The view of Roberts’ message as a critique of the president was also reinforced by the fact that the two men have clashed publicly over a topic related to the chief justice’s year-end report: Trump’s tendency to label adverse court rulings he and his administration face as the work of judges doing the political bidding of previous, Democratic presidents.

A little over a year ago, Roberts issued a highly unusual public statement that lashed back at Trump’s claims that many federal judges are nakedly partisan and illegitimate.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Trump, angry over court orders blocking many of his immigration policies, shot back that Roberts was burying his head in the sand.

“Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country,” Trump wrote last November. “Please study the numbers, they are shocking. We need protection and security — these rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!”

Roberts’ year-end report included no language remotely as pointed as that exchange, but he did use the message to again extol the virtues and vitality of judicial independence.

“We should celebrate our strong and independent judiciary, a key source of national unity and stability,” the chief justice wrote on Tuesday. “But we should also remember that justice is not inevitable. We should reflect on our duty to judge without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity, and dispatch. As the New Year begins, and we turn to the tasks before us, we should each resolve to do our best to maintain the public’s trust that we are faithfully discharging our solemn obligation to equal justice under law.”

Roberts also used his four-page message to note that, in the early days of the republic, rumors sometimes drove citizens to riot. He pointed to a 1788 attack on founder John Jay, who was struck in the head with a rock while trying to quell a lawless mob whipped up by talk that medical students were robbing graves to experiment on corpses.

The episode appears to have limited Jay’s contributions to the Federalist Papers, leaving most of those writings to be prepared by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Roberts observed.

“It is sadly ironic that John Jay’s efforts to educate his fellow citizens about the Framers’ plan of government fell victim to a rock thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor,” Roberts wrote. “Happily, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay ultimately succeeded in convincing the public of the virtues of the principles embodied in the Constitution. Those principles leave no place for mob violence.”

In the coming weeks, Roberts is expected to become the third chief justice to preside over the trial of a sitting American president, as the Senate takes up two articles of impeachment the House passed against Trump in December.

The outing will be an unusual one for the chief justice, not only because of the rarity of such events, but also because he’s not accustomed to his work being televised. Supreme Court sessions are closed to cameras, but the Senate’s impeachment trial is expected to be a spectacle carried live on television.

While Roberts celebrates educational programs and initiatives undertaken by the federal judiciary, his report ignored the lack of video or still cameras at the high court and most lower federal courts. Roberts’ discussion of the courts’ daily work also overstates the extent of other efforts toward openness.

“Today, federal courts post their opinions online, giving the public instant access to the reasoning behind the judgments that affect their lives,” the chief justice wrote.

In fact, two decades after the internet became widely used, most federal district courts do not take the simple step of posting their opinions on the courts’ public-facing websites.

Often, citizens who want to get such rulings directly from the court must register for an account, figure out how to navigate the federal court system’s clunky online docketing system, and pay for the privilege of tracking down the decisions they are seeking.