It’s hard to imagine that now-fired Attorney General Pam Bondi would have been any more forthcoming had she appeared for a deposition, under oath and recorded for public transparency. After her stunningly belligerent public testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, it was clear that she felt no compulsion to either answer questions or behave respectfully, mirroring her patron’s obsession with hurling infantile insults at her, and his, enemies.

But Oversight Committee chair, James Comer, decided not to bother with such details as sworn testimony or public transparency despite the subpoena he was pressured into issuing, opting instead to go with a private unsworn interview. After all, she was fired as AG, so what could she possibly have to offer with regard to what went wrong with the Epstein files release under her watch? Continue reading →

Ah, summer in East Tennessee is wondrous. Families pour into Gatlinburg and the Smoky Mountains for excursions to the National Parks, Splash Country and Dollywood. Concerts kick off in Knoxville with artists like Luke Combs selling out Neyland Stadium.

And in Pigeon Forge, shoppers comb the outlet malls for the best deals while attempting to avoid the stares of the coked-up Kangaroo Man.

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After the government’s raising the specter of prosecuting E. Jean Carroll, who is believed by some to have forced her evil vagina over Trump’s unwitting finger, for being unfamiliar with Reid Hoffman’s financial assistance in her lawsuit when she responded to a question in a deposition, atop the prosecutions, both failed and inchoate, of Tish, Jim, John, Adam, Jim (again), et al., Andrew Weissmann, who has now taken up residence in Michael Avenatti’s old dressing room at MSNBC, sees a problem.

In an administration where prosecutors can be counted on to proceed in good faith — and to follow the Justice Department’s own rules — cases like these should be vanishingly rare. Right now, however, we can’t bank on that. All these examples have at least a whiff of prosecutorial vindictiveness.

Wait, is he saying that the Department of Justice doesn’t carefully scan the answers to every question in every deposition in every case in search of potential perjury for prosecution, as if E. Jean Carroll is inexplicably special? Continue reading →

Orwell knew.

Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.

It was laughable when the DOGE children deleted images and information about the Enola Gay from the Department of Defense website because the algo said so, combined with the typical depth of historical knowledge of young men who go by the sobriquet “Big Balls.” Then again, it was merely the Muskrats mindless method of eradicating DEI from the government in the way coders without conscience do. If it says “gay,” it’s gone.

But what the Department of Justice just did with its mass-deletion is of another bent. Continue reading →

Years ago, some clients would show up at my office with a file filled with their legal research. It would include pages of decisions from myriad jurisdictions which bore headnotes tangentially touching upon the issues in their case, but reflected their near-total ignorance of how the law actually worked.

They would demand that I read their research, which I told them I would happily do provided they would pay me for the time spent. Or they could just let me do my job and pay for that instead. Most would pick the latter. Those who refused tended to not be the sort of clients I wanted to represent, or the sort of clients who wanted a lawyer like me. Rarely were they willing to pay me to read their work rather than merely accept their representation that it was an “easy” case and they had already done all the work. This was just as well, as I was disinclined to waste my time or charge clients for work that was unproductive. Continue reading →

My first SJ post about Memorial Day was in 2007. The idea that someday Trump, or someone like Trump, would be president was unthinkable. “The Donald,” as he was then jokingly called, was the caricature of a dishonorable vulgar narcissist, the sort of person who could never be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

Back then, quaint notions like honor, integrity and liberty, still mattered. People didn’t contort themselves to make excuses for lies. People didn’t fabricate excuses for open and notorious corruption. People didn’t pretend this was only a nation for white Christians, and everybody else should go “back where they came from.” Continue reading →

As a young child, I played with G.I. Joe. Not the new kind, but the original that had ball-and-socket limbs inside its World War II uniform. But I would never have thought to use that as an introduction to an inane diatribe against expecting the Democrats to be elected because voters approved of what they want to do to this nation. Then again, I’m not Roxane Gay.

When I was a kid, my brothers and I often played with G.I. Joe action figures. They battled and drove military vehicles, and though they were too small to reach the pedals, we positioned them to take the occasional spin in Barbie’s pink Corvette.

There was something very satisfying about action figures we could move as we saw fit and insert into narratives of our choosing. As inanimate objects, they had no say in the matter, always staring back at us placidly.

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If there’s an area where I consider myself a bit of an expert, it’s in grocery store etiquette. I’m the least offensive person in the grocery store. This is a point of pride for me.

My skills in this field developed, strangely enough, around the COVID years where everyone in the grocery business went batshit crazy attempting to control one’s behavior by posting arrows demanding one only traverse in a particular direction down an aisle to select food items for purchase. During these years I perfected my technique of getting in and out of a grocery store in less than three minutes from entrance to exit.

It probably saved my life on more than one occasion. Continue reading →

An autopsy is something that’s conducted to determine the cause of death. And death it was. And death it still is. I feel the pain of Republicans and conservatives who find Trump abhorrent, both personally and politically. To the extent I shared those feelings toward the Democratic Party, the “autopsy” released by Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, under extreme  pressure  after he sought to conceal it due to the shame it would reveal about the handling of the 2024 presidential campaign and the party’s abject inability to face its failings, only deepened and confirmed my worst fears.

But the “autopsy” is now out in the open and confirms, in its stunning incompetence, the worst fears of the Democratic Party. Continue reading →

There are three pressing questions when it comes to Trump’s pursuit of architectural hegemony over the District of Columbia, determined to leave his mark so that no one forgets that for a brief moment in history, he was in total and unquestioned control. The first is his aesthetic, which tends strongly to the grandiose and tacky. The second is his authority to tear down and build up whatever pleases him at any given moment, which is partially solved by his stacking the relevant commissions with people both loyal to him and clueless as to architecture. The third is who is going to stop him?

Among the more grandiose notions is the arch Trump plans to build at Memorial Circle on Columbia Island. The land is expressly protected, however, and subject to congressional authority. Does that mean Trump has to use his congressional majority to obtain the authority to build a 250-foot tall arch to reflect the greater glory of Trump’s victory in Venezuela, Iran, or maybe Cuba? Not quite. Continue reading →