Listen on Spotify (transcripts available) Listen on Apple (transcripts available) The post Fridays with Nicole Sandler appeared first on emptywheel ..read more

There was a subtle moment in yesterday’s SCOTUS hearing on Trump’s absolute immunity claim. Former Whitewater prosecutor Brett Kavanaugh asked Michael Dreeben whether DOJ had weighed in on this prosecution. Did the President weigh in? he asked. The Attorney General? JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: As you’ve indicated, this case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country, in my view. You’ve referred to the Department a few times as having supported the position. Who in the Department? Is it the president, the attorney general? MR. DREEBEN: The ..read more

I’m not, now, as full of despair as I was at one point in the SCOTUS hearing on Presidential immunity. (Here’s my live thread.) I believe that a majority of the court will rule that for private conduct — adopting the Blassingame rule that a President acting as candidate acts in a private role — a former President can be prosecuted. But whooboy, Sam Alito really really believes everything Trump has said about this being a witch hunt. He repeatedly said that the protections that we assume ensure rule of law in the US — DOJ guidelines on prosecutions, the role of a grand jury, the role of a judge ..read more

According to Person 16 — who has the potty mouth and performed candor we’ve come to expect from Eric Herschmann — Person 5 is a “total moron” — an opinion about Boris Epshteyn that Herschmann has expressed elsewhere. “I certainly am not relying on any legal analysis from either of you or Boris who — to be clear — I think is an idiot,” Mr. Herschmann wrote in a different email. “When I questioned Boris’s legal experience to work on challenging a presidential election since he appeared to have none — challenges that resulted in multiple court failures — he boasted that he was ‘just having fun ..read more

I continue to dig through the document dump Judge Aileen Cannon finally released the other day. The dump included 70 exhibits (some FOIAed documents) submitted in conjunction with Trump’s motion to compel discovery and a few exhibits submitted with the government’s response. The most titillating of the latter set is a November 2022 interview with Person 16 (whom I suspect to be Eric Herschmann, in part because Herschmann relishes giving titillating interviews in which he calls other lawyers morons). But for the moment, I want to look at Person 27’s December 2022 proffer. While the government i ..read more

Pursuant to Judge Cannon’s order, her clerk has finally unsealed the substance of a complaint from Stan Woodward floated last summer: That, in a August 24, 2022 meeting, Jay Bratt insinuated that if Walt Nauta didn’t cooperate against Trump, then he’d lose his opportunity to be a Superior Court Judge. Here’s the letter presenting Woodward’s side of the story and here’s Jay Bratt’s explanation. In his explanation of the dispute for Judge Cannon, Woodward repeatedly denied being the source for leaks to the press because “we litigate our cases in Court.” He even explained that multiple people got ..read more

Some of the most interesting documents from the exhibits released with Trump’s motion to compel discovery yesterday pertain to the review of the original 15 documents returned in January 2022. This email thread within NARA describes an initial review of the documents. And these tables describe what the FBI found on initial review. Together, they go a long way to describing why FBI had to pursue a criminal, rather than just a countrintelligence, investigation. The initial review was written on January 18, the same day the 15 boxes arrived in DC. That initial review and a follow-up confirmed tha ..read more

After a long wait, Judge Aileen Cannon has finally docketed the exhibits behind Trump’s motion to compel discovery in the Trump stolen documents case. Much of the dispute centers on claims that the Archives exhibited political bias because they wanted to archive Trump’s presidential materials. As such, the exhibits include details about NARA’s efforts to archive the Twitter accounts Trump and others used during their tenure. NARA would later send Carol Maloney a version of this in 2022, which focused attention on tweets that people like Ivanka had deleted. As that letter revealed, the exhibit ..read more

Hunter Biden is attempting to appeal the adverse decisions from both Maryellen Noreika and Mark Scarsi, both attempts for which there is no obvious basis to make an interlocutory appeal. As I’ll return to, in the Delaware case, David Weiss’ prosecutors are trying to prevent the appeal from delaying a not-yet established deadline for Hunter to reveal what he knows. After the Ninth Circuit set a normal briefing schedule, with Hunter’s opening brief due on July 5 and the response a month later, after the scheduled trial date, Weiss moved to have that appeal dismissed on — facially at least — soun ..read more

In my opinion, Donald Trump’s criminal trial, which starts in earnest today, is no more than the third most important thing happening to him this week. While I think charging Trump for alleged crimes for which his co-conspirators have already been punished and in which Bill Barr’s DOJ tampered has merit, and while I don’t think you can separate the allegations here from his other attempts to cheat to win elections, I believe the Trump Organization fraud case and the outcome of the January 6 case (and his claim to absolute immunity generally) have far more impact on Trump’s ability to continue ..read more