Feds Want to Seize This $7 Million Condo in a Luxe Trump Building
Justin Rohrlich – April 1, 2024
UCG
U.S. authorities have targeted an apartment in a Donald Trump-branded luxury Manhattan tower, where they are looking to seize a $7 million unit prosecutors say was illicitly obtained by one of Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s children.
A forfeiture complaint filed Friday in Manhattan federal court and obtained by The Daily Beast says the action “concerns the misappropriation, theft, or embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars from the Congolese treasury, some of which was used for the purchase of a luxury apartment in the Southern District of New York for the use of President Nguesso’s daughter.”
“That property is Unit 32G in the Trump International Hotel & Tower at 1 Central Park West, New York, NY 10023,” the complaint states.
The United States is seeking to repossess the property “because the funds used to acquire it are traceable to violations of specified unlawful activities and U.S. law,” according to the complaint.
Sassou-Nguesso, who has been described as a breathtakingly corrupt kleptocrat, has held power in Congo, almost uninterrupted, since 1979.
Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2023 Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, Russia.Sputnik/Alexander Kazakov/Kremlin via Reuters
A past listing for the apartment says it is a corner space “overlooking Central Park and the Hudson River [and] captures the essence of the most sought after Columbus Circle neighborhood. Special features include: floor to-ceiling windows, 10′ ceilings, a gracious entrance gallery, living/dining room, a windowed eat-in-kitchen with washer/dryer, two bedrooms with spectacular views and luxurious baths ensuite, plus a powder room, capacious closets and a separate bar, ideal for entertaining. Sorry no pets allowed.”
Ownership of the Trump International Hotel & Tower is complicated, with the Trump Organization managing the building and owning some units and hundreds of individual owners holding the rest. On Monday, a Trump Org spokeswoman, Kimberly Benza, told The Daily Beast, “If this sale did occur, it would be by a 3rd party unit owner unrelated to our Organization.”
The apartment was procured via a byzantine array of shell companies and intermediaries who routed funds stolen from Congo’s public coffers through entities in Portugal, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and Brazil, the forfeiture complaint states. The money finally ended up in the U.S., where Sassou-Nguesso and her enablers hired law firm K&L Gates to purchase apartment 32G “for the benefit of Sassou-Nguesso, using a portion of the laundered funds and embezzlement proceeds,” according to the complaint.
Claudia Sassou-Nguesso, daughter of Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, during a national assembly meeting in 2012.Guy Gervais/KITINA/AFP via Getty Images
The complaint says Sassou-Nguesso was aware she could be rejected by Trump International as “a politically-exposed person,” and considered listing her cousin as the unit’s beneficial owner to avoid trouble. However, Trump International officials told Sassou-Nguesso’s team that “it was ‘not a problem’ and that the information was ‘only for the condominium building,’” the complaint goes on. On June 24, 2014, a Portuguese businessman representing Sassou-Nguesso in the deal wired a $710,000 deposit to the condo’s seller, sending the $6,525,000 balance a month later, according to the complaint.
“In sum, the money used to purchase the Defendant Asset was a portion of the approximately USD 19.5 million of Congolese state funds embezzled through… sham contracts… and these embezzled funds were used to purchase the Defendant Asset for Sassou Nguesso’s apparent personal enrichment,” the complaint states.
After the Global Witness report was released in 2019, the Trump Organization said that monthly common charges paid by condo owners did not go directly to Trump himself “for profit.”
According to the forfeiture complaint, Sassou-Nguesso paid some $250,000 in common charges between 2018 and 2022. It says they were paid “out of bank accounts in Luxembourg, Portugal, and the United Arab Emirates” in the name of another Portuguese national fronting for Sassou-Nguesso.
Although the apartment has apparently remained unoccupied since it was purchased, prosecutors say they have reviewed emails from Sassou-Nguesso about interior design work to be conducted at the property, transferring, via her worldwide network, more than $400,000 to a Portuguese firm to carry out the job.
The apartment, according to the forfeiture complaint, “is traceable to… a conspiracy to launder the proceeds of specified unlawful activities.”
“The Court, for the reasons set forth herein, adjudge and decree that the Defendant Asset be forfeited to the United States of America and disposed of in accordance with existing laws, together with costs, and for such other relief as this Court deems proper and just,” the complaint states.
The Trump International Hotel & Tower at 1 Central Park West in Manhattan.Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Trump’s properties, as The New York Times once said, “have a long history of serving as home to people with checkered pasts.”
Former federal prosecutor Kenneth McCallion, a onetime member of an organized crime strike force that investigated potential criminal activities during the construction of Trump Tower, told The Daily Beast that dirty money has long been attracted to Trump buildings.
“They’d pay cash for condos, held them for a few years, sold them, and the proceeds of the sale would then be clean money,” McCallion said.
Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier owned a unit in Trump Tower on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue; alleged Russian gangster David Bogatin—one of at least 13 Russian organized crime figures who have resided in the building—owned five.
A Trump development in Panama was “riddled with brokers, customers and investors who have been linked to drug trafficking and international crime,” according to a 2017 NBC News investigation.
They came for Florida’s sun and sand. They got soaring costs and a culture war.
Shannon Pettypiece – March 31, 2024
One of the first signs Barb Carter’s move to Florida wasn’t the postcard life she’d envisioned was the armadillo infestation in her home that caused $9,000 in damages. Then came a hurricane, ever present feuding over politics, and an inability to find a doctor to remove a tumor from her liver.
After a year in the Sunshine State, Carter packed her car with whatever belongings she could fit and headed back to her home state of Kansas — selling her Florida home at a $40,000 loss and leaving behind the children and grandchildren she’d moved to be closer to.
“So many people ask, ‘Why would you move back to Kansas?’ I tell them all the same thing — you’ve got to take your vacation goggles off,” Carter said. “For me, it was very falsely promoted. Once living there, I thought, you know, this isn’t all you guys have cracked this up to be, at all.”
Florida has had a population boom over the past several years, with more than 700,000 people moving there in 2022, and it was the second-fastest-growing state as of July 2023, according to Census Bureau data. While there are some indications that migration to the state has slowed from its pandemic highs, only Texas saw more one-way U-Haul moves into the state than Florida last year. Mortgage application data indicated there were nearly two homebuyers moving to Florida in 2023 for every one leaving, according to data analytics firm CoreLogic.
But while hundreds of thousands of new residents have flocked to the state on the promise of beautiful weather, no income tax and lower costs, nearly 500,000 left in 2022, according to the most recent census data. Contributing to their move was a perfect storm of soaring insurance costs, a hostile political environment, worsening traffic and extreme weather, according to interviews with more than a dozen recent transplants and longtime residents who left the state in the past two years.
