Somewhere in the US justice still prevails

 

Keep justice alive.

This is America now

 There is no justice.  Only Gestapo.

Texas leads the MAGA revolution

 

Disgraceful and dangerous

 

I should hope he will be watched under a microscope.  Judges can be impeached.

Not by Republicans, of course.  

Letter exchange

 

Response template:

Actual response:

UPDATE 07/10/2025:

What if the lawyers are hobbled?

Just days after revoking Joe Biden’s access to classified information and secure federal buildings — “because I don’t trust him” — Trump said his new top target is ex-Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who orchestrated the “Dirty 51” letter from former intelligence officials on the eve of the 2020 election.

[...]

Trump last week cut off Biden’s access to the daily intelligence briefings normally afforded former presidents, before stripping his security clearances, telling The Post he doesn’t “trust” his predecessor with such sensitive information.

  New York Post

Says the guy who stole classified documents.

Blinken’s security clearances will be revoked, following the same presidential directive aimed at Biden and the 51 ex-spooks last week, Trump told The Post in an exclusive interview.

[...]

“This is to take away every right they have [revoking security clearances] including they can’t go into [federal] buildings.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg join the new group of eight Democrat foes Trump plans to punish by revoking any access to classified information and barring their entry to federal facilities.

The president said they all will be given “exactly the same” punishment as Biden and the Dirty 51 as part of his administration’s vow to hold government officials accountable for actions he regards as election interference or the mishandling of classified information.

[...]

The move is regarded as more symbolic than consequential for [Letitia James and Alvin Bragg].

But it could hamper them in carrying out their official duties by prohibiting them from entering courthouses, prisons, and law enforcement facilities.

[...]

They also will not be able to set foot in the US Attorney’s offices for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

[...]

The other targets Trump disclosed to The Post include Biden’s former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who also was chief foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton during her failed 2016 presidential bid when he notoriously helped foment the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

Also in Trump’s sights are Biden’s Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who was involved in overseeing lawfare investigations against Trump and coordinating the DOJ response to the Jan. 6 riot.

[...]

Next in line are anti-Trumpers Andrew Weissman, the lead prosecutor in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russiagate investigation of Trump, who frequently maligns the former president in his role as an MNBC contributor; lawyer Mark Zaid, who represented Eric Ciaramella, the CIA analyst identified as the whistleblower in Trump’s impeachment in 2019 over a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; and Norm Eisen, special counsel to the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment.

Former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore says Trump’s action is largely symbolic and hard to enforce, especially on New York officials.

But it will have a “major impact” on Zaid’s legal practice “because he fashions himself as a national security lawyer.”

Mark Zaid and his firm are representing FBI agents. 

To steal a phrase from corrupt Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch, we are in a fight "for the ages."

Trump 2.0 in one picture

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This is where we are

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The law does not apply to tyrants

Clean out your desk

A conservative lawyer working on Donald Trump’s transition, Mark Paoletta, offered a stark warning to career Justice Department lawyers Monday that those who refuse to advance Trump’s agenda should resign or face the possibility of being fired.

“Once the decision is made to move forward, career employees are required to implement the President’s plan,” Paoletta wrote in a post on X responding to a POLITICO story detailing widespread fear among DOJ lawyers about being asked to advance or defend policies they consider unethical or illegal.

“If these career DOJ employees won’t implement President Trump’s program in good faith, they should leave,” Paoletta said.

[...]

Paoletta recited a laundry list of Trump goals, including mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, issuing pardons and commutations to Jan. 6 defendants, reversing “lawfare and persecution of political opponents,” and “holding accountable those who weaponized their government authority to abuse Americans.”

Paoletta, a former counsel to Vice President Mike Pence and to the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration, is playing a role in drafting potential changes in Justice Department policy to be put into effect after Trump is sworn in as president in January.

  Politico

The Trump transition team is divided into two sides. The personnel side, helmed by New York financier Howard Lutnick, is working to identify candidates for high-ranking positions in a second Trump administration. The policy side, helmed by Trump’s former small business administrator, Linda McMahon, works on the substantive priorities that federal agencies would tackle. Paoletta is working with the policy side.

[...]

Mark Paoletta, a well-connected conservative lawyer and close friend of Justice Clarence Thomas, is helping Donald Trump’s transition team craft the policy playbook for the Justice Department.

[...]

Earlier this year, Paoletta called Thomas “our greatest living American.” He also wrote a book on Thomas.

  Politico

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

American justice

Supreme Court rulings, Wednesday, June 26

Which is as much help as they can give Trump this session without ruling that a president is immune from prosecution for everything and for all time.

And don't forget - the debate is tomorrow.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 11:19 am:

Who are you kidding?  Take a wild guess.

