A federal judge ruled late Wednesday that an accidentally released memo, in which lawyers for the Trump administration had detailed the weaknesses of the government’s strategy to end congestion pricing in New York City, cannot be used in court.
The decision closes an embarrassing chapter for the U.S. Department of Transportation, after its legal counsel in April mistakenly uploaded the document and effectively revealed the agency’s game plan to kill the new tolling program.
But the ruling was something of a hollow victory for the administration, in that many of the points raised in the memo were no secret to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the operator of the toll program, before the document had been exposed.
Lawyers for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan wrote and uploaded the memo, which caused a tense rift between them and the Transportation Department. A day after the document was released, a department spokeswoman called the lawyers incompetent and suggested that they might have tried to sabotage the case.
The Transportation Department said it had replaced the lawyers involved in the accident, but recent court filings still listed them as counsel in the case.
In his ruling, Judge Lewis J. Liman of the Southern District of New York, wrote that the transit authority and its backers had already challenged the federal government on similar grounds, and that “there was never a concern that the experienced counsel in this case would need to freeload off the arguments of the United States attorney’s office.”
