Attention to the Unseen

ProPublica reports: Stationed at Army posts thousands of miles apart, two soldiers faced a flurry of criminal charges after they allegedly assaulted women within days of each other in early 2017. One soldier was accused of physically assaulting his wife and firing a gun as she tried to flee their home near Fort Hood in Texas. Police later found a bullet hole in a window screen. The other told investigators in Alaska that he’d had sex with a fellow soldier…

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Mark Joseph Stern writes: On Friday evening, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas issued an unprecedented decision withdrawing the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the first drug used in medication abortion, 23 years after it was first approved. His order, which applies nationwide, marks the first time in history that a court has claimed the authority to single-handedly pull a drug from the market, a power that courts do not, in fact, have. Kacsmaryk’s ruling is indefensible from top to bottom and will…

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Washingtonian reports: When Republican megadonor Harlan Crow isn’t lavishing Justice Clarence Thomas with free trips on his private plane and yacht (in possible violation of Supreme Court ethics rules), he lives a quiet life in Dallas among his historical collections. These collections include Hitler artifacts—two of his paintings of European cityscapes, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and assorted Nazi memorabilia—plus a garden full of statues of the 20th century’s worst despots. Crow, the billionaire heir to a real estate…

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ProPublica reports: In a rare public statement, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas responded Friday to a ProPublica report that revealed that Thomas has, for decades, accepted luxury travel from billionaire Republican megadonor Harlan Crow and failed to disclose it. Thomas’ brief statement acknowledges joining Crow and his wife, who he described as among his “dearest friends,” on “a number of family trips” over the years. He also defended his failure to disclose them. “Early in my tenure at the Court,…

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The Washington Post reports: “Justice Thomas Reports Wealth of Gifts” was the title of a December 2004 front-page story in the Los Angeles Times, detailing how Clarence Thomas had received gifts worth tens of thousands of dollars over the prior six years — far more than the other justices on the Supreme Court at the time. The story appears to have marked a turning point for Thomas and his public disclosures of gifts. Since the news account was published 18…

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Politico reports: Hundreds of Jan. 6 obstruction cases — one of the most commonly charged felonies against those who breached the Capitol or confronted police that day — are facing new uncertainty after a divided appeals court ruling Friday. The three-judge panel spared the Justice Department an immediate disaster by agreeing to permit three challenged Jan. 6 obstruction cases to continue. But the judges — one liberal and two conservatives — all raised serious questions about whether other Jan. 6…

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By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica, April 6, 2023 In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef. If Thomas had chartered the…

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Harry Litman writes: Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Trump takes an open-ended approach to the charges that some critics of the unprecedented prosecution see as a weakness. What the detractors have overlooked are the substantial and unanticipated legal and factual strengths in the case Bragg outlined. A key question in advance of Tuesday’s unsealing of the indictment concerned how Bragg would augment the easily proven misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records. Under New York law, those…

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Ken White writes: What we don’t know — at least with the precision necessary to evaluate the case’s strengths and weaknesses — is the District Attorney’s specific legal theory of how Trump was defrauding anyone and how he was promoting or concealing a crime by doing so. That may sound like law pedantry, but it’s crucial to understanding the case. Commentators disagree, but some argue that Bragg will have to prove that Trump conned someone out of money or property,…

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Jed Handelsman Shugerman writes: Astonishingly, the district attorney’s filings do not make clear the core crime that would turn a filing misdemeanor into a felony. Neither the 16-page indictment nor the accompanying statement of facts specifies, though the statement of facts does drop hints about campaign laws. In a news conference, Mr. Bragg answered that he did not specify because he was not required to by law. His answer was oblivious to how law requires more than doing the minimum…

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Ian Millhiser writes: There is something painfully anticlimactic about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Trump. It concerns not Trump’s efforts to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States, but his alleged effort to cover up a possible extramarital affair with a porn star. And there’s a very real risk that this indictment will end in an even bigger anticlimax. It is unclear that the felony statute that Trump is accused of violating actually applies to…

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Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump insisted on turning his Tuesday arraignment into a spectacle, and he’s going to get his wish. A law enforcement official tells Rolling Stone that the former president was offered a chance to surrender quietly and be arraigned over Zoom. Instead, Trump opted for a midday, high-profile booking at the Manhattan courthouse, the official says. “He wanted a perp walk, he wanted daylight hours,” says the law enforcement official, who’s involved in aspects of the security…

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David French writes: To fully understand the Trumpist threat to the rule of law, it’s necessary to discuss what the rule of law means. A nation truly governed by the rule of law isn’t going to have a perfect legal system — no human system can be perfect — but it will have a double check against injustice. The rule of law depends on both substance and process, just laws and just processes, and respect for the rule of law…

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The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump is quite familiar with New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, the judge who oversaw the grand jury that indicted Trump this week and will preside over the criminal proceedings that follow. Merchan, 60, who has sat on the New York bench since 2009, also presided over the jury trial last year of Trump’s namesake real estate company, which resulted in a conviction in December, and the prosecution of the company’s longtime…

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