I subscribe to Marc Elias’ blog called “Democracy Docket.” Marc is a veteran prosecutor who is actively pursing lawsuits against the crimes of the Trump administration and winning many of them.
Together they discuss how the Trump regime has corrupted the rule of law; how grand juries have usually stood firm in defending it; why Trump and his cronies must be held accountable for their efforts to destroy our democracy; why Merrick Garland was weak but Jack Smith was strong; why the Department of Justice must always be apolitical and hold members of both parties accountable; how Pam Bondi has repeatedly broken the law; and why the Epstein Files will eventually reveal a massive coverup.
All that is to say that I found the discussion to be enlightening and informative. These two—Elias and Kirschner–are truly experts, not just someone fulminating at the latest outage.
Since the content of the blog is for subscribers only, I can’t post it in full. It is definitely worth your while to subscribe.
Here is Marc Elias’ introduction to the dialogue:
For decades, the American justice system has operated on a “presumption of regularity” — the idea that the government acts in good faith. But as we enter the second year of this administration, that presumption has become a dangerous fantasy. Glenn Kirschner spent 30 years as a federal prosecutor, and he knows that when the rule of law is hanging by a thread, there’s no such thing as “business as usual.”
Glenn joined me to explain why we need a “scorched earth” mission to investigate the criminal enterprise currently occupying the White House. We also dive deep into the Epstein files cover-up and discuss what it takes to hold the Trump administration accountable when we take back the White House in 2029.
And here is a brief snippet from Kirschner’s remarks:
Glenn: I think accountability doesn’t look like “you’ve got to throw them all in prison, they all need to be in orange jumpsuits.” That’s not accountability. My version of accountability, my definition of accountability, is if we fairly, impartially, aggressively — and I mean scorched earth — investigate in an apolitical fashion every crime that we see with our own eyes. The President and his cabinet, basically this is a criminal enterprise. I prosecuted lengthy RICO cases in federal district court in Washington, D.C. I don’t say that flippantly. This is a criminal enterprise.
So what we need to do is make sure every crime gets fully investigated through an apolitical investigation whereby we give all of the evidence to the grand jury and we let them serve as the first check on our instincts with respect to who should be prosecuted. Do we have enough evidence to make out, one, probable cause, and two, beyond that, do we prosecutors believe we have a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits, which looks like a conviction at trial? That’s some of the language taken from the U.S. Attorney’s Manual. That is our procedural Bible at the Department of Justice. Once we secure indictments against everybody who has been victimizing the American people and violating our nation’s laws, then we move into the courtroom. We try the case as best we can. We deliver it to the jury and they begin to deliberate.
Accountability is done at that point. That may sound counterintuitive coming from a prosecutor who liked winning convictions. I enjoyed holding perpetrators accountable, vindicating the rights of victims, and protecting the community. But the result is not as important as the process. Justice is a process. And once we deliver it to the second check on our instincts—the trial jury sitting as the conscience of the community, just as grand jurors do—we live with the result, win, lose, or draw: conviction, acquittal, or mistrial because it’s a hung jury where the jurors couldn’t agree unanimously on a verdict. That’s what accountability looks like: putting everybody fairly and apolitically through the criminal justice system and let first the grand jurors decide and then we let the trial jurors decide.
Trump and his Department of Justice have a very bad practice of appointing federal prosecutors without bothering to have them confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as the Constitution requires.
Several of his choices have been disqualified by federal courts. If a vacancy exists, the judges appoint a replacement. But Trump and Bondi then fire the judges’s choice.
Remember Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s personal attorney? He named her the U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia. She got an indictment against New York State Attorney General Letitia James, but she was never confirmed by the Senate. After six months as interim U.S. Attorney, she was removed by federal judges, and the indictment she won was dismissed as illegal.
In New Jersey, Trump picked another personal attorney, Alina Habba, as U.S. Attorney, again bypassed the Senate, and a panel of judges removed her. When the judges named a qualified replacement, Trump and the Department of Justice fired him. Having been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, Trump has a very long list of personal attorneys.
Judge Matthew W. Brann ruled that the appointment of the three prosecutors was illegal. Brann, a conservative Republican appointed by Obama, said that this unconstitutional maneuver put in jeopardy all the convictions secured by this office since December, when the troika took charge.
He wrote:
Using italics that demonstrated the heightened tenor of his ruling, he wrote that the Trump administration had shown through its statements and actions that it cared far more about who was running the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office “than whether it is running at all.”
Judge Brann pointedly said that the president’s continued reliance on unlawful mechanisms to appoint top federal prosecutors meant that “scores of dangerous criminals could have their cases dismissed or convictions eventually reversed…”
During Mr. Trump’s second term, when judges have installed a U.S. attorney, the Justice Department has fired them. After it did so with an interim U.S. attorney in upstate New York recently, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, wrote on social media: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution.”