A demonstrator holds a placard reading
“It wasn’t the utopia on any level that I thought it would be,” said Jodi Cummings, who moved to Florida from Connecticut in 2021. “I thought Florida would be an easier lifestyle, I thought the pace would be a little bit quieter, I thought it would be warmer. I didn’t expect it to be literally 100 degrees at night. It was incredibly difficult to make friends, and it was expensive, very expensive.”
Cummings expected she’d have extra money in her paycheck working as a private chef in the Palm Beach area since the state doesn’t have an income tax. But the high costs of car insurance, rent and food cut into that additional take-home pay. After six months of dealing with South Florida’s heat and traffic, she began planning a move back to the Northeast.
“I had been so disenchanted with Florida so quickly,” Cummings said. “There was this feeling of confusion and guilt about wanting to leave, of moving there then realizing this is not anything like I thought it would be.”
A window air conditioning unit during a heat wave in Miami (Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
While costs have been rising across the country, some areas of Florida have been hit particularly hard. In the South Florida region, which includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, consumer prices in February were up nearly 5% over the prior year, compared to 3.2% nationally, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Homeowners insurance rates in Florida rose 42% last year to an average of $6,000 annually, driven by hurricanes and climate change, and car insurance in Florida is more than 50% higher than the national average, according to the Insurance Information Institute. While once seen as an affordable housing market, Florida is now among the more expensive states to buy a home in, with prices up 60% since 2020 to an average of $388,500, according to Zillow.
For Carter, who made the move in 2022 from Kansas to a suburb of Orlando for the weather, beaches and to be closer to her grandchildren, the costs began to quickly pile up. She purchased a manufactured home and initially expected the lot rent in her community to be $580 a month. But when she arrived she learned her monthly bill was actually $750, and by the time she left it had jumped to $875 a month. Along with the $9,000 in repairs from the armadillos, her car insurance doubled and Hurricane Ian destroyed her home’s roof on her 62nd birthday.
A aerial view of a man wading through a flooded street. (Bryan R. Smith / AFP via Getty Images)
There were also the ever-present conversations and disagreements over politics that started to wear on her. Carter, who describes herself as a “middle of the road” Republican, said she learned to keep her opinions to herself.
“You cannot engage in a conversation there without politics coming up, it is just crazy. We’re retired, we’re supposed to be in our fun time of life,” she said. “I learned quickly, just keep your mouth shut, because I saw people in my own community break up their friendships over it. I don’t like losing friends, and especially over politics.”
A supporter of President Joe Biden faces supporters of Donald Trump outside of the courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., where Trump attended a hearing in his classified records case on March 14. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
But she said the final straw was when she couldn’t find a surgeon to remove a 6-inch tumor from her liver that doctors warned could burst at any moment and lead to life-threatening sepsis. After being passed among doctors, she finally found one willing to remove the tumor. But when she called to schedule the surgery, her calls went unanswered and her messages weren’t returned. After months of trying and fearing for her life, she returned to Kansas to have the procedure done.
“It just seemed like one challenge after another, but I kept with it until there was literally a lifesaving event that I needed to get handled and I wasn’t able to do it there,” she said. “I think it was the most difficult year of my life.”
No state has had more residents relocate to Florida in recent years than New York, with 90,000 New Yorkers moving there in 2022, according to census data. Among all out-of-state mortgage applicants, nearly 9% were from New York in 2023, slightly lower than the previous two years but similar to 2019, according to CoreLogic. One of those New York transplants was Louis Rotkowitz. He lasted less than two years in Florida.
“Like every good New Yorker, this is where you want to go,” he said by phone while driving the last of his belongings out of the state to his new home in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It’s a complete fallacy.”
After years working in emergency medicine, and nearly dying from a Covid-19 infection he contracted at work, Rotkowitz said he and his wife were looking for a more pleasant, affordable lifestyle and warmer weather when they decided to buy a house in the West Palm Beach area in 2022. He got a job there as a primary care physician and his wife took a teaching position.
But he said he quickly found the Florida he’d moved to wasn’t the one he’d experienced on regular visits there over the years. His commute to work often took more than an hour each way, he struggled to get basic services like a dishwasher repair, and the cost of his homeowners association fees doubled.
“I had a good salary, but we were barely making ends meet. We had zero quality of life,” said Rotkowitz.
Along with the rising costs, Rotkowitz said he generally felt unsafe in the state between the erratic traffic — which resulted in a number of his patients being injured by vehicles — and a state law passed in 2023 that allowed people to carry a concealed weapon without a license.
A handgun is inventoried at store that sells guns in Delray Beach (Joe Raedle / Getty Images file)
“Everyone is walking around with guns there,” he said. “I consider myself a conservative guy, but if you want to carry a gun you should be licensed, there should be some sort of process.”
Veronica Blaski, who moved to Florida from Connecticut, said rising costs drove her out of the state after less than three years. When at the start of the pandemic her husband was offered a job in Florida making more money as a manager for a landscaping company, Blaski envisioned warm weather and a more comfortable lifestyle.
The couple, both in their 40s, sold their home in Connecticut and were starting to settle into their new community when Blaski said they were hit with a “bulldozer” of costs at the start of 2023.
Her homeowners insurance company threatened to drop her coverage if she didn’t replace her home’s 9-year-old roof, a $16,000 to $30,000 project, and even with a new roof, she was expecting her home insurance rates to double — one neighbor saw their insurance go from $600 a month to $1,200 a month.
She was also facing rising property taxes as the value of her home increased, her homeowners association fees went from $326 a month to $480, and her insurance agent warned that her car insurance would likely double when it was time to renew her policy. Her husband had to get a second job on weekends to cover the higher costs.
While Florida has an unemployment rate below the national average, Blaski and others said wages weren’t enough to keep up with their expenses. The median salary in Florida is among the lowest in the country, according to payroll processor ADP. To afford a home in one of Florida’s more affordable metro areas, like Jacksonville, a homebuyer would need to earn $109,000 a year, around twice as much income as a buyer would have needed just four years ago, according to an analysis by Zillow.
“My little part-time job making $600, $700 a month went to paying either car insurance or homeowners insurance, and forget about groceries,” said Blaski, who was working in retail. “There are all these hidden things that people don’t know about. Make sure you have extra money saved somewhere because you will need it.”
A woman looks at bottle of juice. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images file)
When her husband’s former boss in Connecticut reached out to see if he’d be willing to return, the couple leaped at the chance.
