A federal judge was removed from a challenge to Mississippi's anti-DEI law after the Fifth Circuit blasted his handling of the case as a "botch job," pointing to orders riddled with factual errors, an apparent AI-hallucinated case citation and faulty applications of Supreme Court precedent.

In an opinion penned by Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee, the appeals court vacated Reagan-appointed Judge Henry Wingate's preliminary injunction blocking the law and ordered the case reassigned to a different judge — an "extraordinary" and "rarely invoked" move.

"This district judge carelessly exercised his Article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications," Smith wrote, adding that "the district court—or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent—ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda."

The controversy surrounding Wingate’s handling of the case began with serious errors in a temporary restraining order he issued in July after a group of teachers, parents and students sued, arguing that a Mississippi state law restricting DEI-related practices in public schools and universities violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PROPOSES STRIPPING TAX-EXEMPT STATUS FROM SCHOOLS USING RACE-BASED PROGRAMS

Wingate replaced the order just two days later after Mississippi officials flagged major factual errors, including 11 individuals and organizations identified as plaintiffs who were never a part of the case, two officials incorrectly named as defendants and unsupported claims that three schools had already canceled DEI programs because of the law.

The original TRO also cited purported declarations from four people who did not appear anywhere in the record and "may not even exist," according to the Fifth Circuit. It also attributed language to the bill that does not appear in the law, including references to "race or sex stereotyping," "race or sex scapegoating," "critical race theory" and "institutional bias."

"We are grateful—and, indeed, lucky—that the defendants provided a copy of the original TRO as an exhibit in their July 28 motion, ECF 58-1, given that Judge Wingate kept it from public view," Smith wrote.

Even the corrected TRO contained errors, including a citation to a nonexistent case that the Fifth Circuit called "an apparent AI hallucination." Wingate cited the purported case while discussing the relationship between temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions, leading Smith to conclude that the fabricated citation was "arguably part of the shoddy reasoning of the preliminary injunction, too."

Wingate later acknowledged that a law clerk had used artificial intelligence to assist in drafting the TRO, following accusations of AI use surfacing publicly. Wingate said the errors were "clerical" and did not affect the court’s "core legal reasoning or the ultimate judgment on the merits."

The Fifth Circuit pushed back on that explanation, questioning "how so many mistaken facts could not at least marginally ‘affect’ ‘core legal reasoning’ or support for the judgment on the merits."

The Fifth Circuit found major flaws in Wingate’s legal reasoning, accusing the judge of misinterpreting Supreme Court rulings on free speech challenges, exceeding the limits of court injunctions and mishandling legal protections for government and public-employee speech.

The panel zeroed in on the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Moody v. NetChoice, which sets a two-step test for courts considering First Amendment challenges seeking to strike down a law entirely.

DOJ MOVES TO BOOT FEDERAL JUDGES FROM IMMIGRATION CASES OVER NYT INTERVIEW

Under the Moody analysis, a court can strike down an entire law on First Amendment grounds only if its unconstitutional applications substantially outweigh its constitutional ones. The appeals court took issue with Wingate describing the Moody framework as "supposedly" required.

"That Judge Wingate twice refers to the Moody framework as ‘supposedly’ required calls into question whether he even tried in good faith to follow the law," Smith wrote.

"The district court’s laxity in observing the binding authority of the Supreme Court is yet another reason to doom the preliminary injunction," Smith continued.

The appeals court also faulted Wingate for his reasoning in granting preliminary relief, pointing to his ruling that the court "should pause when faced with an unsettled area with such dire possible consequences."

"That gets the entire law of injunctive relief completely backwards," Smith wrote.

"A preliminary injunction cannot stand just because there is a possibility of success on the merits," Smith continued.

The appeals court also accused Wingate of misreading the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which limits judges from issuing orders that go beyond what is needed to protect the people who filed the lawsuit.

Wingate cited CASA in concluding that injunctions like the one before him "should be all-or-nothing renditions."

SIGN UP TO GET THE POLITICS NEWSLETTER

"That is almost exactly the opposite of what CASA says," Smith wrote. "The quoted portion was the Supreme Court’s cautioning against overbroad relief and urging judges to tailor relief to what is absolutely necessary and nothing more."

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

The Fifth Circuit sent the case back to the Southern District of Mississippi, where a new judge will consider it.

In The Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton famously promised that the federal judiciary would have "neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment." The climate lawfare movement has spent the better part of a decade trying to prove Hamilton wrong.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, in which Boulder seeks to use Colorado public nuisance law to make two energy companies pay for the effects of global climate change.

The case is the culmination of a long campaign.

