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4 days ago
- Business
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Trump's reality TV–style pardon spree has real consequences for the justice system
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. There's a new legal process in America. It used to be that a guilty verdict or plea was followed by years of appeals and, perhaps years after that, a prayerful pardon application. This week showcased a new playbook: skirt your tax obligations by millions of dollars to fund a lavish lifestyle, plead guilty and, instead of going to prison or paying restitution, have your mom raise money for the president and then get pardoned. That's the case of Paul Walczak in a nutshell, but he's not the only new clemency recipient. Among this week's winning contestants were the reality television couple Todd and Julie Chrisley, whom President Donald Trump sprung from hefty prison terms for financial fraud. Their daughter spoke last summer at the Republican National Convention, where she likened her parents' purported persecution to Trump's indictments. You could say they're kindred spirits with the president when it comes to reality TV, fraud and, with those first two commonalities in mind, a knack for casting their cases as coming from unscrupulous prosecutors (in the Chrisleys' case that prosecutor being a Trump appointee, by the way). Remember, Trump's pardon spree didn't start this week or even this year. In his first term, he kicked things off by pardoning Joe Arpaio, the Arizona lawman convicted of contempt for disobeying a court order to stop racial profiling people for immigration enforcement. That set the 'law and order' tone that carries through to this day, when shirking court orders in the name of immigration enforcement sums up the Trump administration's legal work. Another former sheriff was among the lucky winners on Trump's clemency show. When Scott Jenkins of Virginia was sentenced to 10 years for bribery in March, the acting U.S. attorney had the temerity to criticize him for having 'violated his oath of office and the faith the citizens of Culpeper County placed in him when he engaged in a cash-for-badges scheme.' The prosecutor's statement from that bygone era continued, 'We hold our elected law enforcement officials to a higher standard of conduct and this case proves that when those officials use their authority for unjust personal enrichment, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable.' That is, until — well, you know. 'No MAGA left behind,' Ed Martin tweeted upon Jenkins' pardon. You may recall Martin as having effectively been deemed too extreme for confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate for Washington, D.C.'s top prosecutor job. So the administration shifted his duties, and his portfolio now includes being the DOJ's pardon attorney (the last one, Liz Oyer, was fired in March after she refused a speedy request to recommend restoring Mel Gibson's gun rights, which the Trump-supporting actor lost due to his domestic violence conviction). One gets the sense that corruption prosecutions are not a priority in the Trump administration. That's evident not only through the president's clemency but also through his Justice Department's actions in court — perhaps most notably in moving to dismiss New York City Mayor Eric Adams' corruption case for overtly political reasons. Ryan Reilly of NBC News observed a connection between the Adams and Jenkins cases, noting that they're linked by the DOJ's Public Integrity Section, which, he reported, 'has shrunk in both size and influence during the Trump administration.' The Adams connection leads us to another big story this week: Trump announced his intention to nominate Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. Bove came onto the scene as then-candidate Trump's criminal defense lawyer, losing the hush money trial alongside his co-counsel Todd Blanche. Blanche is now the DOJ's deputy attorney general and Bove is principal associate deputy. Putting Bove on the bench would reward a sinister use of his law license with a lifetime judicial appointment. His handling of the Adams case is just one example but it's enough to show that he hardly deserves to be a lawyer, much less a judge. Recall that Bove not only pushed for an overtly political dismissal of the corruption case but caused several ethical prosecutors to resign rather than do his dirty work. And after all that, Bove failed to get the case dismissed in the shady way he wanted to — that is, in a way that would've given Trump's DOJ the option of holding the charges as political leverage over the Democratic mayor. The reason Bove failed in his corrupt mission was that the judge presiding over the case, Biden appointee Dale Ho, saw through the farce and refused to allow it. To be sure, Democrats are at fault for failing to confirm a deserving nominee to the Philadelphia-based circuit when they had the chance last year, leaving a vacant seat for Republicans to fill. The consequences of that failure shouldn't be forgotten, then, if Bove is privileged to be in the position of making decisions like the one Ho had to make, in rising above the base impulses of lawyers like Bove. Have any questions or comments for me? Please submit them on this form for a chance to be featured in the Deadline: Legal blog and newsletter. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Supreme Court used its power to give Trump more power
