Trump Administration Flouting Judges' Orders & Meta Trial

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1:01Suzanne Monyak:What if the secret to better sleep is already on your wrist? Apollo Neuro uses gentle, silent vibrations to help calm your body for sleep. So you can fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up actually feeling rested. This isn't just tracking sleep. Apollo Neuro helps your body regulate naturally. Try Apollo Neuro risk-free for 30 days at Apollo. A-P-O-L-L-O Neuro N-E-U-R-O dot com That's Apollo Neuro at Apollo A-P-O-L-L-O Neuro N-E-U-R-O dot com This is Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio. The Trump administration is not following all court orders, and that's according to federal judges.

1:57The judges are fielding more requests to force the administration to comply with their rulings against the federal government than in any other administration, including the first Trump administration. One of the earliest cases was when the chief D.C. judge in March of 2025 ordered the administration to turn back planes flying Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador, and the administration failed to do so. Now a study by Bloomberg Law shows that judges have found the administration has failed to comply with their orders in more than half of the 25 cases identified regarding preliminary injunctions.

2:41Joining me is Bloomberg Law reporter Suzanne Moniak, who's done the research and crunched the numbers. Normally, a judge issues an order and the parties comply with the order. What's been happening in several cases with orders issued against the federal government?

2:59Suzanne Monyak:We've seen some recent examples where the Trump administration has been at least accused of, and in some cases found of, not fully complying with these court orders. I've tracked two dozen examples, at least, of times when initial preliminary injunction orders issued early in a case were not fully followed, or at least the challengers allege that they were not being fully followed by the government under this administration alone. What kind of cases are we talking about? All different types of cases against the government. We've seen them in big cases over USAID funding cuts, the dismantling of international broadcaster Voice of America, other big cases across the country where there were early preliminary injunction orders granted against the administration telling them to stop doing something.

3:42Suzanne Monyak:And then we saw the challengers come back into court and claim the administration wasn't fully following that order. And in about half of those 25 instances, the judge agreed, at least in part. There was a scathing opinion by a Reagan appointee in the Voice of America case. And in another case, a senior D.C. federal judge said that the Defense Department's actions flout the court's explicit directives. So these federal judges are not beating around the bush. How upset are the judges about this failure to comply with their explicit orders? In some cases, pretty upset. And obviously, when it comes to judges, sometimes they're upset and they still write a pretty boring opinion.

4:22Suzanne Monyak:So it's hard to always know. But yes, as you mentioned in a couple of examples, the judges did, in fact, let us know that they weren't happy with the government's conduct. In that one instance, you mentioned Judge Lambert, a Reagan appointee in D.C., when he was handling the Voice of America case, said that he thought the government was, quote, in violation of even the most meager reading, end quote, of his court order. So definitely not pleased. We've also seen plenty of orders where the judge is kind of very matter of factly is like, I don't see the government as having fully complied with this order.

4:50Suzanne Monyak:These are inconsistent. You know, you need to do this differently if you want to be in compliance with my order. A few judges wanted to take things further or did take things further. So in Minnesota, you had the chief judge finding that ICE violated court orders in dozens of immigration cases. And then there was a federal judge who held a government lawyer in civil contempt, though that didn't last long. Tell us about that. Yes, in this story, I was tracking motions to enforce preliminary injunctions, but there have been a lot of different types of motions filed to force compliance with court orders against this administration.

5:26Suzanne Monyak:And in that one example you mentioned, we saw a Minnesota federal judge actually held a government lawyer briefly in civil contempt of court for not correctly facilitating the release of a detained immigrant. He was released in the wrong state without his property, and it came out that the lawyer hadn't forwarded the court's order to ICE on time, so there was just a full breakdown in communication. The lawyer actually, you know, did apologize and said, I've just been really overwhelmed, but the judge had ordered essentially a financial penalty for every day that the detained immigrant, you know, was not with his property.

5:59Suzanne Monyak:And the government did remedy it very quickly. I don't believe the government lawyer who was acting in the capacity of representing ICE did actually end up having to pay anything personally, but it was a pretty significant sanction to see against the government. So in these cases, the government is giving instructions about what the court said and what the agency is supposed to do. Do you know, Is it a lot of times that the government lawyers are screwing up or that the agency is just not complying? I think it's a mix. In the case I just mentioned in Minnesota, that was a case where there was definitely seemed to be an overwhelmed lawyer for the government.