The reverse migration out of Florida isn’t just among newcomers, but also among longtime residents who said they can no longer afford to live there and are uncomfortable with the state’s increasingly conservative policies, which in recent years have included a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, a ban on transgender care for minors, state interventions in how race, slavery and sexuality are taught in schools, and a six-week ban on abortions.
After more than three decades in the Tampa Bay area, Donna Smith left the state for Pennsylvania in December, with politics and rising insurance costs playing a major role in her decision to leave.
“It breaks my heart, it really does, because Florida was really a pretty great place when I first moved there,” Smith said.
Having grown up in Oklahoma, Smith considered herself a Republican, but as Florida’s politics shifted to the right, she said she began to consider herself a Democrat. It wasn’t until the past several years, though, that politics started to encroach on her daily life — from feuds between neighbors and friends to neo-Nazis showing up at a Black Lives Matter rally in her small town.
“When I first moved to Florida, it was a live-and-let-live sort of beach feel. You met people from all over, everybody was relaxed. That’s just gone now, and it’s shocking. It’s just gone,” said Smith, 61, who works as a graphic designer and illustrator. “Instead, it’s just a constant stressful atmosphere. I feel as though it could ignite at any point, and I’m not a fearmonger. It’s just the atmosphere, the feeling there.”
She was already considering a move out of the state when she was told by her homeowners insurance company that she would need to replace her home’s roof because it was older than four years or her insurance premium would be going up to $12,000 a year from $3,600, which was already double what she had been paying. Even with a new roof, she was told her premium would be $6,900 a year. Before she could make a decision about what to do, her insurance policy was canceled.
Shortly after, Smith ended up moving to the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, area, where she is closer to her adult children. While the majority of voters in her new county chose Donald Trump in the last election, she said politics is no longer such a heavy presence in her everyday life.
“I don’t feel it is as oppressive. People don’t wear it on their sleeve like they did in Florida,” she said. “When you walk in a room, you don’t overhear a conversation all the time where people are saying ‘Trump is the best’ or ‘I went to that last rally,’ and they’re telling total strangers while you’re just waiting for your car or something. It was just everywhere.”
A supporter of Donald Trump wears a Trump bust jewelry. (Chandan Khanna / AFP – Getty Images)
Costs and politics were also enough to cause Noelle Schmitz to leave the state after more than 30 years, despite her son having a year left in high school, and relocate to Winchester, Virginia. She said the politics became ever-present in her daily life — one former neighbor had a massive Trump banner in front of their house for years, and another had Trump written in big letters across their yard. When she put out a Hillary Clinton sign in 2016, it was stolen and her house was egged.
“I saw my neighbors and co-workers become more radicalized, more aggressive and more angry about politics. I’m thinking, where is this coming from? These are not the people I remember,” Schmitz said. “I was finally like, we need to get the hell out of here, things are not going well.”
For some Florida newcomers though, politics is the main draw to the state, said John Desautels, who has sold real estate in Florida for decades. While politics never used to be a topic for homebuyers, Desautels said it is now a regular subject his clients bring up. Rather than asking about schools or amenities in a community, prospective buyers are asking him about the political affiliations of a certain neighborhood.
“One of the first things they say is, ‘I don’t want to be in one of them X or Y political party neighborhoods,’” Desautels said. “I spend hours listening to people vent to me about fleeing the communist government of XYZ and they want to come to freedom or whatever. So the politics have been the biggest issue when we get the call.”
Even home showings have become a politically sensitive issue. He recalled showing an elderly woman one property where there were Confederate flags at the gate and swastikas on the fish tank.
But while politics are a lure to people arriving in the state, he said they’re also among the reasons sellers tell him they’re leaving, and the state’s politics have deterred some of his gay or nonwhite clients from moving there.
“The problem is, when we alienate protected classes, it sounds like a good sound bite, but you’ve got to remember those are people who spend money in our community,” he said. “For this pro-business, free state, I’m feeling it in the wallet, bad.”
In Kansas, Carter says it’s good to be home. She moved into a 55-plus community in a small town about 10 miles from Wichita. While in Florida she was paying nearly $900 in lot rent for her manufactured home, she now pays just $520 in rent for a cottage-style apartment — a place she estimates would have cost her $1,800 a month in Florida.
With the money she’s saving in Kansas, she can afford to visit Florida.
“People call me the modern-day Dorothy,” she said. “There’s no place like home.”
An aerial view of a vehicle driving along a flooded street. (Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP via Getty Images)
Nicole Wallace Gets Fed Up, Tosses Script While Covering Latest Trump Attack: ‘What Are We Going to Do Different?’ | Video
Stephanie Kaloi – March 30, 2024
MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace quite literally threw out her prepared script on Friday on-air while covering breaking news about a new public attack from former president Donald Trump. The visibly angry anchor told a panel of guests that “it’s time to do something different” when speaking about Trump’s outrageous and sometimes dangerous actions on and offline.
Wallace picked up her news script and tossed it to her right as she explained, “I have come on the air with breaking news about requests for gag orders because of threats for judges and their kids more times than I can count today before I got ready.”
After she apologized to the person who “has to write the banner at the bottom of my show,” Wallace added, “Donald Trump broke the rule of law. We should cover a broken judiciary in this country. Donald Trump managed to delay every federal, criminal trial based on facts that he barely denies.”
“Donald Trump managed to enlist the Supreme Court in a delayed process — the highest court in the land. Donald Trump brazenly and repeatedly attacks not just judges … judges don’t have Secret Service protecting them.”
Nicolle Wallace literally throws out the script, disgusted by Donald Trump’s latest behavior. pic.twitter.com/HtbiVrLkzk
Wallace spoke in response to a Truth Social post that Trump published on Thursday about the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, who had previously placed Trump on a gag order before his April 15 court date in his hush money trial.
Trump wrote, “Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised, and should be removed from this TRUMP Non-Case immediately. His Daughter, Loren, is a Rabid Trump Hater, who has admitted to having conversations with her father about me, and yet he gagged me.”
“She works for Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Leftists who Campaign on ‘Getting Trump,’ and fundraise off the ‘Biden Indictments’ – including this Witch Hunt, which her father ‘presides’over, a TOTAL Conflict – and attacking Biden’s Political Opponent through the Courts. Former D.A. Cy Vance refused to bring this case, as did all Federal Agencies, including ‘Elections.’
The claim about Merchan’s daughter has not been prove true.
Trump’s repeated use of social media to fire unsubstantiated and unwarranted accusations at his political opponents (perceived and real) is unprecedented in American politics, and has posed a real danger to his targets.
The gag order in Trump’s hush money case is meant to prohibit both Trump and surrogates from making public statements about jurors and witnesses in the trial. He is also banned from making statements about the court’s staff, prosecutors, and family members. The gag order does not prohibit Trump from commenting on Judge Merchan or his family members.
