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trump v. united states
The Roberts Court Is Pushing the US Toward Existential Conflict
By gutting the Voting Rights Act and granting President Donald Trump irmmunity, the Supreme Court has helped set up a fight over the future of US democracy.
May 24, 2026
Is the United States headed for a second Civil War? According to a survey of likely midterm voters published by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 57% of Americans believe it is. Sixty-nine percent say democracy is under serious threat; and an equal percentage of non-white voters say they fear rising white supremacy.
While President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement deserve the lion’s share of blame for such findings, the Supreme Court has done its part. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has issued a blistering succession of dangerously polarizing rulings, ranging from presidential immunity, union organizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, and gun control to affirmative action and abortion rights. The resulting jurisprudential carnage has accelerated the nation’s rupture into irreconcilable belligerent tribes and prompted speculation that we are headed for another existential conflict.
The Roberts Court has taken a particularly malevolent interest in destroying the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. Last month’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the landmark legislation, which was amended in 1982 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power.
The court’s 6-3 majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito invalidated Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map that created a second majority-Black congressional district to operate alongside the state’s five white-majority districts, roughly reflecting the size of Louisiana’s Black population. The ruling handed a victory to the lead plaintiff in the case, Phillip “Bert” Callais, an election denier and alleged conspiracy theorist who had attended the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally on the White House Ellipse that eventually snowballed into the insurrection at the Capitol. Barely concealing their racial animus, Callais and his co-plaintiffs described themselves in court filings as “non-African American voters” who were the victims of reverse discrimination. Louisiana has since moved to redraw its voting maps.
Neutering the Voting Rights Act represents the culmination of Roberts’ lifelong calling and warrants his ranking alongside Taney as the most disgraceful chief justice in history.
With the demise of the “effects test,” future Section 2 plaintiffs will have to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps were created with overt discriminatory intent rather than for political purposes. And as the court held in a 2019 opinion written by Roberts in Rucho v. Common Cause, political gerrymandering claims cannot be brought in federal courts because, as the Republican majority sees it, they present nonjusticiable “political questions.”
Both Callais and Rucho built upon Roberts’ 2013 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Alabama gutting two other sections of the VRA that required state and local jurisdictions with histories of egregious voter discrimination to obtain advance federal approval—known as preclearance—before making changes to their election procedures. Like Alito in Callais, Roberts declared in Shelby that racial discrimination in voting was a thing of the past and thus special protections for minorities were no longer necessary.
The combined effects of Shelby and Rucho have led to a proliferation of voting roll purges, onerous photo ID laws, and limitations on mail-in ballots in red states across the country. Now, with Callais, election law experts predict that as many as 19 Democratic congressional seats in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana could be eliminated, returning the former states of the Confederacy to one-party rule.
The court’s handiwork has sparked outrage and alarm. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation, who will likely lose his seat to gerrymandering, has condemned Callais as “equivalent to a second Civil War.” Other observers have compared the current moment in the US to the 1850s, when debates over the future of slavery eventually led to secession and war.
Chief Justice Roberts has also drawn comparisons to Chief Justice Roger Taney, whose 1857 majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that Black Americans had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The Dred Scott decision helped precipitate the Civil War, and is widely considered the most infamous in the court’s history.
The parallels between Taney and Roberts are beyond hyperbole. Both men began their legal careers as zealous partisan political advocates. Before ascending to the Supreme Court in 1836, Taney was elected to the General Assembly of Maryland, and later served as a loyal foot soldier to President Andrew Jackson, first as secretary of war and then as attorney general, in which capacity he penned an advisory opinion that prefigured his Dred Scott ruling, arguing that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were inapplicable to Black people, even those living in free states.
Similarly, the young Roberts established himself as a dependable right-wing operative, clerking for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and afterward serving as special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration. There, he authored upward of 25 memos opposing the 1982 amendment that added the effects test to the Voting Rights Act in addition to ghosting op-eds for Smith and preparing administration officials for their testimony before Congress on the test. Later, as an attorney in private practice, he played an important role as a consultant, lawsuit editor, and prep coach for the GOP’s legal arguments in the run-up to Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election.
Neutering the Voting Rights Act represents the culmination of Roberts’ lifelong calling and warrants his ranking alongside Taney as the most disgraceful chief justice in history. As the civil rights activist and writer William Spivey argued in an essay published earlier this month in the online journal Level:
Taney held that no Black person, free or enslaved, could ever be a US citizen. He believed that Black people were not part of the political community and the Constitution was written for white men only.
