Attention to the Unseen

The Daily Beast reports: Retired American generals vehemently say that no, Donald Trump cannot deploy SEAL Team 6 to kill a political rival. Gun groups howl that the United States is turning into Communist China. And a convicted Jan. 6 rioter warns that President Joe Biden could someday get sued over the death of a jogger in Georgia. These are among the 18 various groups that shared their wisdom with the Supreme Court earlier this month, filing amicus briefs on…

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Philip Rotner writes: While a motion to remove a judge generally has to be filed initially with the judge herself, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals—the appellate court that has jurisdiction over Judge Cannon’s court—has “the authority to order reassignment of a criminal case to another district judge as part of our supervisory authority over the district courts in this Circuit”: If a district judge’s continued participation in a case presents a significant risk of undermining this public confidence, this…

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Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman writes: Donald Trump is determined to avoid accountability before the general election, and, so far, the U.S. Supreme Court is helping him. Trump has no legal ground whatsoever to delay a ruling in his plea for presidential immunity. The reason Trump has nevertheless sought to slow down the immunity appeals process is obvious: to postpone the trial date, hopefully pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the Department of Justice and…

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Ankush Khardori writes: When Justice Stephen Breyer stepped down from the Supreme Court in 2022, he left the court with a record of accomplishment — but a legal approach that has been battered. With former President Donald Trump’s three appointees on the bench, the court was firmly in the hands of conservative justices whose theories of constitutional and statutory interpretation differed fundamentally from that of the liberal Breyer. Their methods have already upended American law in recent years in a…

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Rolling Stone reports: For years, Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that if he doesn’t win the 2024 presidential election, he is willing to cheat and steal it. Since President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, according to sources with intimate knowledge of the situation, Biden and his inner circle have been drawing up meticulous plans and creating a large legal network focused on wargaming a close election finish, in which the former president and Republican Party launch a scorched-earth, Big…

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Politico reports: Allies of Leonard Leo have mounted a monthslong offensive against the man investigating the judicial activist’s network: Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb. Since news of the probe broke last August, the GOP chairs of powerful congressional committees launched their own investigation of Schwalb’s investigation; conservative media wrote articles criticizing Schwalb on unrelated crime issues — based on a social media post from a top Leo lieutenant; and a group of his Republican law enforcement peers sent letters…

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The New York Times reports: After being sworn in as attorney general in March 2021, Merrick B. Garland gathered his closest aides to discuss a topic too sensitive to broach in bigger groups: the possibility that evidence from the far-ranging Jan. 6 investigation could quickly lead to former President Donald J. Trump and his inner circle. At the time, some in the Justice Department were pushing for the chance to look at ties between pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol…

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Jonathan Chait writes: The Republican Party is united in its belief that Donald Trump’s court-ordered financial distress is the product of Democratic Party “lawfare.” Liberal prosecutors and courts have set out to persecute an upstanding businessman, hounding him over minor or nonexistent financial discrepancies. He is being forced to liquidate his extremely solid business to pay trumped-up fines. The conservative talk-show host Mark Levin has absorbed these complaints and earnestly raises a natural follow-up question: Why aren’t any patriotic conservative…

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Ray Brescia writes: For the last few weeks, the legal and political world had its eyes on the spectacle of an effort to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the prosecution of former President Donald Trump, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Yet over the last six months, a slow-moving car-crash of a case has been unfolding, with a judge who seems committed to protecting the former president at every turn of the…

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Politico reports: The Supreme Court has turned away a convicted member of the Jan. 6 mob who was barred from public office in New Mexico under the Constitution’s “insurrection clause” seeking to reverse his disqualification. The justices on Monday denied Couy Griffin’s petition to consider his effort to overturn the rulings of courts in New Mexico that deemed him ineligible from holding office there ever again. Griffin, who was convicted in 2022 of misdemeanor offenses related to his role in…

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