The Trump administration just booted its own lawyers after accusing them of sabotaging a high-stakes legal battle, according to a report by The New York Times.
On Wednesday night, three federal lawyers accidentally uploaded a private memo to a public court file. That document didn’t just lay out the government’s strategy—it ripped it apart. The 11-page memo, dated April 11, said the Trump team’s argument to kill New York City’s congestion pricing plan was weak and “exceedingly likely” to fail.
The lawyers said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was leaning on “shaky rationale” and pushed for a different approach: drop the current legal fight and instead claim the government was changing policy. But their memo got out.
By Thursday, the U.S. Department of Transportation had had enough. In a rare move, it pulled those lawyers from the case. The department accused them of possibly trying to “sabotage” the administration’s efforts to block New York’s tolling plan.
“This was legal malpractice,” a DOT spokesperson said. “Are S.D.N.Y. lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST?”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said it was just a mistake. Spokesperson Nicholas Biase called it “a completely honest error and was not intentional in any way.”
The case centers on Trump’s decision to cancel federal approval for New York City’s congestion pricing—a toll on drivers entering lower Manhattan meant to cut traffic and boost public transit use. The program was approved by President Biden’s team last year and began in January. The MTA then sued the Trump administration for trying to shut it down.
The embarrassing memo was quickly pulled from the court docket, but not before legal analysts grabbed screenshots.
Now the case is being handed over to the Justice Department’s civil division in Washington. Meanwhile, the sidelined lawyers are out—and the Trump administration is trying to clean up the mess made by its own team.
