Attention to the Unseen

Greg Sargent writes: When Judge Aileen Cannon handed down her latest ruling in the prosecution of Donald Trump for stealing classified documents, many legal observers immediately understood the shady gamesmanship lurking behind it. She did, technically, rule against Trump by refusing to dismiss the case—but actually made it easier for herself to kill the case later, or to steer a jury toward an acquittal. Trump’s lawyers had argued that the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in the wake of…

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Politico reports: The Biden administration put the finishing touches Thursday on a plan to restrict presidents from unilaterally nixing civil service protections from large swaths of the federal workforce, as former President Donald Trump renews his vow to uproot a perceived “deep state” if he is returned to the White House. While a future president could take steps to squelch the new directive, it reflects a larger effort by the Biden administration to put a protective wall around its policies….

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Norman Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Joshua Kolb write: On Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith threw down the gauntlet in an extraordinary filing in the Mar-a-Lago prosecution, the case that centers around former President Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents and his resistance to government attempts to recover them from his Mar-a-Lago estate. Smith warned Judge Aileen Cannon that her approach to the law governing the handling of presidential records — and so Donald Trump’s culpability in the case —…

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Judd Legum writes: Republicans first attempted to sink the nomination of Adeel Mangi, who would be the first Muslim American to serve on a federal appellate court, on allegations that he was an anti-semitic terrorist sympathizer. During Mangi’s December 13, 2023 confirmation hearing, Republican Senators asked Mangi if he “celebrated 9/11” or “condemned the atrocities of Hamas terrorists.” The pretext for these attacks was Mangi’s role as an advisory board member for the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights,…

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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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