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. Let's talk about power. We're always doing that when we talk about the law, even when we don't realize it. But in this week's newsletter, I'd like to highlight how the Supreme Court majority used its power in an almost comically unconvincing way to further empower President Donald Trump. The Republican-appointed majority had a problem. A fake problem of its own making, to be sure. It wanted to let the president fire members of independent federal agencies, but it didn't want to spook the financial markets in the process. The faux dilemma arose in a case about labor board members whom Trump sought to remove without cause. That's illegal. Or at least it used to be. But the government's argument for why Trump could so — in the face of a nearly century-old precedent saying he couldn't — also implicated the independence of the Federal Reserve Board, which the unpredictable president has tilted at. The Fed's independence wasn't directly at issue in this appeal, but the risk of economic chaos loomed large. What's a Roberts Court to do? The solution, it turned out, was easy: Make something up. The judicial creation came in an unsigned order Thursday on the court's so-called shadow docket (or emergency docket, if one prefers). It was there that the majority granted an urgent bid from the Trump administration, agreeing to lift lower court orders that had stopped the president from firing Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris from the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, respectively. The majority's unsigned order was only two pages, but it devoted one of its four paragraphs to protecting the Federal Reserve. Responding to Wilcox and Harris' claim that the vitality of removal protections in their case also implicates the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, the majority said simply: 'We disagree.' OK, that's not all it said, but it didn't say much more, and what it did say didn't help. 'The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,' it went on. To support that proposition, it cited a footnote — footnote 8 for those playing along at home — from a 2020 case called Seila Law, in what was then the latest instance of the court granting presidents more power over agencies. The gambit didn't go unnoticed by the dissent from Justice Elena Kagan, who has a knack for plainly exposing shenanigans like these. The Obama appointee said the Federal Reserve caveat came 'out of the blue.' She appreciated the majority's 'intention to avoid imperiling the Fed' but said it still posed 'a puzzle.' That's because the Federal Reserve's independence rests on the same foundation as agencies such as the NLRB and the MSPB — which, Kagan pointed out, means it rests on that nearly century-old precedent, Humphrey's Executor. The Trump administration wants to overturn the 1935 decision, and the majority's order effectively does so — or at least signals its willingness to do so in a future ruling in this case, which is still being fully litigated in the lower courts. And about that footnote. The majority cited it for the proposition of the Federal Reserve's unique structure, which, the majority implied, would save it from the president's firing spree that the court was otherwise willing to condone. Joined by her two fellow Democratic appointees in dissent, Kagan pointed out that a review of that footnote 'provides no support' for what the majority suggested. The trio charged their colleagues with 'making new law on the emergency docket' against the Humphrey's precedent, while creating 'a bespoke Federal Reserve exception[.]' If the majority wanted to 'reassure the markets,' Kagan wrote, 'a simpler — and more judicial — approach would have been to deny the President's application for a stay on the continued authority of Humphrey's.' The majority didn't want to do that. It wanted to have it both ways. So it did. A lesson in power from the Roberts Court. Have any questions or comments for me? Please submit them on this form for a chance to be featured in the Deadline: Legal Blog and newsletter. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Souter's unwitting legacy
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. Ever wonder how we got to this extreme point in American life? Some of it has to do with David Souter. More specifically, it has to do with the fact that the late Supreme Court justice was a reasonable man. He was nominated by a Republican president in 1990 but eschewed the partisan push to overturn abortion rights and accomplish other GOP priorities from the bench. The retired justice's death on Thursday thus highlights today's radically different court — and country. 'No More Souters' was the Republican rallying cry against the George H.W. Bush appointee's moderate streak. If the party were to accomplish its goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, it could no longer afford to nominate squishy jurists. That quest for Supreme Court domination helped put Donald Trump in the White House for his first term, where the three justices he appointed helped make a majority in the Dobbs case. The Dobbs dissenters lauded Souter as a judge 'of wisdom.' They noted that he and fellow GOP appointees Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy had previously declined to overturn Roe. 'They would not have won any contests for the kind of ideological purity some court watchers want Justices to deliver,' Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote in that rare joint dissent in 2022. 