Judge Brann, a federal judge who typically sits in Pennsylvania but was designated to handle the matter in New Jersey, referred to that statement and others like it as “combative (and legally incomplete).” He said that such assertions clearly indicated that “the Department of Justice would not permit anyone to hold any United States attorney’s office if that person was not handpicked by the president…”
Judge Brann joins a growing collection of district court judges in New Jersey and around the country whose rulings are increasingly colored by their frustration with what they have consistently characterized as the lawless behavior of the Trump administration.
In several such rulings, judges appear to be seeking strategies to address frequent violations of the law. At least three in New Jersey have proposed new processes or tactics that they clearly hope will curb the administration’s conduct.
At the same time, the administration has grown more and more belligerent toward the judiciary. Top officials ridiculed the Supreme Court after it ruled against Mr. Trump’s tariffs, and Justice Department lawyers began an appeals court brief last week by saying: “Courts cannot tell the president what to say. Courts cannot tell the president what not to say.”
Since last summer, the New Jersey prosecutor’s office has been a casualty of the chaos created by the Trump administration’s moves to retain control. Dozens of seasoned lawyers have left the office, and trial court judges have been forced to grapple with the possibility that decisions they make about criminal cases could be overturned.
The Trump administration is trying to destroy what it does not control: the electoral process, the legal system, the public’s belief in the fairness of democracy as a way of government.
Despite the Trump regime attacking the Constitution, eroding our rights, and filling every office with incompetent or malevolent individuals, our legal system has frustrated some (certainly not all) of their evil designs.
Not three hurrahs but only two. Why? The Department of Justice is now wholly under Trump’s control. It has become Trump’s law firm, answering only to him. The U.S. Supreme Court has been far too accepting of Trump’s reckless policies. Too many federal judges have gone along with him.
All too often, the regime has ignored the judges. Rulings against Trump’s policies have come from all kinds of judges, including some appointed by Trump. Grand juries have refused his efforts to indict his enemies.
Nonetheless, many federal judges across the country have repeatedly blocked the regime. Many have defended the right of due process for immigrants, many of whom are arrested without a warrant or access to a lawyer, then disappeared into a detention camp or deported to a country they never lived in.
Here are reasons for cheer.
The U.S. Supreme Court declared that Trump does not have the power to slap tariffs on every other country, because the Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress, not the President. Trump, furious, responded by slapping a 10% tariff on every country, then raised it to 15%. Will the Supreme Court ignore his open defiance?
This is the same Court that ruled that the President is above the law. Absolute immunity. Trump is the kind of guy who loves absolute immunity for any actions he takes.
Even more powerful than the decisions of judges has been the refusal of grand juries to indict Trump’s enemies and critics. That’s why he attacked Iran without congressional approval. Why should he bother? He is above the law, the dream of a habitual law-breaker.
Many federal judges have repeatedly defended the very American idea that immigrants–even undocumented immigrants–have legal rights. They have repeatedly interfered with ICE’s efforts to arrest, detain, and oust immigrants, without a hearing, without due process.
Federal judges confounded Trump’s vendetta against big law firms who represented Trump’s enemies.They frustrated his vengeance so consistently that the Justice Department dropped the charges. The law firms that quickly acquiesced to Trump have egg on heir collective faces.
The grand juries have been dogged in their refusal to bow to Trump’s pursuit of vengeance.
When Sean Charles Dunn, a paralegal in the Justice Department hurled his footlong Subway sandwich (turkey) at US Customs and Border Patrol agents, he was charged with a crime, fired from his job, and hauled before a grand jury. The grand jury refused to indict him. The “Sandwich Guy” was briefly a folk hero for his defiance.
Mark Joseph Stern, writing in Slate, said that the grand jury’s refusal to indict appeared to be an instance of jury nullification, stating that “a grand jury will typically indict a ham sandwich, but it turns out a D.C. grand jury won’t indict the guy who threw the sandwich.”
Trump told Pam Bondi to go after his enemies and she did.
She charged former FBI Director James Comey with lying to Congress, but the grand jury refused to indict him. She charged him again, and the next grand jury did not indict him.
Bondi then went after New York State Attorney General Leticia James, who won successful convictions of Donald Trump in New York state courts.
Trump wanted her indicted for bank fraud and mortgage fraud. (DOJ allegedly received confidential information from Bill Pulte, chair of the Federal Housing Finance Agency). Eric Siebert, the first interim federal prosecutor in Virginia, who was respected by both parties, refused to bring charges because the evidence was flimsy. He resigned and was replaced by Lindsay Halligan, a personal attorney of Trump’s who had no experience as a prosecutor.
Halligan persuaded a grand jury to indict James but the prosecution was invalidated because Halligan had not been confirmed by the Senate and her predecessor had used up the 120 days when he was interim prosecutor.