SUPREME COURT BEGINS NEW TERM WITH HIGH-PROFILE LOOK AT CLEAN AIR AND FEDERAL AUTHORITY

A small, well-funded network of climate activists, convinced that drastic action is needed to save the planet and frustrated that their fellow citizens have not voted to dismantle the fossil-fuel industry, have turned to state and local courts after the Supreme Court unanimously shut down federal climate-nuisance suits in 2011’s American Electric Power v. Connecticut. Their strategy rests on a single premise: When the front door of democracy is closed, try the courthouse back door.

But thanks to documents released September 30 by the House Judiciary Committee, we no longer have to guess. One of the movement’s architects put the strategy in writing.

CLIMATE SEMINARS FOR JUDGES FACE FUNDING TRAIL PROBE AMID FEARS OF OUTSIDE INFLUENCE ON COURTS

"It seemed to me that without legislative or executive action to address the climate problem, real government action might still be derived from court decisions," Paul Hanle wrote in a May 2022 email. Hanle founded the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, which has put at least 140 federal judges through its climate "education" seminars. In the same email, he laid out CJP’s strategy to target "key judges" with seminars, hoping to "make a great difference in the final outcome of cases."

The crown jewel was the judges’ own science manual. In December 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine invited Michael Burger to write the climate chapter of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, the federal judiciary’s go-to science guide. Burger runs Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and is of counsel at Sher Edling, a firm representing many of the cities and counties suing oil companies. The Federal Judicial Center balked, citing his litigation work.

CHINA-LINKED GREEN GROUP TRAINING US JUDGES DRAWS FRESH HEAT AS FOREIGN TIES FUEL PRESSURE AT HOME

The next day, Burger told his Sabin Center colleagues, the chapter’s eventual named authors, that he’d "be happy to contribute behind the scenes." Within weeks, one of them was circulating a draft with "Mike’s edits" and revising the legal section in response to his comments. Soon after the manual was published, the FJC withdrew the climate chapter. The National Academies finally followed suit in August.

Why all the stealth? Because climate plaintiffs have a causation problem they cannot solve in the open.

SUPREME COURT CAN RESTORE SANITY AND STOP THE LEFT’S RADICAL CLIMATE AGENDA

At the Suncor Energy oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan told the oil companies’ lawyer, "Well, you sound like you have a very good causation argument." She meant it as a brush-off; she immediately questioned why causation should matter for preemption.

But Kagan is right: No climate plaintiff has a good causation argument. Greenhouse gases mix globally, and about 90 percent of emissions occur outside the United States. Tying a drought in Boulder to any particular company’s barrels of oil is simply not possible.

ECO-WARRIORS WANT TO TURN UP THE HEAT ON YOUR WALLET TO FUND THEIR CLIMATE AGENDA

That is why the climate lawfare movement needs judges to swallow "extreme event attribution." Boulder’s trial court has already shown what the endgame looks like, declaring, "in a multiple contributor tort case, there is no need to tie specific injuries to the actions of defendants." If you can’t meet the standard, lower it.

This is precisely what the Constitution’s structure exists to prevent: a small minority weaponizing federalism to impose its policy preferences on the entire nation. One county cannot regulate the world. If Boulder prevails, the companies’ lawyer warned, some 90,000 municipalities could make national energy policy through jury awards. Pressed by Justice Clarence Thomas at oral argument, Boulder’s lawyer conceded that "nothing in our theory" prevents suing retailers too.

WAVE OF OVERLOOKED 'LEFT-WING' LAWSUITS COULD COME WITH AN UNEXPECTED PRICE TAG FOR AMERICANS

And it won’t stop with oil companies. The Climate Judiciary Project’s own curriculum for judges shows where this is headed. One module touts "source attribution" studies tracing nearly two-thirds of all carbon dioxide emitted since the 1750s to 90 fossil-fuel and cement producers. Then it turns to the dinner table: "Though its members have not yet been named as defendants in climate change lawsuits, the heavily concentrated industrial animal agriculture industry also has been subjected to source attribution analysis." Note the word "yet."

The module is candid about the point of the exercise. These studies take an alleged problem that could be attributed to "several billion past and present human individuals" and reduce it "to one driven by a few dozen companies," which makes climate change "appear to be more amenable to traditional tort law adjudication." This is regulation by litigation, pure and simple. Punish the companies that supply Americans’ fuel, food and building materials, and every family pays the bill at the pump and the grocery store. 

Chief Justice John Roberts cut to the heart of the matter: "Isn’t your suit an attempt to evade those decisions?" He meant the Court’s long line of cases treating interstate air pollution as a matter of federal law, which Justice Brett Kavanaugh had called "a wall of precedent." Kavanaugh then read aloud from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinion in AEP: Federal judges "lack the scientific, economic, and technological resources" to set emissions policy. If that is true of federal judges, Kavanaugh asked, doesn’t it apply to "a six-person state jury in Boulder?"

