‘May have engaged in misconduct’: Delaware senators file ethics complaint against Trump-appointed federal appeals judge

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Delaware’s two U.S. senators never wanted Jennifer Lee Mascott to serve on the federal appeals court that rules on cases from their state, and now they have filed a formal ethics complaint about her conduct.

Mascott, a conservative legal scholar from Washington, D.C., who previously served in both Trump administrations, had never been a judge before the president nominated her to the Philadelphia-based U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals last year.

The Republican lawyer also had no ties to Delaware except ownership of a vacation home in Bethany Beach. Nor is she a member of the Delaware bar.

Delaware’s Democratic Sens. Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester complained last year that her ascension to the post would end the longstanding practice of having two judges from Delaware on the court that also handles matters emanating from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the Virgin Islands.

“Her key qualification appears to be that she works in President Trump’s White House Counsel’s Office,” the duo said then in a joint statement. “She has never been a judge of any kind, yet she is nominated to one of the highest judicial posts in the country.”

And now, after Mascott spent a year on the 14-member Philadelphia-based appeals court, Coons and Rochester have filed an ethics complaint against her.

Citing an August story in Politico about Mascott’s work for her late husband’s public relations firm Aderfo, and her dearth of written opinions, Coons and Blunt Rochester want the court to review whether she’s violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

The senators’ complaint focuses on these two allegations reported by Politico:

• Several employees at Aderfo, which has since gone out of business, described Mascott as being “intimately involved in the firm’s day-to-day work” for at least six months after becoming a jurist in America’s second-highest court.
• Mascott hired consultants with deep ties to the Republican Party, and at least two clients severed ties with Aderfo because “they felt Mascott was taking the firm in a more partisan direction.”

Coons and Rochester want Third Circuit Executive Margaret Wiegand to review whether she violated a rule concerning outside work and political activity.

“We want to ensure that the judges serving our state on the Third Circuit are fully committed to doing their best work, free from undue distraction or unethical conduct,” they said in the letter.

Blunt Rochester would not agree to an interview, but Coons told WHYY News he felt compelled to act on what Politico and other media outlets revealed about the fledgling judge who serves on a court only surpassed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The appeals court has 12 regional circuits.

“I think it’s important that members of the federal judiciary focus exclusively on their job as a jurist,” Coons said. “And once it was brought to my attention that there’d been repeated press accounts of complaints by former employees of the business that she ran into the ground, I thought it was worthy of consideration because it raised a potential violation of the federal judicial code of conduct.”

Mascott succeeded Kent Jordan, a longtime Delaware corporate lawyer, federal prosecutor and U.S. District Court judge before joining the appeals court. The other Delaware-based judge on the appeals court is Tamika R. Montgomery-Reeves.

Mascott did not respond to a request from WHYY News to discuss the complaint by the Delaware senators.

Wiegand said she could not comment.