UPDATE 01:35 pm:  

So, let me ask:  If the document in question is the opinion, why couldn't they announce that opinion today?  They have about 10 decisions to get through in the next 2 days, or they'll have to add extra decision days in July.  They only did two today.

Let me guess:  They want to postpone the immunity decision until they are absolutely 100% positive there is no way on earth Judge Chutkan can get the January 6 trial underway before November.  Am I close?

Anyway, this decision is the absolute least they could do in this case. Allow emergency cases to be treated. Wow. How liberal.

Okay, so maybe they'll reconsider after the debate/election when it comes back around.

UPDATE 02:24 pm:

UPDATE 06/27/2024:

Wisconsin fake elector charges

Link

Roberts' bullshit report

Roberts’s invocation of the existence of “gray areas” as the reason humans are better suited to law than AI feels all the more out of place because everybody paying attention now knows that any contested questions are likely to be resolved in whatever way most benefits Republicans, fundamentalist Christians, or wealthy conservatives. People might prefer that impartial humans make these decisions rather than AI, but does anybody really think the Supreme Court justices are impartial? I’m not against the application of human judgment, I’m against the application of Harlan Crow’s judgment. I’m against the application of Jesus Christ’s judgment, or at least whichever bigoted jerk the conservatives think is speaking for him. Roberts and his conservative brethren are already bots; they’re just bots designed and programmed by Leonard Leo.

  The Nation

This is a very good Elie Mystal article - maybe one of his best. Read the whole thing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Facial recognition software is apparently racist

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Battling fascists in and on the courts

On Thursday, Oct. 12, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) and fellow Republicans indicated that they would walk back their impeachment crusade against liberal state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz.

This comes after last week when former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser advised Vos that there should be “no effort to impeach” Protasiewicz over her refusal to recuse herself from an ongoing legal challenge to the state’s legislative maps.

[...]

Last Friday [...] the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to hear a legal challenge to the Republican-drawn maps. The petitioners in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission allege that the Wisconsin state Assembly and Senate maps are extreme partisan gerrymanders that unduly favor Republicans in violation of the state constitution.

[...]

“In 2012, Republicans won 48.6% of the statewide vote, which yielded a remarkable 60 assembly seats…When Democrats received roughly the same vote share, they carried 36 assembly seats… From the 2012 through the 2020 elections, Republicans never fell below 60 seats—winning up to 64, or nearly two-thirds of the seats. In 2018, Republicans won 63 seats with just 44.8% of the vote.”

[...]

Just three days ago, in a statement responding to Protasiewicz’s decision not to recuse herself, Vos said he felt she should have, and warned that “the United States Supreme Court will have the last word here.”

[...]

Today, in what appears to be an attempt to retract his threats, Vos clarified that any impeachment inquiries going forward would rest on what the justice does while “in office.”

  Democracy Docket

A warning threat.

In agreeing to hear the case, Protasiewicz also denied the Wisconsin Legislature’s motion for recusal. In the order, the newly elected justice argued, “Recusal decisions are controlled by the law. They are not a matter of personal preference… As Justice Prosser has warned, unjustified recusal can affect the integrity of the judicial branch.”

[...]

[O]n Tuesday of this week, state Sen. Duey Stroebel became the first Republican in the Wisconsin Senate to explicitly oppose impeaching Protasiewicz and state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara (R) followed suit on Wednesday.

The Senate Republicans now lack the necessary supermajority to convict and remove Protasiewicz should Vos and Assembly Republicans make good on their threats to impeach.

[...]

Since her election in April, the state’s Republicans have been threatening to impeach the newly elected Protasiewicz if she does not recuse herself from a redistricting lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s legislative maps.

The calls have focused on political statements that Protasiewicz made while campaigning earlier this year. Specifically, she has referred to the maps as “rigged.” Republicans argued this constituted a predetermination of how the justice would rule on a case challenging the maps. In September, a state judiciary disciplinary panel rejected multiple complaints filed by Republicans alleging the statements violated ethics rules.

Republican lawmakers have also taken issue with the financial contributions made by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin to her campaign. Neither issue, however, violates the state constitution or statute. Jay Heck, the director of the nonpartisan group Common Cause of Wisconsin, called the Republicans’ “selective outrage” hypocritical. All but one of the sitting justices have accepted contributions from a party at the national, state or county level.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Re: Brett Kavanaugh

Director Doug Liman says his self-funded Brett Kavanaugh documentary Justice, which premiered at Sundance Friday night, might be far from finished as new tips started pouring within a half hour of the highly-secretive project being announced on Thursday.

[...]

“The machinery that’s put into place against anyone that speaks up… we knew that machinery would be turned on us,” Liman said. “The film wouldn’t have been shown at Sundance, there would have been an injunction” had word of it leaked in advance.

[...]

