The Department of Transportation announced Thursday it had removed prosecutors from its case against New York over a congestion toll.
The U.S. attorneys in question — assigned to the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York — filed an internal legal memo Wednesday night revealing what the lawyers thought were the weaknesses in their case against New York City’s Mass Transit Authority.
The New York Times reported that the memo has since been removed from the public docket, and the prosecutors have been replaced by others in the DOJ.
The federal lawyers from the Southern District of NY who were handling the DOT’s case in the congestion pricing lawsuit mistakenly filed a document last night that outlined flaws in the legal strategy. CBS has also confirmed that those federal lawyers have now been sidelined.
Sec… pic.twitter.com/In95PrwYUl— Ryan Sprouse (@RSprouseNews) April 24, 2025
The Times said that the congestion pricing program, the first of its kind in the nation, charges drivers $9 to enter Manhattan Island below 60th Street during peak traffic hours.
The purpose of the fee is to reduce traffic and pollution and raise funds for the mass transit system. The Biden administration approved the plan in November 2024, and the toll began being assessed on Jan. 5. The Trump administration is seeking to end it.
In the wrongly filed 11-page memo arguing against the administration’s position, “three assistant U.S. attorneys on the case warned that Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, was using shaky rationale to end the tolling plan and was ‘exceedingly likely’ to fail, the lawyers wrote,” according to the Times.
Rather than target the legality of the toll, the attorneys recommended that the Transportation Department seek to withdraw its approval “as a matter of changed agency priorities.”
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The New York Post reported that DOT spokeswoman Halee Dobbins addressed the memo snafu, saying, “Are SDNY lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST? At the very least, it’s legal malpractice. It’s sad to see a premier legal organization continue to fall into such disgrace.”
“SDNY’s memo doesn’t represent reality. [New York Gov.] Kathy Hochul’s congestion pricing war against the working class was hastily approved by the Biden Administration after Donald Trump was elected,” she added.
“Taxpayers already financed the highways that Hochul is now shutting down to the driving public and there is no free alternative. This is unprecedented and illegal. If New York doesn’t shut it down, the Department of Transportation is considering halting projects and funding for the state,” Dobbins said.
Nicholas Biasem, spokesman for SDNY, said in a statement to the court that his office’s since-removed filing “was a completely honest error and was not intentional in any way.”
SDNY spokesman Nicholas Biase says, “Unfortunately, an attorney-client privileged document was erroneously filed on the public docket last night. This was a completely honest error and was not intentional in any way.” pic.twitter.com/RaaNCvDdNU
— Molly Crane-Newman (@molcranenewman) April 24, 2025
Duffy spoke about his decision to seek to block the toll in February, telling CBS News, “We’ve never had a program like that, where there’s not a free public road to get into a certain area.”
New York’s congestion pricing scheme was an abusive shakedown of working-class Americans. That’s why I shut it down today. pic.twitter.com/ghxArEHsVA
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) February 20, 2025
“You can’t take American taxpayers who paid for roads and block them out,” he added. “I think it’s a war on the working-class Americans who work in that space.”
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