Injustice for all is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system and the people who are fighting back.
This week, a Supreme Court justice says what we’re all thinking, Donald Trump is told to sit down and start talking, and Jeanine Pirro’s shitty lawyers escape consequences.
Elena Kagan knows what’s going on
Justice Elena Kagan is not the type to trash the Supreme Court or her colleagues. Indeed, she was still strangely defending her conservative colleagues until July of this year, even though they were detaching themselves from all law and logic. But even Kagan, a balanced woman, has her limits.
As the midterm elections approach, which the Trump administration has made increasingly chaotic, she denounces recent decisions taken by the court which contribute to this chaos.
“The Court was in some way blinded to the very deleterious effects of its decisions on the functioning of the political system. “” Kagan said during a discussion at Catholic University. She added that the Supreme Court has “created a democracy that does not function as well as it should.”
These comments may seem casual, but coming from a Supreme Court judge, they are a wake-up call. Oh, and the willingness of conservatives to allow endless amounts of black money to circulate? She’s not a fan.
“The American people look around at this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare. And they’re right,” she said.
Indeed, they are, Judge Kagan. Indeed, they are.
Trump continues to try to block his own lawsuit against the BBC
As we well know by now, Trump loves to file lawsuits, but actually file them? Not so much.
So far, he has been very successful in slowly moving his own $10 billion libel lawsuit against the BBC, even attempting to refuse to sit for his own deposition not only after the midterms, but until the end of the investigation period in his case. On Thursday, that strategy collapsed, with the magistrate judge in the case ordering him to appear no later than December 11 for a deposition by the BBC’s lawyers, unless the parties agreed to extend the investigation period beyond the current December 18 deadline.
Unfortunately, this is only a decision by a magistrate. The real judge in this case is one of Trump’s nominees who has been extremely friendly, so this order could very well be changed, although it is ridiculous to allow Trump to refuse to participate in his own trial while forcing the BBC to follow all the rules.
Related | Trump didn’t think suing the BBC would be this much work
Trump is also trying to stop the BBC from subpoenaing former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection. It makes perfect sense that the BBC would try to talk to Smith, as the BBC explained in a court filing: “It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith, who has spent years gathering evidence on these topics with the force of the Justice Department and the power of the grand jury behind him.” »
Smith does not object to the subpoena, but Trump is very, very angry and sad about the possibility of Smith being able to appear, and begs the very sympathetic judge to put a stop to it, telling the court: “Smith has no personal knowledge of the issues surrounding this case.” ” Hmm. Since Trump refuses to let the BBC speak to his inner circle and appears to be dodging his own testimony, it is difficult to argue that the BBC would not benefit from hearing from Smith.
Another day, another Trump request to the Supreme Court
It seems like not a week goes by without Trump taking to the Supreme Court to demand he win his case. And why not? They provide reliable results.
Most recently, the administration is demanding that the Supreme Court overturn a lower court injunction preventing it from expediting a border security project that runs through Big Bend National Park.
As with so many things Trump wants to do, this isn’t even a situation where the plaintiffs claim he’s not allowed to do it, period. The lawsuit focuses on whether Trump is required to follow laws that are supposed to be followed before the federal government travels hundreds of miles of environmentally sensitive areas, archaeological sites, sacred sites and more. The administration ignored all of this and just started building, as usual, and now wants the Supreme Court to greenlight its right to keep jumping.
Unfortunately, it will probably work, because conservatives on the Supreme Court are pathologically inclined to believe Trump’s perennial argument that if he can’t do exactly what he wants right away, it is somehow unconstitutional.
A big “womp womp” for the OPM
This case lasted more than 18 months, but federal employees, past, present and potentially future, ultimately won their case against the Office of Personnel Management.
Remember the heyday of the so-called Department of Government Effectiveness, when Elon Musk’s little gang of racist goons were hoovering up all the government data they could get their hands on? OPM willingly turned over data on tens of millions of former, current and prospective federal employees. Sure, we have a privacy law that prohibits the willy-nilly sharing of personnel records between agencies, but what’s a major law compared to what Musk and company wanted, right?
The laughable excuse that OPM always relied on was that somehow this was necessary to modernize…well, no one really knows exactly what was supposed to be modernized. It also does not appear that the government was able to tell U.S. Judge Denise Côté what was supposed to be modernized, or why it would have required access to the private data of tens of millions of people.
“The record also does not support the conclusion that it was the pursuit of a modernization program that prompted OPM to grant expanded and expedited access to approximately 20 DOGE agents to its systems of record containing personally identifiable information,” the decision states.
Big loss for OPM and big win for data privacy.
No consequences for DOJ lawyers running amok as usual
The ridiculous and baseless lawsuit that Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office filed against former Olympian David Hearn for allegedly damaging the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool has collapsed spectacularly, highlighting just how bad things are at the DOJ these days.
Related | Trump is furious at losing his Reflecting Pool scapegoat
There were really only two possibilities here. Either Pirro’s prosecutors were so bad at their jobs that they didn’t even bother to look into whether the allegations against Hearn had any merit, or they knew the allegations had no merit and filed vindictive charges at the president’s behest. Both possibilities are bad!
However, the DOJ Inspector General apparently doesn’t even consider this worthy of investigation. Hearn’s lawyers are asking the IG to reconsider, and if there were real justice, the IG would say yes.
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