Nope, not a Trump appointee, but this is one of those examples of how bad Dubya was at his job too.

A judge that once had to resign as chief judge of the Central District of California over racist comments about a Black court official and later dismissed the criminal cases of alleged drug dealers and child porn purveyors because he felt they should have had jury trials during the COVID shutdown dismissed charges for the second time in five years against members of the White Supremacist Rise Above Movement accused of inciting brawls at political rallies throughout the state because antifa wasn’t charged along with them.

RAM founder Robert Rundo and Robert Borman saw their charges dismissed by U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney, an appointee of then-president George W. Bush. In his order, Carney seemed to ignore the violent crimes the two men were accused of and instead turned the case into a whataboutism and free speech issue. “Prosecuting only members of the far right and ignoring members of the far left leads to the troubling conclusion that the government believes it is permissible to physically assault and injure Trump supporters to silence speech,” he wrote. “There seems to be little doubt that Defendants, or at least some members of RAM, engaged in criminal violence. But they cannot be selected for prosecution because of their repugnant speech and beliefs over those who committed the same violence with the goal of disrupting political events.”

Unlike anyone on the left that could have been similarly charged, it was alleged that Rundo conspired and trained with others to go to political rallies and engage in physical violence against people and groups that did not support their ideology. During an April 15, 2017 protest in Berkeley, California, Rundo was ordered by police to stop attacking a “defenseless person” and he allegedly punched an officer twice in the head, according to an arrest warrant. Another RAM associate, Tyler Laube pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiracy, admitting in his plea that he attended a combat training event in San Clemente one month before the Berkeley protest and to assaulting people at a Huntington Beach rally in March 2017.

Judge Carney agreed Rundo’s attorneys argued that the federal Anti-Riot Act of 1968 was “unconstitutionally over-broad” and dismissed the charges in 2019, but the charges were reinstated in 2021 on appeal. By this time Rundo fled to Europe and was recaptured last year and brought back to the United States to face Carney again.

Despite the possibility of this history repeating itself, Carney then denied prosecutors’ request to keep him detained while they file an appeal, saying, “I don’t believe it’s warranted that Mr. Rundo spend one minute more in custody, so I’m going to release him forthwith.” Prosecutors then went to the The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who on Thursday stayed the district court’s order authorizing Rundo’s release temporarily while it considers the government’s longer-term request for a stay pending appeal. Rundo however was already released before the ruling and at the time of this posting his whereabouts are unknown.

Carney has seen controversy in the past. In June 2020 he resigned from the chief judge position of his district after serving less than 20 days in that role when during a webinar he referred to Black court official Kiry K. Gray as being “street smart.” The following year Carney protested his successor to chief judge and his order to shut down the courts during the pandemic by dismissing several court cases, saying in one ruling, “Nowhere in the Constitution is there an exception for times of emergency or crisis” for a defendant to have a jury trial. A federal appeals court reversed this ruling, rebuking Carney in the process.

Should Rundo and Borman see the charges reinstated they will possibly face a different judge as Carney reportedly will be retiring in May.