Getty Trump quotes legal blog to argue travel ban ruling is 'a disgraceful decision'

Citing a legal blog with ties to the Brookings Institution, President Donald Trump said Friday that an appeals court’s unanimous ruling upholding a stay of his controversial executive orders on immigration and refugees was “a disgraceful decision.”

“LAWFARE: ‘Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute.’ A disgraceful decision!” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning.


The president, who is believed to be an avid viewer of morning cable news programs, pecked out his post to Twitter just minutes after MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” discussed the Lawfare blog entry to which Trump referred.

Lawfare is a legal blog that covers the intersection of national security and the legal world. Its website reads that it is published in cooperation with the Brookings Institution, a well-known Washington think tank.

The author of the Lawfare post, Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings and the co-founder of the blog, later Friday morning tweeted a link to the post with a note that he backs the court's ruling.

"You decide whether the POTUS is quoting me in context. Here's the article. For the record, I support the decision," he writes.

The post Trump referred to breaks down the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling, released Thursday, upholding a stay on the president’s executive order temporarily banning individuals from certain majority-Muslim nations from entering the U.S. The White House has vowed to continue to fight for the orders and has expressed confidence that they will ultimately be upheld in court, but Thursday ruling keeps them out of effect, at least for the time being.

In its post, Lawfare urges readers to disregard much of the appeals court’s scolding of Trump, including over his demands that the judicial system be deferential to him in cases of national security. Instead, the author notes that “remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this statute, which forms the principal statutory basis for the executive order,” a passage that the president excerpted for his tweet Friday morning.

But the post also notes how the 9th circuit ruling also wraps in Trump’s past rhetoric on the campaign trail and on social media and applies it to his executive orders. The author writes that role the president’s intentions — referred to in the post as his “repeated and overt invocations of the most invidious motivations” — play in the future of his executive order remains an open question.

“Eventually, the court has to confront the clash between a broad delegation of power to the President—a delegation which gives him a lot of authority to do a lot of not-nice stuff to refugees and visa holders—in a context in which judges normally defer to the president, and the incompetent malevolence with which this order was promulgated,” the Lawfare article reads.