The hush money case is the first of Trump’s four federal cases that will go to trial. He is accused of logging payments to his former lawyer Michael Cohen as legal fees when they were actually for his work during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Those payments included $130,000 to adult entertainment star Stormy Daniels to ensure she would not speak about a sexual encounter she had with Trump.
Trump has pled not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records and has denied Daniels’ claims.
Watch the segment with Wallace in the video above.
At this point, I kind of feel bad for No Labels. They’re like the kid at recess who nobody picks for a kickball team.
The allegedly centrist third-party group holds the increasingly inaccurate belief that Americans don’t want to choose between Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican former president and current criminal defendant Donald Trump. Since both candidates have resoundingly locked up presidential nominations, there’s little wind in the sails of the “nobody wants them” argument, but No Labels has persisted.
Even Chris Christie wants nothing to do with No Labels
President Donald Trump shakes hands with New Jersey governor Chris Christie after he delivered remarks on combatting drug demand and the opioid crisis on October 26, 2017, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C.
The party has reportedly amassed big bucks from dark-money donors, but it is missing the one thing most necessary for a presidential run: a human person willing to say, “I am the No Labels presidential candidate!” out loud without feeling profoundly embarrassed and ashamed.
This week, Christie became the latest big-name politician to pass on the opportunity.
The former GOP presidential candidate told The Washington Post in a statement: “While I believe this is a conversation that needs to be had with the American people, I also believe that if there is not a pathway to win and if my candidacy in any way, shape or form would help Donald Trump become president again, then it is not the way forward.”
That puts him very much at odds with No Labels, whose organizers surely recognize their candidate’s presence on the ballot might help Trump by pulling votes away from Biden.
I know the group doesn’t like labels, but it is clearly a threat to the incumbent and an asset to the guy who tried to overturn the last election.
My name is Rex Huppke, and I am the No Labels presidential candidate
Others who have said “Yeah, no” to No Labels included: former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican; Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat; and former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican.
(FILES) Former President Donald Trump gestures to the crowd after speaking at a campaign event in Rome, Georgia, on March 9, 2024.
Since No Labels officials seem both unwilling to go away and unable to find anyone willing to play in their sandbox, I’ll take one for the team and be the group’s presidential candidate.
My platform will be: “For the love of God, please vote for Joe Biden. The other guy is, at best, dictator-curious, and he’s now selling $60 Bibles like some traveling huckster in a bad community theater musical.”
Getting to know the self-declared No Labels presidential candidate
Here is a candidate questionnaire so you can get to know me – Rex Huppke, the 2024 No Labels presidential candidate – a bit better.
Q: Why did you decide to join the No Labels ticket?
A: Well, for starters, I admire the party’s strong opposition to labels. I dislike labels, particularly the ones they put on apples at the grocery store. Those are hard to get off and sometimes I accidentally eat them.
Q: What should voters know about your key policy positions?
A: I don’t have any of those. I’m lucky if I can decide what I want for lunch, so asking me to decide how best to run the economy or deal with Russia is a fool’s errand. Absolutely nobody should vote for me. Ever. They should vote for President Joe Biden, who is by far the least likely of the two major party candidates to lock up journalists, forcibly silence dissenters and sell an entire U.S. state to a foreign power to help pay off his legal debts.
A: I guess I’d go with “incredibly selfish” and then perhaps “unconcerned about democracy” and “righteous to the point of arrogance and dismissive of all vulnerable groups that would be profoundly harmed by a second Trump presidency.”
Q: That sounds a little harsh.
A: Yeah, I guess I’m kind of labeling people a bit. The truth hurts sometimes. But when you think about it, even “No Labels” is a label, right? Like if someone called themselves a “centrist,” that’s a label. The only true “no label” would be … you know … not saying anything. Just kind of shutting up.
Q: Did you get high before this interview?
A: Yes. Yes I did. Nobody should vote for me. I am deeply unqualified. Please vote for Joe Biden.
USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke has bravely stepped up and offered to be the No Labels presidential candidate. His platform is simple: “Please vote for Joe Biden.”
Q: Will you be picking a running mate?
A: Hah! No. If I’m the best No Labels could find for a presidential candidate, do you honestly think there’s a person alive who would stoop to being my vice president? No, the ticket is just me. And our slogan will be: “Huppke/Nobody 2024! A vote for us is dumb!”
The Unhinged Arguments the Supreme Court Is Fielding on Trump Immunity
Jose Pagliery – March 30, 2024
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Retired American generals vehemently say that no, Donald Trump cannot deploy SEAL Team 6 to kill a political rival. Gun groups howl that the United States is turning into Communist China. And a convicted Jan. 6 rioter warns that President Joe Biden could someday get sued over the death of a jogger in Georgia.
These are among the 18 various groups that shared their wisdom with the Supreme Court earlier this month, filing amicus briefs on the same day that Trump told the high court why he should be able to dodge a federal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election on false pretenses.
Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump has finally reached the nation’s highest judicial authority, which will determine whether the business tycoon can be put on trial. The timing of the nine justices’ eventual decision will determine if the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee is to face trial in court before Election Day in November.
But ahead of oral arguments next month, the Supreme Court is already getting inundated with all kinds of opinions about the main question in the case: whether a former president enjoys immunity for actions made while at the White House.
The Daily Beast reviewed the litany of uninvited legal arguments spanning 599 pages, ranging from breathless reiterations of Trump’s claims to head-turning warnings. Yet all bear the signs of a historic case that could determine the fate of the election, if not American democracy.
The most unusual and unexpected amicus brief comes from three former high-ranking military leaders: Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served as Trump’s own acting national security adviser; Robert Wilkie, who served as Trump’s Veterans Affairs Department secretary; and retired Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, who once led the Army’s elite commandos in Delta Force and Green Berets.
The three former military men felt it necessary to join together and address—in public and at the national level—one of the crazier Trump legal arguments: that Trump’s immunity from criminal prosecution is so beyond question that it would allow him to order the assassination of his political enemies.
“No—the president cannot order SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political rival and have the military carry out such an order,” they clarified, marking the first time former military leadership has ever had to utter such a phrase in court.
The trio went further, pointing out that a Reagan-era executive order already prohibits anyone acting on behalf of the United States government from taking part in an assassination. They dedicated a significant portion of their 18-page court filing to making clear that military officers would be legally justified in refusing to even carry out an official order from their commander-in-chief, an assertion rarely made by military brass—and one that underlies just how stark their concerns are at this point.
