Overview

John James McConnell Jr. was born in 1958 in Providence, Rhode Island. He earned an A.B. from Brown University in 1980, and a J.D. from Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 1983. After completing his legal studies, McConnell served as a law clerk for Judge Donald F. Shea of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island from 1983-1984. He then spent the next 27 years employed as an attorney for two private-sector law firms in Providence, Rhode Island – Mandell Goodman from 1984-1986, and Motley Rice LLC from 1986-2011.

From approximately 1995-2009, McConnell served as treasurer of the Rhode Island Democratic State Committee. During this same period, he was a major donor to Democratic political candidates, organizations, and causes. Cumulatively, his donations between 1993-2009 totaled nearly $700,000.

• Among the individual recipients of McConnell’s campaign contributions were such notables as: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Keith Ellison, Bill Richardson, David Cicilline, Patty Murray, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Charles Schumer, Tammy Duckworth, Sheldon Whitehouse, Dick Durbin, Chris Murphy, Chris Dodd, Ken Salazar, Patrick Kennedy, Howard Dean, Loretta Sanchez, Geraldine Ferraro, Richard Gephardt, Rahm Emanuel, Tom Daschle, Mark Udall, Gwen Moore, Deborah Stabenow, Ron Wyden, Martin O’Malley, Fritz Hollings, and Evan Bayh.
• Among the organizational recipients of McConnell’s donations were: the American Association for Justice, EMILY’s List, HillPAC (a now-defunct entity associated with Hillary Clinton), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the DNC Services Corporation, the Washington State Democratic Party, the Rhode Island Democratic Party, the Rhode Island Democratic State Committee, the Rhode Island PAC, the Democratic Party of New Hampshire, the Effective Government Committee, the Democratic Party of Ohio, the Vermont State Democratic Committee, and the State Democratic Committee of Wisconsin.

From 2003-2009, McConnell served as campaign chair for then-Providence mayor David Cicilline. He also spent four years as director of the Rhode Island branch of Planned Parenthood.

Moreover, McConnell became a member of Amnesty International USA.

Notable Cases as an Attorney

During his long tenure with Motley Rice LLC, McConnell cultivated a reputation as a nationally prominent trial attorney. He was involved in numerous high-profile lawsuits against major corporations and industries, and his work focused on advocating for plaintiffs claiming to have been negatively affected by dangerous products or corporate misconduct. Some examples:

• McConnell was one of the attorneys who represented dozens of U.S. states that sued cigarette makers in a case that culminated in the multi-billion-dollar Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of 1998. Fifty-two state and territory attorneys general signed this accord with America’s four largest tobacco companies as a means of settling dozens of state lawsuits that aimed to recover billions of dollars in healthcare costs stemming from smoking-related illnesses.
• McConnell also litigated numerous lawsuits against manufacturers of asbestos in cases that involved plaintiffs claiming to have suffered health consequences from their exposure to that substance.
• McConnell represented the state of Rhode Island in a 2006 lawsuit that held three paint-manufacturing companies — Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries, and Millennium Holdings — liable for having created a “public nuisance” by making and selling lead paints in prior decades, and then covering up the health consequences of exposure to such products. Though McConnell won a verdict against the defendants, that ruling was subsequently overturned in July 2008 when the Rhode Island Supreme Court issued a 4-to-0 decision stating that the lawsuit should have been dismissed at the outset because “public nuisance law simply does not provide a remedy for this harm.” Stating that paint companies had no control over how their lead-based products were used or abused by consumers, the court asserted that landlords and property owners bore the ultimate responsibility for making their properties safe from lead contamination.

Federal Judgeship

On both May 13 and September 13 of 2010, President Barack Obama nominated McConnell for the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island seat that was being vacated by Judge Ernest Torres, who had announced his plans to retire from the bench. After both of those nominations were returned to the President, Obama again nominated McConnell on January 5, 2011. This time, McConnell was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a 50-44 vote on May 4, 2011, and he received commission two days later. McConnell continues to serve on this same District Court, where he has held the position of Chief Judge since 2019.

Member of the American Constitution Society

While his nomination for the District Court judgeship was under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2010, McConnell disclosed on a Senate questionnaire that he had been a member of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) from 2008 to the “present”; he never subsequently indicated when, or if, his ACS membership had ended. ACS is a leftwing legal activist organization that endorses the doctrine of “living constitutionalism,” which views the United States Constitution as a highly malleable document whose meaning and mandates are constantly evolving in order to adapt to changes in societal values and norms. In 2020, McConnell declined to answer the Washington Free Beacon’s questions about his relationship with ACS, or whether he had taken part in any ACS events or activities since becoming a judge. One of his aides told the Free Beacon that McConnell “does not comment on confidential Codes of Conduct matters.”

