Attention to the Unseen

ProPublica reports: The party guests who arrived on the evening of June 23, 2022, at the Tudor-style mansion on the coast of Maine were a special group in a special place enjoying a special time. The attendees included some two dozen federal and state judges — a gathering that required U.S. marshals with earpieces to stand watch while a Coast Guard boat idled in a nearby cove. Caterers served guests Pol Roger reserve, Winston Churchill’s favorite Champagne, a fitting choice…

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NBC News reports: The judge presiding over the upcoming damages trial against Rudy Giuliani said Friday she will tell jurors that the former Trump lawyer intentionally hid financial documents and other records in defiance of court orders. In a five-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said the move was necessary given “Giuliani’s continued and flagrant disregard of this Court’s August 30 Order that he produce financial-related documents concerning his personal and his businesses’ past and present assets” and other…

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Forbes reports: Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, lied in sworn testimony on Tuesday when questioned about Donald Trump’s penthouse atop Trump Tower. Weisselberg was on the stand as part of a $250 million lawsuit that the New York attorney general is waging against Trump and his associates, including Weisselberg, accusing them of lying about Trump’s net worth to financial institutions. To arrive at inflated figures, the Trump Organization used demonstrably incorrect facts, such as…

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Law & Crime reports: Attorneys for Donald Trump this week argued that the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause does not and cannot apply to a president, or someone running for president, of the United States. “Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit someone from running for office—it prohibits someone from holding office, and even then, only if Congress chooses not to lift the prohibition,” a Monday filing by the ex-president’s lawyers reads. The argument was made in response to…

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Ian Millhiser writes: The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority spent Wednesday morning seemingly hunting for a reason to uphold a South Carolina congressional map that everyone agrees was gerrymandered to benefit the Republican Party. The case is Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, federal courts are not allowed to hear lawsuits challenging partisan gerrymanders — that is, maps drawn to benefit one political party or the other. But federal courts may hear challenges to racial gerrymanders — maps drawn…

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The Washington Post reports: When Donald Trump needed to value his Trump Tower apartment for homeowner’s insurance in 2010, he personally showed an appraiser around the unit for 15 minutes but ushered him out before the expert could take any measurements. Trump’s company then declared that the 11,000-square-foot unit measured 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size. A few years later, expert appraisers told Trump his 70-story office building at 40 Wall Street in Manhattan, steps from the…

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Aaron Blake writes: Donald Trump’s many legal problems have led to a veritable fire hose of often-mundane, procedural court filings. But occasionally, there’s a nugget that catches your eye. Such was the case Monday, in the government’s latest filing in Trump’s classified documents case. While arguing against the motion by Trump’s lawyers to delay the May 20 trial, special counsel Jack Smith’s lawyers assured they’re ready to go and that such a delay isn’t necessary, unsurprisingly. But they also said…

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Rolling Stone reports: In the weeks leading up to the start of his $250 million civil fraud trial in New York, Donald Trump and his attorneys privately discussed how they believed defeat in this trial was preordained. Their best chance — and it wasn’t much, according to two sources familiar with the matter and another two people briefed on internal deliberations — would be to fight the case on appeal. This belief led to the development of an approach to…

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Norman L. Eisen and Joshua Kolb write: On Thursday, Donald Trump’s legal team filed a long-awaited motion to dismiss the special counsel’s 2020 election interference charges on presidential immunity grounds. We anticipated that Trump would mount this defense even before the charges officially dropped in a model prosecution memo on the case earlier this summer and published an extended takedown of the arguments. Now that the motion is here and we can judge the substance, it is still likely to…

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  Former Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg: “I think another shoe is going to drop very soon, which is, in the order today, they ordered him to disclose secret equity partners in any of the interests in his New York properties. Now, I’ve been theorizing for years now, to editors and to other journalists that Trump has these investors — that his piece of the equity is not really his piece; that he has loaned it out. We will see what…

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The New York Times reports: No one close to Mr. Giuliani, 79, has suggested that drinking could excuse or explain away his present legal and personal disrepair. He arrived for a mug shot in Georgia in August not over rowdy nightlife behavior or reckless cable interviews but for allegedly abusing the laws he defended aggressively as a federal prosecutor, subverting the democracy of a nation that once lionized him. Yet to almost anyone in proximity, friends say, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking…

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Politico reports: Judicial activist Leonard Leo is not cooperating with an investigation by Washington D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb for potentially misusing nonprofit tax laws for personal enrichment, his attorney confirmed. David Rivkin, Leo’s attorney, said in a statement to POLITICO that Schwalb has “no legal authority to conduct any investigatory steps or take any enforcement measures” because Leo’s multi-billion-dollar aligned nonprofits — which poured millions into campaigning for the nominations of conservative Supreme Court justices and advocating before them…

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The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump had a lot to say on the first day of the fraud trial against him and his company. Speaking to reporters at a Manhattan courthouse on Monday, he dismissed the judge as a “rogue” justice and said he did not “think the people of this country are going to stand for it.” And he focused on the official who filed the lawsuit against him, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James….

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Ian Millhiser writes: Imagine that the Supreme Court of the United States spent an entire morning debating whether penguins are the primary cause of colon cancer or whether John F. Kennedy was assassinated by aliens from the planet Venus. That’s more or less the quality of arguments that former Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco presented to the Court on Tuesday, as part of a quizzical effort to convince the justices to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional. The good news…

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