Chief Justice Roberts has been more effective than anyone in disenfranchising Black people. Most of what Taney accomplished can be traced to a single decision that remained in place for 11 years before being reversed [by the 13th and 14th Amendments]. Roberts has spent an entire career whittling away at the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and, most recently, the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement.
Roberts will also be remembered for composing the majority opinion in Trump v. United States in 2024 that gave the president near-complete immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts. That decision, along with the evisceration of voting rights, has emboldened Trump to threaten the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the military to polling places and hatch other plots to rig the midterm elections and consolidate Republican power.
It may be premature to conclude a new Civil War is upon us, but a high-stakes battle for the future of the country is well underway.
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The Supreme Court Has Enabled Trump to Become Profiteer-in-Chief
Before Trump v. United States, presidents knew they could be criminally prosecuted if they looted the government, but Chief Justice John Roberts’s ruling all but stops any bribery prosecution before it starts.
May 20, 2026
On Monday, Donald Trump dropped his sham lawsuit against the federal government. In exchange, the Justice Department under his control will establish a $1.8 billion fund for “victims of lawfare,” as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it. This will be a slush fund for Trump’s allies—presumably January 6 insurrectionists and others already rewarded with a pardon.
There is a zone of lawlessness around the Oval Office, erected by the Supreme Court when it granted current and former presidents effective immunity from prosecution if their crimes involved “official acts.” Loot the taxpayers, misuse government power for graft, and you’re off the hook.
Last week, the president filed a report with the Office of Government Ethics detailing the stock trades he made this year. It is a novelistic tale of profiteering, recognizable as insider trading in every way except, perhaps, under the law.
Former US Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer offers a useful guide.
It’s epic corruption in plain sight. History shows that after scandal comes reform—often, but not always.
In recent months, as Paramount and Netflix vied to buy Warner Brothers, Trump bought stock in all three companies. Now the Justice Department is considering whether to approve Paramount’s purchase of Warner Brothers.
As CNBC reported, Trump “scooped up shares” in the data firm Palantir. Soon after, he abruptly praised the firm. “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment,” Trump posted, even highlighting its ticker name. “Just ask our enemies!!!” All this while Palantir was winning big federal contracts.
He invested in Oracle while brokering its deal to buy TikTok.
Just this week, he paraded off Air Force One in China, flanked by the CEOs of Nvidia and Boeing. Trump bought millions of dollars of Boeing stock before the trip, which led to the sale of 200 Boeing airplanes to the Chinese government. Among his biggest purchases has been Nvidia stock, which has seen steep increases after the US government cleared 10 Chinese companies to purchase its advanced chips, in a big reversal from earlier national security concerns.
Altogether, Oyer writes, “You’ll find it hard to avoid the conclusion that, to Donald Trump, governing is synonymous with profiteering.”
This president is constrained by the weakest legal rules in history.
Start with that immunity ruling, Trump v. United States. Before that, presidents knew they could be criminally prosecuted if they looted the government. Chief Justice John Roberts’s ruling all but stops any bribery prosecution before it starts, by preventing any inquiry into the president’s motivations, even when the act looks and smells like a bribe. Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that the ruling would “hamstring the prosecution” in a case such as bribery. (Having critiqued the misguided majority, Barrett then mystifyingly voted with it.)
Insider trading laws are weak, in any case. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 prohibits using nonpublic information to guide stock trading, but its application to elected officials remains murky. In 2012, Congress passed the Stock Act to prevent insider trading among members of Congress, but the president and vice president remain exempt.
It’s epic corruption in plain sight. History shows that after scandal comes reform—often, but not always.
In January, the Brennan Center published Nine Solutions for Political Corruption. In it, we call for a law to require the president to divest from all stocks and other assets that could generate a conflict of interest. That was the norm, and now it must be a law. Ethics rules should cover presidents and vice presidents too.
And we call for a constitutional amendment to end the unilateral power of a president to issue corrupt pardons.
What about that Trump v. United States ruling? In the past, after the Supreme Court has erred so gravely, we’ve changed the Constitution. The 14th Amendment, for example, undid the Dred Scott decision. Another amendment is needed to clean up the immunity mess.
