Lazy Caturday Reads

Happy Caturday!!

Camilla Dickerson, Christabel with Cat

I have mostly legal news for you today. I’ll begin with some reactions to the Fani Willis witch hunt down in Georgia.

George Chidi at The Guardian: Is appearance of impropriety enough to oust Fani Willis from Trump case?

Is the appearance of impropriety enough to change the trajectory of the Donald Trump trial in Georgia?

That’s one legal question Scott McAfee, the Fulton county superior court judge, will wrestle with as he contemplates whether to throw the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade off the trial of the former president and co-defendants in the sprawling racketeering and election interference case.

The stakes are high. If Willis is disqualified, it will plunge the prosecution against Trump, and others, into chaos, likely triggering delays that could go beyond the November election. If Willis remains, the prosecution of the former US president for seeking to undermine Georgia’s 2020 election will continue – though it will be badly damaged in terms of political optics.

Defense attorneys argued early in the hearing Friday on the defense motion to remove Willis and her office from the case that the standard for disqualifying Willis requires only that the defense prove the appearance of conflict of interest.

“She is supposed to be disinterested under the sixth amendment, and she has been anything but that,” argued attorney John Merchant, who is representing Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official and co-defendant in the trial. “If this court allows this kind of behavior to go on … public confidence in the system will be shot.”

Willis’s team countered that the legal standard isn’t an appearance of a conflict, but an actual conflict, and that it’s a high burden that the defense hasn’t met. If Willis had concocted a scheme of self-enrichment with Wade, she would not have approached two other people to lead the prosecution first, nor would she have been pushing for the earliest-possible date to begin the trial, said Adam Abbate, an assistant district attorney for Fulton County.

McAfee expressed a sense of ambiguity in case law related to prosecutorial disqualification, noting that there was no clear-cut previous example resembling the issue before him.

“There are a number of cases that appear to exclusively rely on an appearance of impropriety,” McAfee said. “They acknowledge that there is some ambiguity here.”

Click the link for more discussion of the case. This whole “scandal” seems so silly to me. And why is a defendant in the case given so much credence by the justice system? I question whether this would be happening if Fani Willis were a white man.

At Esquire, Charles Pierce writes: The Fani Willis Evidentiary Hearing Was a Joke.

Down in Fulton County in Georgia, Judge Scott McAfee began hearing closing arguments in the hearings that will determine whether or not Fulton County DA Fani Willis will continue as the prosecutor in her monumental RICO case against a whole mess of defendants, including the mess that is the former president*, accused of conspiring to ratfck the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Judge McAfee already has said he will need at least two weeks to render the decision. And the stall-ball strategy reaches another judicial arena. Christ, I’d hate to be waiting for some of these judges to make our lunch order. We’d starve.

By Vincenzo Calli

The case is a joke. It literally is a product of one of the people under indictment, a career Republican operative named Michael Roman. It tangled the case all up in Willis’s romance with prosecutor Nathan Wade, which, in turn, tangled the case up in Wade’s divorce proceedings. From the Guardian:

“This was a disqualification hearing that quickly denigrated into a daytime soap opera,” said J Tom Morgan, a former district attorney in DeKalb county, a Fulton county neighbor. “Have they proven a conflict of interest, where this all started, absolutely not.”…It’s not exactly clear what the standard Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the case, will use to determine whether Willis should be disqualified. Georgia law allows for a prosecutor to be disqualified if there is an actual conflict of interest. Experts say state law has long established this high bar to clear and the defendants in the case have not done so. But McAfee has suggested that defense lawyers may not need to prove an actual conflict, but merely the appearance of one. “I think it’s clear that disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” he said at a recent hearing.

Oh, I love the sound of that. Judge McAfee needs two weeks to decide whether he feels like Willis has a conflict of interest? Between this, and the Supreme Court’s punting the can down the road and into the Potomac, and Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida slow-talking everything in the purloined documents case, it is now my considered opinion that the American judicial system needs a damn shot clock.

Now here’s a real legal scandal for you.