Two new grand juries refused to indict James, even though they heard only the prosecutors’ evidence, not her defense. .
In another high-profile case, Secretary of Hegseth wanted to punish six members of Congress–all military veterans–who endorsed a video declaring that members of the military should not obey illegal orders. Hegseth himself was on video saying exactly the same thing a few years ago, but no matter. Trump said that their actions were “seditious” and deserved the death penalty. In another comment, he called them “traitors.” Trump’s top aide Stephen Miller said that the six were engaged in an “insurrection.”
The case was put before a grand jury by the U.S. Attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, a former FOX News host.
Not one member of the Grand Jury supported the indictment.
In a separate case, Hegseth tried to reduce Senator Mark Kelly’s rank and pension to punish him for participating in the video. Kelly said he had free speech rights. Federal Judge Richard Leon, a Bush II appointee, enjoined Hegseth’s actions. Hegseth is appealing; he wants to bring Kelly down. His case, however, is absurd. How can a U.S. Senator be muzzled because he is a veteran? How can the Secretary of Defense be allowed to vindictively reduce the rank and pension of those who served honorably but had the temerity to speak their mind?
A few days ago, Federal Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts ruled that the government’s policy of deporting immigrants to third countries–countries they have never lived in–is illegal. This is an unusually cruel policy. The decision will of course be appealed.
So three cheers for the brave judges who stand up for the rights of individuals.
Three cheers for Grand Juries, especially those who think for themselves and refuse to be cowed by political bigwigs.
And two cheers for our legal system, which moves very slowly and can bankrupt anyone who does not have a pro bono lawyer.
At the beginning of his second term, Trump demanded that many large law firms be punished because they had opposed him in the past or represented his opponents. He threatened to bar them from any federal work unless they agreed to donate millions of dollars in pro bono services to causes of his choosing. Most law firms, among the most prestigious in the country, quickly accepted Trump’s demands.
Four major law firms decided to fight the executive order. They won in federal courts. Yesterday the Trump Department of Justice announced that it was dropping its efforts to punish the four resisting firms. The ones who quickly conceded owe Trump nearly $1 billion in legal services.
As historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his book On Tyranny, Do Not Obey in Advance. The losing law firms did not fight for their independence. They obeyed in advance.
The Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Justice Department as soon as Monday was expected to drop its appeals of four trial-court rulings that struck down President Trump’s actions against law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey.
Trump issued a string of executive orders last year against several law firms and individual lawyers that would have stripped security clearances, restricted their access to federal buildings and directed agencies to end any federal contracts with the firms and their clients.
While the administration lost its battle in court, the executive orders nonetheless put a lasting chill on the industry. Fear of the orders prompted nine large firms to make deals with the president, promising nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes favored by the administration. Many of the same firms that took a leading role opposing the Trump administration in court during his first term have shied away from taking on pro bono cases adverse to the government.
“This affected the interest of big law firms doing what they normally do, to stand up for people without representation,” said Scott Cummings, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In that sense, Trump achieved something important that will linger.”
In targeting the firms, Trump cited their connections to his political rivals and criticized their diversity initiatives and pro bono work advocating for immigrants, transgender rights and voting protections. The White House had singled out these firms for representing clients including Hillary Clinton and George Soros, and for ties to figures such as Robert Mueller, who as special counsel led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The orders set off a panic among law firm leaders across the country, especially after one of the biggest firms, Paul Weiss, chose to settle with the White House rather than gamble on suing the administration.
Others chose a combative approach, arguing in a series of lawsuits that Trump’s actions amounted to unconstitutional retaliation and an abuse of executive power. The firms said the orders would be devastating to their business and that they risked losing lucrative clients that work with the federal government….
An ideological mix of judges ruled against the administration, saying the executive orders undermined bedrock principles of the U.S. legal system. In one decision, Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said blocking the sanctions was necessary to preserve an “independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting.”
Joyce Vance has an excellent post about the law firms that defended themselves and those that capitulated at once to Trump.
She wrote:
So far, four different federal judges have held the orders are unconstitutional. While one of those judges was appointed by Barack Obama and another by Joe Biden, two of them were appointed by George W. Bush— bad math for the administration.
As for the firms that capitulated early on, they too appear to have miscalculated. Neera Tanden, who served in the White House during the Biden administration, explained the cost on Twitter:
Former Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who is now the Director of the Center for Law and Public Trust at NYU Law School, explained it like this: “The law firms that capitulated to blatantly unconstitutional orders out of fear and for increased profit undermined the rule of law and the legal profession in this country. This episode will be remembered as demonstrating the difference between institutions that had the courage to uphold the Constitution and fight bullying, and those that didn’t and gained nothing. Let’s hope that media companies, universities, and other organizations pay heed.”
Standing up to the bully is the right response. Yes, it requires some initial courage. But the bully ultimately backs down. And every time he does, we win. Today, we won again, thanks to some lawyers who were willing to take the risk and be brave.
