Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: When Brett M. Kavanaugh came before the Judiciary Committee in May 2006 for his nomination to be an appeals court judge, senators pressed him on his role in President George W. Bush’s use of signing statements to claim the power to bypass new laws — like a much-disputed assertion the previous December that he could override a ban on torture. Judge Kavanaugh, who at the time was the White House staff secretary, acknowledged handling draft…

Read More Read More

Garrett M Graff writes: When the history books are written, Rod Rosenstein might just be the most interesting figure of the Russia investigation—the beleaguered deputy attorney general whose memo in his first days on the job was used to justify the firing of James Comey. After that he quickly appointed Robert Mueller as the special counsel and spent the following year supervising his investigation while under immense pressure from President Trump and congressional wolves seeking to undermine his credibility, even…

Read More Read More

Adam Davidson writes: Even before the financial crisis of 2008, Trump found it increasingly difficult to borrow money from big Wall Street banks and was shut out of the rapidly growing pool of institutional investment. Faced with a cash-flow problem, he could have followed other storied New York real-estate families and invested in the ever more rigorous financial-due-diligence capabilities required by pension funds and other sources of real-estate capital. This would have given him access to a pool of trillions…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: Before he embarked on a week of transatlantic diplomacy, President Trump sat down with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who previewed for the boss an explosive development: The Justice Department would soon indict 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For the first time, the United States would be charging Russian government agents with planning and executing a sustained cyberattack to disrupt America’s democratic process. Yet…

Read More Read More

Noah Feldman writes: Some Democrats and advocacy groups are saying President Donald Trump picked Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his second nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court because of Kavanaugh’s view that a president shouldn’t be indicted while in office. It’s important that not become the narrative of the Democrats’ opposition, because it can easily be refuted. Properly understood, Kavanaugh’s expressed views actually support the opposite conclusion: that the president can be investigated and maybe even indicted unless Congress passes a…

Read More Read More

Ian Millhiser writes: If you could grow a judge in a vat, and design every moment of their life to appeal perfectly to the Republican establishment, the man who would emerge fully-formed from that vat would be Brett Kavanaugh. A two-time Yale graduate, Kavanaugh clerked for the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, worked for Bill Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr, and served as one of President George W. Bush’s top White House aides. Kavanaugh was a frequent opponent of President Barack Obama’s…

Read More Read More

David Cole writes: At the close of his opinion upholding President Donald Trump’s ban on immigrants from five predominantly Muslim countries, Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed on Tuesday that “Korematsu has nothing to do with this case.” He went on to write that Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision that backed the internment of Japanese citizens and immigrants based on their race, “was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history and—to…

Read More Read More

Mark Joseph Stern writes: Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Supreme Court shocked liberals so deeply that some haven’t quite accepted that his decision to step down was on the up and up. A New York Times report on the Trump administration’s quest to nudge Kennedy off the bench has spawned a series of conspiracy theories that revolve around one detail in the piece: The justice’s son, Justin Kennedy, worked at Deutsche Bank when it loaned Trump more than $1…

Read More Read More

Noah Feldman writes: In what may be the worst decision since the infamous Korematsu case, when the Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the court today by a 5-4 vote upheld President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban. Like the Korematsu decision, Trump v. Hawaii elevates legal formalities as a way to avoid addressing what everyone understood is really at issue here — namely, prejudice. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion downplays Trump’s anti-Muslim bias, focusing…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: The special counsel’s accusation this week that Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, tried to tamper with potential witnesses originated with two veteran journalists who turned on Mr. Manafort after working closely with him to prop up the former Russia-aligned president of Ukraine, interviews and documents show. The two journalists, who helped lead a project to which prosecutors say Mr. Manafort funneled more than $2 million from overseas accounts, are the latest in a…

Read More Read More

Jonathan Chait writes: For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, the specter of a coming constitutional crisis has loomed over the Russia investigation. The newly leaked memo by Trump’s lawyers, obtained by the New York Times, suggests that such a crisis is not merely a likelihood, but that it has already begun. The memo proposes several tendentious interpretations of the publicly available facts of Trump’s behavior, along with some legally questionable and amateurish citations of precedent. But the most important passage…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: Judges appointed by Republican presidents gave longer sentences to black defendants and shorter ones to women than judges appointed by Democrats, according to a new study that analyzed data on more than half a million defendants. “Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to three more months than similar nonblacks and female defendants to two fewer months than similar males compared to Democratic-appointed judges,” the study found, adding, “These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics…

Read More Read More