He Sat on the Spy Court. Then He Hosted the Delegation.

Leave a CommentHe Sat on the Spy Court. Then He Hosted the Delegation.Commentary

James Boasberg is the chief judge in the District of Columbia. Obama put him on the trial bench. The chief justice put him on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from 2014 to 2021. In 2020 he ran that court. That is the room where the government asks to listen to foreigners — and, when the paperwork is sloppy, to Americans who wandered into the frame. He has spent the second Trump term blocking deportation flights, flirting with contempt findings against the executive, and last month telling the Pentagon it could not hang a “Chinese military company” tag on a biotech giant out of Shanghai. This week a reporter laid the other file on the table: nine years as a listed host for a Chinese legal exchange underwritten by a foundation a House China hawk has called an instrument of political warfare.

That is the record. It is not a dead drop in a park. It is worse in one sense. It is respectable.

The China File, Without the Fog Machine

The exchange is run through a Washington institute that brings Chinese legal visitors into American courtrooms. The institute’s own host lists put Boasberg on the roster every year from 2015 through 2020, then 2022, 2023, and 2024. Nine times. “9X Host.” Six of those years he was also a FISA judge. One of them he was the presiding judge.

A 2023 recruitment flyer from a Beijing university names the China-United States Exchange Foundation as an underwriter and promises visitors “exclusive conversations with influential actors” and proceedings “few are ever able to witness firsthand.” The foundation was built by Tung Chee-hwa, a vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference — the United Front’s polite dining room. Last November the chairman of the House panel that watches Peking warned universities that shops like this exist to identify foreigners the Party can use.

That is not a membership card in the Politburo. It is a D.C. habit: treat a United Front cutout like the Rotary Club because the canapés are good and everyone else on the bench did it too. Other judges’ names appear on the same lists. That does not make it smart. It makes it a culture. The culture put the man who signed FISA orders in a photo on the bench with the delegation.

He did not recuse when a Chinese firm asked him to stop the Pentagon from calling it a military company. August 7. Preliminary injunction. Scarlet letter, he wrote. Customers fleeing. Maybe the administrative record was sloppy. Maybe a judge who spent nine years hosting the exchange should have handed the file to someone who had not. Appearance is not a footnote when the subject is the PLA’s favorite industry.

The Trump File

This is the same judge who slammed the brakes on Alien Enemies Act flights in March 2025, then found probable cause that the government blew through his order. Signal-message fights. Grand-jury paper. The D.C. chief judgeship is where every administration-killing TRO goes to live. Calling that “activism” is what the losing side always says. Calling it a coincidence that the same chambers keep drawing the cases that freeze this White House is what the winning side always says. Both can be true. Assignment systems are not random when the chief is the brand.

On FISA he sentenced the FBI lawyer who altered the Carter Page email. The sentence was the soft landing — the kind that tells the next lawyer the crime was paperwork. That is not “anti-Trump” in a rally sense. It is the permanent class protecting the process that wired a campaign.

Is He “Corrupt”?

Corrupt in the envelope sense: nobody has produced the envelope. Corrupt in the Washington sense: he swam in a program funded by the United Front while holding the country’s most sensitive warrant docket, then sat on a China-military designation case without stepping aside. That is a recusal problem and a clearance problem. It is not a sealed indictment.

Likelihood of an Indictment

Low. Painfully low. Article III judges do not get cuffed for hosting a seminar. They get letters from the circuit, ethics complaints, and maybe a recusal motion that dies. A prosecutor who charged “you had lunch with the exchange” would be laughed out of the grand jury. A prosecutor who found a classified disclosure to a visitor would have a case. Nobody has published that disclosure.

What can happen: Congress hauls the flyer and the FISA dates into a hearing. The Justice Department asks whether he should have recused on WuXi. The Judicial Conference pretends to care. Impeachment talk on cable. None of that is an indictment. If you are waiting for a perp walk because a judge was rude to this president, buy a chair. If you are waiting for a serious government to treat United Front hospitality and FISA access as oil and water, you are asking for a standard this city has not kept in thirty years.

The Point

Peking does not need a judge on the payroll. It needs a judge who thinks a United Front foundation is a cultural program and a biotech designation is a paperwork dispute. Boasberg gave them the first in public, nine times, six of them while he could see the country’s most secret applications. Then he gave a Chinese company the second. That is not a spy novel. It is the establishment. The establishment does not get indicted. It gets another host year. The only indictment that matters is the one voters return when they decide whether this is the judiciary they want sitting on the spy court and the China file at the same time.