A Clinton-appointed federal judge will decide if Governor Ron DeSantis lawfully suspended a Soros-backed prosecutor for refusing to enforce Florida abortion laws.
Soros-backed Florida prosecutor Andrew Warren recently sued Governor Ron DeSantis to get his job back.
DeSantis wasn’t intimidated by Warren’s lawsuit.
“Warren said that it doesn’t matter what the legislature does in the state of Florida. He is going to exercise a veto over that. He’s also instituted policies of ‘presumptive non-enforcement’…that is not consistent with the role of a prosecutor. You can exercise discretion in individual case, but that discretion has to be individualized and case specific,” DeSantis said as he announced Warren’s suspension.
“It’s not surprising Warren, who was suspended for refusing to follow the law, would file a legally baseless lawsuit challenging his suspension,” DeSantis’ comms director Taryn Fenske said in a statement, according to Fox News. “We look forward to responding in court.”
US District Judge Robert Hinkle, a Clinton appointee, said he will decide in the next few weeks if DeSantis lawfully suspended the prosecutor.
A federal judge has no authority to make this decision, but here we are.
ABC News reported:
A federal judge on Thursday pressed attorneys for Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis to explain why the governor’s recent suspension of a state prosecutor he viewed as “woke” wasn’t an unlawful and politically motivated overreach of executive authority.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle said he would rule in the coming weeks on whether the governor was within his rights to suspend Andrew Warren, a Democrat who was reelected last year as the top state prosecutor in Tampa and surrounding Hillsborough County after running on a platform of criminal justice reform.
“This whole thing is chock-full of animus toward [reform-minded] prosecutors,” Hinkle said on the last day of a three-day trial in Tallahassee. “Florida law does not allow a governor to remove a state attorney because the governor disagrees with a state attorney’s general approach.”
But attorneys for DeSantis insisted in court that was not why the governor suspended Warren, who was first elected to his position in 2016.
“We have someone here who was not going to enforce the law, based on his own statements,” DeSantis attorney George Levesque told the judge.
According to the executive order suspending Warren in August, the state attorney demonstrated “incompetence and willful defiance of his duties” by implementing certain “policies of presumptive non-enforcement” and by co-signing a left-leaning advocacy group’s public statements about state laws criminalizing gender-affirming care and abortions.