The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), along with a coalition of state attorneys general, has formally opposed a motion by Agri Stats Inc. seeking the recusal of U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim from a federal antitrust lawsuit. The DOJ asserts that the motion lacks merit and is based on speculative reasoning.
In a filing submitted Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, the DOJ and state enforcers rejected Agri Stats’ claim that a judicial conflict exists due to the prior employment history of one of Judge Tunheim’s law clerks. Agri Stats contends the clerk’s previous work at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office and at law firms involved in similar antitrust cases against the company constitutes grounds for recusal.
The DOJ emphasized that the clerk in question “has not worked for the court on this case and never will,” adding that Agri Stats acknowledges Judge Tunheim himself has no personal or perceived conflict. “That should be the end of the matter,” the government’s filing states.
The enforcement action accuses Agri Stats of facilitating the exchange of sensitive production and pricing information among the country’s largest chicken, pork, and turkey processors via detailed industry reports. The DOJ and states argue that the recusal bid is a delay tactic, especially as it comes months after Agri Stats became aware of the clerk’s background and only followed a recent decision advancing a separate pork-related case to trial.
The DOJ further argued that Agri Stats’ motion relies on a tenuous and speculative series of inferences linking the current enforcement action to unrelated proceedings. “There is no case requiring recusal under such an attenuated chain of reasoning,” the response stated.
The government also addressed Agri Stats’ attempt to tie the recusal request to expert witness rulings in the pork litigation, which the DOJ characterized as meritless and irrelevant. The summary judgment decision in that matter was “decidedly mixed,” with the court granting some motions and denying others on both sides.
Moreover, the DOJ stressed that any similar motion in the pork case was also unfounded, as key rulings were made well before the law clerk’s employment began. “No reasonable person could conclude that the court reaching the same conclusion about the same criticism of the same regression analyses two years later with different clerks could indicate bias,” the filing said.
Agri Stats has argued that the law clerk’s previous summer employment with firms involved in antitrust cases, along with interactions on social media and alleged courtroom conduct, justify recusal. The DOJ strongly refuted these claims, calling them speculative and lacking any legal foundation.
The DOJ is represented in the matter by attorneys Mark H.M. Sosnowsky, Eun Ha Kim, William M. Friedman, James H. Congdon, Silvia J. Dominguez-Reese, Peter A. Nelson, and Garrett Windle, along with representatives from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota and various state attorneys general.
The case is titled U.S. et al. v. Agri Stats Inc., Case No. 0:23-cv-03009.
