By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
A South Florida man is publicizing his own book that defends Israel against claims of genocide in Gaza after the 2023 Hamas invasion. He calls the head-covering Palestinians wear a “terror scarf.”
The First Amendment protects this kind of provocative political speech. But should it matter that the author/activist is Miami U.S. District Judge Roy Altman?
Apparently not to the conservative 11th Circuit appeals court. The court that oversees Florida federal judges made short work of a misconduct complaint targeting Altman’s constant public advocacy for Israel.
Yet the title “U.S. District Court Judge” does matter to the Department of Justice (DOJ). The government is pursuing an ethics complaint against a half-dozen Minnesota federal judges for criticizing the Trump administration’s relentless immigrant purge to The New York Times.
Coral Gables lawyer Katherine Giannamore, a food and drug compliance law specialist with no obvious ax to grind, accuses Altman of violating ethical norms.
She notes he’s promoted his best-selling book “Israel on Trial” along with that nation’s wartime interests – even selfie-filming live podcasts in his office – and claims Altman has expressed “significant bias” against Arabs and Muslims.
On Sept. 1, less than a month after Giannamore filed her complaint with the 11th Circuit, Chief Judge William Pryor dismissed it. The complaint “fails to present a basis for a finding of misconduct,” he wrote.
Pryor endorsed Altman’s lengthy reply to the charges, including that he wrote the book not as a judge but “as a proud American who cares deeply about my country and its future prosperity.”
Giannamore asked for a judicial council review panel to take another look at her complaint and reverse Pryor’s decision. The chance of that happening is vanishingly slim because the chief judge appoints review panels.
MORE RECUSALS FOR ALTMAN?
Judge Altman’s office said he would not comment for this story. But ethics scholars agree Altman stands out for his candor, given that judges traditionally take pains to appear unbiased and encourage public belief in an impartial court system.
Altman upends that approach. Consequently, for example, a lawyer for a pro-Palestinian nonprofit suing an Israeli firm wouldn’t want him handling their lawsuit; if he were assigned the case, he’d be expected to recuse himself.
And that’s problematic, according to Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who teaches legal ethics.
“Judges are supposed to refrain from making statements that ensure recusals,” he said. “Even commenting on something not before the court could lead to a recusal if it bears on whether that judge can be fair and impartial or appear to the public not to be fair and impartial.”
At the same time, “U.S. Supreme Court justices, on both the right and the left, have become very willing to publicly share their views about all sorts of things, something that their predecessors never did,” Robert Jarvis said.
“So we definitely are living in a different time when it comes to judicial ethics and off-the-bench activities,” said Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie who focuses on legal ethics.
Still, he predicted an uptick in transfers of Altman’s cases, either because parties ask for recusal or because the judge recognizes a conflict and steps down.
Already, on Sept. 16 Altman recused himself from presiding over a lawsuit filed by anti-GOP-establishment activist James Fishback. He sued Anthony Rodriguez, chair of the Miami-Dade County Commission, for having Fishback ejected from a meeting when he verbally attacked Rodriguez for the county’s decision to invest up to $450 million in Israeli government bonds.
“Citizens must be free to question how our government uses our money,” Fishback posted on X at the time.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO ALTMAN’S BOOK
At 36, Altman became the nation’s youngest federal judge when the Senate confirmed him by a 66-33 vote in 2019. Democrats who regularly oppose President Trump’s far-right choices voted against Altman, who has a Federalist Society pedigree.
They objected to his brief experience as a lawyer — and none as a judge — but not the quality of his credentials. Altman is a Yale Law School graduate with a solid reputation as a prosecutor and litigator, first as an assistant U.S. Attorney and then as a partner with the Miami law firm Podhurst Orseck.
Altman must be well known to Judge Pryor and the 11th Circuit, where he clerked for Senior Judge Stanley Marcus. Marcus, a former U.S. Attorney in Miami, described Altman as a “spectacular trial lawyer” who “loves the idea of justice and the idea of law” in a profile published by the Federal Bar Association, South Florida Chapter.
And Altman, in turn, “credits Judge Marcus as teaching him more about law and lawyering, fairness, justice, and public service than anyone else in his life,” the profile says.
Altman’s Jewish family odyssey helps explain his devotion to Israel. His paternal grandparents were exiled to Siberia from the former Soviet Union before emigrating to Venezuela. His maternal grandparents left Poland in the 1930s and wound up in Israel by way of Mexico. Other close relatives perished at Auschwitz.
His father joined the air force in Israel and met his mother there. They moved to Venezuela and their son Roy was born in Caracas in 1982. Two years later the family settled in Miami.
Inspired by his father’s teachings and lessons from the Holocaust, Altman has said, he wrote “Israel on Trial” to apply dispassionate legal analysis to the world’s case against Israel. After the barbaric Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 that aroused latent anti-Semitism, he found the need to stand up for Israel compelling and inescapable.
In May Altman got into a high-profile dust-up with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who reported from the West Bank that Palestinians were being sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers and members of the Israeli security forces. “American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit,” he wrote.
A week later The Free Press, the for-profit publication founded by controversial CBS News chief Bari Weiss, published Altman’s response: “A Miscarriage of Journalism at ‘The New York Times.’ “
Altman called Kristof’s column “a travesty” because it was wrong on the facts, “regurgitated long-debunked blood libels against the Jewish state” and “because it embraces the erosion of democratic norms at an inflection point in our history.”
GOOD SPEECH, BAD SPEECH
Giannamore explained why she filed the Altman complaint in an interview published Aug. 28 by Al Jazeera, the Qatari government-funded global news outlet. She didn’t respond to a request for comment from Florida Bulldog.
“This kind of blatant use of the judicial office for your own political aspirations or your beliefs, it’s bad for the judiciary,” she said. “It’s bad for public opinion as far as the legitimacy of the judiciary.”
Giannamore said she didn’t expect Altman to be reprimanded but that wasn’t her goal. She’s trying to raise awareness about judges with life tenure behaving unethically.
“It’s important to bring awareness to that, and maybe give them a moment to take a step back and say, ‘Is this worth it? Is this something that we accept? And would we accept it if it was other issues that the judge was using the office to speak on?’” Giannamore told Al Jazeera.
A new complaint against Minnesota federal judges that tests the limits of their free speech may answer her question about selective disapproval.
Perhaps six federal judges –the exact number is unclear, but it’s almost the entire Minnesota federal trial bench – gave interviews for a Sept. 17 New York Times story headlined, “Trump’s Minnesota Surge Threatened Democracy, Judge Warns.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had violated almost 100 orders from Minnesota federal judges during the month of January, including some to release undocumented immigrants. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote when he demanded an end to the violations, according to the story.
In response, on Sept. 30 the DOJ filed a misconduct complaint with the 8th Circuit against Schiltz and the other judges who contributed to the Times story. The complaint accuses them of threatening “public confidence in judicial impartiality” by “pander[ing] to the press.”
A month later, 174 former federal and state judges petitioned 8th Circuit Chief Judge Steven Colloton in St. Louis to dismiss the DOJ complaint.
It doesn’t sit well with law professor Peter Joy, either. The complaint is “way off base,” he said.
“Judges have long voiced concerns about threats to the rule of law, as these judges did” and are allowed to do, Joy said. “Every party, including the government, has to obey court orders. When any party does not, they threaten the very basis of our legal system and the essential values of a free society.”
,
Leave a Reply