Contempt for President Trump

In a 2021 video interview, McConnell characterized President Donald Trump as a “tyrant” who, during his recently completed four-year term in office, had threatened “the rule of law in this country,” thereby causing the United States to come close to “popping” like a balloon. Comparing the years of Trump’s first term to the era of the American Civil War, McConnell asserted that the nation’s courts had a duty to do what they historically had done in the past: “stand and enforce the rule of law that is against arbitrary and capricious actions by what could be a tyrant.” “We’ve [seen] plenty examples of that recently,” he elaborated. “[T]here are plenty of examples over history and there are plenty of examples over the last four years, where it’s the courts that kept that balloon from bursting when it was challenged.”

Citing His Own “White Privilege”

In that same 2021 interview, McConnell portrayed himself as a “middle class, white male, privileged person” who habitually made a conscious effort to empathize with the needs of any defendant “that may be a woman, or may be black, may be transgender, may be poor, may be rich, may be whatever, may have experiences that aren’t yours.” “And you have to walk in their shoes,” he added, “and understand that the law applies to them where they are, and then you have to apply the law accordingly.”

Upholding a Ban on “High-Capacity” Ammunition Magazines

In December 2022, Judge McConnell issued a notable ruling that affirmed the constitutionality of Rhode Island’s ban on high-capacity magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition – on grounds that magazines do not constitute “arms” protected by the Second Amendment, but instead are merely components of such arms. In the end, McConnell upheld the statewide ban as a policy that was both reasonable and measured. And his decision was later upheld, in turn, by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. When he announced his ruling, McConnell stated that a Glocester firearms dealer and four local gun owners who had requested a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against the magazine ban had “failed to persuade the court that it [the ban] is unconstitutional.” He further said that, contrary to the claims made by those seeking the TRO, the victims of mass shootings are generally not “chosen randomly,” but rather, targeted specifically:

“They are random in that their identities are usually not known to the shooter … but in actuality, victims have not been chosen randomly. They have been chosen because they were attending a synagogue in Pittsburgh or church in Sutherland Springs. Or because they were sitting in an elementary school classroom in Newtown or a high school classroom in Parkland. Or because they were at a concert in Las Vegas or a nightclub in Orlando. They were not chosen because of anything they did, but because of what they represented to a particular person with a gun and a lot of ammunition. It is perhaps inevitable that Rhode Island will one day be the scene of a mass shooting, The ban is a small, but measured attempt to mitigate the potential loss of life by regulating an instrument associated with mass slaughter.”

McConnell’s ruling gave Rhode Islanders a 180-day grace period within which they would be required to either turn their high-capacity magazines over to police, sell them to firearms dealers from other states, or permanently modify the magazines in a manner that would make them incapable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

Blocking President Trump’s Federal Funding Freeze

On January 27, 2025, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo titled “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs,” which directed all federal agencies to temporarily freeze many billions of dollars in scheduled obligations for a wide range of grants, loans, and other forms of financial aid. The objective was to give the Trump administration an opportunity to determine which expenditures were consistent with its chief objectives and thus worthy of continuance — and which ones constituted waste, fraud, or abuse of taxpayer dollars.

In response to the new Trump policy, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan issued a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that blocked the Trump funding freeze only minutes before it was slated to take effect on January 28, 2025. AliKhan’s TRO was scheduled to remain in effect for six days, until February 3.

On January 31, twenty-two Democrat-led U.S. states as well as the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration in federal court to block the OMB funding freeze. Judge McConnell was assigned to preside over the lawsuit, and he ordered the federal government not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” any federal funding that had been promised to those states.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that Trump and the OMB “plainly have authority to direct agencies to fully implement the President’s agenda, consistent with each individual agency’s underlying statutory authorities.” But when Judge McConnell learned, on February 10, that the Trump administration had not yet restored all the frozen federal funds in compliance with his , he accused the White House of defying his order of January 31. Ordering the administration to “immediately take every step necessary” to unfreeze all the grants and loans that had been paused, McConnell insinuated that he might levy criminal charges of noncompliance if the freeze — which he said violated the separation-of-powers and encroached on Congress’s “power of the purse” — were to remain in place.

The Justice Department, in turn, said that McConnell’s order was preventing the executive branch from exercising its lawful authority to manage its discretionary spending. “A single district court judge has attempted to wrest from the President the power to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,’” wrote government attorneys in an emergency appeal to have the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstate the pause on federal funding. “This state of affairs cannot be allowed to persist for one more day.” But on February 11, the Circuit Court rejected the DOJ’s appeal.

On February 21, 2025, McConnell considered a request in which the 22 Democrat-led states asked for a permanent injunction that would further prevent the Trump administration from freezing the disbursement of grants and loans. On March 6, he issued a preliminary injunction that made his TRO of January 31, permanent.