“That a person is a political rival of the president is neither a justification nor an excuse for an unlawful killing. And deliberately carrying out an order to murder such a person would be acting upon a premeditated design to kill or an intent to kill. Therefore, any officer engaged in murder on the orders of a president would be subject to the death penalty or life in prison—and the officer would know it,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the other amici curiae—the so-called “friends of the court” who weighed in to give the Supreme Court their two cents—largely sided with Trump.
The right-wing nonprofit America’s Future—which screened a bonkers QAnon Hollywood conspiracy “documentary” at Mar-a-Lago earlier this week—joined forces with Gun Owners of America and similar firearms associations to warn the high court that Smith’s prosecution was making the United States look more like China, Russia, or Zimbabwe.
“The prosecution of President Trump by the Biden Administration has a parallel to a recent event in Communist China,” they wrote, recalling the way former Chinese President Hu Jintao has vanished from public view ever since he was mysteriously escorted out of a public ceremony where he had been sitting next to his successor, Xi Jinping.
The United States is heading down that same route, they warned, lamenting “the explosion of lawfare” aimed at Trump for doing what they deemed totally sensible political speech—an argument that rests, in part, on the gun-toting petitioners’ continued rejection of the 2020 election results. They referenced Trump’s “supposed” defeat in Arizona and Georgia.
The real danger here, though, is that while Trump is currently polling strong, the gun groups concede that “the effect of a conviction may be very different and could determine the outcome of the election.”
But it wasn’t the conglomeration of Second Amendment enthusiasts that made a veiled threat over the high court decision. That came from an Alabama electrical engineer who’s become a political financier.
In his court filing, Shaun McCutcheon describes himself as “a successful, self-made American businessman and constitutional patriot.” And he warned Supreme Court justices that the country’s MAGA loyalists aren’t going to suddenly start trusting the U.S. court system to select fair-minded jurors.
“The former President’s tens of millions of supporters cannot reasonably be expected to accept the typical legal fictions of voir dire under such extreme circumstances,” his lawyer wrote.
McCutcheon assigns malicious intent to the Special Counsel’s decision to indict Trump in the largely liberal District of Columbia—never mind that the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment ensures that a person will be subjected to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury drawn from the district where his alleged crime was committed, which in this case was the White House.
“A prosecutor appointed by a partisan presidential appointee of the opposing political party may prosecute a former president in a hand-picked venue deeply hostile to that former president, his beliefs, political expression, and legacy,” his lawyer wrote.
While the Supreme Court received various interpretations of presidential immunity that cast the Special Counsel’s investigations as a severe threat to the functions of the commander-in-chief’s job, the sharpest example came from someone who knows a thing or two about Trump’s insurrection.
In his brief, Treniss Evans argued that if Trump can be put on trial for allegedly masterminding a months-long and multi-pronged attack on U.S. democracy, then President Biden could be held personally responsible for the death in February of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, given that an allegedly undocumented Venezuelan man was arrested for her killing.
“If a President doesn’t have immunity from prosecution for his actions, what prevents Georgia murder victim Laken Riley’s family from suing Joe Biden for allowing her illegal migrant murderer into the USA? Or what if hundreds of families all sued, seriatim?” his lawyer wrote, using the Latin phrase that means “one-by-one.”
Evans made the filing through his “legal advocacy group,” which bears the emotionally charged name Condemned USA. He trivialized Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims, but then went on to assert that Trump and his followers can’t possibly be accused of trying to stop certification of the election with a violent riot because technically Jan. 6, 2021, was just the official counting of the already certified votes before Congress.
The Supreme Court justices will get the sense that this topic is deeply personal for Evans. After all, his brief says right up top that “Mr. Evans has been investigating and reporting events of January 6th since January 6th, 2021. He was present at the Capitol on that day.”
In reality, he was in the violent crowd, held a bullhorn, and entered the Capitol—only to be identified by a Facebook tipster, arrested in Texas two months after the insurrection, and eventually sentenced to three years’ probation. To convince the federal judge to go easy on him, his other lawyer wrote that “Mr. Evans is quite self-reproving, sincerely remorseful, and duly contrite. He is embarrassed of this criminal conduct and the shame he has brought upon himself and his family. He has entered his plea of guilty voluntarily.”
But his March 19 brief before the Supreme Court doesn’t exactly hint at that remorse, nor does it morph into any critique of the man who called on him and others to show up that day and march on the Capitol Building.
Yet another legal advocacy firm asked the Supreme Court to give even more deference to Trump for the actions that led up to the disaster at the tail end of his presidency. The Christian Family Coalition Florida, a conservative Miami group that recently lent its support to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crackdown on transgender kids in girls’ sports teams, reduced Trump’s election interference efforts to merely “core political speech.” And it would give future politicians carte blanche to lie—and follow through with those lies—regardless of their claim’s merit.
“For the sake of the presidency and the nation, criminal liability cannot turn on a mere factual dispute over whether an ex-president’s communications in challenging an election were ‘knowingly false,’” a lawyer for the group wrote.
In this Trump case, justices also heard from a favorite villain of the American progressive movement: Citizens United, the nonprofit behind the Supreme Court’s 2010 landmark decision that opened the door to having corporations spend unlimited funds on elections.
The group joined with two former U.S. Attorneys General: the Reagan administration’s Edwin Meese III, and the George W. Bush administration’s Michael B. Mukasey. Together, they tried to strip the current team of federal prosecutors going after Trump from any legitimacy.
They argued that Smith “wields tremendous power, effectively answerable to no one, by design.” And they contend that’s something he can’t do without the Senate’s confirmation. Instead, they say, AG Merrick Garland should have taken the same approach he did with the separate Hunter Biden investigation and tap an existing, Senate-confirmed federal prosecutor in charge of a regional office, like Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
The two conservative former AGs and the nonprofit also claim that most cabinet officials have the authority to appoint officers—minus the Justice Department, a proposition that would give the heads of Agriculture, Education and Homeland Security departments more leeway than the nation’s attorney general. And they warn that Garland’s actions could “create by regulation an entire shadow Department of Justice.”
But leave it to a consortium of 18 state attorneys general—all pro-Trump Republicans led by Alabama AG Steve Marshall—to make the one point everyone can probably agree on.
“If he had not been president, none of this would be happening,” they wrote.
Donald Trump faces backlash after sharing video featuring a hogtied Joe Biden
Phillip M. Bailey, USA TODAY – March 30, 2024
Former President Donald Trump is facing intense criticism for what Democrats say is a new low this weekend after sharing a video on his social media website that has an image of President Joe Biden hogtied.
Trump indicated the clip was filmed in Long Island on Thursday while he was there attending the wake of Officer Jonathan Diller, a New York City police officer gunned down in the line of duty.
