Attention to the Unseen

Judd Legum writes: North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls is being threatened with sanctions for criticizing the court’s approach to racial and gender discrimination. Earls, the only Black woman on the court, is under investigation by the state’s Judicial Standards Commission, a body largely comprised of conservative judges appointed by North Carolina Chief Justice Paul Newby. On August 15, Earls received a letter from the Commission informing her that she was under investigation on suspicion that her comments to…

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Politico reports: The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office is “carefully reviewing the legal issues involved” in a long-shot effort by some Republicans in the state to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot in 2024, the office announced on Tuesday. Bryant “Corky” Messner — an attorney and prominent Republican who ran on Trump’s endorsement as the state’s 2020 U.S. Senate nominee — has publicly questioned Trump’s eligibility to run for president, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The…

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Liz Dye writes: Last year, Judge Aileen Cannon tried valiantly to derail the Justice Department’s investigation of Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida country club. The unanimous conclusion among court watchers was that Judge Cannon, who was confirmed after Trump had already lost the 2020 election, put both thumbs and all eight fingers on the scale for the man who nominated her to the federal bench. She was only stopped by the intervention of the 11th Circuit,…

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David Frum writes: The Fourteenth Amendment won’t save us from Donald Trump. Eminent jurists are promising that it will. They argue that language in the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, should debar the coup-plotting ex-president from appearing on a ballot for any office ever again. Their learning is undisputed. Their conclusions are another story. The project to disqualify Trump from running for president is misguided and dangerous. It won’t work. If it somehow could work, it would create…

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NBC News reports: Four criminal indictments of Donald Trump have ignited his followers and spurred his House Republican allies to try to use the upcoming government funding deadline of Sept. 30 as leverage to undermine the prosecutions. The bad news for them: A government shutdown wouldn’t halt the criminal proceedings against the former president. Trump’s indictments in New York and Georgia would not be affected, while his federal indictments — for allegedly mishandling classified documents and for his role in…

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Robert Katzberg writes: Donald Trump’s first lawyer and reviled early mentor, Roy Cohn, famously observed: “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.” While Cohn was reportedly referring to the corruption then existing in the New York state judiciary, the quote only minimally overstates the courtroom reality even in today’s most ethical and respected courts of law—who the judge is generally is key to the outcome. That insight was reinforced this morning in when Judge…

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The New York Times reports: In seeking to persuade Judge Chuktan to move quickly to trial, Ms. Gaston [one of the prosecutors in the case] reminded her that Mr. Trump had repeatedly attacked the “integrity of the court and the citizens of D.C.” on social media in ways that could affect the case’s jury pool. At a hearing last month, Judge Chutkan warned Mr. Trump that she would not tolerate him using social media posts to intimidate witnesses or taint…

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Greg Sargent writes: Because Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) cares deeply about the plight of the unfairly accused, he has launched yet another House GOP effort to protect Donald Trump from prosecution. The Judiciary Committee, which Jordan chairs, is demanding that Georgia prosecutor Fani T. Willis turn over documents related to her indictment of the former president over his insurrection attempt. Jordan’s game — using House investigations to protect Trump at all costs — is transparent. Yet if he really pursues…

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Shan Wu writes: The “Disqualification Clause” found in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment fits Donald J. Trump like a glove. Or as political podcaster Allison Gill asked on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter: “if section 3 of the 14th amendment wasn’t designed for him, who was it designed for?” The historical answer to Gill’s query is, of course, that it was designed for Confederates trying to get back into the federal government after losing the Civil…

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ABC News reports: [Federalist Society members, William] Baude and [Michael Stokes] Paulsen maintain their theory [that Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment bars Trump from public office] is “self-executing.” They say that means that public elections officials don’t need special permission from lawmakers to disqualify Trump from the ballot: if they believe the argument is valid, they can disqualify potential candidates on their own. Not only that, the scholars argue, the election officials are legally required to do…

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Ankush Khardori writes: To hear Donald Trump tell it, the fact that he keeps getting indicted by prosecutors is a boon to his reelection effort. “Any time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls,” he said at a dinner shortly after he was charged by the Justice Department with attempting to overturn the 2020 election. This counterintuitive claim is questionable on its face — if not demonstrably false upon close examination — but it is one…

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USA Today reports: For former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and their 17 other co-defendants, the threat of jail time is getting very real for those charged, arrested and booked in the Georgia election fraud case. After trying desperately to avoid arrest by having his case transferred to federal court, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows surrendered Thursday afternoon. He is now in the same boat as his 18 fellow defendants in the Georgia case, even as Meadows…

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  Joy Reid discusses Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s treatment of the Exonerated Five and other Black and Brown people in New York, and calls the mug shots of the two politicians “justice.”

The Intercept reports: A little over a week after a prosecutor in Georgia indicted former President Donald Trump for trying to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election, Republicans said they will use a new law to remove her from office. In May, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the law that created a new commission of political appointees with the power to remove and discipline elected prosecutors over decisions or policies not to prosecute certain offenses. The law…

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CNBC reports: Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was booked and released from an Atlanta jail Thursday in connection with the Georgia criminal case accusing ex-President Donald Trump and his allies of illegally trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Meadows is charged with racketeering and soliciting a violation of an oath by a public officer. His bond was set at $100,000 earlier Thursday. The same day, the bond for Jeffrey Clark, a pro-Trump former Department of…

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Politico reports: A federal judge quickly shot down bids Wednesday by two former Trump administration officials — Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark — to derail the criminal proceedings against them in Fulton County, where they’re charged alongside Donald Trump with a sprawling racketeering conspiracy to subvert the results of the 2020 election. In two six-page rulings by Atlanta-based U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones effectively ensures that Meadows and Clark will face arrest this week, a result both men attempted…

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