Erwin Chemerinsky is a leading Constitutional scholar and dean of the law school at Berkeley. He wrote the following analysis for CAFE, a publication of legal scholars
He writes:
The attack on Iran shows how far this country has gone in abandoning checks and balances and creating a president with virtually limitless power. President Trump could have and should have sought congressional approval for this military action, as President George W. Bush did after 9/11 in having Congress adopt the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. But instead, President Trump acted unilaterally, again rendering Congress meaningless.
The Constitution created an elegant structure that was meant to require two branches of government to be involved for any major action of the federal government. Enacting a law required the involvement of Congress and the President. Enforcing a law necessitated a prosecution by the executive branch and a conviction by the courts. Appointing ambassadors or Supreme Court justices required nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate. A treaty is negotiated by the President, but effective only if ratified by the Senate.
War powers, too, were divided between Congress and the President. Under Article I of the Constitution, Congress has the power to declare war, while Article II says that the President is the Commander-in-Chief. Although there has long been debate over the power of the President to use troops without congressional approval, the Constitution was meant to have both branches of government involved before the United States goes to war. Most simply, the framework of the Constitution intended that Congress would decide whether the United States would be involved in a war, and if so, then it would be for the President to decide how to wage it.
Of course, there can be emergencies where it is impossible for Congress to be consulted or involved before troops are used. But no one realistically can say there was an emergency that required military action in Iran. That country’s development of nuclear weapons and its human rights violations are not new. In fact, this is the second military action against Iran in the last year. President Trump has been threatening new military action against Iran for weeks.
Moreover, the War Powers Resolution, a federal statute adopted in 1973, requires congressional approval for the United States to be involved in a war. Under that statute, the president must notify Congress within 48 hours of the military action, and must seek congressional approval for troops to remain for more than 60 days. Congress adopted this in an attempt to reassert its powers after the disastrous war in Vietnam. The War Powers Resolution reinforces the basic constitutional principle of checks and balances and the Constitution’s rejection of unconstrained presidential power.
There is no doubt that we are at war in Iran. President Trump has described this as a “massive” military effort and has warned that there likely will be the loss of lives, in Iran and Israel, across the Middle East, and of American soldiers.
No one person should be able to make this choice under a Constitution based on the separation of powers. President Trump should have sought congressional approval, like the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed in 2001. This would have allowed scrutiny of President Trump’s claims about the need for this military action.
President Trump has asserted that the military action was needed because Iran had enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days and was developing long-range missiles that would soon be capable of hitting the United States. President Trump’s long history of lying to serve his purposes certainly should warrant scrutiny of his claims. Congress should have had the opportunity to do this before the United States went to war in Iran.
There is strong reason to believe that President Trump’s claims of a need for this military action are simply false. There are serious doubts that Iran has sufficient nuclear material to construct an atomic bomb. In fact, President Trump declared not long ago, after the first military action against Iran, that we had successfully destroyed Iran’s nuclear capacity. Experts also disagree that Iran has long-range missiles.
None of this is to deny that Iran has engaged in brutal repression. Nor is it to deny the concern over the dangers of Iran having nuclear weapons. But whether these fears justified military action should have been scrutinized, debated, and decided in Congress.
President Trump likely feared that if he had gone to Congress for authority to launch military actions against Iran, even the Republican controlled House and Senate would have said no. But that is exactly why the Constitution intended two branches of government to be involved in war-making decisions.
President Trump certainly also believes that he did not need congressional approval and that, as Commander in Chief, he can use the military however he wants. Unfortunately, there have been many instances in which both Republican and Democratic Presidents have used troops without congressional authorization.
But under a Constitution committed to checks and balances, there must be some limit on what the President can do unilaterally, especially in a matter so grave as involving the United States in war. It is now imperative that Congress exercise its constitutional powers. It should immediately hold oversight hearings to learn the objectives of the military action in Iran. Congress must be part of deciding what comes next.
More fundamentally, we need to recognize a serious flaw in how the Constitution has come to be implemented. There is no separation of powers and no checks and balances when it comes to war powers. We have come to empower the President to do whatever he wants. We should recoil at this and be very frightened by it, regardless of who is in the White House.
It is impossible to know the outcome of the military action in Iran. Will it lead to a regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear program, and a humane, even democratic, government? Or will it create a power vacuum and lead to a disaster like the one that occurred in Iraq after the military action there? Will the loss of life from this military action be minimal, or will a desperate regime in Iran cause catastrophic harm?
But it is precisely the uncertainty over grave consequences whenever there is a war that justifies why no single person should be able to have so much power. We must find a way to ensure checks and balances in the exercise of the war-making power.