The sturdiest protection against corruption would be fierce anger from fleeced taxpayers. A few months ago, when asked about his conflicts of interest, Trump said, “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”
It turns out that Americans do care. In January, a YouGov poll found that “large shares of both Democrats and Republicans think their party focuses too little on corruption.”
Let’s make this a major issue for the campaign trail and press politicians from both parties to provide solutions, not just soundbites. Or else, as Oyer wrote, we risk having future presidents who “loot and pillage our country without a shadow of shame.”
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SCOTUS v. Democracy: 7 Supreme Court Decisions Brought Fascism to America
Trump v. CASA, Inc. was the coup de grace, capping six earlier and toxic SCOTUS decisions which, scattered over two centuries, collectively enabled this moment.
Jul 07, 2025
The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on June 27, 2025 created in President Donald Trump an American fascist dictator.
The decision in the case Trump v. CASA, Inc. did not seem momentous. It declared only that Federal District judges could no longer issue “universal” injunctions to foreclose nationwide harm; they could now grant relief only to a plaintiff in a specific lawsuit. But the decision was far from trivial: Trump v. CASA, Inc. was the coup de grace, capping six earlier and toxic SCOTUS decisions which, scattered over two centuries, collectively enabled fascism.
In deciding Trump v. CASA Inc., the six conservative justices of the Roberts Court agreed with the Republican Party’s inane claim: The injunctions of Federal District judges across the country were impeding President Trump’s ability to govern.
A president who can break laws at will is a dictator. The political system creating and accommodating this condition is fascism. Donald Trump is a dictator heading a fascist regime.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller: “Our objective, one way or another, is to make clear that the district courts of this country do not have the authority to direct the functions of the executive branch.”
Attorney-General Pam Bondi: “Active liberal… judges have used these injunctions to block virtually all of President Trump’s policies.”
The argument is laughingly specious, plausible but dead wrong in describing what is actually transpiring. It is no more than misleading spin, resting on two audacious assumptions: (1) The “functions of the executive branch” never violate the law, and “President Trump’s policies” certainly have not. (2) The “active liberal judges” who think otherwise are knee-jerk partisans with not a shred of professional integrity.
Injunctions in lawsuits are issued to block the defendant’s illegal action from continuing to harm the plaintiff, when the judge determines the lawsuit is warranted and the harm is serious. Federal District judges deal with issues nationwide in scope—their purview is every bit as wide as the Supreme Court’s—and if they believe the harm from the defendant’s action poses a threat to the nation at large, the injunction is applied “universally” across the country. We have followed this protocol since it was established by the Judiciary Act of 1789.
Federal District judges do not engage in blocking actions they know to be legal. The injunction in the case at hand and some 40 others against Trump were issued by judges who thought his actions were not, and were harmful nationwide.
Did they make judgment calls? Yes, Federal District judges don’t do anything else. Do they ever make bad ones? Certainly, but they err on the side of caution. If they’ve misjudged, and the enjoined action turns out to be legal, its interruption does no serious social harm. If they’ve judged correctly, and the action is in fact illegal, its interruption prevents serious social harm.
Here, then, is what Mr. Miller, Ms. Bondi, et al., are truly seeking: No Federal District judge should be empowered to protect the nation’s well-being from President Trump’s illegal actions.
And that’s what the Supreme Court’s decision has now codified.
Trump v. CASA is truly cataclysmic. After 236 years of upholding the rule of law, the Supreme Court has now offered Trump an off ramp. He can violate any law he pleases and not be enjoined from jeopardizing the American people.
A president who can break laws at will is a dictator. The political system creating and accommodating this condition is fascism. Donald Trump is a dictator heading a fascist regime.
Fascism is defined in scholarly literature as far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist governance, characterized by a dictatorial leader, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, frequently a fusion with corporate power, and often a cult of personality.
Here we are.
The Supreme Court’s first toxic decision occurred in 1803, in the case of Marbury v. Madison. With no constitutional authority to do so, Chief Justice John Marshall’s Court overturned a law passed by an elected Congress and signed by an elected president. How democratic was that? SCOTUS has exercised the power of judicial review ever since, throwing out both federal and state laws.
Corporate oligarchy was the intermediate step between government by the people and fascism.
The next devastating decision was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 83 years later. In this case the court upgraded the status of U.S. corporations from artificial persons created by state charters, to that of legal persons, with constitutionally protected rights of free speech, peaceful assembly, petition for redress of grievances, and freedom from unlawful search and seizure. Corporate personhood is prima facie preposterous—in fact its granting was technically illegal—but today it is “settled law.”
