Since 2020, professional groups in both law and medicine have weighed whether & how to discipline lawyers and doctors for spreading falsehoods. Their struggles speak to broader Qs about the First Amendment, trust in expertise, and how we define truth.
The "this has never happened before" argument is truly impressive. You know what else never happened before? A spree of potential crimes committed by a US president on the way out the door
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA): “I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”
Someone off-camera: “Oh my goodness.”
Dr. Saule Omarova, Biden’s comptroller currency pick: “I’m not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.”
can't remember who I first saw make this point, but it is genuinely striking how normie/centrist Dems have held the line on transgender rights without even blinking
He’s calling for the “eradication” of people. This is evil and dangerous.
This was in front of thousands at a Republican conference. Every person who believes that calling for the “eradication” of others is wrong must denounce it. There can be no “what he meant was” excuses.
There seems to be a strain of fatalism about the J6 hearings: they're not going to change people's minds, the reasoning goes, so ... so what? I would humbly submit that I am next to no one when it comes to pessimism, but I disagree. It still matters to tell people the truth.
Without getting too into the weeds of the current debate on legal twitter over the Trump indictment, there seems to be a split between folks who have practiced NY crim law (who generally think the indictment is stronger) & former fed prosecutors/law profs (who think it is weaker)
The angry response to the Mar-a-Lago search speaks to Trump's vision of political authority: all legitimate power flows from him; all force used against him is illegitimate; all violence used on his behalf is justified. For
@TheAtlantic
this is incredible—the Rowling podcast apparently uses Milo as an example of "cancel culture" not working. Milo is Exhibit A for deplatforming being *extremely effective.* he used to be everywhere. where is he now?
Rowling’s tweets are exhausting because they require constant vigilance. They are not screaming out obvious bigotry, rather, they are whispering plausible-deniability bigotry, the kind that purports to be just asking questions.
One way to understand some of the recent Supreme Court reporting is that the justices live in the very small, very rarified world of elite legal circles, which reporters are now newly interested in covering
Dobbs has obliterated my well-honed instinct to explain why it's Actually A Bit More Complicated, because it's not, and the thing is that the Dobbs majority doesn't seem to really believe it is either
The Supreme Court now largely functions as a mechanism for turning right wing culture war grievances into law, and the reason other constitutional rights are not safe is there will always be a new conservative grudge to be remedied by judicial fiat
There's an incredible moment in the podcast Burn Wild where an FBI agent says that the Earth Liberation Front investigation was the biggest domestic terror investigation ever, and the FBI spox sitting behind him quietly corrects him that it's actually the Jan 6 investigation
Kansas intel agency is warning law enforcement that fictional movie "How to Blow Up A Pipeline" poses a terror threat, despite acknowledging it's 1st Amendment protected speech & that they couldn't identify any specific threat, per leaked doc I obtained:
Lest we forget, Mueller considered Trump's dangling of pardons as contributing to a pattern of obstructing justice, by encouraging defendants not o cooperate
This is extremely far from the main takeaway here but ... Eastman was working to overturn the election on not just one but TWO work email accounts, one of which was affiliated with a public university and therefore available via public records requests?
NEWS: A new batch of John Eastman emails from Dec. 2020 shows his advice to state legislators seeking to rescind Joe Biden's electors — including his suggestion that they simply retabulate the popular vote to put Trump on top.
A lot of people working under Trump told themselves that they were doing a service by preventing something much worse from happening—preventing the red line from being crossed. But being in that environment itself erodes your ability to identify where the line is.
Separate from the strength of the potential charges, this check—Trump's reimbursement to Michael Cohen for the hush money payments, signed *during Trump's presidential term*—remains a truly wild historical document
The jump cut at 0:20 between Zelensky's shaky selfie footage and the more traditional video of him in the president's chair is really telling in terms of what Zelensky is doing as a communicator and why his videos are so effective
Zelenskiy with another video from his office in the heart of Kyiv.
Not many presidents would still be there and not in a bunker, on the 12th day of an invasion, with multiple intelligence reports of hit squads out to get him.
His resilience is proving hugely inspiring here.
It matters to create a record; it matters to show that Congress can stand up and conduct a complicated investigation into an attack on itself. The more realistic our expectations, the less likely we find ourselves paralyzed by nihilism when the hearings fall short of lofty goals
Elite legal culture is a strange and rarified thing. The justices operate in a world where everyone is very polite. I wonder how much a person in that world can understand or price in the anger of people who aren't bound by that same obligation of deference
Separate from the legal merits of the Manhattan case against Trump, the underlying conduct at issue (paying hush money to improve Trump's chances in the 2016 election) is ... actually quite bad. For
@TheAtlantic
Making this kind of threat to your own Justice Dept or FBI *when you are the president* is one thing. Trying it when you’re no longer in office is quite another
SCOOP: U.S. and Mexico reach deal to restart Trump-era ‘Remain in Mexico’ program along border. Announcement planned for tomorrow, with implementation likely next week. with
@ksieff
The FBI search at Mar-a-Lago came months after federal investigators served an earlier grand jury subpoena & took away sensitive national security docs from Trump's property during a June meeting, sources tell
@evanperez
,
@GabbyOrr_
&
@PamelaBrownCNN
.
The shoddy reasoning of the majority in Dobbs and Bruen is clarifying. If we're operating in a place where Alito can snark about abortion as eugenics or the uselessness of gun laws re Buffalo, why should we be required to evaluate those opinions on the level of cold reason?
