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.
If you had to read all the court documents mentioned below, you’d be slogging through over 250 pages of filings, and why would you waste your beautiful mind on something like that?
Instead, we’ll suffer through President Donald Trump’s bloated brief in his ongoing attempts to make his criminal convictions go away, and the latest emergency Supreme Court application from Trump’s solicitor general, and the Department of Justice letter featuring some truly creative math-ing to cover up the fact that the administration lied to a lower court. And you’ll just get the highlights—or lowlights.
I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho, or sorry that happened.
Trump has finally appealed his New York state conviction in his hush-money case, where he was found guilty on 34 felony counts.
It’s a 111-page screed no one needs to read, really. By now, we all know Trump’s argument, always and forever, is that the Supreme Court’s immunity decision is a magic shield that applies to everything. Yes, this guilty verdict in the New York state case came before Chief Justice John Roberts gave Trump the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, and yes, it’s hard to see how that immunity would cover Trump’s hush-money deal, which happened before he was president, but that’s just because you lack imagination.
Trump has got to be furious that these convictions still exist after he was able to get everything else wiped out. The problem for Trump is that this is in a New York state court, so he’s got no way to make his big Supreme Court friends take care of it or have his pet Department of Justice appointees make it disappear. Instead, he’ll just have his lawyers scream at the New York appeals court about how he’s untouchable and see what happens.
It’s really terrific that the president of the United States has so much free time to pursue his personal lawsuits. It’s so necessary to maintain a healthy work-life balance, isn’t it?
Is it good when so many people think you should be out of a job?
A bipartisan group of former federal judges and U.S. attorneys filed a joint amicus brief in support of former FBI Director James Comey’s motions to dismiss his criminal case.
According to the filing, the installation of Trump’s new favorite U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was not to do justice but to “pursue retribution against President Trump's perceived political opponents.”
The filing also addressed that whole not-legally-appointed thing that Halligan is also facing, saying that Trump’s temporary-appointment shenanigans with Halligan “ensure[ed] that the Senate did not have the opportunity to scrutinize his selection.”
In case you’re wondering if these folks pulled any punches: “If this Court allows the indictment against Mr. Comey to proceed, it will ratify the President's decision to breach the barricades created by the structure of the Constitution itself, in order to amass excessive and inappropriate power. This indictment is an embodiment of the creeping ‘accumulation of all powers’ which leads to tyranny.“
Indeed.
Illegal firings for everyone!
By now, Solicitor General John Sauer must have a macro on his computer so that he can quickly whip up requests that the Supreme Court sweep away any lower-court decisions that make Trump sad.
In Trump’s 31st emergency application since January, he wants the court to let him fire Shira Perlmutter, the head of the copyright office, whom he briefly removed before a lower court reinstated her. But why should he listen to them when he has the conservative justices on speed dial?
Surely, it’s a coincidence he tried to fire her after her office issued a report that said AI companies hoovering up copyright data might not always be legal.
Sauer’s argument to the Supreme Court, such as it is, boils down to this: You already let Trump illegally fire a bunch of other people, so you have to let him fire Perlmutter too.
Tough to argue with that.
DOJ deeply regrets the error. No, really. Stop laughing!
In the litigation over whether Trump can deploy troops to Portland, Oregon, the administration got lucky at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals when a three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that if Trump thinks a city is on fire, it’s on fire, facts be damned.
However, the administration just had to correct a rather large-ish error.
The 9th Circuit’s ruling rested heavily on a declaration from Robert Cantu of the Federal Protective Service, which provides security for federal buildings like immigration detention centers.
Cantu told the lower court, “To date, 115 FPS officers have had to deploy to Portland to maintain a 24/7 operational tempo.” Those 115 FPS officers represented nearly a quarter of the FPS, so surely you can see how dire things are in Portland?
The two Trump appointees on the panel ate this up, mentioning it multiple times in their ruling staying the lower court’s order blocking Trump from deploying troops.
One problem: It appears to have been a lie. Oregon filed a letter saying the administration had provided discovery—after the appellate court’s favorable decision—showing there were never more than 31 FPS personnel in Portland at a given time.
In response, the administration couldn’t help but inflate the numbers in a different way, saying that 86 individuals were deployed in total, 65 of whom were personnel providing building protection, and gosh, some must have been double-counted.
This is still wildly disingenuous. The administration’s original contention was not that 115 total FPS personnel had been sent to Portland over time, but that FPS was forced to surge 115 personnel all at once due to the extreme danger posed by people wearing frog costumes.
The administration knows full well how many FPS personnel have been deployed to Oregon. It doesn’t matter whether the administration sends in new FPS personnel or redeploys them. The relevant number is how many people FPS needs to secure the facility at any given time, not a running total of everyone assigned over several months.
The administration is working hard to spin these numbers, but all they really managed to do is get the 9th Circuit to agree to reconsider the case en banc. Now they get to try to convince 11 appellate judges to buy this ever-shifting math.
Florida’s New College bends the knee before it’s even asked
Remember the higher-education compact that the Trump administration graciously offered to nine universities, many of which it had previously targeted with sham investigations and the arbitrary withholding of federal grants?
Under the compact, schools could get more federal money if they just took the wee-little step of letting the administration basically run their school. Such a bargain!
Seven of those nine have rejected it, while Vanderbilt is mushy and the University of Texas at Austin remains interested in bootlicking.
But over in Florida, they are so hyped to do this that they didn’t even need to be invited. New College, once a top school in the state, has been brought low by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and creeps like far-right activist Christopher Rufo. Now that they run the place, the school’s ratings have tanked, and almost 40% of the faculty have left, but hey, at least they will soon have a statue of right-wing bigot Charlie Kirk.
On Monday, New College issued a press release explaining that it has done most of the things the compact requires without even being asked. The school eliminated diversity initiatives and shuttered departments that right-wingers don’t like. They did, however, keep one form of affirmative action: hiring conservatives for administrative roles they are in no way qualified to do.
Since they were willing to do all this trash for free, why not sign the compact and get paid? Congrats on another great achievement, New College.