Jane Mayer at The New Yorker: The Scandal of Clarence Thomas’s New Clerk.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas shocked the legal community when the news broke that one of his new law clerks will be Crystal Clanton—who became notorious in 2015 for apparently sending texts that said, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” For most young lawyers, sending such a text would indeed have been the “end of story.” Instead, Clanton is on the cusp of clinching one of the most coveted prizes in the American legal system. In the past several years, as Clanton has risen through the ranks of conservative legal circles, the story of her alleged racist outburst has been curiously transformed into a tale of victimhood. The new narrative is that Clanton was somehow framed by an unnamed enemy who—for motives that remain unclear—fabricated the racist texts to defame her.

This new account has been greeted with suspicion by many. If the revised story is a lie, then it threatens to implicate not just Justice Thomas, who has endorsed it, but several lower-court federal judges and the leader of a major political group aligned with former President Donald Trump. Indeed, the whole affair may prove one of the most shopworn axioms of political reporting—that the coverup is worse than the crime.

Loe Saalborn Woman with a Cat 1950

When the vile texts were sent, Clanton was the second-in-command and field director of the hard-right youth group Turning Point USA. The organization, a nonprofit advocacy group closely allied with Donald Trump’s Presidential aspirations in 2024, is well known for poisonous rhetoric: its leader, Charlie Kirk, has recently denigrated Martin Luther King, Jr., as “awful,” questioned whether Black pilots are capable of flying planes, and argued that televised public executions, perhaps by guillotine, should be held in America, with young people watching. Yet, even within Turning Point, colleagues were so shocked by the bluntness of Clanton’s alleged texts that they preserved screenshots of the messages, which were shared in 2017 with The New Yorker. At the time, multiple Turning Point employees told me that Clanton was the author of the messages.

In 2017, Clanton told me, via e-mail, that she didn’t recall sending the texts, and that they seemed out of character. But when she was asked directly if she denied sending them she declined to answer. The screenshots of the messages bore her cell-phone number. Another former Turning Point employee, John Ryan O’Rourke, who was the recipient of the texts, said at the time that he preferred not to discuss them. Several other Turning Point colleagues had also seen and circulated the screenshots. And there was more evidence. In addition to the racist comments, the screenshots show Clanton asking, “Can I come to Starbucks in 5?”; she showed up at one, on cue, a few minutes later. (In 2018, the online platform Mediaite revealed another offensive statement by Clanton, sent on Snapchat. The post featured a photograph of a man who appeared to be Arab, accompanied by a caption that she had added: “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”)

Clanton was kicked out Turning Point because of the texts. The Gini Thomas came to the rescue.

The story would likely be long forgotten, were it not for an extremely strange plot twist. After the texting scandal, Ginni Thomas, the lobbyist and politically active wife of Clarence Thomas, who had worked closely with Clanton as an adviser to Turning Point, unofficially adopted Clanton as the couple’s protégée. The Thomases harbor deep anger at the mainstream media, stemming in part from the Justice’s embattled 1991 confirmation hearing, and evidently saw in Clanton a fellow-victim. Soon after leaving Turning Point, Clanton started working for Ginni Thomas. Remarkably, the Thomases then invited Clanton to live with them at their home in exurban Virginia, for the better part of the next year. The couple encouraged Clanton to go to law school, and Justice Thomas himself recommended her when she successfully applied to the Antonin Scalia Law School, at George Mason University. Justice Thomas also helped Clanton, who graduated in 2022, line up a prestigious judicial clerkship with Chief Judge William  H. Pryor, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Pryor is one of the most conservative members of the federal bench, and a well-known “feeder” of clerks to Justice Thomas’s chambers.

Supreme Court clerkships, which last for a year, are extremely valuable in both professional and financial terms. It’s common for former clerks to receive half-a-million-dollar bonuses when they sign on for their first law-firm jobs, and the credential eases the path to coveted academic and political positions. An extraordinary number of Thomas clerks—twenty-two, according to the Associated Press in 2018—populated the high ranks of the Trump Administration or were nominated by Trump for judgeships; others have fanned out across the nation to other prominent posts.

There’s much more at the New Yorker link.

And then there’s the Supreme Court, which appears to be trying to help Trump postpone his federal criminal cases.

Sonja West at Slate: SCOTUS Is Slow-Walking for Trump.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the case in which former President Donald Trump claims a virtually king-like right of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution. The court’s two-paragraph statement grants the case and sets the argument date at the end of April, without explanation. The announcement came with little fanfare, appearing on the court’s website (if you knew where to look) under the yawn-inducing heading of “Miscellaneous Order.”

