Federal judge overturns Trump's executive order targeting law firm Jenner & Block
A federal judge on Friday struck down an executive order signed by President Donald Trump earlier this year targeting the law firm Jenner & Block, ruling the effort ran afoul of the Constitution's First Amendment.
The decision from US District Judge John Bates in Washington, DC, represents the second time in recent weeks a judge has thwarted Trump's attempt to retaliate against a top law firm.
'This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn't like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers,' Bates, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, wrote in the ruling. 'It thus violates the Constitution and the Court will enjoin its operation in full.'
'The challenged executive order targets Jenner for what it has said and thereby attempts to dampen what it might yet say. That is unconstitutional under any view of the First Amendment,' the judge concluded.
The order from Trump targeting Jenner & Block instructed federal agencies to terminate contracts with the firm and its clients, limited the firm's access to federal officials and buildings and suspended the security clearances for attorneys at the firm.
Shortly after the law firm sued, Bates paused parts of the order while the case unfolded. But his new ruling goes significantly further by overturning every part of the order.
Earlier this month, another judge in Bates' courthouse similarly overturned a separate order from the president that targeted the firm Perkins Coie. Several other cases brought by other firms facing a retaliatory executive order are still pending.
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Fast Company
23 minutes ago
- Fast Company
‘We're on the cusp of more widespread adoption': Laura Shin on Trump, stablecoins, and the global rise of cryptocurrency
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Yeah, I would say we're probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number-one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. That has not been true of previous administrations. In fact, the Biden administration was probably, I want to say, actively hostile. I don't know if people will love that term, but that's probably a pretty accurate description. For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. This administration is more, not only open-minded, but even in some regards almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say. I think there's going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year, but then on top of it, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product-market fit. We're seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don't trust their local currency. It could be Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There are just a lot of places where people don't actually have a great way to save their money, and they maybe don't also have really great ways to send money across borders. So, stablecoins are fulfilling that role and Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the U.S. around stablecoins. For a layperson, someone not engaged in the crypto world, can you just explain what a stablecoin is relative to a memecoin, relative to whatever the portfolio might look like? Yeah, so a stablecoin is any blockchain-based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset—99% of all stablecoins are pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians, and it covers 2013 until 2018. Even at that time, people would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars. No matter whether they were European or Asian or just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars. . . . Here's a really simple example: There's a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mahboob, and she had this microblogging platform, and I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. They had a hard time paying them, because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don't have bank accounts, or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. So [the platform] set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them. 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So you're correct that this is people wanting U.S. dollars, which is a form of currency linked to a specific government, but of course the people who want those dollars are people who don't otherwise have the privilege of easily accessing them. Bitcoin, of course, existed before stablecoins ever existed. There have been times when the Bitcoin price would go up, and then it would crash for a little while, and then it would go up again and then it would crash, and so that's kind of when you started to see stablecoins also take off. A lot of people view Bitcoin as a good long-term investment, but on any short-term timescale, you don't really know where the price is going to be, so if you need the money on a shorter-term timescale, then you would probably rather have something more stable, and so that's where the interest in stablecoins came about. There's a reason why 99% of the stablecoins are denominated or pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, and it's of course because we're the global reserve currency, so there's a lot of safety there. Trump seems like he's done a full 180 on crypto. I mean, he said it was a scam during his first term and then supported it very strongly in his campaign. He's launched his own Trump coin three days before the inauguration. Do we know how much of Trump's crypto position is about political opportunity or financial opportunity, or some larger philosophy about markets? I don't think there's a larger philosophy. I think most people probably know what Trump's MO is. But let's just say he's president and he took a luxury jetliner from the Qataris, so whatever it is that you think that says about him, it applies to his activities in the crypto world. What I will say though, aside from his personal dealings, which by and large in my opinion, they're business dealings, things that would help his family or him. He launches this memecoin, which by the way, to make one of these things costs almost no money, so I just want to make that clear, and you're basically printing money out of thin air, right? But then on top of that, the people who got in very early, they just had some agreement where they had to hold their coins until whatever it was, 90 days or I forget what the number of days was. Now, fortuitously, when that deadline came, [Trump] announced that he was going to have a dinner, and in order to participate in the dinner, you had to be one of the top holders of this coin, so of course the price shot up right at that time when this unlock was happening for those insiders. 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Washington Post
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Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump supporters, this is what you're cheering as his deportation scheme unfolds
For the past several days, Los Angeles has been alive with protests over President Donald Trump's immigration agenda. These largely peaceful demonstrations are vital to democracy. They're also infuriating Trump and Republicans. They've upset the president so much, in fact, that he deployed the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to the city against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. On the campaign trail for reelection, Trump threatened the 'largest deportation operation in American history.' Whether he's actually achieving that doesn't really matter; the terror he's instilling in immigrant communities is unlike anything I've seen in my lifetime. In the wake of these protests, it is important to remember why people are upset in the first place. Protesters are angry that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is indiscriminately targeting people, and these people, who are being arrested and deported, have no access to due process. 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I understand the importance of deporting criminal aliens, but what we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings ‒ in many cases, with credible fear of persecution claims ‒ all driven by a Miller-like desire to satisfy a self-fabricated deportation goal.' Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. I hate to break it to Garcia, but this is exactly what she and others voted for. This is what America's 'largest deportation operation' was always going to look like – it was never going to just be the 'worst of the worst.' But her latest reaction is a sign that supporting Trump now means something different. It now means supporting rounding up people following the legal process just to make yourself feel better with a fake sense of "securing the border." Under Trump, immigration officials have essentially done away with due process in the interest of meeting deportation goals. They've made it clear they want no part of following the law or the process for deporting people. That's too much work. They'd rather defy the courts, then play the victim when the courts rule against them. Opinion: Republicans, be so for real. This embarrassing government is what you wanted? That's what happens when you arrest people on their way to immigration hearings. That's what happens when you deport people to jurisdictions outside of the United States. It is what happens when you circumvent the rules to achieve a goal, and it should terrify everyone. Regardless of what Trump and Republicans think, the right to due process for everyone is enshrined in the Constitution. If the president can take away the rights of a vulnerable group of people, who's to stop him from infringing on the rights of U.S. citizens in the future? Again, Republicans, you still want this? You want people to be stripped of their rights? You want a federal government imposing itself on states? You want people deported indiscriminately? Congratulations, then. You're doing it. Follow USA TODAY columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter, @sara__pequeno You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump lied. ICE nabs law-abiding immigrants, not criminals | Opinion