6:36Suzanne Monyak:He was dealing with a lot of these immigration detention challenges known as habeas cases. But certainly I think there may be instances where it is, you know, the agency. And we've seen the government actually, like in that Minnesota case, say, like, look, we can't always be responsible for what the agency does. The Justice Department, of course, represents federal agencies in court. And so, you know, that's really kind of an interesting question as we see some of these compliance issues come up in cases. To what extent is the Justice Department responsible for a federal agency not fully following a court order or interpreting it too narrowly and, you know, not fully complying in the full spirit of the order?

7:14Suzanne Monyak:I think that's an interesting question and one that we've seen come up already. One of the first and probably still most famous cases is where the chief judge in D.C., Judge Boesberg, ordered the government when they were sending Venezuelan immigrants to prisons in El Salvador to turn the planes around. And they didn't. And he wanted to have a criminal contempt investigation. But what happened? The D.C. Circuit ruled against him on that issue and, you know, blocked a hearing from being held. Proceedings are still pending on that issue. But yes, that was probably one of the most famous issues of court compliance that have happened in this administration.

7:54Suzanne Monyak:And it happened so early, kind of set the tone perhaps for some of the issues to come. And in that case, we were talking about criminal contempt, which is a different form of contempt than we were discussing with the Minnesota lawyer. That was civil contempt. So quite a bit more serious. I mean, particularly it's noticeable in the immigration cases to me. But is it a reflection of the Trump administration sort of flexing or trying to flex its executive power or is it something else? Certainly, it depends who you ask. I think that it is fair to say that when we're seeing this many motions to force compliance of court orders, more motions to enforce preliminary orders, but also some of the other ones you've talked about to compel compliance, to consider contempt, that does probably show that we're dealing with an executive branch that is, you know, maybe interpreting court orders in a new way or really, you know, drawing more of this litigation as well.

8:48Suzanne Monyak:It's also partly a bit of a numbers game. To be clear, the majority of cases were not seeing these compliance orders. It is still a small share of them. It's just a significantly higher share of them we've seen involving the government and administrations past. The Department of Justice did respond to our reporting, and they blamed really more the plaintiffs. They said, this is not a pattern of noncompliance on our part. Our DOJ lawyers work closely with the agencies to make sure they're complying and said that it's actually the plaintiffs, the court challengers who are trying to test or expand the scope of injunctions.

9:20Suzanne Monyak:So I think what we're also kind of seeing, and not only is sort of this flexing of executive power, but it's also the tension between executive power and judicial power and the administration saying, you know, what can we do with the courts ruling as they are? And plaintiffs are saying, what can the courts do to keep the administration from doing what it's doing? So we're kind of seeing a lot of that push and pull lately. In how many cases did the judges actually find that there hadn't been compliance? We looked at a small slice of court compliance motions, which were motions to enforce preliminary injunctions.

9:53Suzanne Monyak:But I think it's an interesting example to look at because it shows a compliance issue really early in a case. A preliminary injunction would come down pretty soon after a lawsuit showing that the challenger was likely to win its case. And so then we're seeing the government, you know, immediately potentially not following that order. I think it's an interesting place to look. In that case of the 25 motions we identified and certain types of cases against the government, 14 of them had a judge either grant fully or partially that ruling. In a few other cases, it was either denied, sometimes it was resolved otherwise, or even mooted sometimes, because the case just progressed past that stage.

10:28Suzanne Monyak:But a 14 out of 25 was still somewhat of a striking number for comparison. Under the Biden administration, there were only two motions to enforce preliminary injunctions filed against the government. And one of them was partially granted in a Medicaid-involved case led by Texas. And during the first Trump administration, we saw 11 motions to enforce preliminary injunctions. About half of those partially or fully granted. So somewhat of a similar statistic, but I mean, that was 11 over four years. We're looking at 25 in a year and a half. So I think we can expect potentially this number to grow as the number of court challenges grow.

11:01And, you know, as we see the administration kind of see what, you know, they're able to do with these court orders. So I've talked with, you know, many former federal prosecutors who talk about how the presumption of regularity is being eroded in the Trump administration, in the second Trump administration, because the judges are not trusting what the government lawyers are saying.

11:28Suzanne Monyak:That's certainly a consequence when we're talking about court compliance issues. If we're seeing examples where the government is making, I mean, in addition to court compliance issues, there have also been notable examples where government lawyers have made mistakes in court, said things that they've had to go back and later correct. And even if they are still correcting it, which is what you're supposed to do, if you notice an error, you're supposed to correct it. That still does work to chip away at that presumption of regularity or the assumption judges make that the government's acting in good faith in court.

11:57Suzanne Monyak:Some of the lawyers I spoke to, you know, one of them told me that she didn't see the presumption of regularity as being in full crisis at this point yet, but that it's certainly being tested. So I think that's another thing that we're going to watch and both during this administration and in administrations to come. To what extent will the government be able to recover from this? It's also true that a lot of these lawyers who are being thrown into court, particularly in immigration cases, they have people who are not experts in immigration appearing in court. And they have a lot of inexperienced prosecutors because so many prosecutors left the Justice Department.

