Improper purpose: That concept lies at the heart of the striking opinion by Chief Judge James Boasberg of the federal district court in Washington, which quashed the Trump administration’s subpoenas aimed at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Rather than focusing on procedural irregularities, which lawyers love to do, the judge homed in on the far more obvious point: The criminal investigation of Powell was really intended to pressure him to lower interest rates. That made the subpoenas improper because Fed independence is protected by law. And it is a general principle of constitutional law that the government may not use indirect pressure to do what it may not do directly.

Improper purpose has been a hallmark of the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law from the beginning of its tenure — and the pattern has intensified in recent months.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently designated the AI company Anthropic as a supply chain risk after openly telling the company — and the public — that he would do so unless it agreed not to set conditions for the department’s use of its product. In Anthropic’s lawsuit challenging the designation, the company argues, quite persuasively, that the designation had nothing to do with any actual supply chain risk but was simply intended as bargaining leverage.

What makes this a classic case of improper purpose is that the point of a supply chain risk designation is to protect national security, not to give the government a tool to punish companies it dislikes. The Trump administration was attempting to achieve its true objective by misusing a legal tool that had no bearing on the issue at hand.

The ICE crackdown in Minnesota was another example of improper purpose, though one that may prove more difficult for the courts to address. Trump targeted a blue city in a blue state in an effort to punish Minnesotans and provoke conflict. The proper purpose of ICE is to protect the borders and enforce immigration laws, not to terrify the population with an armed presence that resembles an occupation. When state officials sued in federal court, they argued that the ICE presence amounted to an occupation.

If the lawsuit isn’t declared moot in the wake of ICE redeployments, the court hearing the case will face the challenge of deciding whether it is willing to say openly that the agents’ true purpose wasn’t the one asserted by the Trump administration.

The truth is that our legal system isn’t always good at identifying the government’s true motivations or at using a dose of realism to enforce limits on executive power. For one thing, the courts tend to defer to the president’s assertions about why he’s doing something. For another, many executive actions have multiple overlapping reasons behind them.

The Supreme Court’s low point in failing to identify Trump’s improper purpose came in the 2018 decision in Trump v. Hawaii (the so-called travel ban). At issue was his ban on granting visas to visitors from some 18 majority-Muslim countries. Despite extensive evidence in the public record that Trump was acting on the basis of Islamophobic prejudice, the Supreme Court held that it would not look deeply into whether his stated rationale was actually his true purpose.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that when the president exercises his powers over immigration negatively “on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason, the courts will neither look behind the exercise of that discretion, nor test it by balancing its justification against the asserted constitutional interests of U. S. citizens.”

In a ringing dissent that has stood the test of time, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the ban was so “divorced from any factual context from which we could discern a relationship to legitimate state interests” and that its “sheer breadth was so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the policy [was] inexplicable by anything but animus.”

In retrospect, Roberts made a terrible mistake in deferring to Trump’s professed statements of purpose. The message to the president was that he could systematically lie about his policy objectives and get away with it.

That’s why Boasberg’s opinion in the Powell case is so significant. As the president ramps up his use of improper purpose across domain after domain, the courts must be careful not to repeat the mistake the Supreme Court made in Trump v. Hawaii.

Having had his orders apparently defied by the executive branch in the case of the Venezuelan deportees, Boasberg learned the hard way that the Trump administration is willing to lie to the courts. Since then, the judge has emerged as a hero of the rule of law for his resistance to the administration’s unlawfulness. If the courts are forced to pretend that falsehoods are true, the rule of law ceases to exist.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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