The film follows up tips the FBI apparently ignored in an investigation launched after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were both high school students in Maryland.

[...]

Blasey Ford appears briefly in the opening few minutes of the film. Excerpts from her dramatic testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee serve to tell her story. Liman said he did not include a new on-camera interview with Blasey Ford because “she did her part. She more than did her part for this country. She’s done enough for 10 lifetimes.”

[...]

Justice premiered in an overflowing theater to enthusiastic response. The documentary had been kept under close wraps and was only announced as part of the lineup at the opening news conference a day earlier.

[...]

In a statement released after the festival announced the premiere of the documentary, Liman said, “It shouldn’t be this hard to have an open and honest conversation about whether or not a Justice on the Supreme Court assaulted numerous women as a young man. Thanks to this fantastic investigative team and the brave souls who trusted us with their stories, Justice picks up where the FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh fell woefully short. The film examines our judicial process and the institutions behind it, highlighting bureaucratic missteps and political powergrabs that continue to have an outsized impact on our nation today.”

  Deadline

Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/27/2023:  Why Kavanaugh won't be removed.

The reason the federal Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability, which had been tasked with investigating the allegations against Kavanaugh in 2018, stopped its probe in 2019, after he was sworn in at the Supreme Court, was because it no longer had any jurisdiction to examine his conduct. It had no authority to investigate a sitting justice, and so this machinery also ground to a halt. Another tip line to nowhere.

All of which means that the Liman film, and whatever resultant probe it generates, actually only replicates the problem faced by Ford back in 2018, and by Anita Hill and the other Clarence Thomas accusers back in 1991: No matter how much evidence you amass, no matter how many tips you investigate, no matter how many people eventually turn up to corroborate your story, there is nobody to call. There is no entity in existence to properly evaluate the claims, and there is no instrument to test them and to bring about accountability. Liman’s rolling tip line may indeed be a welcome move to correct the factual record and to amp up a cultural conversation about judicial behavior, and that is not a trivial intervention. But what it cannot be—because we haven’t yet built such a thing—is a formal political or legal engine for actual change in the judicial appointment system, or to the judiciary.

[...]

And once again, without actual rules and enforceable systems of accountability, it will be yet another reminder that the women who are abused have no power, and that once the justices are seated, their relative power is boundless.

  Dahlia Lithwick @ Slate

Investigating Brett Kavanaugh documentary

Sundance has added a secret documentary about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh from director Doug Liman to its lineup, Sundance programmers announced Thursday.

The film “Justice” is intended to screen on Friday night at 8:30 p.m. MT as a special premiere at Park Avenue Theater followed by a Press & Industry screening at 10 p.m. MT.

[...]

“This is a film that focuses on the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh and the investigation that ensued,” festival director of programming Kim Yutani said in a press conference. “It is a very powerful documentary that we felt was important to add. We saw it practically yesterday, and it’s a film that I think challenges existing narratives, I think it asks tough questions, and I think it provokes conversations.”

  MSN

“It shouldn’t be this hard to have an open and honest conversation about whether or not a Justice on the Supreme Court assaulted numerous women as a young man,” said Liman in a statement. “Thanks to this fantastic investigative team and the brave souls who trusted us with their stories, Justice picks up where the FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh fell woefully short.”

Liman added: “The film examines our judicial process and the institutions behind it, highlighting bureaucratic missteps and political powergrabs that continue to have an outsized impact on our nation today.

  Hollywood Reporter

No doubt Justice will be well and widely viewed.

UPDATE 01/22/2023:

The film premiered. New tips are "pouring in."

Impeach Kavanaugh.

Do you need more evidence that stacking the courts was Mitch McConnell's finest contribution?

[Trump-nominated federal court judge Aileen Cannon] has named Raymond Dearie, a senior US district judge with experience handling US national security matters, as an independent arbiter to vet records seized by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Florida estate in an ongoing criminal investigation.

[...]

Dearie was one of two candidates for the post proposed by the former president, and the US justice department had said it would not oppose his appointment.

[...]

Dearie, who is 78 and based in Brooklyn, is tasked with deciding whether any of the documents seized by the FBI during the August search are privileged – either due to attorney-client confidentiality or through a legal principle called executive privilege – and should be off limits to federal investigators.

Dearie has until 30 November – after the midterms – to finish the review.

  Guardian

After the midterms. That was important.

Trump will be required to pay costs associated with the special master.

No problem. He'll just get the rubes to cover the cost.

The justice department had said in a court filing on Monday that Dearie’s experience as a judge qualified him for the special master role, but opposed the other candidate proposed by Trump’s team, private attorney Paul Huck. Trump’s lawyers opposed the two retired federal judges proposed by the department.

Of course they did.

Dearie was appointed in 2011 to the foreign intelligence surveillance court, which reviews warrant applications from the US government on matters of national security, where he served until 2019.

