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.
It has been a fun week to see one of President Donald Trump’s latest superstars, interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, behaving like the dog who caught the car, but this week offered us so, so much more in the way of stupid legal tricks.
We’ve got former Trump adviser Steve Bannon running to the Supreme Court, Trump forcing out another of his own U.S. attorney picks, and Pete Hegseth’s personal attorney who is also a Navy attorney who is also a private practice attorney! Plus, special return appearances from both Brown University and … “Big Balls”?
Steve Bannon wants to find out if he has the juice
Trump’s worshipers and hangers-on have been watching his streak of luck at the Supreme Court, and they want to know if they can get in on that action.
Yes, it’s time for another installment of “Does SCOTUS Like Me As Much As They Like Trump?” Up next, Steve Bannon!
Steven Bannon, shown in Feburary.
Bannon, ever the media-savvy nightmare, has been shopping around his petition for a writ of certiorari so that we could all see it before it was docketed on the court’s website. So thoughtful! The Hill posted a copy of his petition this past Monday, and what it looks like is that Bannon would like his contempt conviction wiped out.
You’ll recall that Bannon is still sad there were consequences for when he refused to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Besides wiping his conviction off the books, Bannon would like the court to make it harder to bring contempt charges in situations like this.
Has Bannon thought this one through? Does he really want to be the guy who makes it harder for Trump to prosecute his enemies?
Also, perhaps Bannon wants to take a gander at how little the court cared about conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his entreaties, and adjust his expectations accordingly.
Big Balls, no justice
Two of the teens who attacked a former staffer of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are getting off with probation.
Edward Coristine, who went by “Big Balls” online, took some time away from doing whatever racists teens do when they’re no longer employed by DOGE to whine that the other people who beat him had not been caught and to “think of your daughters and mothers.”
Dude, you don’t even work for the government any longer. Just go home. You already managed to be one of Trump’s excuses to overrun the nation’s capital with troops, so you’ve done enough here, thank you very much.
The many jobs of Pete Hegseth’s personal lawyer
Tim Parlatore has a sweet deal. He represented Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over accusations he had sexually assaulted a woman in 2017, complete with a gross threat to sue his accuser, and it netted him a Navy Reserve commission.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, shown in September.
So, Parlatore’s day job is his ostensibly nonpartisan military job as a special adviser to Hegseth, the same person he has represented in his personal capacity. But Parlatore also kept his private attorney practice, including cases where he’s suing the Navy.
The Navy that he works for. Where he works for Hegseth.
As an unnamed person at the DOD said to The Washington Post: “This guy is an officer, who also wears a civilian hat, who is also representing the secretary, who also is in the secretary’s front office, who also still has a private law firm.”
Parlatore’s conflicting roles have been known for a while, but it burst back into the light this week when it turned out that Parlatore was the one who came up with the idea of trying to make the media sign away its First Amendment rights in order to report at the Pentagon.
When even Fox News—your boss’ previous employer‚tells you to pound sand, you fucked up, Tim. Good thing you’ve got your active law practice suing the government to fall back on if need be.
What if we run out of former Trump lawyers?
Daily Kos has been tracking the Trump administration’s shortage of morally flexible lawyers, but it turns out that Trump might need to cough up yet another one of these winners.
Interim U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan, shown in August.
While we were focused on Trump pushing out U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert so he could install Lindsey Halligan to bring bogus charges against Trump’s enemies, chaos was also reigning in the Western District.
There, Todd Gilbert, a longtime Republican whom Trump appointed, is out after he refused to punish a career prosecutor who said there were just no criminal charges to be had stemming from the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
No word on which sixth-tier, parking-lot lawyer Trump will find next for this role, but we’re sure they will be awful.
Brown finesses a way to say no after being stupid and saying yes
Brown University was one of the first nine schools offered the chance to enter into Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” in which schools essentially agree to end academic freedom and let the administration run the institution into a very racist grave.
It took a bit of dithering, but Brown turned it down.
The problem for Brown is it had already entered into one of those illegal “voluntary” agreements with the administration to restore $50 million in federal funds. And they needed to figure out a way to reject the compact without undercutting their earlier deal.
It’s a good result at the moment, but it’s also a reminder that there is nothing you can sign, no knee you can bend far enough, that will satisfy the Trump administration.