Stay Informed, Erwin
CAFE Contributor Erwin Chemerinsky is the Dean of Berkeley Law, where he also serves as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. He is the author of over 200 law review articles and nineteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. He is a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times Opinion section, and writes regularly for the Sacramento Bee, the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He also argues appellate cases, including before the United States Supreme Court.
One batch in particular was missing. It consisted of FBI interviews with a woman who claimed she was raped when she was a minor by both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.
The law requiring the release of the files specifically said that the names of victims should be redacted, but not the names of the perpetrators.
There is a coverup underway. Unlike in other countries, no one is being held accountable for their participation in Epstein’s illicit activities. At least a few are taking responsibility: Bill Gates apologized to the staff of his foundation and admitted having affairs with two Russian women.
The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against President Trump, according to a review by The New York Times.
The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.
The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released. According to that index, the F.B.I. conducted four interviews in connection with her claims and wrote summaries about each one. But only one summary of the four interviews, which describes her accusations against Mr. Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. The other three are missing.
The public files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index also indicates are part of the file. The Justice Department released similar interview notes in connection to F.B.I. interviews with other potential witnesses and victims.
It is unclear why the materials are missing. The Justice Department said in a statement to The Times on Monday that “the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the department also noted that documents could have been withheld because of “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.
The woman’s description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump in the 1980s is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president, that are contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.
When the files were made public late last month, officials described the trove as including all material sent by the public to the F.B.I. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement at the time, calling such claims “unfounded and false.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In a statement on Tuesday, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said Mr. Trump had “been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein…”
The woman who made the accusation about Mr. Trump came forward in July 2019, days after federal investigators arrested Mr. Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, according to records in the public files of tips the F.B.I. received during that period. She claimed that she had been repeatedly assaulted by Mr. Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s, according to a summary of an F.B.I. interview with her on July 24, 2019.
The F.B.I. did three subsequent interviews to assess her account in August and October 2019 and made a summary of each interview, according to the index of records compiled in the case. But the memos describing those three interviews were not publicly released.
The public files do contain a 2025 description of her account, as well as other accusations against prominent men contained in the documents. In that 2025 memo, federal officials wrote that the woman had said that Mr. Epstein introduced her to Mr. Trump, and that she claimed Mr. Trump had assaulted her in a violent and lurid encounter. The documents say the alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation.
The Times’ examination of a set of serial numbers on the individual pages in the public files suggests that more than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files. The missing materials were reported earlier by the journalist Roger Sollenberger on Substack and by NPR.
Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor who explains legal issues to the lay public. Her writing is clear, concise, and free of legalese..
She writes here about Judge Aileen Cannon, who has almost single-handedly protected Trump from facing criminal prosecution by her tactics and rulings.
Her post is titled, “If DOJ Is Trump’s Law Firm, Aileen Cannon Is His Judge.” I have heard speculation that if Alito or Thomas should retire, Trump may well replace him with Cannon because she saved him from trial and ignominy.
In her latest ruling, a few days ago, she barred the public release of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s report about Trump and his retention of classified documents after leaving office. As Vance says, the public release of such reports is routine. But Judge Cannon saw something in the report that might be embarrassing for Trump, so she blocked their release.
Hopefully, a higher court will overrule her or some anonymous person who has the report will post it on the Internet.
I am not pasting Vance’s commentary in full. I urge you to open the link and finish reading.
Vance writes:
South District of Florida federal Judge Aileen Cannon has history with Donald Trump. He appointed her to the bench in May 2020. She was confirmed that November. Then came the June 2023 indictment of Trump by federal prosecutors. It landed on her desk.
Some judges would have recused. There is no precedent, because no former president had been indicted previously. But a reasonable jurist might have thought that the public wouldn’t have confidence in the objectivity of a judge sitting on a criminal case against the president who appointed her. It would have been the safe bet for someone concerned about the integrity of the judicial branch of government. Judge Cannon did not recuse.
To be fair, the government didn’t ask her to. That turned out to be a miscalculation.
From the earliest moments of the case, even before it was indicted, Cannon’s decisions were questionable. Mar-a-Lago was searched on August 8, 2022, well before Trump’s indictment and Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel. Cannon was asked to consider the unusual motion Trump’s lawyers filed to restrict the Justice Department’s ability to use evidence seized during the search. It was an attempt to impose an unprecedented (back when that word still had meaning) constraint on the government’s ability to investigate a criminal case.
But Cannon agreed with Trump’s position, assigning a special master to review seized documents. Her decision dramatically slowed the progress prosecutors were able to make. On December 1, shortly after Jack Smith’s appointment in November, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Cannon. The per curiam order did not mince words: “This appeal requires us to consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to block the United States from using lawfully seized records in a criminal investigation. The answer is no.”
The manifestly unmeritorious decision she made in Trump’s favor pre-indictment was a harbinger of everything that was to come. The case was indicted on June 8, 2023. There is no way to know how much the loss of four months in giving prosecutors full access to the evidence against Trump contributed to the ultimate demise of the case, which was dismissed without going to trial on Smith’s own motion, once Trump was reelected.