Donald Trump (L) and Joe Biden (R) during the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22, 2020. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski and JIM WATSON / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKIJIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Promoting the video ignited a new round of condemnation from Trump’s critics, who pointed to how the GOP contender has repeatedly used grisly images in the past and who asserted it crosses a serious line in U.S. politics.
“A realistic picture of President Biden tied up helpless in the back of a van with Trump’s gloating mug in front of the scene. He’s threatening the president’s life,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor emeritus said in a March 29 post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“That’s a felony. If anyone else did it, the feds would arrest him. What now?”
Asked about sharing the clip, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung pivoted to several comments by Democrats in years past that he alluded to as going too far.
Among the examples Cheung spotlighted was a 2018 comment made by Biden referring to Trump’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, which surfaced during the 2016 campaign.
“If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,” Biden said at the time.
“Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him,” Cheung said.
The Biden campaign did immediately responded to a request for comment.
Trump shares video with image depicting Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck
Megan Lebowitz – March 30, 2024
Matt Rourke
Former President Donald Trump shared a video on social media Friday that included an image of President Joe Biden bound and restrained in the back of a pickup truck.
The 20-second video, which Trump indicated was taken Thursday in Long Island, New York, shows a truck emblazoned with “Trump 2024” and a large picture depicting Biden tied up and lying on his side.
Trump was in Long Island Thursday for the wake of fallen NYPD officer Jonathan Diller.
When reached for comment on the image in the video, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said, “That picture was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway.” Cheung also accused “Democrats and crazed lunatics” of calling for violence against Trump and his family, arguing that “they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
Cheung pointed to comments by Biden in 2018, before he declared his candidacy, when he said that if he and Trump were in high school he’d “take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him” if he heard him demeaning women.
Biden campaign spokesman Michael Tyler slammed Trump for posting the video.
“This image from Donald Trump is the type of crap you post when you’re calling for a bloodbath or when you tell the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by,'” Tyler said in a statement. “Trump is regularly inciting political violence and it’s time people take him seriously — just ask the Capitol Police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6.”
The White House referred questions about the video to the campaign.
Trump has previously used violent imagery and rhetoric, both in his 2024 presidential campaign and before.
On March 16, he vowed that there would be a “bloodbath” if he was not re-elected, while speaking about the economy. Last year, before his numerous indictments, Trump warned about “potential death and destruction” if he were to be charged in the Manhattan district attorney’s hush money case against him.
He also shared an article on Truth Social that had an image of him with a baseball bat near Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s head. The post was deleted.
More recently, Trump used his Truth Social platform to go after Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the hush money case, as well as the judge’s daughter after being hit with a partial gag order.
Trump faces four criminal indictments for charges related to allegations of election interference, mishandling classified documents and falsifying business records related to hush money payments. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Adam Gopnik’s latest essay for The New Yorker explores how Adolf Hitler was able to rise to power in Nazi Germany—which happened largely because people believed they would be able to control him.
Gopnik tells The New Abnormal co-host Danielle Moodie that the same could be said for Donald Trump leading into the 2024 election.
“You had this character who was regarded as a chaotic clown by everyone around him. The conservative minister of defense called him a psychopath,” he said. “Yet all of those people, the media moguls, the respectable conservatives, ended up aiding and abetting him in every way in his search for power and they did it in a way that is, yes, disconcertingly familiar to us.”
“They all thought they could manage him. They all thought they could control him. They all thought that they could take advantage of his movement for their own ends. And that on the day when it all blew up, because it had to blow up because he was a psychopath and clearly not capable of exercising power, they would be there to inherit,” he said.
Gopnik says that those who propped up Hitler believed they could “control the beast” and that they would “end up the ultimate victors.” However, as history shows, that wasn’t the case.
“Those patterns are frightening to see emerging again and again throughout history.”
It’s rare for a federal judge to appear on a news program for any reason. But to appear on one for the purpose of criticizing a party in an active case was so extraordinary it rendered my colleague, Sarah Isgur, nearly speechless.
“This is a sitting federal judge commenting on a criminal defendant in a pending trial in his district,” she tweeted in reaction to the news. Not a word of that sentence is overtly critical, but it didn’t need to be. Merely describing what had happened conveyed the depth of her astonishment.
If it matters to you, Reggie Walton is a senior judge rather than an active judge, which means he hears cases on a reduced and irregular schedule for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He isn’t presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Washington for trying to overturn the 2020 election; Judge Tanya Chutkan is in charge of that. And if you watch the interview he did with Kaitlan Collins, you’ll find that he spoke mainly in generalities about threats to judges instead of focusing on Trump.
But so what?
The context for the CNN segment was Trump’s attempt to intimidate the judge overseeing his upcoming criminal trial over the Stormy Daniels hush-money payoff. Collins made that explicit on social media:
Judge Walton understood that context. He knew, of course, that Trump is a criminal defendant right now not only in his home district but in Florida, Georgia, and New York. He must have recognized that prospective jurors in each of those venues might see the interview and have their views of Trump’s guilt colored by a notable judge’s dim regard for his behavior.
As you may have heard, Trump is also the Republican nominee for president. Even if no jurors end up being influenced by Judge Walton’s interview, some voters very well might be. Federal judges aren’t supposed to be campaigning against candidates for office. So what was he doing on CNN?
Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges urges jurists to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” Canon 5 warns them against engaging in “political activity.” Whether or not Judge Walton’s conduct ran afoul of either is above my pay grade, but the appearance of impropriety was glaring enough for numerous Trump boosters to complain loudly about it online.
How seriously should we take them?
One of my editors described Judge Walton’s appearance as the latest in a series of “broken clock” moments for Trump’s critics. A broken clock is right twice a day, the saying goes; insofar as Trump reflexively whines about corruption and unfairness after every setback he faces, most famously following the 2020 election, he’s a broken clock.
But sometimes, Trump’s antagonists overreach by making special exceptions to institutional norms just for him. When they do, the broken clock appears correct, leading many Americans to wonder whether it’s actually as broken as his critics say.
The reasons for that overreach vary.
Sometimes, the missteps are a matter of earnest gullibility driven by understandable suspicion, as happened when some media outlets published the Steele dossier without affirming the truth of its contents. A special exception from standard journalistic practices was made for Trump because his apologetics for Vladimir Putin are genuinely weird and because he appears amoral by nature to a degree that no U.S. president, Richard Nixon included, has ever been. If any commander-in-chief might plausibly be jungled up with the Kremlin, it’s him.
So a special exception was made. And when it didn’t pan out, the broken clock that’s forever complaining about the media being out to get him seemed correct.
Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by Twitter and Facebook in October 2020 falls into the same bucket. A special exception to platform rules was made because it seemed only too likely that Russia was once again trying to lend Trump a hand in the home stretch of an election. Liberals weren’t about to let that happen with victory within reach; the laptop story was suppressed on the assumption that it was enemy disinformation or, at the very least, the product of hacking.
It wasn’t. The broken clock was right.
Sometimes, it’s personal ambition that causes overreach. Prosecutors keen to make a political name for themselves have always eyed high-profile suspects hungrily, but Trump is a historically juicy target due to the animosity Democrats feel for him and the freakishly high political stakes of a conviction before November. Some of his antagonists have gotten sucked into that and dropped the pretense that they’re dispassionately applying the law, instead playing to the cheap seats. Witness Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis warning Trump that “the train is coming” for him, the sort of thing you might hear at a pro wrestling event. Or consider New York State Attorney General Letitia James doing the legal equivalent of end zone dancing by posting daily updates online of how much interest Trump owes in the civil judgment against him.
The broken clock says he’s being persecuted by corrupt, hyperpartisan Democratic lawyers for political gain. Sometimes he seems correct. The fact that Willis has gotten sidetracked by a garish ethical scandal of her own making only seems to drive the point home: Why should Donald Trump pay a legal price for his misconduct when those who sit in judgment of him are compromised themselves?
No wonder that Americans’ views of his criminal culpability have changed.
Insofar as Judge Walton’s CNN interview was another “broken clock” moment, though, neither ambition nor gullibility explains it. I think it’s a matter of sincere exasperation. And while that doesn’t excuse it, it does make it relatable.
On some level, this newsletter is a product of the same sentiment. The reality that half the country is comfortable enough with how Trump behaves that they’re willing to entrust the presidency to him again is so shattering and disillusioning that I often retreat into the belief that they simply mustn’t know how bad he is. I’d better tell them! (And tell them, and tell them, and tell them.) Those of us opposed to a second Trump term can rationalize the current polling by speculating that Americans haven’t paid any attention to what Trump has been up to since 2021 and that they’ll snap out of their stupor soon enough. Ignorance, not indifference, is to blame.
Maybe. But it may also be that they do have some sense of what he’s been up to yet have chosen to remain willfully ignorant about the particulars so as not to create any pangs of guilt before they go out and vote for him again. They know the clock is broken, but they don’t care—and don’t care to be reminded of it.
In their heart of hearts, some might even admit that it’s the brokenness that attracts them.
I can’t read Judge Walton’s mind, but I imagine him finding Trump’s intimidation tactics in the New York case—which now include mentioning the judge’s daughter by name—so far beyond the pale that he concluded some extraordinary measure needed to be taken to alert the public. Threats against judges and prosecutors have been commonplace during Trump’s legal travails, yet Republican voters handed him their party’s presidential nomination anyway almost by acclamation. How is that possible? Can it be that they hadn’t heard anything about them when they cast their ballots for him?
They simply mustn’t know how bad he is, Judge Walton might have figured. I’d better tell them—even if telling them, in this case, meant committing a breach of judicial ethics, proving the broken clock correct once again about American institutions ditching their usual rules to go after Trump.
This is all very conflicting for a Never Trumper.
J. Michael Luttig, a conservative and a former judge himself, commended Walton on Friday for speaking up to try to protect the judiciary from Trump’s goonish tactics “because no one whose responsibility it is to do so has had the courage and the will.”
Luttig went on to say that the United States Supreme Court and its counterparts at the state level should be taking the lead on this, but ultimately, he laid the blame where it belongs: “It is the responsibility of the entire nation to protect its courts and judges, its Constitution, its Rule of Law, and America’s Democracy from vicious attack, threat, undermine, and deliberate delegitimization at the hands of anyone so determined.”
That’s correct, but the nation—or half of it, anyway—has chosen to abdicate that responsibility. How far should institutional actors go in bending their own rules to try to pick up the slack and/or spur that wayward half into caring again?
Forced to choose, I prefer Sarah Isgur’s attitude to Luttig’s. If we must defeat Donald Trump in November to prevent him from smashing American norms, but the only way to defeat him is to smash those norms ourselves, then … what is the point, exactly?
What is classically liberal conservatism conserving in that case?
Underlying Luttig’s argument is the sense that democracy no longer works as well as it used to. American institutions could safely follow the ethical guidelines by which they’ve traditionally abided so long as the people themselves were virtuous enough not to reward a comically vulgar demagogue with power. That virtue has now been lost. And so some institutional actors—like courts, prosecutors, and Judge Walton—may feel an earnest duty to try to fill the vacuum by confronting the demagogue themselves, even if that means carving out ethical exceptions to do so.
I understand the impulse. Trust me, I do. But putting a thumb on the scale by ignoring traditional norms amounts to institutions admitting that they no longer trust the people whom they allegedly serve to defend the constitutional order themselves. The “pro-democracy” movement that opposes Trump is actually pretty anti-democratic in that respect.
If all of that doesn’t move you, consider how swing voters might be processing all of these examples of ethical rules being broken by Trump’s critics in law enforcement. The more correct the broken clock appears to be, the more tempted some of those voters will be to conclude that it isn’t really broken at all. In an election that may turn on Americans’ judgments of whether Trump or his political enemies are more incompetent and corrupt, every “broken clock” moment gets him a little closer to victory.
So, no, Judge Walton shouldn’t have done the interview.
But I can scold him only so much.
The vacuum of condemnation described by Luttig is real, after all, and predictably most pronounced on the American right. It’s an ineffable disgrace that Trump continues to try to intimidate law enforcement in the light of day, up to and including digs at their children, and endures scarcely a word of meaningful protest from anyone to the right of Liz Cheney.
That’s partly because many have been physically intimidated themselves. When former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was asked recently why more Republicans weren’t speaking out against the former president, he answered bluntly: “They probably don’t like death threats.” Being threatened with harm by Trump’s rabid fans is now a fact of American political life and no one with a modicum of influence in the GOP has the nerve to object to it. So Judge Walton opted to fill the void.
It’s also hard to get indignant about his CNN appearance in light of the cynicism with which Trump apologists routinely yet falsely spin every bit of institutional resistance he encounters as a “broken clock” moment. Jonathan Chait had their number in a piece published Wednesday by New York magazine in which he identified disingenuous abuse of the term “lawfare” by figures across the American right:
The advantage of this catchall term is that it allows Trump’s defenders to ignore the specifics of Trump’s misconduct, or at least to analyze it in a highly selective way. There are indeed a couple instances in which Trump has faced legal challenges that are questionable (the attempt to disqualify him from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment) or downright weak (Alvin Bragg’s indictment over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels). Conservatives tend to focus obsessively on these cases, and “lawfare” is a permission structure that allows them to use these cases to ignore or discredit the others, where Trump’s behavior is impossible to defend.