The misfortunes of judicial review and corporate personhood joined forces in two more SCOTUS decisions, in 1976 and 1978. Buckley v. Valeo found unconstitutional the Corrupt Practices Act of 1910, and declared spending money in political campaigns is an exercise of free speech. Two years later, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a state law prohibiting corporations from spending money in political campaigns. The court concluded, citing Buckley, spending money in political campaigns is free speech and corporations have that right, protected by the Constitution.
But money doesn’t utter sounds or leave marks, and corporations don’t walk, eat, breathe, make love, or succumb to disease. Money is speech and corporations are people? How can that be? These two absurd concepts set the nation on the path to fascism.
Both Buckley and Bellotti, however, retained some minor restrictions on corporate spending: “Some conditions apply.” But spend the corporations could, and savagely they did. Over the rest of the 20th century, American corporations exercised their rights of free speech to dominate campaign finance, and their rights of petition to dominate congressional and executive branch lobbying. When the constant stream of corporate money became more influential in Washington than citizens’ episodic votes, democracy was displaced. Corporations succeeded in tilting the crafting of public policy to favor corporate interests over the American people’s well-being. (The nation’s physical infrastructure decayed, for example, while the defense corporations prospered.) Corporate oligarchy was the intermediate step between government by the people and fascism.
The minor restrictions on corporate spending were lifted by the next toxic decision, Citizens United v. FEC in 2010. The court declared corporate political spending could not be constitutionally constrained. “Some conditions [no longer] apply.”
The grip of corporate oligarchy tightened, expressed vividly in the first Trump administration’s slashing of corporate taxes. But at the end of those four years the transition to fascism appeared in dramatic fashion, when Trump refused to leave office, and his cult of personality stormed the Capitol.
Trump was subsequently indicted in two federal cases involving his presidency, for a total of 48 felonies. He denied everything and fought back, claiming his prosecution would handicap future presidents’ freedom of choice, especially in national security issues, if they feared prosecution when out of office. He took his case to SCOTUS.
The Roberts Court showed its propensity for accepting inane arguments. In Trump v. United States, July 1, 2024, the court declared immunity from prosecution for former presidents, if their violations of law were incidental to “official acts.”
No one is above the law, the Roberts Court proclaimed, except presidents.
Then a year later Trump v. CASA Inc. was the straw that broke democracy’s back.
SCOTUS v. DEMOCRACY brought us fascism and fashioned a dictator. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority continues as Trump’s compliant servant. Pam Bondi is his defense attorney. The sycophantic Republican Congress passed a law massively enriching the corporate and the wealthy at the direct expense of everyone else. No democracy on Earth would do that, ever.
And no country is a democracy if commanded by a single unaccountable man.
Trump can violate, has violated, is violating, will violate any law he chooses and face no universal injunctive interdiction. If he is sued for violating federal statutes and Pam Bondi fails with demonstrated vigor to dismiss the charges, his prosecution is postponed by Department of Justice policy until he is out of office. And once out of office Trump is immune.
But that may not happen. he may not leave office. If Trump can ignore the 14th Amendment in voiding birthright citizenship, he can ignore the 22nd and run for a third term. Or he might declare martial law and suspend elections altogether.
What will stop him? He’s 79. Maybe death. Anything else?
Angry, well informed, organized, and committed people are already protesting in the streets. That could stop him, but only if the movement grows larger.
Toppling Trump is by no means out of reach. Scholars Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan tell why in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Based on their rigorous research into historic conflicts, they offer a “rule of thumb.” An autocratic regime is in mortal peril when 3.5% of the people register civil resistance.
Doing the math we need a bit more than 12 million Americans to do this, and we may be about halfway home. An estimated 4-7 million individuals have joined in thousands of protests multiple times since Trump was inaugurated.
So, people, we have to get that many more into the streets. Full stop.
This article is drawn from a book the author is completing, The Triumph of Corporate Oligarchy: How It Defeated Democracy, Savaged a Thriving Nation, Normalized Fraudulent War, and Brought Forth Donald Trump.
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SCOTUS Has Enabled Fascism in America; Will the Senate Intervene?
If the majority on the Supreme Court thinks that the leader they have enabled will allow them to regulate his actions, it can only be because of their ignorance of history.
Dec 03, 2024
The Supreme Court in Trump v. United States has enabled Fascism in America.