'But if there were awards for Justices who left this Court better than they found it? And who for that reason left this country better? And the rule of law stronger? Sign those Justices up.' Sotomayor replaced Souter, another sign of how different things are today. He retired in 2009, when Barack Obama was president. That cleared the way for the Democrat to put his stamp on the court. It's unthinkable today for a justice to willingly depart their powerful seat when the opposing party is in control. Kennedy didn't do that; he stepped down under Trump so Trump could nominate Brett Kavanaugh. That's a legacy of the 'No More Souters' ethos. Trump's presidency and all it has wrought are a legacy of that ethos, too. Republicans who might've otherwise hesitated to back him in 2016 had their eye on the high court prize. They got it, and the country got that and more: The Jan. 6 insurrection; the attempts to crush dissent; the gutting of the federal government; the lawless renditions to El Salvador; the profiting off the presidency while toying with the economy. Without the GOP's fear of a wobbly justice on abortion, there'd be no Ed Martin running the U.S. attorney's office in D.C., and no Jeanine Pirro in his place when even he was deemed too extreme for the party of Dobbs — and even then, just barely so. The list goes on. The court that the GOP built with Trump let the president start enforcing his transgender military ban this week. It did so on a straight party-line vote, a description that wouldn't have been possible in Souter's time, when the justices didn't strictly align with the presidents who nominated them. Next Thursday, the court will hold a rare hearing stemming from Trump's attempt to curb birthright citizenship — a move that judges around the country have deemed unlawful. Technically, the appeal isn't about whether Trump's underlying move was legal, but whether judges can block it nationwide. Yet, the court chose this issue as a platform to scrutinize nationwide injunctions. I'll report back next week on where the Souter-less court seems headed on this article was originally published on
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Historical echoes in Trump cases
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. If you're at least a casual news consumer, you've probably seen a rash of retrospectives on the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second term. I contributed to the genre here. This week's newsletter continues along that reflective theme, looking at how judges are invoking American history to help us understand the moment we're in. The Red Scare in the 1920s and McCarthyism in the 1950s featured in a ruling ordering the release of Mohsen Mahdawi on Wednesday. The legal U.S. resident was seized by immigration agents at his citizenship interview last month in Vermont. He argued that he was targeted for exercising his right to speak out for Palestinians. U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford seemed to agree, finding that his continued detention would likely have a 'chilling effect' on protected speech. The judge also marked the moment by noting 'the extraordinary setting of this case and others like it.' He observed that legal residents who haven't been charged with any crimes are being threatened with deportation for stating their views on political issues of the day. Against that backdrop, Crawford summoned the anti-communist Red Scare and McCarthyism panics of the last century. 'The wheel of history has come around again,' the Obama-appointed judge wrote, 'but as before these times of excess will pass.' To be sure, it's been a bipartisan judicial affair calling out this administration. Crawford's ruling reminded me of last month's lesson from Reagan-appointed appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III. Lamenting the government's resistance to returning the illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Wilkinson wrote that '[t]he Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.' The government is still resisting Abrego Garcia's return. This week, another Reagan appointee zoomed out to rebuke claims 'from both inside and outside government' that the courts are causing a constitutional crisis by usurping Trump's power. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the government to disburse congressionally approved funds to pro-democracy nonprofit Radio Free Europe. In doing so, the judge wrote that he was 'humbly fulfilling my small part in this very constitutional paradigm — a framework that has propelled the United States to heights of greatness, liberty and prosperity unparalleled in the history of the world for nearly 250 years.' Lamberth concluded that '[i]f our nation is to thrive for another 250 years, each co-equal branch of government must be willing to courageously exert the authority entrusted to it by our Founders.' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the historical conversation in remarks to a judicial conference in Puerto Rico. Politico reported that she condemned attacks on judges who have ruled against the administration. The Biden appointee reportedly encouraged judges to be courageous and 'keep doing what is right for our country, and I do believe that history will vindicate your service.' Jackson and her high court colleagues wrapped up the term's regularly scheduled arguments this week. Among them was a case that could make history because at stake is whether the justices will approve the nation's first-ever publicly funded religious charter school. While Justice Amy Coney Barrett's recusal from the appeal could make the vote closer, the remaining Republican appointees were largely sympathetic to the school, which the Trump administration backs. It could come down to Chief Justice John Roberts' vote. The Supreme Court's next hearing is a rare one over Trump's quest to curb birthright citizenship, set for a special May 15 session. Besides that, the justices are busy writing their final opinions of the term, which are typically published by July. In the meantime, they're frequently fielding emergency litigation that could produce orders at odd hours, including on the administration's pending appeal to enforce a ban on transgender military service. The administration added yet another emergency request on Friday, seeking permission for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to access Social Security article was originally published on
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Is the Trump administration trying to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia?