It is a similar rhetorical strategy to the way Republicans dismissed the entire Russia scandal as “Russiagate” (or, in Trump’s preferred phrasing, “Russia, Russia, Russia”). The Russia scandal consisted of innumerable strands and accusations, some of which (most famously the Steele dossier) did not pan out. But the sweeping frame allowed Trump’s defenders to ignore the voluminous evidence of guilt. No need to defend Trump pardoning the campaign manager who had a Russian intelligence agent as a partner when you can just denounce Russiagate as a hoax.
That’s correct, and it’s as true of anti-anti-Trump conservative partisans as it is of diehard MAGA populists. Devoting oneself to running political interference for the Republican Party, as both groups do, requires relentlessly muddying the waters between genuine examples of Trump’s enemies behaving irresponsibly and examples of them simply holding him to account for his own irresponsible behavior. It’s the same impulse that motivates bad-faith right-wing analogies between Trump’s 2020 coup attempt and the fact that certain random Democrats questioned the results when he won in 2016.
Ask yourself: How often do Trump apologists in right-wing media attempt to draw ethical distinctions between Fani Willis on the one hand and Special Counsel Jack Smith on the other? How commonly do they distinguish the dubious Stormy Daniels prosecution in Manhattan from the formidable case against him in Florida for concealing classified documents? Their goal in refusing to do so is to convince Republican voters to lump together all accusations of misconduct against Trump, no matter how well substantiated, and dismiss them out of hand en masse as part of the same meritless “witch hunt.” That goal has largely been achieved
Go figure that Judge Walton thought desperate measures were needed to try to puncture the information bubble by using CNN to reach more conciliatory Republican viewers about threats being made to judges and their families.
I understand his decision to appear on the network for another reason, though.
Trump gets to threaten people, to preemptively cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, to tease violent unrest if he’s convicted of a crime, and to promise “retribution” for his enemies if he’s elected, all with political impunity. As a matter of moral and civic duty, Joe Biden and the leaders of his party must be better.
It’s the right thing to do. But emotionally, it is maddening to have to engage in asymmetrical political warfare with Trump and his most goonish, dishonest enablers.
Judges aren’t supposed to indulge their emotions in public discourse, which is why I’m Team Isgur more so than Team Luttig. But as a matter of common humanity, one can’t help but sympathize with Judge Walton emotionally for not remaining similarly passive as Trump stoops to thuggery toward the law that even a mafia don would eschew. When someone makes a habit of physically intimidating others, a rule-of-law stickler might understandably feel compelled to raise a very mild objection to it publicly rather than take it lying down.
That’s what Walton did. Consider it a matter of self-defense, a principle Republicans normally cherish and exalt. If the American right won’t defend the courts from Trump’s intimidation racket, shouldn’t the courts defend themselves?
They’ve been moved to defend their integrity from Trump’s attacks before, remember, although admittedly not in the thick of an election campaign when he was facing dozens of federal criminal charges.
The “broken clock” problem exemplified by Judge Walton’s interview recurs eternally in liberal societies confronted by illiberal threats because it feels foolish and self-defeating to follow norms designed to protect the rights of authoritarian cretins who wouldn’t extend the same courtesy if the roles were reversed. And when said cretins start crying crocodile tears about ethical rigor amid their usual hosannas to a man who doesn’t understand ethics as a concept except as something suckers believe in to justify their own weakness, it’s downright infuriating.
The illiberal faction will always cynically exploit ethical lapses by the liberal establishment they resent and hope to replace to draw a moral equivalence between that system and their own brand of “might makes right” politics. Having to indulge them while they play that game is, as I say, sincerely maddening—even for a federal judge.
But what’s the alternative? If the only way to stop Trump from becoming president and appointing partisan judges is to have judges quasi-campaign against him on CNN, the great war over normalizing Trumpism is already over. We lost.
I think we lost regardless, even if we resolve to slap Reggie Walton on the wrist. And I think he thinks so too: He wouldn’t have agreed to appear on CNN, I assume, if he didn’t think the hour was late in getting American voters to care about politicians using threats as a pressure tactic. The battle against Trump might be won in November, but Trump has never been the problem in all this. The real problem will remain.
Conservative Judges Sound Alarm: Trump Will Shred Our Justice System
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling – March 29, 2024
Donald Trump’s attacks on the judges and court staff overseeing his criminal trials have much deeper legal implications than petty fines. Instead, the attacks—and the responding “passivity, acquiescence, and submissiveness by the nation”—are actively undermining the entire judicial system, prominent conservative judges are warning.
In a CNN interview Thursday evening, Republican-appointed federal District Judge Reggie B. Walton felt compelled to announce that Trump’s continued attacks could result in “tyranny.” Just hours later, former Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig, also a conservative, issued his own warning cry, declaring that Trump is responsible for the “dismantling” of the nation’s “system of justice.”
“The Nation is witnessing the determined delegitimization of both its Federal and State judiciaries and the systematic dismantling of its system of justice and Rule of Law by a single man—the former President of the United States,” started Luttig in a multipart thread on X.
“In the months ahead, the former president can only be expected to ramp up his unprecedented efforts to delegitimize the courts of the United States, the nation’s state courts, and America’s system of justice, through his vicious, disgraceful, and unforgivable attacks and threats on the Federal and State Judiciaries and the individual Judges of these courts.”
“Never in American history has any person, let alone a President of the United States, leveled such threatening attacks against the federal and state courts and federal and state judicial officers of the kind the former president has leveled continually now for years.”
Luttig also warned that Trump isn’t accomplishing the task alone. It’s the complicit Supreme Court—and the American people—that are letting Trump get away with it.
“It is the responsibility of the Supreme Court of the United States in the first instance to protect the federal courts, the federal judges, and all participants in the justice system from the reprehensible spectacle of the former president’s inexcusable, threatening attacks, just as it is the responsibility of the respective State Supreme Courts in the first instance to protect their courts and their state judges from the same,” he added. “Ultimately, however, it is the responsibility of the entire nation to protect its courts and judges, its Constitution, its Rule of Law, and America’s Democracy from vicious attack, threat, undermine, and deliberate delegitimization at the hands of anyone so determined.”
Here was Walton’s own dire warning:
Senior Judge Reggie Walton: “We do these jobs because we’re committed to the rule of law & we believe in the rule of law & the rule of law can only function effectively when we have judges who are prepared to carry out their duties without the threat of potential physical harm.” pic.twitter.com/V1GC7LVD2g