We can see why if we examine the best book I know about Nazi Germany, Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State. Fraenkel was a German-Jewish attorney in Weimar Germany. He continued to practice after the Nazis came to power, emigrating to the United Kingdom in 1938 and to the United States in 1939. In The Dual State, published shortly after he arrived in the United States, Fraenkel characterizes the nature of the Nazi state, showing how Adolf Hitler ruled using prerogative powers. Fraenkel draws an analogy between Hitler’s rule and the king’s use of prerogative powers prior to the English Revolution in the 17th century.
Fraenkel shows, well before the events, how, after the court’s decision, as Sonia Sotomayor stated in her dissent, “the President is now a king above the law,” a king with the ability to act arbitrarily, without fear of sanction, in violation of the constitutional restraints the English Revolution sought to impose on the King in the 17th century, and the restraints that prior to the court’s decision, the U.S. Constitution was understood to impose on the president.
The clearest indication, so far, that Trump intends to rule using prerogative powers is his desire to infringe on the Senate’s authority to confirm or reject his appointments.
In patrimonialism, agents in the state function as “personal servants” of the leader. They are the vehicle for the expansion of the scope of the leader’s power, which is enhanced to control areas previously understood as outside the executive’s purview, including many that were previously legislative or judicial.
Charles I was king within an institutionalized state. He was able to claim that his misuse of prerogative powers, substituting them for actions that fell within the scope of parliamentary powers, was legitimate. When Hitler was named chancellor, he quickly moved from an illegal expansion of his powers to a coup d’état, governing using arbitrary prerogative powers. Like Charles I, he cloaked his usurpations in legal terms, but, in fact, as Fraenkel put it, characterizing the Nazi “constitutional” state, “There are no legal rules governing the political sphere. It is regulated by arbitrary measures (Massnahmen), in which the dominant officials exercise their discretionary prerogatives. Hence the expression ‘Prerogative State’ (Massnahmenstaat),” a patrimonial state.
In Nazi Germany, “Absolute dictatorial power is exercised by the leader and chancellor either personally or through his subordinate authorities. His sole decision determines how this power shall be wielded.” In his attempt to legalize his absolute power, the support given to Hitler by traditional conservative forces, including those within a fundamentally conservative legal order, was crucial. While there were sporadic attempts to curtail Hitler’s prerogative, they failed, because of institutional deficiencies and because of the timidity of those who were in a position to defend the Weimar political and legal order. Likewise, in the USA, where the constitutional-judicial safeguards are stronger, the conservatives within the legal and political order have followed their leader like lemmings walking off a cliff. Now the Supreme Court has enabled future presidents to claim, without fear of sanction, sovereign, patrimonial power, immunity for all “official” actions undertaken as president.
Crucially, the determination of what falls under the prerogative is made by the leader himself. As Fraenkel puts it, “The decisions of the state are free from normative restrictions. The state becomes absolute in the literal sense of the word.” The Nazi state suggested that “politics” was independent of the law, “and that the definition of the boundary lines between the two rests in the hands of the political authorities themselves.” If the majority on the Supreme Court thinks that the leader they have enabled will allow them to regulate his actions, it can only be because of their ignorance of history.
While the leader’s prerogative powers may derive from an emergency, it is often the fascist movement that creates the emergency it claims the power to resolve. In Nazi Germany, Fraenkel tells us, “Normal life is ruled by legal norms. But since martial law has become permanent in Germany, exceptions to the normal law are continually made... Whether the decision in an individual case is made in accordance with the law or with ‘expediency’ is entirely in the hands of those in whom the sovereign power is vested. Their sovereignty consists in the very fact that they determine the permanent emergency...”
“From this follows the principle that the presumption of jurisdiction rests with the Normative State,” he continues. “The jurisdiction over jurisdiction rests with the Prerogative state. The limits of the Prerogative State are not imposed upon it; there is not a single issue in which the Prerogative State cannot claim jurisdiction.”
As Fraenkel contends, “the legal situation of the 17th century has been reincarnated. The tendency defeated in England in the 17th century gradually attained success in [Nazi] Germany” (my italics). Now, with the aid of the Supreme Court, we in the United States are at peril of repeating this history, of witnessing President-elect Donald Trump, or one of his successors, acting with absolute immunity in what he chooses to define as his constitutional authority, and the Supreme Court will find that they have authorized him to do so.
