The Trump administration on Tuesday evening withdrew its request that a federal judge reconsider the $100,000 fine she imposed on the Education Department and Secretary Betsy DeVos when she found them in contempt for violating a court order on the collection of student loans.
— Justice Department attorneys wrote in a court filing that, contrary to what they told the judge last week, they actually weren’t sure whether the government is in “full compliance” with the May 2018 order to halt the collection of loans owed by certain former students of Corinthian Colleges, the now-defunct for-profit college.
— The administration last Thursday, in a 28-page court filing, asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim to reconsider the monetary sanctions she imposed. The fine wasn’t justified, the Justice Department wrote, because DeVos and the Education Department “are now, and were at the time of the Sanctions Order, in full compliance with the preliminary injunction and have remediated the harm to affected borrowers.”
— But on Tuesday evening, the Trump administration withdrew its motion. The DOJ attorneys representing DeVos and the department wrote that “Defendants cannot fairly represent that they are in ‘full compliance’ with the Court’s preliminary injunction and have remediated the harm to all affected borrowers.” The department is in “the process of reviewing and confirming” whether it improperly collected on the loans of another group of approximately 14,000 additional borrowers, the filing said.