Law
October 11, 2018 — Scott Johnson
This past February Special Counsel Robert Mueller brought the dramatic indictment against Russian actors allegedly responsible for interference in the 2016 presidential election. The Department of Justice has posted the indictment online here. Politico covered the indictment in a good story by Michael Crowley and Louis Nelson. The indictment charged three Russian companies and 13 Russian individuals with election related crimes. I don’t think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that one
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October 3, 2018 — Steven Hayward
If it wasn’t already evident that even if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court in a few days the left will carry on with a full-scale attack (including an impeachment investigation), then the email below from Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect sent out yesterday makes the matter explicit. I’ll intersperse my comments in places: The Back-Up Way of Defeating Kavanaugh. Assume the worst: Let’s posit that within
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September 21, 2018 — Scott Johnson
In the memoir Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO on the Feds’ Hit List (written with Stephen Saltarelli), Howard Root tells the story of his experience as chief executive officer of Vascular Solutions caught in the crosshairs of the federal government when prosecutors sought to put his company out of business and to send him to the big house. Howard touched on one aspect of his story in
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September 9, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Andrew McCarthy’s weekly NR column poses this pointed question: “For precisely what federal crimes is the president of the United States under investigation by a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department?” He observes: “It is intolerable that, after more than two years of digging — the 16-month Mueller probe having been preceded by the blatantly suspect labors of the Obama Justice Department and FBI — we still do not
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September 6, 2018 — Scott Johnson
We have closely followed the killing of Justine Damond by Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor on July 15 last year. The case has received international attention and justly so. Noor has now been charged homicide and manslaughter charges here in state court. Noor is also the defendant in a civil lawsuit brought by Justine’s family here in federal court. I wrote recently about the federal lawsuit in “Notes on the
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August 30, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Department of Justice today filed a Statement of Interest on the side of the plaintiff in Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard College. Students For Fair Admissions, an organization of students and parents, alleges that Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants when making admissions decisions. The Justice Department opened a Title VI investigation into Harvard’s admissions process in 2017 based upon a complaint filed by more than 60
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August 21, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
When President Trump was asked today about the Paul Manafort convictions, he made two points: (1) that Manafort worked not only for his campaign, but also for Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole and (2) that the Manafort convictions have nothing to do with Russia collusion. Trump did not answer questions about Michael Cohen’s guilty plea. Trump’s first point about Manafort doesn’t apply to Cohen. The sleazy lawyer was Trump’s guy,
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August 21, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Some years ago, a lawyer was kicked to death by a moose in the parking lot of the federal courthouse in Anchorage, Alaska. That’s how the story goes, anyway. Local lawyers said, that’s a really bad day in court. President Trump didn’t have that bad a day in court today, but it wasn’t great. I was on the radio, hosting the Laura Ingraham show, when breaking news came across the
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August 4, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott has embedded the opinion of Judge John Bates in NAACP v. Donald J. Trump. Judge Bates ordered the administration to restart the DACA program within 20 days because, in essence, he doesn’t think much of the administration’s policy reasons for ending the program. I have plowed through the opinion. It reminds me of the scene in “Duck Soup” where Groucho Marx (Rufus T. Firefly) refuses to hear a matter
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August 4, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Paul Mirengoff frequently refers to “our robed masters” in the federal judiciary. Yesterday our robed master Bates of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia administered the latest in a series of legal defeats to President Trump’s attempted rescission of President Obama’s unconstitutional program to regularize illegal immigrants by executive decree. The is President Trump’s second defeat in this case. The New York Times’s Miriam Jordan gave
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July 26, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
In a stunning display of judicial activism, one with far-reaching implications, a federal appeals court has ruled that the Alabama law Minimum Wage and Right-to-Work Act, which mandates a uniform minimum wage of $7.25 per hour throughout Alabama, may be unconstitutional. Finding that the Act, which toppled a Birmingham ordinance setting the minimum wage at $10.10 per hour, has a disparate impact on black workers, the court allowed a claim
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July 25, 2018 — John Hinderaker
I don’t believe we have written anything about the “bombshell” tape that President Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, leaked to CNN. On the tape, Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing a potential payment to a former Playboy Playmate of the Year named Karen McDougal. McDougal claims that she had an affair with Trump in 2006. I doubt that anyone cares about the underlying facts. The president’s reaction was, on
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July 25, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I spoke with Minneapolis attorney Bob Bennett about the complaint he filed on Tuesday in connection with the death of Justine Damond at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor. Bob represents the plaintiff trustee for the next of kin in the case. I’ve known Bob as a dogged and straightforward attorney from the first time I met him at the rosy dawn of our legal careers. Since then
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July 5, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Earlier this week the pseudonymous Techno Fog posted the transcript of the June 15 hearing before Judge Dabney Friedrich in the Special Counsel prosecution of Concord Management and Consulting (“the Russian troll case,” as TF calls it). TF extracts every bit of interest from the transcript in a series of tweets beginning with the one below. I have posted the 33-page transcript itself at the bottom. New – transcript of
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June 28, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Anthony Kennedy isn’t likely to get the moment in the sun sometimes granted to an outgoing or departed Supreme Court Justice. Two factors conspire against it. First, Kennedy was admired by neither the left nor the right. Second, the battle over confirming his successor has already commenced, even though no successor has been nominated. The intensity of the battle doesn’t leave much energy for Kennedy appreciation (or condemnation). Jack Goldsmith,
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June 25, 2018 — Steven Hayward
We’ve reported here previously on the frivolous lawsuits the climatistas brought in California courts against major oil companies, and especially how California cities claimed imminent harm from climate change while telling prospective bond buyers that they couldn’t estimate possible future risks from climate change. In any case, late today Federal district court judge William Alsop—a Bill Clinton appointee—dismissed the lawsuits with a strongly-worded opinion that is quite clear about how
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June 23, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I have been saying that an overwhelming wealth of story lines emerges from the IG report on the Clinton email “investigation” released last week. I posted the report via Scrbid here. Andrew McCarthy pointed out before the election in 2016 and repeatedly since (perhaps most recently here), the fix was in from the beginning. The fix was in because Obama was in on the wrongdoing and he was the head
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