The mood on English-lang Twitter has been so triumphalist around Ukraine—and to be clear, the scenes of Ukrainians standing up for their country are deeply moving—that I worry what happens on here if/when Russia starts to turn the tide by sheer brute force over the next few days
Worrying about the dangers of prosecuting Trump is a bit like focusing on the risk that chemotherapy poses to a cancer patient’s health: the chemo might be ugly, but the problem is the underlying disease. For
@TheAtlantic
Maybe I’m being too critical here or there’s context missing, but this reads like ... the senate majority leader asking the attorney general for political help in an upcoming election. Not great!
So far weaving in the Civil War references strikes me as quite effective, especially the comparison of Lincoln's willingness to concede to McClellan—when the fate of the country was genuinely on the line—with Trump insisting on holding onto power
The point where these buddy-buddy dynamics shade into bad behavior (eg Crow's jet) is a bit uncertain, imo, and everything being reported on isn't equally bad, but for folks saying "this isn't news, this is just how things work": the fact that it's how things work is itself news
Set aside the silliness of this argument—I think the underlying premise here is that Trump’s authority is the only legitimate authority, the office of the president is rightfully his, and therefore his desires and whims shape the world (and what is classified). L’etat c’est moi
Trump now claiming he had a “standing order” to instantly declassify anything he brought to his residence. Unclear if anyone has seen or knows of the existence of such an order.
"No one had ever before called me n*gger while wearing the uniform of Capitol Police Officer...To be candid, the rest of the afternoon is a blur." -- Officer Harry Dunn
White House lawyer to Eastman on Jan 7, 2021: “Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you're ever getting in your life. Get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.”
Aaaaaand now the hearings have been postponed to June: "Members of the committee plan to hold those hearings in June and aim to have a report out about their investigation by the end of the summer or early fall, said Raskin, who sits on the panel."
@TheAtlantic
The payoffs underline Trump’s unfitness for office and inability to conceptualize anything outside of himself. They're not worse than encouraging insurrection, but they are disturbing, and we shouldn't lose sight of that
NEW: Former FBI director Jim Comey and his deputy Andy McCabe were the subjects of highly unusual and invasive IRS audits over the past three years. Comey's audit occurred at the same time he was under DOJ investigation.
My grandfather came to the US as a refugee after World War II. Over the last few days it's been impossible to stop thinking about the brute unfairness of who makes it out and who doesn't
This doesn't mean that all law is meaningless, but rather that members of the public who haven't learned all our little codes and signals might be at an advantage in some sense in seeing through the pompous language built up to hide what is really happening.
“essentially acting as a lawyer for the Country” is incredibly interesting phrasing insofar as it pits the president (or the presidency) against “the Country”
"There obviously must be a point where information is so sensitive, and Trump’s disregard for law so extreme, to justify legal process against Trump ... Otherwise the law is entirely hostage to a former president’s (and his supporters’) self-serving veto"
Per Jacob, Eastman told him: “Al Gore did not have a basis to do that in 2000, Kamala Harris will not have a basis to do it in 2024, but I think you should do it today”
all of us who said that the inherently milquetoast nature of liberalism necessarily undercuts the possibility of a passionate defense ... we could not anticipate Dark Brandon
being unable to understand important court proceedings because of a flood of un-mutable voices taking over the phone line is actually a pretty good metaphor for much of the trump era
in fact, Milo's ban from Twitter was SO effective that he's maybe not even a good example to use if you were making the opposite case for deplatforming's usefulness because of how atypically effective it was!
I haven't done the necessary thinking as to why this is, other than that perhaps there just simply isn't a center-left constituency for this kind of rhetoric in the US, despite efforts to import TERF politics from the UK
the pandemic is so terrible in so many parts of the world right now and yet the members of the american intelligentsia are spending their time arguing over outdoor masking
The level of self-delusion among people working in the Trump administration—as also described in the incredible and harrowing Atlantic piece on child separations—is truly something else
In a solo concurring opinion, Thomas says the court should reconsider rulings that protect contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage.
at least to the vast majority of people who will never occupy these spaces. Certainly all this should be contextualized & no one should be letting the liberal justices off the hook. But saying "there's no story" just emphasizes how little scrutiny this world has received
Maybe I’m being too critical here or there’s context missing, but this reads like ... the senate majority leader asking the attorney general for political help in an upcoming election. Not great!
People often confuse requirements for criminal culpability w standards by which to evaluate moral/political accountability. The difficulty of proving corrupt intent shouldn’t let Trump off the hook, unless we accept DOJ as the arbiter of moral acceptability (which we shouldn’t)
I'd seen the footage of Fanone being pulled into the crowd before, but never the video of him being dragged back by other officers—who are standing above his body, screaming for a medic, telling him to hang on. incredibly upsetting.
I am increasingly wondering whether the strategy here is simply to be as outrageous as possible and thus build MAGA celebrity as a backstop against whatever bar discipline may be imposed at the end of this
New: Former DOJ official
@JeffClarkUS
has filed suit to remove the DC Bar ethics case against him from the local court to transfer it to federal court (h/t
@MikeScarcella
)
lol I missed that Musk said banning Trump amplified him. Not only is this not true, existing research on deplatforming suggests that the tactic generally doesn't backfire in that way