12:34Suzanne Monyak:Yes, the brain drain in the Justice Department is certainly a significant factor when it comes to these issues. Anytime you see a lawyer make a mistake in court who's really new to the department, I mean, you have to wonder if perhaps having had more of those career people who had years of experience being there might have helped. And certainly, again, in that Minnesota case, we were discussing the attorney who was briefly held in civil contempt was a military lawyer who'd been dispatched, apparently, to help out with the surge of immigration cases happening in Minnesota at the time because there wasn't the staffing to handle it.

13:07Suzanne Monyak:So, I mean, those are the things that happen. Things do slip through and you end up with mistakes being made, even under the best intentions, when there isn't full staffing or full level of experience. Suzanne, you put a lot of research into this. Thanks so much for sharing your findings with us. That's Bloomberg Law reporter, Suzanne Moniak. The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work.

13:47Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Everyone's talking about how AI is transforming work, especially in sales. While the landscape shifts, one thing remains the same, the thrill of closing a deal. Whether it's a gong or a confetti machine, every team has its celebration rituals. Adio is designed for that moment. It's the agentic CRM that turns customer signals into actionable insights, helping you close deals faster with revenue agents and automations working around the clock.

14:20You'll have everything you need to scale your go-to market efforts. Elevate your wins with Adio. Start your free trial at adio.com slash iHeart.

14:28Suzanne Monyak:What if the secret to better sleep is already on your wrist? Apollo Neuro uses gentle, silent vibrations to help calm your body for sleep so you can fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up actually feeling rested. This isn't just tracking sleep. Apollo Neuro helps your body regulate naturally. Try Apollo Neuro risk-free for 30 days at Apollo. A-P-O-L-L-O Neuro N-E-U-R-O Dot com That's Apollo Neuro at Apollo. A-P-O-L-L-O Neuro N-E-U-R-O Dot com It's the biggest legal fight yet over harm to youth from social media. and a pivotal moment for Metta, which is facing a possibility of a$1.4 trillion damages verdict and structural changes to its platform.

15:23Metta is once again on trial over dangers its platforms allegedly posed to children, and it's arguing, once again, that it works hard to make its platform safe for children. State attorneys general accused Metta of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms and hiding these harms from the public. It also argues that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents' consent in violation of federal law. Joining me is Bloomberg legal reporter Madeline Meckleberg, who's covering the trial.

16:05Madeline, tell us about this sort of new strategy the plaintiffs are using where they're arguing that it's the products themselves, their design and functionality that have created harms rather than talking about the content. That's right. So this case is like thousands of others that have been filed in that it's an attempt by litigants to get around Section 230, which gives pretty broad protections to technology companies from liability for content that's posted on their website. And so there are different baskets of cases that we can talk about, but essentially all of them are seeking to hold companies like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Google's YouTube.

16:53They're trying to hold them accountable for the design of their platforms and features that they say are designed to be addictive and harmful to kids. So it's the public nuisance theory that was used in the New Mexico case. So the case that's at trial right now with the state attorneys general is not a public nuisance case. That's a legal theory that's being put forward in cases that have been filed by groups of school districts and by some individual attorneys general. There are a ton of cases, so it's pretty confusing and it's hard to keep track of all of them. But the case that's at trial right now involves 29 state AGs and they've brought their case under two kind of baskets of legal claims.

17:34The first one is consumer protection laws. And this is where it gets slightly more confusing. Only four of the 29 states have brought consumer protection claims, but they're all being tried together at this trial. And those are claims about the design of the platform. They say that they knowingly designed it to hook kids and importantly, that they misled the public and parents about risks that the companies should have known about its products. and that's one basket and then there's also privacy claims during this lawsuit and so the rest of the states are alleging that meta knew that there were users under 13 on its platform and it was collecting data from those kids in violation of federal law so it's two different kind of baskets but it's being discussed as part of this broader landscape of the cases against social media and they're all kind of trying slightly different novel legal theories as different ways of getting at these companies.

18:28And I want to clarify that the case that's happening right now, Metta is the only defendant in this DAG case. Some of the other cases include other social media companies, but this one is just Metta. In the opening statement, the plaintiff's attorney said the business model is hook the user, hook them for as long as you can, harvest their data, and then hide the truth. Did she say how she was going to prove that? That's right. She was talking about her four H's and kind of giving the jurors a roadmap of what we can expect to hear. And I think for folks that were following some of the developments in the personal injury case that happened earlier this year, we're going to see a lot of similar arguments and similar witnesses come forward.

