Trump Begs Supreme Court To Do His Bidding Again–In Hush Money Case
INSIDE: Jack Smith ... Aileen Cannon ... Mark Z.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Does The Roberts Court Have Any Dignity Left To Surrender?
President-elect Donald Trump raced to the Supreme Court this morning to try to get the high court to block his sentencing Friday in the hush money case in New York.
Trump’s latest move to avert sentencing came after he was rebuffed by an state appeals court judge Tuesday. In a 30-minute emergency hearing scheduled on a hour’s notice, Trump argued that his entire conviction was defective, that presidential immunity precluded his prosecution, and that sentencing him during the presidential transition was disruptive. TPM’s Josh Kovensky was in the courtroom for the hearing.
The prospect of the uber-conservative Supreme Court coming to Trump’s rescue from criminal accountability yet again raises the specter of an even more unbound Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20. Furthermore, it may not be the only Trump-related case the Supreme Court has to consider before inauguration. Also potentially on tap is whether Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report to Attorney General Merrick Garland can be made public.
Oh, Look, It’s Aileen Cannon Again
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon continued her series of extraordinary interventions in the Mar-a-Lago case, purporting to block the public release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report. In an unprecedented order issued at the urging of Trump’s co-defendants, Cannon barred the Justice Department from releasing the report until three days after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals disposed of the matter.
Trump’s co-defendants had urged both Cannon and the 11th Circuit to intervene. The 11th Circuit gave Smith a deadline of this morning to respond. It’s timetable beyond that is unclear. Trump has since moved to intervene in the case himself. In an almost comic move, after the won relief from Cannon, Trump’s co-defendants reiterated to the 11th Circuit to that they prefer the appeals court let Cannon handle the matter herself. Of course.
Cannon arguably has no jurisdiction over the Mar-a-Lago case while it’s on appeal, yet she acted anyway. Still, the most alarming aspect of her ruling was that she seems to be blocking the release of Smith’s report not just as to the Mar-a-Lago, but also as to his Jan. 6 case in Washington, D.C., over which she never had any jurisdiction.
For The Record
Jay Bratt, 65, a counterintelligence prosecutor and a key member of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team on the Mar-a-Lago case, retired on Friday, after 34 years with the Justice Department, the NYT reported.
Timely …
Reuters: ‘Three senior U.S. Justice Department officials committed misconduct in the final months of Donald Trump’s first presidency by leaking details about a non-public investigation, a move that may have been intended to sway the 2020 election, the department’s internal watchdog concluded in a new report.”
Crazy Making
Trump held one of his rambling, untethered, make-of-it-what-you-will press conferences at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. If you’re inclined to freak out, there was plenty to freak out about. If you’re taking more of a wait-and-see-what-he-actually-does approach, there was still plenty to freak out about:
“This news conference, which was the first since Trump’s re-election was certified by Congress, was a wild one — even by Trumpian standards. In a little over an hour behind a podium at his Mar-a-Lago beach club, the president-elect, along with promising to rename an ocean basin, threatened potential military force against Panama and Denmark. He also suggested he might use “economic force” to make Canada the 51st State.”–TPM’s Hunter Walker
“There was a lot of déjà vu in Tuesday’s news conference, recalling scenes from his first presidency. The conspiracy theories, the made-up facts, the burning grievances — all despite the fact that he has pulled off one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. The vague references to “people” whom he never names. The flat declaration that American national security was threatened now, without defining how the strategic environment has changed in a way that could prompt him to violate the sovereignty of independent nations.”–NYT’s David Sanger
“[Trump] just left open using a military threat against a NATO ally, Greenland. And NATO rules require an attack on any member to be treated as an attack on them all. That’s certainly no small thing, even if it’s just Trump being Trump.”–WaPo’s Aaron Blake
Zuckerberg’s Big Capitulation To Trump
In the face of threats from the Trump and the right, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is abandoning content moderation on Facebook:
TPM’s Josh Marshall: Zuckerberg Achieves Trump Lap Monkey Badge And Other Platform News
The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last: Mark Zuckerberg Is a Surrender Monkey
The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel: Mark Zuckerberg is at war with himself.
Trump himself, giving Zuckerberg zero cover:
Super Smart Read
Henry Farrell, on the social media crisis:
We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation – that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.
Scoop
The Forward: “The Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic, according to documents obtained by the Forward.”
RED ALERT IN NORTH CAROLINA
Mother Jones: “The Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the state election board from certifying the victory of one of the court’s own members—Democratic Justice Allison Riggs. In doing so, the state’s highest court laid the groundwork for potentially overturning the election and handing the seat to Riggs’ GOP challenger.”
Voting Right Watch: Face Palm Edition
TPM’s Kate Riga: Louisiana: Racism Doesn’t Exist Anymore, So Let Us Racially Gerrymander
Quote Of The Day
“I think being president of a public university in a red state right now is one of the hardest jobs in higher education.”–Michael Harris, professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University
LA Under Siege From Extreme Wind-Driven Wildfires
Dire warnings of an extreme wind event in Los Angeles proved prescient Tuesday with entire neighborhoods overrun by flames; cars hastily abandoned in a panicked retreat being shoved aside by a bulldozer so emergency workers could reach the fire zone; a school, a synagogue, and a landmark restaurant burned to the ground.
Three major fires were burning in Los Angeles overnight, with winds expected to ebb some later in the day but none of the fire were close to being contained yet. Casualty figures were remarkably low but it was still early and with the extent of the damage had yet been surveyed.
Jimmy Carter’s Final Return To Washington
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One of the grimmer news days since Election Day...*Judge* Cannon making a last-minute, high-profile bid to gain tRump's full allegiance, and a quickie nomination to an appellate judgeship, or even a candidate-in-waiting when either Alito or Thomas step down. Just a judicial clusterfuck, any way one slices it.
Louisiana has outdone itself once again! Let's see if SCOTUS can degrade themselves even further.