Once Trump and his co-defendants were charged, Judge Cannon ruled in their favor at virtually every opportunity. She ruled for them on pretrial motions, like this one, after delaying. She rejected a request by prosecutors, a fairly routine one, to protect witness identities pre-trial. A timeline of her rulings and the delays they engendered is set out at length in this ABC report. Ultimately, Smith’s request to dismiss the case went to the Eleventh Circuit because Cannon had dismissed the prosecution in July 2024, accepting the highly questionable defense theory that Jack Smith’s appointment was unlawful. That decision was on appeal when Trump was elected.
We discussed Cannon’s decision in this post, where I noted that “Until today, every federal judge that considered the issue—all eight of them—unanimously found that attorneys general have the constitutional authority to appoint a special counsel. But Judge Aileen Cannon disagrees. In a 93-page opinion, nicely timed for the first day of the Republican convention … she dismissed the entire indictment.”
But pursuant to DOJ rules that prohibit the prosecution of a sitting president, Smith had little choice but to ask the Eleventh Circuit to dismiss the case as to Trump. When he did so, he wrote: “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant.”
That catches us up, more or less, to what happened today, when Judge Cannon ruled on what she characterizes as two “unopposed” motions, one by Trump, one by his co-defendants, both designed to prevent release of Volume II of Jack Smith’s special counsel report, the one covering the Mar-a-Lago case. If it weren’t such a serious matter, “unopposed” would be funny—these motions preventing the routine release of a special counsel’s report are only unopposed because the Attorney General, who should have filed an opposition, lives in Trump’s hip pocket. Cannon has managed to hold up the release of Volume II for over a year at this point.
Please open the link to finish this valuable analysis.
Andy Borowitz is America’s humorist. More than that, he is incisive and brilliant. He used to write for The New Yorker, but now has his own Substack blog called The Borowitz Report. I subscribe, and I recommend that you do so as well.
In this post, he gives insight into our notorious Attirney General, Pam Bondi, who has turned the Department of Justice into Trump’s personal law firm.
It’s important to remember that she was Attorney General of Florida from 2011 to 2019. She claimed that human trafficking was her #1 issue but somehow overlooked Jeffrey Epstein. As Attorney General, she is still shielding his crimes. Could it be that she is doing this to protect Trump?
Her obnoxious, aggressive, pugnacious appearance before the House Judiciary Committee showed the real Pam Bondi.
Can the attorney general of the United States go to prison?
The answer, of course, is yes: John Mitchell, who served under Richard M. Nixon, later served 19 months behind bars for crimes related to the Watergate cover-up.
Will the toxin known as Pam Bondi follow in his footsteps?
It’s worth considering in light of her appearance before Congress on Wednesday, a performance that Kimberly Guilfoyle might call “too shouty.”
Her testimony was unquestionably obnoxious. But was it criminal?
When you examine the evidence, it doesn’t look good for Pam.
This was the pivotal moment: responding to a question from California Rep. Ted Lieu about the Epstein scandal, Bondi snapped, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime. Everyone knows that.”
Lieu, who must have been tickled that Bondi was dumb enough to step into the weasel trap he set for her, responded that the attorney general might have just committed perjury. Which, as every Watergate superfan knows, is exactly what earned her Republican predecessor, John Mitchell, a trip to the pokey.
When the Trump shitshow is finally over, two things must happen. First, there must be a solid month of dancing in the streets. Second, there must be a reckoning: ideally, Nuremberg-style trials of the corrupt quislings who enabled this unprecedented crime spree. With those enjoyable tribunals in mind, let us now consider the case of Pam Bondi.
Remember when Trump nominated Matt Gaetz to be attorney general? We were so much younger then—although, it should be added, not young enough for Matt Gaetz.
At the time, I observed that Gaetz’s nomination was not what QAnon had in mind when they said they wanted to bring pedophiles to justice. In the end, Matt turned out to be as reckless with Venmo as he was about the age of consent, and Trump quickly withdrew his name.
Pundits claimed that Trump never expected Gaetz to pass muster with the Senate. By their reckoning, he was a “sacrificial lamb”—an odd way to describe a man who, in his personal life, had consistently behaved like a wolf. But by shitcanning Gaetz, the theory went, Trump was sending a signal to his Senate toadies that they’d better confirm all his other nominees, no matter how idiotic, incompetent, or drunk. When it came to Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Dr. Oz, Kash Patel, and myriad other passengers in Trump’s clown Cybertruck, the gambit seemed to pay off.
Matt Gaetz, peering into the gates of Hell. (Erin Scott-Pool via Getty Images)
As for the job of attorney general, Democrats and Republicans alike seemed relieved that it would not be filled by a summer-stock version of Jeffrey Epstein. Surely, whoever Trump named as Gaetz’s replacement would be an improvement.