The clearest indication, so far, that Trump intends to rule using prerogative powers is his desire to infringe on the Senate’s authority to confirm or reject his appointments. He wants the Senate to let him make recess appointments without their consent, and he has chosen a set of candidates who are among the most unqualified and dangerous in American history. The question now is whether the Senate will guard its constitutional authority to both vet and reject Trump’s candidates. If they do not do so, they, along with SCOTUS, will chart a path to fascism.
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New Motion Presents Most Detailed Case Yet Against Trump for Insurrection Crimes
"The desperate plan that Trump embarked on to try and overturn the results of a legitimate election was reprehensible, irresponsible, and—the document shows—criminal," said one consumer advocate.
Oct 02, 2024
Jack Smith, the special counsel probing former U.S. President Donald Trump's attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential contest, on Wednesday presented a massive trove of fresh evidence supporting his election interference case against the 2024 Republican nominee.
Smith's sprawling and highly anticipated 165-page motion—which was partly unsealed Wednesday by presiding U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan—states that Trump "asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so."
Trump—who in August 2023 was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights—contends that his actions were taken in his official capacity as president and not as a private individual.
In July, the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing justices—including three Trump appointees—ruled that the ex-president is entitled to "absolute immunity" for "official acts" taken while he was in office, raising questions about the future of this case. According to Smith's motion:
Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one. Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as president, had no official role.
In Trump v. United States... the Supreme Court held that presidents are immune from prosecution for certain official conduct—including the defendant's use of the Justice Department in furtherance of his scheme, as was alleged in the original indictment—and remanded to this court to determine whether the remaining allegations against the defendant are immunized.
The answer to that question is no. This motion provides a comprehensive account of the defendant's private criminal conduct; sets forth the legal framework created by Trump for resolving immunity claims; applies that framework to establish that none of the defendant's charged conduct is immunized because it either was unofficial or any presumptive immunity is rebutted; and requests the relief the government seeks, which is, at bottom, this: that the court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.
Smith's filing details what Trump told various people in his inner circle, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, his now-disgraced and twice-disbarred lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and leading White House and Republican Party figures—some of whose names remain undisclosed.
The motion also highlights Trump's actions on January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Trump is still pushing his "Big Lie" that Democrats stole the 2020 election; his running mate, U.S. Sen. J D Vance (R-Ohio), on Tuesday
refused to acknowledge that Trump lost to Biden when he was asked about the election during a vice presidential debate against Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
"Upon receiving a phone call alerting him that Pence had been taken to a secure location, [PERSON 15] rushed to the dining room to inform [Trump] in hopes that the defendant would take action to ensure Pence's safety," the filing states. "Instead, after [P15] delivered the news, the defendant looked at him and said only, 'So what?'"
Smith argued that deceit was central to Trump's efforts, specifically, "the defendant's and co-conspirators' knowingly false claims of election fraud," which they used to purvey the Big Lie.
The motion states:
When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the "targeted states"). His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, to obstruct Congress' certification of the election by using the defendant's fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification.
For a historic second time, Trump was
impeached by the House of Representatives following his effort to subvert the election, although he was subsequently acquitted by the Senate.
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung
blasted Smith's motion as "unconstitutional" and "falsehood-ridden."
"Deranged Jack Smith and Washington D.C. Radical Democrats are hell-bent on weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power," Cheung said in a statement aping Trump's habit of overcapitalizing words. "President Trump is dominating, and the Radical Democrats throughout the Deep State are freaking out. This entire case is a partisan, Unconstitutional Witch Hunt that should be dismissed entirely, together with ALL of the remaining Democrat hoaxes."
Democracy defenders, however, welcomed Smith's ruling.
"Jack Smith has shown us yet again the merits of his case against former President Trump," said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and co-chair of the Not Above the Law Coalition.
"In his filing, Smith clarifies that the alleged criminal actions occurred while Trump was acting as a private citizen," Gilbert added. "The desperate plan that Trump embarked on to try and overturn the results of a legitimate election was reprehensible, irresponsible, and—the document shows—criminal. Accountability to the American people and our democracy is our only path forward."
Judge Chutkan unsealed the motion five weeks before Trump will face off against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in a tight presidential election. If he wins, Trump will have the power to order the Department of Justice to drop the criminal charges against him.
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New Revelations Show Just How Corrupt the Supreme Court Really Is
Call me naïve. At the beginning of this year, I felt confident in asserting that the court was a conservative court, a Federalist Society court, even a Republican court—but not a MAGA court.