But while the justices may be attempting to disguise their decision as the normal workings of a court of law, we need to be clear: This was an extraordinarily political act. They had before them a menu of options on how to handle this unprecedented case, and from those options, they chose one of the most beneficial for Trump’s chances of reelection. This is a big deal, and the court should not be allowed to hide its deliberate decisionmaking behind a smokescreen of generic legal maneuvering.

Berény Róbert (Budapest, 1887 – Budapest, 1953)

In fact, at every point in this process, the court has acted exactly as Trump’s legal team wished they would. First, the justices denied a mid-December request to take the question on an expedited basis, forcing it instead to go through a burdensome and predictably meaningless hearing in a lower court. Once the case returned to them, they then stayed silent for a bewildering two weeks before eventually announcing they would take the case. And, finally, they once again refused to act quickly and instead scheduled the oral argument a full seven weeks away, in late April. While technically they could have stalled even longer and refused to hear the case until next fall (and for all we know the late-April date was some sort of compromise position), the result of their judicial foot-dragging is the same: It very likely delays Trump’s election obstruction trial until after the election.

By camouflaging their actions in the banality of court procedure, the justices are obscuring the extent of the power they are exercising. Scholars and journalists who cover the court are left struggling over how to explain to the public the momentousness of what is really happening. “The thing that I find most challenging about covering this Supreme Court is that I have a ‘this is an exceptionally alarming decision’ voice that I try to use very sparingly, so as not to diminish its effectiveness with overuse,” Vox Supreme Court correspondent Ian Millhiser wrote on Threads following the court’s decision on Wednesday. “But I don’t know how to accurately convey what happens in this Court without using it often….

…[S]pecial prosecutor Jack Smith suspected the justices would want the final say on the question, so in mid-December he asked them to please bypass federal appellate court review and instead take the case as quickly as possible. Resolving this issue speedily, Smith told the justices, was of “imperative public importance.” Indeed, public polling shows that whether Trump is charged criminally for these events is one of the things that voters have said would affect their decision in November.

Yet the court refused this request, sending the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where a panel of judges did expedite their review and unanimously upheld Chutkan’s ruling. Trump immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, and Smith once again asked the court to either uphold the lower court’s ruling or decide the case as soon as possible.

More at the link.

David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: Supreme Court Picks Up Where the Jan. 6 Mob Left Off.

I don’t think most Americans realize how close we are to losing everything we most value about our system of government.

It is not just that the leader of one of our two political parties has declared that if reelected he will assume the powers of a dictator. It is not just that he and his followers actively support enemies of the United States. It is not just that he and members of his party in the U.S. Congress seek to strip away more fundamental rights from American women and men, or that they have already demonstrated they are willing to tolerate egregious abuses of presidential power, or that they will abet efforts to steal election results with which they disagree.

It is all these things. But as we saw again this week, while opponents of fundamental American values control the House of Representatives, have a significant voice in the U.S. Senate, and aspire to reclaim the White House, the branch of government that has been most corrupted by the American right remains the United States Supreme Court.

The Court—through its decision to hear the ludicrous, anti-constitutional arguments of Donald Trump’s lawyers that his actions to steal a presidential election were protected by so-called “presidential immunity”—reminded us that throughout this century the right wing on the court has done grave damage to our country and the judicial system whose oversight has been entrusted to them.

By Joan Barber

Cases like Citizens United (granting the rich more influence in elections), Shelby County (undermining voting rights), Heller (expanding gun rights), Bruen (striking down sensible gun controls), Dobbs (overturning Roe v. Wade), and Students for Fair Admissions (gutting affirmative action) are just a few of the notable examples of their service to their benefactors and their political agenda.

The Court’s decision to hear the Trump immunity case was outrageous, legally indefensible, and handled procedurally in a way that made it clear they were no longer acting as a court, but rather as the judicial arm of the Republican Party.

They took a case they should not have accepted, agreeing to hear arguments that were already rejected in an expertly argued appeals court decision. Just as damagingly, they did so in a way that—regardless of their final ruling—would mean American voters would likely not hear a verdict before November’s election.

It is a dark irony. They have chosen to hear the Department of Justice’s case against Donald Trump for election interference in a way that is itself election interference.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast.

The DC appeals court has upended a large number of January 6 cases that have already been decided.