Instead, Trump picked Pam Bondi.
In 2016, when she was Florida attorney general, Bondi secured her place in Trump’s heart with a speech at the Republican National Convention. Her bloodcurdling attack on Hillary Clinton inspired the GOP mob to break into a familiar chant, which prompted Bondi to comment, “Lock her up? I love that.” And so, by approving the incarceration of a woman who had never been charged with a crime, Bondi displayed an attitude towards due process that would someday serve her splendidly as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
She would, of course, have another opportunity to assert her preference for imprisoning innocent people with the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. On April 14, 2025, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump’s accomplice in the world’s most notorious administrative error, joined him in the Oval Office, receiving a much warmer welcome there than was offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. After chummily congratulating each other on the abduction and deportation of a non-criminal, the two men started workshopping how their brilliant strategy might be applied to innocent American citizens.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump told Bukele, who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator”—a stroke of branding so cringe, it’s amazing it didn’t come from Elon Musk. “You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump advised him.
Where did America’s attorney general stand on this flagrant nullification of a basic right enshrined in the Constitution? Trump added, “Pam is studying. If we can do that, it’s good.”
Pam, apparently, is a quick study. On Fox that evening, she was all in on Trump’s blatantly illegal idea, asserting, “These are Americans who he [Trump] is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically.”
It’s not that Bondi is bad at her job—it’s that she’s outstanding at the exact opposite of her job, that is, using the DOJ to subvert justice whenever possible. Bondi’s Department of Injustice, a mutant creation worthy of George Orwell and Lewis Carroll, has proven inhospitable to career DOJ lawyers, who have struggled in court to defend the indefensible.
One such staffer, senior immigration attorney Erez Reuveni, committed what Bondi apparently considers a cardinal sin: uttering a truthful statement within earshot of a judge. After acknowledging what was obvious to any thinking person (but seemingly elusive to Messrs. Trump and Bukele)—that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a mistake—Reuveni was put on indefinite leave and then fired.
Meanwhile, Liz Oyer, a longtime DOJ pardon attorney, was fired for refusing to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost them after pleading no contest to domestic battery charges in 2011. Apparently, Trump believes Mel Gibson needs lethal weapons more urgently than Ukraine.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see Trump standing up for the rights of domestic abusers, since a sizable number of the January 6 rioters he pardoned fit that description. He doubled down on his support for this cohort by appointing a crony accused of domestic violence, Herschel Walker, ambassador to the Bahamas.
But what makes the Mel Gibson case particularly rich is that Trump has repeatedly claimed he is punishing universities for their “failure to combat antisemitism.” If Trump is serious about spanking antisemites, he need look no further than his pal Mel.
After the actor’s 2006 drunk driving arrest in Malibu, the police report indicated, “Gibson blurted out a barrage of anti-semitic remarks about ‘fucking Jews’. Gibson yelled out: ‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’ Gibson then asked: ‘Are you a Jew?'”
Mel Gibson after his 2006 drunk driving arrest (L) and his 2011 domestic violence arrest (R).
In the upside-down world of Pam Bondi, highly regarded DOJ lawyers are fired and Mel Gibson is rearmed. But do such perversions of justice make Bondi a candidate for worst attorney general ever? They most certainly do, when one considers how decisively and repeatedly she has violated her oath of office:
“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
Rather than defend the Constitution, Bondi has used her time in office to tirelessly protect pedophiles—which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her tenure as Florida’s AG. The following campaign ad from that era, in which she vowed to “put human trafficking monsters where they belong—behind bars,” hasn’t aged well:
As Bloomberg’s Mary Ellen Klas wrote, “Bondi kept her distance from the state’s most prominent sex-trafficking case, even as Epstein’s victims pleaded with the courts to invalidate provisions of his non-prosecution agreement and filed lawsuits alleging that he abused them when he was on work release from jail.”
I am confident that Bondi’s misdeeds—including but not limited to her role in the Epstein cover-up—have more than earned her a Nuremberg-style tribunal. I am not, however, suggesting we chant, “Lock her up.” Unlike our current attorney general, I believe in due process.
Last night Rep. Jamie Raskin posted a comment on Twitter about his visit to a nearby ICE facility:
I just exercised my right as a Member of Congress to conduct an unannounced oversight visit of the ICE field facility in Baltimore. The staff I met with respected my right to visit, but what I saw was disgraceful. Kristi Noem has a budget of $75 billion she could use to ensure humane conditions, but we saw 60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets. Whether it’s for three days or seven days, nobody would want a member of their family warehoused there. The room set aside for dangerous criminals and violent offenders was empty. We’re demanding immediate answers and action.
What kind of a person treats other human beings this way?
The Trump fascists have many problems in Minnesota. One of them is the Chief U.S. District Judge of Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, appointed by President George W. Bush.