Sep 18, 2024
Last spring, Justice Samuel Alito had drafted an opinion dropping federal charges against many of the January 6 insurrectionists who violently stormed the Capitol. The ruling in Fischer v. United States had not yet been released. Then The New York Times published a startling story: Alito himself had flown the flag of insurrection at his home. (He briefly blamed it on his wife: “She is fond of flying flags.”) Days later, it was reported that he had flown such flags at his vacation home as well.
Awkward! Grounds for recusal? Time to rethink the ruling? Nah. Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts quietly took Alito’s embarrassing name off the opinion and slipped his own name onto it instead.
That is just one of the gobsmacking revelations from a story by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak that appeared in The New York Times last weekend. The lurid news of the day quickly overwhelmed it—the gunman arrested outside Donald Trump’s golf course, the continued smear campaign by former President Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) against the Haitian immigrant community in a small city in Ohio, and more.
Throughout American history, overreach by the Supreme Court has provoked a response.
But we must not let these revelations fade from view. They paint a damning and indelible picture of how John Roberts, for all his vaunted “institutionalism” and piety about calling “balls and strikes,” steered the court to shield Trump from accountability for his misdeeds.
Call me naïve. At the beginning of this year, I thought I had few illusions about the court. I had just published a harshly critical book, The Supermajority. But I felt confident in asserting that the court was a conservative court, a Federalist Society court, even a Republican court—but not a MAGA court. It had not yet shown an appetite for excusing Trump from the reach of the law.
So I, along with most legal observers, assumed that the justices would let Trump’s trial proceed. I thought there was a good chance it would be unanimous, that Roberts would work behind the scenes to ensure that the court spoke with one voice on major issues of presidential power and constitutional law. That’s what other chief justices did, most notably Warren Burger in United States v. Nixon, the Watergate tapes case and the closest analogue to the Trump trial ruling.
After all, we all thought, Trump v. United States was legally easy. Indeed, the possibility of criminal charges was the stated reason why Republican senators did not vote to convict him of the January 6 charges in Trump’s second impeachment trial.
Many of us, too, sensed there was a deal afoot—a unanimous ruling that Trump could not be thrown off the ballot by one state under the 14th Amendment and a principled ruling on the criminal trial.
Behind the velvet curtain of the court, though, there was no deal. Roberts wrote a memo in February—before the court had even announced that it would hear Trump’s appeal—declaring that the court would give the former president a huge win. “I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently” from the appeals court, he wrote. As Kantor and Liptak summarized, “In other words: grant Mr. Trump greater protection from prosecution.”
They detailed myriad other ways that Roberts steered rulings Trump’s way. He froze out Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The ruling was sloppy and immunized vast areas of potential presidential wrongdoing. The Times noted that NYU Law professor Trevor Morrison had discovered that Roberts selectively edited a quote from a key earlier ruling to help Trump.
The resulting ruling tells future presidents that they can break the law, plainly and flagrantly. As long as they conspire with other government officials, it will be effectively immunized. (Order your White House counsel to pay hush money, as Richard Nixon did, not your campaign manager, and you’ll be off the hook.)
The opinion has widely and correctly been scorned as one of the worst in American history—a rip in the constitutional fabric. The Times’ tick-tock makes clear that this was not a baffling anomaly. Rather, it is the biggest, most visible, and perhaps most consequential in a series of actions taken by a corrupted court. It follows Citizens United, Shelby County, and other rulings that systematically undid key democratic protections.
Throughout American history, overreach by the Supreme Court has provoked a response. Dred Scott did in the 1850s—it helped lead to a civil war. Reactionary rulings such as Lochner did in the early 20th century. Trump v. United States should join with the Dobbs abortion rights ruling to spur a similar backlash today.
We’ve argued for an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, because nobody should have too much public power for too long. And we’ve urged a binding code of ethics, which would have forced Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas to step out of these key cases. These reforms are widely popular. Most recently, a Fox News poll this summer found that 78% support term limits.
The court is a broken institution. It’s time to fix it. The latest revelations remind us that otherwise, the fix is in.
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After Immunity Ruling, Trump Indicted Again for Trying to Reverse 2020 Election
"Congratulations to Donald Trump on being the historic first-ever major party presidential nominee to be indicted after the convention," quipped one observer.
Aug 27, 2024
This is a breaking news story... Please check back for possible updates.
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump was hit Tuesday with yet another federal indictment for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.
Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment that revises earlier felony charges against Trump in the election subversion case. The revised indictment comes in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's July Trump v. United States ruling, which affirmed presidents' "absolute immunity" for "official acts" taken while in office.
None of the four charges against Trump—conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights—have been dropped.
However, parts of Smith's initial indictment—like Trump's conversations with officials at the Department of Justice after the 2020 election—are no longer admissible under the high court's ruling.
"Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority in the decision.
To secure the new indictment, Smith presented his evidence to an entirely new grand jury.
"So, a new group of American citizens, doing their civic duty, sat and heard this evidence and returned 'a true bill' against Trump for the four charges in this superseding indictment," observed MSNBC's Katie Phang.
Reacting to the new indictment on his Truth social network, Trump fumed with his usual overcapitalization that "no Presidential Candidate, or Candidate for any Office, has ever had to put up with all of this Lawfare and Weaponization directly out of the Office of a Political Opponent."
"The whole case should be thrown out and dismissed on Presidential Immunity grounds, as already ruled unequivocally by the U.S. Supreme Court," Trump said. "What they are doing now is the single greatest sabotage of our Democracy in History."
Grant Stern, the executive editor of Occupy Democrats, quipped on social media, "Congratulations to Donald Trump on being the historic first-ever major party presidential nominee to be indicted after the convention."
Trump was impeached twice during his presidency, including for inciting the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol by believers of the then-president's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential contest was "rigged" by Democrats. He was not convicted by the Senate in either case.
In May, a New York state jury found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts related to the falsification of business records regarding hush money payments to cover up sex scandals during the 2016 presidential election. It was the first time in U.S. history that a former president was convicted of felony crimes.
In Georgia, the state Court of Appeals last month paused proceedings in a separate election interference case against Trump and other defendants until an appellate panel determines whether the prosecuting district attorney should be disqualified for an alleged conflict of interest. Trump faces 10 felony charges in the case, including violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corruption Organizations Act, conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree, false statements and writing, and filing false documents.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon—a Trump appointee—dismissed 40 felony charges against the former president over his alleged mishandling of classified government documents after he left office. On Monday, Smith urged an appeals court to reverse Cannon's dismissal.
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'Stunning Abdication': Appeals Court Dismisses Biden Genocide Complicity Case
"We turned to the law to help stop the horror, and the court chose to do nothing," said one plaintiff in the case. "We are beyond disappointed."
Jul 16, 2024
Palestine defenders on Tuesday decried a U.S. federal appellate panel's dismissal of a case brought by Palestinians accusing senior Biden administration officials of failing to prevent and complicity in Israeli genocide in Gaza.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed a lower court's dismissal of the lawsuit against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, which was led by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of several Palestinian groups and individuals.
During a Tuesday interview on Democracy Now!, CCR attorney Katherine Gallagher—who represented plaintiffs in the case—said its dismissal "essentially gives the blank check to carry out any kind of conduct that the executive wants in times of genocide, in times of war."
Gallagher's interview followed a Monday statement in which she referred to the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling granting the president "absolute immunity" for "official acts."
"On the heels of Trump v. United States, this stunning abdication of the court's role to serve as a check on the executive even in the face of its support for genocide should set off alarm bells for all," she said.
The lawsuit—originally filed in November in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland—sought to stop the Biden administration from aiding Israel's bombardment of Gaza. U.S. weapons have played a critical role in Israel's war, which Palestinian and international agencies say has killed, wounded, or left missing more than 137,500 Gazans.
While the court found that "the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law," it dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds in late January. The 9th Circuit subsequently granted an expedited appeal in the case, which was heard in June.
"This decision is mind-boggling and, frankly, scary," plaintiff Waeil Elbhassi said in a statement Monday. "It is just unfathomable, while we count our dead, witness the total obliteration of Gaza—aided by our own government."
"As the death toll keeps rising and we see nonstop images of carnage during this livestreamed genocide, the court washes its hands of our case," Elbhassi added. "We turned to the law to help stop the horror, and the court chose to do nothing. We are beyond disappointed. We have no choice but to continue to fight for our people. Our very existence is at stake."
Israel's conduct in Gaza—including alleged forced starvation that has fueled deadly famine in parts of the besieged strip—is under investigation by the International Court of Justice in a genocide case brought by South Africa.
Additionally, International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan has applied for warrants to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for crimes including extermination allegedly committed on and after October 7.
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