The Washington Post: Appeals court ruling means over 100 Jan. 6 rioters may be resentenced.

More than 100 people convicted of participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol may have to be resentenced after a federal appeals court Friday overturned a sentencing enhancement used to help determine their punishments.

The decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit came in the case of retired Air Force Lt. Col. Larry R. Brock Jr., who had appealed his felony conviction of obstructing the work of Congress that day. Former president Donald Trump faces the same charge.

The court, a panel of three Democratic appointees, did not overturn the conviction. But it said that a lower court judge erred in deciding that Brock should face a stiffer sentence for “substantial interference with the administration of justice,” ruling that the penalty does not apply to crimes committed at the Capitol.

At least 100 people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack have had their punishments shaped by that enhancement, and they could now ask to be sentenced anew. That does not mean they would necessarily face lighter terms. Sentencing enhancements raise the suggested range of prison time that a judge must consider. But in D.C., judges have generally imposed penalties below those recommended ranges, and they have often said their punishments would be the same regardless of what enhancements they applied.

Resentencing can also be dangerous for defendants. One participant in the riot who succeeded in undoing his 60-day misdemeanor sentence on technical grounds was given another 60 days behind bars by a judge who cited the man’s lack of remorse. (That ruling is now on appeal.)

Still, many will surely ask for lower punishments. Edward Ungvarsky, a defense attorney involved in several Jan. 6 cases, said there is “great potential” for some defendants to win earlier release. “Even if a judge suggested their sentence would be the same regardless of application of any enhancements,” he said, that judge “still has to meaningfully reconsider that sentence.” The ruling could also have an impact in plea negotiations, eliminating a bargaining chip used by prosecutors to encourage defendants to plead guilty without a trial.

Read more at the WaPo.

Finally, I want to recommend this piece by Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic: Why Is Trump Trying to Make Ukraine Lose? The former president isn’t in office—but is still dictating U.S. policy.

Nearly half a year has passed since the White House asked Congress for another round of American aid for Ukraine. Since that time, at least three different legislative efforts to provide weapons, ammunition, and support for the Ukrainian army have failed.

Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, was supposed to make sure that the money was made available. But in the course of trying, he lost his job.

BySuzanne Clements

The Senate negotiated a border compromise (including measures border guards said were urgently needed) that was supposed to pass alongside aid to Ukraine. But Senate Republicans who had supported that effort suddenly changed their minds and blocked the legislation.

Finally, the Senate passed another bill, including aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, and the civilians of Gaza, and sent it to the House. But in order to avoid having to vote on that legislation, the current House speaker, Mike Johnson, sent the House on vacation for two weeks. That bill still hangs in limbo. A majority is prepared to pass it, and would do so if a vote were held. Johnson is maneuvering to prevent that from happening.

Maybe the extraordinary nature of the current moment is hard to see from inside the United States, where so many other stories are competing for attention. But from the outside—from Warsaw, where I live part-time; from Munich, where I attended a major annual security conference earlier this month; from London, Berlin, and other allied capitals—nobody doubts that these circumstances are unprecedented. Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president’s foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility.

For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize. Johnson himself said, in February 2022, that a failure to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “empowers other dictators, other terrorists and tyrants around the world … If they perceive that America is weak or unable to act decisively, then it invites aggression in many different ways.” But now the speaker is so frightened by Trump that he no longer cares. Or perhaps he is so afraid of losing his seat that he can’t afford to care. My European colleague shook his head, not because he didn’t believe me, but because it was so hard for him to hear.

Since then, I’ve had a version of that conversation with many other Europeans, in Munich and elsewhere, and indeed many Americans. Intellectually, they understand that the Republican minority is blocking this money on behalf of Trump. They watched first McCarthy, then Johnson, fly to Mar-a-Lago to take instructions. They know that Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent figure at the Munich Security Conference for decades, backed out abruptly this year after talking with Trump. They see that Donald Trump Jr. routinely attacks legislators who vote for aid to Ukraine, suggesting that they be primaried. The ex-president’s son has also said the U.S. should “cut off the money” to Ukrainians, because “it’s the only way to get them to the table.” In other words, it’s the only way to make Ukraine lose.

Read the rest at The Atlantic. It’s not that long. There is a paywall, but you can usually get one free article.

That’s it for me today. What do think? What other stories have captured your interest?