A conservative Supreme Court justice's new book received a scathing review Tuesday from a former Justice Department prosector who described its contents as error-riddled, right-wing propaganda.
Ankush Khardori panned Justice Neil Gorsuch and his book "Over Ruled" in a lengthy Politico Magazine take-down that questions both the ethics behind the publication and a member of the nation's highest court.
"The book...is riddled with glaring factual omissions and analytic errors that seriously call into question its reliability and rigor," wrote Khardori. "It represents a remarkable attack by a sitting Supreme Court justice on the other two branches of government."
Khardori said Gorsuch ducked interview and comment requests for two months before his co-author, a former clerk named Janie Nitze, issued a statement dismissing his concerns as “nonsense.”
The former prosecutor took umbrage with many of the book's arguments, which he said misled readers with an emphasis on anecdote over evidence, but focused on Gorsuch's narrative of a commercial fisherman named John Yates and his undersized fish.
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As Gorsuch tells it, Yates was improperly imprisoned for 30 days under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — which criminalizes the falsification of objects to impede a federal investigation — after an agent seized 72 red grouper, then returned to discover the fisherman had quietly swapped out the offensive catches.
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled the provision did not apply to "all objects in the physical world" and therefore did not cover Yates’ misconduct.
But Gorsuch's argument for federal overreach omits two points, Khardori argues: that Yates told a fellow fisherman to lie to the government and that he was also charged with destroying property seized by the government.
"These are not obscure facts — they are contained on the first two pages of the Supreme Court’s opinion — but they are not mentioned anywhere in Gorsuch’s account," the former prosecutor wrote. "What’s left out of the book is often just as instructive — if not more so — than what’s in it."
Other problematic anecdotes involve a magician regulated for use of a rabbit and a race car driver who received a $75 fine, according to Khardori, who ultimately concludes the book is an "embarrassment."
"If the problem of over-enforcement had actually become ubiquitous, then Gorsuch would not have to trawl through old media stories in order to make his point," Khardori wrote.
"Even setting aside the questionable optics, the book does not come close to establishing its thesis."