Ethical Violation

As detailed above, when the Trump administration in January 2025 sought to enact its federal spending freeze on grants, loans, and other financial assistance programs in January 2025, Judge McConnell blocked the freeze and ordered the administration to disburse the funds as originally intended. That order was ethically problematic, however, because McConnell, at that point, was in the midst of serving his 19th consecutive year as a board-of-directors member with a $31 million nonprofit organization called Crossroads Rhode Island (CRI) – a low-income housing developer that depended on federal funding via the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for more than half of its annual revenues. According to America First Legal, a conservative public interest group, CRI had received more than $128 million in federal funds during McConnell’s tenure on the board — which he had chaired from 2011-2021 and vice-chaired from 2008-2009. Some of those federal funds were first filtered through Rhode Island’s state and local governments before eventually winding up in the coffers of CRI as a sub-awardee. Between 2010-2025, for instance, 155 federal grants took such a route to CRI.

Because CRI derived vast sums of money from the federal government, McConnell’s position as a CRI board member clearly gave him what would appear, to rational observers, to be a logical motive to do whatever he could to keep federal funding flowing rather than frozen. But federal law requires judges to recuse themselves from any case where: (a) there is even an “appearance of impropriety” or partiality, or (b) “they are a fiduciary or have any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” Adds Canon 2A of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges: “A judge must expect to be the subject of constant public scrutiny and accept freely and willingly restrictions that might be viewed as burdensome by the ordinary citizen.”

Resolution to Impeach McConnell

On March 24, 2025, congressional Republicans formally introduced House Resolution 241, calling for Judge McConnell’s impeachment and removal from office. Article 1 of the Resolution charged McConnell with Abuse of Power and said that he had:

• “knowingly politicized and weaponized his judicial position to advance his own political views and beliefs”;
• “engaged in actions that prioritized his own political views and beliefs over his duty of impartiality owed and deserved to litigants and the public in his handling of State of New York et al. v. Donald J. Trump, et al.”;
• “spent his entire professional career displaying his political views and beliefs in his financial contributions as well as public comments,” even though “the Code of Conduct for United States Judges states … that A Judge Should Refrain from Political Activity”;
• “served as the director of the Rhode Island branch of Planned Parenthood”;
• “contributed [along with his wife] almost $700,000 in political donations to Democratic committees, causes, and campaigns”;
• “allowed his personal, political opinions to influence his decisions and rulings”;
• “made public comments in January 2021, that equated President Donald J. Trump’s first term as President to the Civil War and Jim Crow laws, and likened him to a tyrant”; and
• “clearly demonstrate[d] a political bias that would impair his ability to make a fair judgement regarding President Trump and his Administration’s actions.”

Article II of Resolution 241 charged McConnell with Conflicts of Interest. Some key excerpts:

• There is substantial evidence that Chief Judge John James McConnell Jr. serves on the Board of Directors for the non-profit organization, Crossroads Rhode Island, and previously served as the Chair of the Board from 2011 to 2021.”
• “According to Crossroads Rhode Island’s tax filings for 2023, its total revenue was $30,664,778, of which $18,616,874 came from an array of government entities including the Government of Rhode Island.”
• “There is a clear conflict of interest given that Chief Judge John James McConnell Jr. presided over and made a decision regarding a case which significantly impacts the funding of an organization in which he serves as a director of and as a fiduciary.”
• “Section 455 of title 28, United States Code, requires that Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
• “Moreover, section 455 of title 28, United States Code, requires that judges must disqualify themselves from a proceeding when He knows that he, individually or as a fiduciary, or his spouse or minor child residing in his household, has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”
• “Chief Judge John James McConnell Jr. had a significant conflict of interest in presiding over State of New York et al. v. Donald J. Trump, et al., … due to his simultaneous role as a director of Crossroads Rhode Island. This conflict of interest made it impossible for him to be impartial in this proceeding.”
• “Chief Judge John James McConnell Jr. should have immediately recused himself from presiding over this proceeding, but instead continued to oversee it knowing he was violating the duty of impartiality owed under Federal law.”

The impeachment effort in the House of Representatives ultimately failed, however, as it lacked the necessary support to pass both the House and the Senate, the latter of which requires a two-thirds majority for conviction.

Judicial Complaint by America First Legal

In May 2025, America First Legal filed a judicial complaint against Judge McConnell, asking Chief Judge David Barron of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to investigate him for misconduct. “McConnell has a personal interest in the litigation’s outcome and, therefore, has an improper bias that should disqualify him from presiding over the matter,” read the complaint. “When Judge McConnell ordered the federal government to resume payments to the plaintiffs, he ensured that an organization on whose board he has sat, and to which he has owed a fiduciary duty for nearly two decades, would continue receiving tens of millions of dollars from the federal government.”