The wisdom of having the Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, do the Sunday morning talk shows was questionable to begin with. He’s not a media personality, like others favored by Trump, and there is little a prosecutor ought to do on television that wouldn’t be more appropriately done in the courtroom. But that didn’t stop Blanche from taking to the airwaves following his indictment of for director of the FBI and enemy of Trump, Jim Comey. It did not turn out well.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, on Sunday sought to contrast the Justice Department’s indictment of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey over a social media post with other instances in which people have shared the same message, saying that the department had gathered additional evidence during an 11-month investigation.

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This week I had to buy a new printer for my wife’s clinic as her old one bit the dust.

I’m not particularly upset about the loss of this printer. If we’re being completely honest, her staff tends to beat printers to death. It was repeatedly abused living in the back of an RV that regularly drove over bumpy roads. This is basically a ticking time bomb for printers. When they’re getting abused regularly, placed on inclines and doing shit that most household printers weren’t made for, then you’re probably going to see a high printer mortality rate.

Anyway, let me tell you what I had to do with this new printer. Continue reading →

In what can only charitably be called testimony, Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth responded to a question by Senator Tim Kaine as to the administration’s plans for today. Today is the 60th day after Trump’s notification to Congress that he started a war. According to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, this is that day when the Warfighter-in-Chief must act.

Except Hegseth’s response asserted otherwise.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued Thursday that the Trump administration can continue the Iran war despite a Vietnam-era law that requires Congress’s approval after 60 days of fighting, in an apparent attempt to stave off the rapidly approaching deadline.

His comments came in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee where Hegseth asserted that an ongoing ceasefire between Washington and Tehran “pauses” the countdown.

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Technically, Justice Sam Alito’s 6-3 majority opinion doesn’t kill the Voting Rights Act, as he allowed that Section 2, prohibiting the dilution of minority voting rights by gerrymandering to still be unlawful if it could be proven that the map was drawn with the intention of denying minority citizens opportunity on the basis of race.

To successfully challenge district maps under the Voting Rights Act now, Justice Alito wrote, challengers would need to show evidence supporting “a strong inference” that a state “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” A legal challenge that “cannot disentangle race from the state’s race-neutral considerations, including politics,” will fail.

But Alito, following Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Allen v. Milligan, found that times have changed, that distinctions based on race can’t go on forever, and that drawing district lines on the basis of race “collided” with the Constitution. Continue reading →

Some might think that I, as a criminal defense lawyer, would take comfort in the serial failures of the Department of Justice and its United States Attorneys’ offices across the country. The flight of career prosecutors, inability to secure indictments despite the minimal threshold of probable cause, dismissal of case after case, should bring joy to my tribe, right? Except I’m also an American, a law-abiding citizen, and a human being, and crime, per se, is a bad thing. I don’t want people harmed or victims to suffer.

In the past day, two high profile things happened which were so stunningly wrong, so fundamentally, laughably incompetent, as to conclusively demonstrate that the United States Department of Justice (or Trump’s personal machinery for vanity and vengeance) is utterly incompetent. Continue reading →

Not that Jeanine Pirro couldn’t screw up anything she touched, but she looked adamant and sober when she stated, “Make no mistake, this was an attempted assassination of the President of the United States.” Her sentence then continued by directly contradicting this assertion.

The complaint charges Cole Allen with three counts (with more likely to come), the top count being 18 U.S.C. § 1751(c), attempted assassination of the president. The affidavit in support of the complaint relies entirely on a text attachment to an email Allen sent immediately beforehand, which is being called a “manifesto” to dredge up images of Karl Marx and the Unibomber. Continue reading →

Democrats have introduced numerous war powers resolutions in Congress, to no avail. They knew, or should have known, that these bills were performative and had no chance of passing, but they did so to appear to be doing something, anything, to address Trump’s war of choice in Iran. Perhaps it made them feel warm and fuzzy, but it had no effect whatsoever.

By the end of this week, however, it will be a different situation. As of this coming Friday, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 kicks in.

If the war continues through Friday without congressional approval, it will clearly be illegal, having passed the 60-day threshold and the 48-hour notice period that the president is given, under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, to conduct this kind of military operation. Continue reading →

Regardless of how many things one thinks Trump has done poorly, one thing he’s excelled at is taking advantage of his position for personal and familiar financial gain. Hey, everybody has their strengths. One example of this is his suit against the Internal Revenue Service seeking damages in the amount of $10 billion for an employee of a contractor releasing his tax return. Before the Department of Justice answered the complaint or entered an appearance, Trump moved to extend the defendants’ time “so the Parties can “engage in discussions designed to resolve the matter[.]”

Before deciding the motion, Judge Kathleen Williams in the Southern District of Florida raised a very interesting question: Did the court have jurisdiction if there was no legitimate case or controversy? The judge began with a bit of the irony presented by Trump’s suit. Continue reading →

Great Stirrup Cay in the Bahamas is a private island owned largely by the Norwegian Cruise Line family of companies. This is not as glamorous as it sounds.

Let me explain. Back in the day in Appalachia, there were things called “Company Towns.” A very nearby version of one of these towns is called Alcoa, Tennessee (named after the Aluminum Company of America—Alcoa). These towns were completely owned by one company and often paid local workers in what was referred to as “Scrip”—or currency only redeemable in company town businesses. Continue reading →

The question isn’t whether it’s a good thing, or even just fine, that ICE and CBP agents round up random people who appear to be foreigners with neither visible names nor shield numbers such that you can identify who engaged in illegal conduct. Stephen Miller thinks that’s swell, even if Gavin Newsom and others do not. The question is whether the State of California can make it a crime for federal agents to do so within its borders. The Ninth Circuit, unsurprisingly, in an opinion by Judge Mark Bennett, held it cannot.

Section 10 generally mandates the visible display of identification by law enforcement officers operating within the State. See Cal. Penal Code § 13654. It provides that any “law enforcement officer operating in California that is not uniformed . . . shall visibly display identification that includes their agency and either a name or badge number or both name and badge number when performing their enforcement duties.” Id. § 13654(a). “Law enforcement officer” is defined to include “any federal law enforcement officer.” Id. § 13654(d)(2). And “‘[e]nforcement duties’ means active and planned operations involving the arrest or detention of an individual, or deployment for crowd control purposes.” Id. § 13654(d)(1). An officer’s “willful and knowing violation of [§ 10] is punishable as a misdemeanor” under California law. Id. § 13654(c).

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