcome the fatal ambiguity explained above, I would also terminate the criminal-contempt proceeding,” Katsas wrote.

Rao was blistering in her denunciation of Boasberg, calling his “abuse” of the contempt power “especially egregious.” But she stopped just short of taking criminal contempt entirely off the table, limiting the ruling to the impossible choice she alleges Boasberg left the administration of either taking custody of the AEA detainees or facing prosecution for criminal contempt of court.

But while Rao left open the possibility that Boasberg could still moved forward with a criminal contempt proceeding, she invited the Trump administration to return to the appeals court for relief. “If the district court chooses the problematic and uncertain path of criminal contempt, the government may seek relief from this court to remedy any specific harms arising from the district court’s actions,” Rao warned Boasberg.

The saga of Boasberg’s thwarted effort to stop the AEA removals on the weekend of March 15 is well known by this point. After he verbally ordered the Trump administration to turn back any AEA flights that were in the air, he issued a written order that barred the AEA removals. The Trump administration’s fig leaf of an argument was that the written order, which didn’t explicitly mention turning the flights around, trumped the verbal order from the bench.

Katsas and Rao danced around the verbal v. written distinction, with Katsas concluding Boasberg’s written order intentionally avoided some of the “problematic” elements of his verbal order – even though Boasberg has subsequently said his verbal order was still in full force and the administration likely violated it.

In her dissent, Judge Cornelia Pillard, the Obama appointee, painstakingly works through the many freewheeling legal and factual aspects of the two concurring opinions, but she zeros in on the verbal v. written canard. “Faced with the unambiguous command, overwhelmingly confirmed by context—to prevent plaintiffs from being transferred out of U.S. custody and bring them back to the United States—defendants attempt post hoc to manufacture ambiguity in the TRO.”

In a nearly simultaneous ruling Friday, a separate panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that included Katsas and Rao and a third Trump appointee, Judge Justin Walker, vacated a later Boasberg order in the AEA case. The appeals court said Boasberg’s order that the CECOT detainees must get the chance to make habeas corpus claims since they were denied due process was overtaken by events, specifically the repatriation of the detainees to Venezuela. The appeals court remanded the case to Boasberg for further proceedings in light of the changed circumstances, a move the ACLU, which is representing the former CECOT detainees, lauded.

“We express no opinion on what kind of class or relief, if any, may be appropriate in light of the changed circumstances,” the appeals court panel said in the second ruling, though it all but said that it would not have upheld the order if the detainees were still in CECOT.

Still, the ACLU, which is representing the former CECOT detainees, hailed the second decision.

The Trump administration’s conduct in the original AEA case was arguably its most brazen defiance of the court orders, especially when Erez Reuveni, one of the career prosecutors involved in the case, was fired and came forward as a whistleblower to reveal internal DOJ communications. In his own account, buttressed by corroborating texts and emails, Reuveni has said that Bove told DOJ colleagues in a meeting that they might have to consider telling the courts “fuck you.” The internal communications show it was Bove who concluded that the AEA flights could proceed without violating Boasberg’s order blocking the removals.

After the two separate appeals court rulings that handcuffed Boasberg, it was left to Pillard to defend the chief judge, a respected jurist with a reputation for probity and measuredness who has come under vicious attack from the White House and Attorney General Pam Bondi for his decisions in the AEA case:

Chief Judge Boasberg faced immense pressure to make a quick decision in a rapidly evolving, high-stakes situation. He performed that task calmly and with an even hand, bringing to bear his skill and wisdom as an experienced jurist. Even when faced with what reasonably appeared to him to be foot dragging, evasion, and outright disregard for his jurisdiction and his orders, he responded with unfailing composure. The majority does an exemplary judge a grave disservice by overstepping its bounds to upend his effort to vindicate the judicial authority that is our shared trust.

The ACLU condemned the contempt of court decision. “Even DOJ’s own lawyers have now stated publicly that they understood that they were not supposed to hand over these men to El Salvador. There was zero ambiguity in the moment,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead counsel in the case said in a statement that noted the ACLU is considering all of its options on how to proceed.

The ACLUS could seek en banc review, giving the full court of appeals a chance to weigh in. Only three Trump appointees sit on the 16-judge court, but by the luck of the draw that had historic implications, they were disproportionately represented on the panel.

Read the opinion: