Things exploded online after conservatives discovered that the wife of a US District Court judge who ordered the Trump Administration to restore websites that promoted woke gender ideology founded an NGO that received large amounts of funding from USAID, which the Trump Administration, at the time, was still targeting and trying to shutter.
The judge at issue was U.S. District Judge John Bates. He issued a ruling in which he ordered federal health agencies to backtrack and restore pages in favor of transgenderism they had pulled off their websites in response to an executive order from President Trump about fighting “gender ideology extremism.”
In the ruling, the judge alleged that the websites were removed without the proper amount of opportunity for public comment. He wrote, in his ruling, “No backend remedy could ameliorate the inability to provide all required care during an appointment time to a patient who cannot return in the future.”
It then emerged that Judge Bates’ wife, Carol Rhees, started a nonprofit called Hope for Children in Ethiopia. Her non-profit received huge amounts of funding from USAID, which the Trump Administration was still working to shutter at the time, receiving thousands of dollars from it. Many thus saw corrupt motives at play with Judge Bates’s decision.
Amongst those who saw corruption at the root of the matter was then-DOGE head Elon Musk, who wrote, in a furious post on X that received over 15 million views, “No kidding. Yet another corrupt judge.” That came as a quote tweet response to a post exposing the judge’s ties to the NGO-USAID complex.
In the post to which Elon was responding, the account “Bad Kitty Unleashed” wrote, “🔥🔥Breaking! Judge John Bates wife gets funded by USAID! This is a serious conflict of interest since her funding relies on the Trump admin! Recall Bates is the judge who ordered the Trump admin to restore website info on gender ideology and sex change operations. His wife, Carol Rhees, is the founder of Hope For Children in Ethiopia. And has been a very long term recipient of USAID.”
Other posters on X sounded off on the matter as well. Particularly, some posters noted that even if there is no corruption, there is the appearance of it. That, in turn, is a major problem that the judiciary is supposed to catch ahead of time, so as to not diminish the public’s confidence and faith in the judicial system.
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The “Amuse” account, for example, noted that this appears to be an example of “the Swamp” Trump promised to drain striking against him, writing, “USAID: The swamp is deep. One of the activist judges blocking Trump’s agenda, Judge John Bates, is married to the founder of a USAID-funded NGO. Carol Rhees is a Democrat lawyer who started Hope for Children in Ethiopia a long-time USAID grant recipient.”
Responding, Virginia State Senator Glen Sturtevant noted that the apparent conflict of interest here, given the importance of destroying USAID to the Trump Agenda, and that the court system should have caught it so as to avoid creating the impression of corruption that the judge created. He said, “Federal courts usually do a conflicts-of-interest check before assigning cases. They should be looking even for the appearance of a conflict of interest. If true, it’s concerning this court’s conflicts process didn’t catch this.”
Watch Newt Gingrich Slam rogue judges here: