Challengers to the Trump administration’s ban on transgender military service have asked a federal district judge to compel the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation to produce records about any communications with the administration that relate to the new policy.
“The purpose of the executive in adopting the transgender ban is squarely at issue in this case, and communications between the executive and advocacy groups like FRC and Heritage about that ban are likely to illuminate its purpose,” wrote Paul R.Q. Wolfson of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, counsel to the challengers in the case Doe v. Trump.
Wolfson continued: “That is especially true in a case like this one, where the need to discover the communications arises precisely because the executive action at issue took place under circumstances that strongly suggest that the explanation given by the executive for its action is untrue.”
In the motion, Wolfson, along with lawyers from Foley Hoag, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the District of Columbia that the FRC and Heritage had made a “blanket refusal” to produce any documents in response to their subpoenas.
An attempt to get similar records from the Trump administration also failed, the challengers said. The administration argued the president is constitutionally immune from civil discovery requests and that—at a minimum—the presidential communications privilege covered the records.
Kollar-Kotelly on Monday ordered Family Research Council and Heritage to respond to the motion to compel by April 23, and the plaintiffs to file a reply by April 30.
The subpoenas, issued on Feb. 12, seek “external communications between Jan. 20, 2017, and Sept. 1, 2017″ between FRC and Heritage and the president, vice president, their respective executive offices, and the U.S. Department of Defense “concerning military service by transgender people and/or any restriction of military service by transgender people.”
Family Research Council, represented by Gene Schaerr of Washington’s Schaerr Duncan, objected to the subpoena, saying that the council is an “explicitly Christian ministry” and that compliance with the subpoenas would burden its religious exercise rights in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Schaerr also argued that the production request would violate the Family Research Council’s First Amendment rights to petition the government, freedom of association and freedom of speech.
Read the full story at the National Law Journal