19:10They're planning to call folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, who's the CEO of Meta and the head of Instagram, respectively. They're going to call current and former employees to talk about the design and to talk about internal studies at Meta that they conducted about teen users and harms that they report experiencing on the platforms. And they also are going to call in folks like Arturo Behar, who was the first witness. He's a former employee turned whistleblower who's spoken very publicly about his safety concerns with the platform. So it's going to be a lot of witness testimony and internal documents showing what Meta knew when and then juxtaposing that with what messaging they were putting out to the public.

19:53Because that's a kind of important component in this case, is this idea that they misled or otherwise hid information that the attorneys are arguing should have been made available. A lot of the witnesses have already testified in other cases. And so both sides should pretty much know what they're going to say. I think that's definitely one way to look at it. I don't think at this moment we're expecting any major bombshells to be revealed about things going on at Meta that we didn't know about. And I think that's kind of the point of these cases is it's not about unearthing previously unknown information, which sometimes is what happens when cases go to trial.

20:36This is an issue that we are well aware of as the public. Like it's something that's been discussed at congressional hearings, in other cases, and by the companies themselves as they've repeatedly rolled out their attempts at safety features. And, you know, you might hear about teen accounts on different platforms. And so this is about finding an avenue for accountability for certain groups of litigants for this company. And so, yeah, I think a lot of the testimony is going to be familiar to folks that really care about this issue and follow it. But that doesn't make it any less important because at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what we know about it.

21:12What matters is that this is potentially the first time that those jurors sitting in the room are hearing about some of this stuff, hearing the testimony, seeing these internal emails. Let me ask you about the jury, because it's an advisory jury. This judge has used that kind of advisory jury before. Yes. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is probably well known to folks following any kind of the social media cases, but also just kind of tech and Silicon Valley cases in general. She's seated in Oakland, and we saw her do the similar strategy at a recent high-profile case, which was the Elon Musk lawsuit against Sam Altman in OpenAI, where she essentially is having a jury seated for the trial.

21:55They're hearing all the evidence, and they're going to issue a verdict. They don't know that their opinion is going to be advisory. But then at the end of the day, Judge Rogers can decide whether she wants to adopt their findings or whether she feels like the evidence is pointing her in a different direction. They'll be disappointed when they find out. They sat for all these weeks and their verdict is not binding. It doesn't mean it's not, you know, they're not doing a valuable service. Like there's a reason that she's doing that. And it's that these cases are incredibly complicated. And while this one is not a bellwether, it's still part of this massive multi-district litigation.

22:30And the outcome here, again, it won't necessarily set a precedent until there's appeals and kind of gets decided at the circuit level in some respects. But what happens here will have sway in other cases. So I think what we're seeing is a judge who's really trying to dot all the I's, cross all the T's and make sure that she's really giving it fair consideration. Do you know if she followed the jury's suggestions in the open AI case with Altman and Elon Musk? She did. She did follow their suggestions there. And that was because she kind of said from the outset in that case, there was a question of timing and whether Musk waited too long to file his claims and the statute of limitations.

23:10And she said that if the jury made a finding on the statute of limitations question, she would adopt that without question, because that's a key. You know, they didn't weigh in on the merits of his claims, actually, just whether he took too long to file them. So you heard from the defense attorney as well, opening statements. What was his position? That's right. So Metta has maintained, you know, they deny all of the allegations that have been brought forward in this lawsuit. And he talked a lot about safety features that Metta has rolled out and said that they've made real efforts to try to reduce purported harms to teenagers.

23:48Another thing that we've heard Metta talk about and their legal team talk about is this idea of 13 year olds on the platform and kids under the age of 13. they've talked about how this is an industry-wide issue is kids signing up when they're not supposed to have accounts and they feel that this is an industry-wide challenge it's not something that they should be singled out for in this case this is something that that needs to be tackled at a more systemic level and everyone's trying to brainstorm solutions on that and so I think what you heard from them is that the AGs are really overstating their case that's another thing I I think I'm sure we're going to talk about this big$1.4 trillion penalty number that's been floated.

24:30I think Meta's stance is that, you know, when we're talking about specific consumer protection violations, the number that's being floated is totally disproportionate to the allegations at issue. And that's another component of this is they've said, you're not going to hear directly from kids in this case. You're not going to hear from people who've been harmed. You're supposed to just take the attorney's general word for this. And that's not good enough. They're not going to call any children or young adults? I don't believe that there's any individuals on the witness list. And that's because this case is different than, you know, the personal injury cases is a whole other category.