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. Is the Trump administration working to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States? It sounds like an odd question at first, given the government's stubborn stance in this case and others. But there was a mysterious development raising the possibility. Plus, yet another judge ordered yet another person's return from El Salvador, all while lawyers for scores of people held in that nation's notorious terror prison press a new claim for 'urgent' relief. Ahead of the mystery move, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis blasted the government's 'willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.' (Discovery is the information-gathering process during litigation.) In an order Tuesday, Xinis assailed the Trump administration's 'continued mischaracterization' of the Supreme Court's demand to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release and 'to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.' She told officials to answer his lawyers' questions by Wednesday evening. But then a sealed motion appeared Wednesday on Xinis' docket. It was from the government, seeking a weeklong pause in the discovery fight. A sealed response from Abrego Garcia's lawyers followed, and Xinis granted the motion. Crucially, she noted the pause was '[w]ith the agreement of the parties.' The details of the filings weren't public, so we don't know what each side said. But why would Abrego Garcia and Xinis agree to any delay if it's not to get him back? The docket has been silent since Wednesday. Meanwhile, judge ordered the return of another man from El Salvador. U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher sided with a 20-year-old going by 'Cristian' in court papers who, she said, was wrongly sent to that country before his asylum application was processed. 'Thus, like Judge Xinis in the Abrego Garcia matter, this Court will order Defendants to facilitate Cristian's return to the United States so that he can receive the process he was entitled to,' Gallagher wrote. But what about all the others shipped to El Salvador and loaded into a notorious prison without due process? Lawyers are now seeking their return, too. The motion is pending before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who found probable cause last week to hold Trump officials in contempt, which the administration is currently trying to appeal. Speaking of Trump v. The Judiciary on immigration, his administration just escalated the war by arresting a Wisconsin state court judge whom the federal government alleged obstructed an immigration arrest. 'No one is above the law,' Donald Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, said upon the arrest of Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan. A statement on Dugan's behalf said she 'has committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career' and 'looks forward to being exonerated.' Elsewhere in Law & Order, three more federal prosecutors from the Eric Adams boondoggle resigned rather than betray their oaths. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wanted them to admit wrongdoing in refusing to dismiss the case for Trump's political aims, but they declined to 'confess wrongdoing when there was none.' And one of the president's latest clemency grants for a loyal supporter is memorably captured in The Associated Press' headline: Trump pardons Nevada politician who paid for cosmetic surgery with funds to honor a slain officer. The Supreme Court enters its final full week of hearings Monday, after considering a request this week from parents to keep their elementary school kids away from instruction involving LGBTQ-themed books. The high court majority sounded ready to side with the parents' religious appeal, while another big argument is set for Wednesday over a bid for the nation's first public religious charter school in Oklahoma. That would typically be the final hearing of the term, but remember that the justices set a rare May 15 hearing on birthright citizenship, too. As always, emergency appeals will keep the court busy on immigration and more, with the administration this week adding another urgent filing seeking to enforce its transgender military service ban. We could learn next week if the court wants to help Trump out on that one — so far in his second term, his record is mixed at the court. What's certain is that the appeals will keep article was originally published on