Judge Schiltz believes in his oath of office. He believes in upholding the Constitution. That spells trouble for Trump’s military occupation of Minneapolis.
“My hope is to be the Benjamin Harrison of chief judges: one that no one remembers,” he told his hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in 2022.
Four years later, the mild-mannered George W. Bush appointee — known for his conservative jurisprudence, his clerkship with late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his mentorship of future Justice Amy Coney Barrett — has been thrust into an increasingly pitched legal confrontation with President Donald Trump’s immigration forces.
It’s a role that will be remembered.
Schiltz, 65, has publicly aired his fury over the Trump administration’s mistreatment of noncitizens arrested in Operation Metro Surge, the Department of Homeland Security’s mass deportation push in the Twin Cities. He blasted the Justice Department for its criticism of his courthouse colleagues and labeled as “frivolous” the administration’s effort to compel him to issue an arrest warrant for former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others involved in last week’s church protest in St. Paul.
The clash is slated to reach a climax Friday, when Schiltz plans to haul into his Minneapolis courtroom Todd Lyons, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to grill him about the rampant violation of court orders that Schiltz and his colleagues say has poisoned the trust between the administration and the court.
The hearing raises the prospect that a top federal official could be sanctioned for his agency’s failures to obey the courts. And at the very least, he’ll be forced to begin accounting for an extraordinary number of cases — more than 2,000, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney — in which judges have ruled that ICE has illegally detained people…
In a court order, Schiltz cited “dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks….”
Schiltz acknowledged his move was extraordinary, but he added that “the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed.”
“The Court’s patience is at an end,” he added….
The order follows a pair of letters Schiltz sent last week that featured similarly exasperated language, this time about people who were arrested for protesting at a St. Paul church where they claimed a pastor was a top local ICE official..
In that case, Schiltz derided what he cast as an effort by the Justice Department to ignore the usual process in order to bring charges in a politically charged case.
A magistrate judge found there was no probable cause to charge five of the eight people DOJ wanted to charge, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who has said he was acting in his capacity as a journalist. The DOJ quickly asked for the district court to intervene. Schiltz said he surveyed a wide variety of colleagues, and everyone who responded could think of no precedent for such a request. Then when Schiltz didn’t rule fast enough, the DOJ sought the intervention of an appeals court, which ultimately declined.
In his letters, Schiltz cited “the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year old).”
He wrote at one point: “The government has also argued that I must accept this as true because they said it, and they are the government.”
The judge also criticized the government for characterizing the situation as a national security-related emergency, noting it had declined to bring the cases to a grand jury that could have decided on charges quickly.
(The administration has failed to get grand juries to indict in a number of such politically charged cases in which the evidence appeared thin.)
Schiltz’s first letter, in particular, is remarkable.
CNN legal contributor Steve Vladeck wrote Sunday, before the judge summoned Lyons, that his letters were must-reads when it comes to understanding the Trump DOJ’s manipulation of the legal process.
“Were it not for Chief Judge Schiltz’s actions here, we might not know about any of this backstory — or, even worse, the Eighth Circuit might have simply acceded to the government’s entirely one-sided account of what happened and granted unprecedented relief,” Vladeck wrote.
He argued that other judges should lay these things bare just like Schiltz did. And now Schiltz’s summoning of Lyons puts these issues even more squarely in the spotlight.
On Friday, a judge with impeccable conservative credentials is set to hold an extraordinary hearing putting the top ICE official in a Republican administration on the spot about its disregard for court orders.
And it could be a big moment in an already bad week for the administration’s Minneapolis crackdown.
However, Judge Schiltz cancelled the hearing after ICE met one of his stipulations, releasing an immigrant named Juan T.R., as per his order. The Court had previously demanded the release of Juan by January 15. ICE ignored the court’s order. Judge Schiltz wanted to know why. When Juan was finally released, Judge Schlitz canceled the hearing.
In his statement canceling the hearing, Judge Schiltz made clear his impatience. He wrote:
Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.
This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence. The Court warns ICE that future noncompliance with court orders may result in future show‐cause orders requiring the personal appearances of Lyons or other government officials. ICE is not a law unto itself. ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this Court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.
FOX News thought they did a gotcha on Judge Schlitz when they discovered that he had donated to immigrant legal groups. AHA! A closet liberal!
But he stopped them in their tracks with his response. FOX said:
A Minnesota-based federal judge who threatened to hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons in contempt of court has donated to a nonprofit that gives legal support to illegal immigrants.
Judge Patrick Schiltz, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, and his wife were listed in a 2019 annual report for the organization, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which routinely condemns the Trump administration and advertises free legal advice for immigrants, refugees and people detained by ICE.
Schiltz told Fox News Digital in a statement he has “donated for many years to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
“I have also donated for many years to Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. I believe that poor people should be able to get legal representation,” Schiltz said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 