Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit against President Donald Trump over the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles is in the hands of a federal judge who is the younger brother of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, a former Watergate prosecutor nominated to the bench by Bill Clinton in 1997, was assigned to Newsom’s case Tuesday, a day after California officials sued to reverse Trump’s order.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, citing the presence of his and other state offices in that city as justification for the choice of venue. Breyer is one of 13 judges in that courthouse and was assigned the case through a random process overseen by the court clerk.
Breyer, who attended Harvard before getting his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, was confirmed by unanimous consent in the Senate and has served as a judge in the San Francisco-based federal court since. Notably, Trump himself nominated Breyer in 2018 for a second term on the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Breyer, 83, will decide whether Trump had the legal authority to federalize 4,000 California National Guard troops amid street protests over the administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles. Newsom argues that the move was unlawful because Trump bypassed a requirement to coordinate with the governor’s office and called up the troops over Newsom’s objection.
In a 2023 appearance at the Supreme Court alongside his brother, Breyer recalled that he was a local prosecutor during unrest in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s but pressed on with his day-to-day work.
“I was an assistant district attorney. There were riots in San Francisco, over Vietnam over at San Francisco State, close it down,” Charles Breyer said. “You did your task, which didn’t mean that you weren’t aware of what was going on or not sensitive to what was going on or tried to understand what was going on, but it meant you had a task.”
In 2008, at a public talk alongside other former Watergate figures, Breyer said the Nixon-era scandal proved the value of the Constitution — and in particular, the First Amendment protections for those who “speak out against the government.”
“We were told from Day One, why are you doing this? You’re tearing down the presidency. You’re making it very difficult for the president of the United States to discharge his obligations,” Breyer recalled. “And our answer really was that the Constitution was set up … to allow an examination of the way our government operates. And that’s what happened.”