In 2017, he was one of four federal judges who approved warrants used to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page amid concern about Trump campaign contacts with Russians, according to papers released to media outlets that sued for the records.

If Judge Dearie has anything left of impartiality and a sense of actual justice, he'll move ASAP. And he'll recognize the bullshit that got him to this point.

In ruling in favor of Trump’s request for a special master, Cannon rejected the department’s arguments that the records belong to the government and that because Trump is no longer president he cannot claim executive privilege. Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2020.

Assumptions about Dearie can't be fairly made without background. Here's some more:

In remarks to the New York Criminal Bar Association in 2016, he called for the criminal justice system to be "rethought and retooled significantly."

"If society relies on the jail cell alone to bring relief to the streets of New York or Chicago, or to fight the heroin epidemic that has invaded our communities, little will change," he said, adding that he wondered "how we as a society would fare if we took a fraction of the money we spend on warehousing people and invested it in programs to reach those vulnerable to the hollow call of the streets."

[...]

Andrew Weissmann, a federal prosecutor, a former senior member of special counsel Robert Mueller's team and a special master himself, described Dearie as "compassionate" and "fair" and the "platonic ideal of what you want in a judge."

"If you asked both prosecutors and lawyers, they would say the same thing, that he is just so fair," Weissmann said. "It's unusual to have a judge where both sides just have enormous praise for somebody."

[...]

And in a statement to NPR, Daniel R. Alonso, partner at Buckley LLP and a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, called Dearie an "old-school gentleman and unfailingly polite."

"Judge Dearie is a judge who, though unfailingly fair, would never tolerate the kinds of arguments that Trump's lawyers tend to put forward," Alonso said.

  NPR

We shall see. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Next up: DOJ appeals

UPDATE: 

Charlottesville trial

Four years [after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.], jury selection is set for Monday in a case seen as the most sweeping attempt yet to hold to account those associated with the march. To do so, those behind the suit are taking a page from a decades-old playbook: they're turning to civil litigation in an attempt to put extremists out of business.

[...]

"We have had a number of issues with effective returns in criminal trials for reasons ranging from ingrained problems in our legal system that have to do with long histories of white supremacy, to all kinds of procedural problems that have derailed justice in one way or another," [Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago] said. "Civil trials are a really good tool in hitting the pocketbooks and the membership lists of white power groups."

[...]

In 1987, SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] lawyers won a $7-million judgment on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose 19-year-old son, Michael, had been abducted and brutally murdered by members of United Klans of America in Mobile, Ala. The group had to turn over their building to Ms. Donald and the suit effectively shut down its activities.

Similarly, the SPLC won multimillion-dollar judgments from the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, White Aryan Resistance, Aryan Nations and Imperial Klans of America in later civil lawsuits. They were all forced into turning over their assets to satisfy court judgments.

  NPR

Yes, but it didn't end the movement.

"In the the cases where we were litigating against the Klan in the 80s, they had property, physical land, and they had buildings and bank accounts that could be seized and taken," said Scott McCoy, interim deputy legal director for LGBTQ rights and special litigation at the Southern Poverty Law Center. "It's harder now in the digital age because a lot of these groups don't have those kind of assets. Their assets are in cryptocurrency and it's much harder to find and get at and attach those kind of assets."

McCoy is part of a legal team that represented Tanya Gersh, a Montana woman who sued Andrew Anglin in 2017 for organizing an anti-Semitic harassment campaign against her family.

Anglin runs a neo-Nazi website, and is also among the 24 namIn a pre-trial court hearing, defendant Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who coined the term "Alt-Right," referred to the case as "financially crippling." He also acknowledged in an interview on a far-right YouTube channel that the lawsuit has led him to cut back public appearances for fear of being sued.ed defendants in the Charlottesville trial. Gersh won a $14 million judgment against Anglin, but collecting on that has been a challenge. According to McCoy, Anglin has kept his money in Bitcoin, which has made it difficult to track.

Cryptocurrency: the preferred currency of criminals.

Nonetheless, attorneys in the Virginia case say there's evidence that tying defendants up in a protracted and costly lawsuit has already disrupted their activity and influence.

[...]

"One of the most striking facts to me in this case is that Charlottesville was really Charlottesville 2.0," said Dunn, referring to the fact that some of the participants had taken part in an earlier event in that city, which they had dubbed "Charlottesville 1.0," in May 2017. "There was every intention for there to be a Charlottesville 3.0, which did not happen, in part because of this case.

[...]

"In a pre-trial court hearing, defendant Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who coined the term "Alt-Right," referred to the case as "financially crippling." He also acknowledged in an interview on a far-right YouTube channel that the lawsuit has led him to cut back public appearances for fear of being sued.

If you can't stop them, slow them down, I guess?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.