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Take it from Ginsburg herself. Greenhouse-gas regulation, she wrote, "cannot be prescribed in a vacuum." It demands weighing environmental benefits against "our Nation’s energy needs and the possibility of economic disruption."

The climate lawfare complex lost at the ballot box. It lost in AEP. So its backers went behind the scenes—into judicial seminars and judges’ own science manual. Enough already. The Supreme Court should shut the courthouse door for good.

CLICK FOR MORE FROM JOSH HAMMER

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone public dissenter in a Thursday decision allowing New Hampshire to block the use of student ID cards in the upcoming midterm elections.

Other justices on the court cited the longstanding precedent "that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election," and said that lower courts failed to argue that the specific case in New Hampshire warranted an exception to the tradition. Jackson, however, argued the proximity to an election should not get in the way of properly applying the law.

"I respectfully dissent because — even, and perhaps especially, when an election is looming — I would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State’s electoral processes," she wrote.

FEDERAL JUDGE BLOCKS INDIANA BAN ON STUDENT ID FOR VOTING

The underlying dispute stems from a law signed in April that went into effect in June, striking student ID cards from the list of forms of identification that election officials can accept when an individual requests a ballot. A voting rights group sued New Hampshire on the grounds that the law illegally discriminated against young voters by making it more difficult for them to vote.

New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan then issued guidance saying that student IDs could not be used to establish voter identity, even as supporting evidence under the state's alternative verification procedures. A district judge blocked that portion of the guidance, arguing that it went beyond the scope of the law itself, which only removed student IDs from the list of expressly accepted forms of identification.

Among the supporters of the guidance was the Republican National Committee.

DEMS HAND GOP FRESH MIDTERM WEAPON BY OPPOSING WIDELY USED VOTER ID

While Jackson was the lone public dissenter, it is possible that other justices dissented as well, but opted not to be named on the court order. During her roughly four years on the Supreme Court, Jackson has broken from the rest of her colleagues in areas such as campaign finance, immigration and congressional map litigation.

In 2023, she was the lone dissenter in an 8-1 ruling allowing a concrete company to sue striking union workers. She also stood alone in a May 2026 decision involving federal prisoners seeking to challenge their convictions through compassionate release.

TRUMP SCORES SUPREME COURT WIN IN ELECTION INTEGRITY FIGHT AS STATES GAIN NEW VOTER ROLL TOOL

New Hampshire is holding a handful of close races on Election Day, putting some weight behind the court’s decision. Fox News’ power rankings rate the state’s Senate race as leans Democratic, meaning that liberals have a slight advantage in a race that could decide control of Congress. The state’s governor’s race, meanwhile, is rated as likely going to the GOP.

College students typically favor the Democratic Party, though it is unclear how many voters will be affected by the court ruling, as students who previously relied on their student IDs will now need another accepted form of identification.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Some Democrats, however, believe allowing voters to use student IDs would be a good thing. Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, for instance, has pushed for such a thing in his state.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday allowed New Hampshire officials to reject student IDs as a valid form of identification when voters cast their ballots in next month's midterm elections.

A lower court judge previously found that state officials had improperly gone further than a new law restricting the use of student IDs to obtain a ballot, ruling that officials still had to consider student IDs alongside other evidence when voters lacked other means of verifying their identity.

But the Supreme Court took issue with the judge intervening this close to the elections.

ARIZONA VOTER LAW FIGHT REACHES SCOTUS AS ELECTION GROUPS WARN ‘ABSURD’ CONSEQUENCE COULD ENSUE

The high court has said orders handed down too close to an election can cause voter confusion, an idea known as the Purcell Principle. The court cited the recent legal back-and-forth over Missouri’s redistricting maps.

"Here, the District Court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle," the majority wrote in its opinion.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the rule did not apply since the lower court judge was helping ensure the public received accurate information.

JACKSON RIPS INTO SUPREME COURT COLLEAGUES' 'SERIOUS LEGAL ERROR' ON TRUMP MAIL-IN VOTING ORDER

"When a federal court determines that material misrepresentations are being made about a State’s election rules, an injunction to prohibit that conduct does not contribute to public confusion, it prevents that very problem," Jackson wrote. "I would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State’s electoral processes," she wrote.

This comes after Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed House Bill 323 into law in April, removing student IDs from the list of identification expressly considered valid for obtaining a ballot. The law took effect June 2. After the law went into effect, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan issued guidance to election officials about the change, and multiple trainings were held.

"New Hampshire has a responsibility to protect the integrity of its elections and ensure that election laws are applied as written," New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, a Republican, said in a statement.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

"The Supreme Court’s decision is an important victory for our efforts to defend those laws and prevent last-minute court orders from creating uncertainty for voters and election officials. We will continue to defend New Hampshire’s election laws and the safeguards they provide," he continued.

The Supreme Court's decision was not a final ruling on the merits of the case, and the underlying litigation over the law remains ongoing.