<The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Monday that it was introducing a new code of conduct for justices amid ongoing calls to implement an ethics code, prompting criticism on social media.

"The undersigned Justices are promulgating this Code of Conduct to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court. For the most part these rules and principles are not new," the court said in a statement.

"The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct."

In recent months, some Americans have urged the court to adopt a code of ethics following reports that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito received gifts and trips from billionaires. ProPublica published a report in August detailing that Thomas received several trips and traveled aboard the private jet owned by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

The MoveOn organization created a petition this year calling for the court to adopt a "clear and enforceable code of ethics."

The Supreme Court Code of Conduct released on Monday includes several canons, such as "a Justice should uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary," "A Justice should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities," and "A Justice may engage in extrajudicial activities that are consistent with the obligations of the Judicial Office."

"Nothing in the 14-page document, or the one-page cover note, addresses the elephant in the room: *Whatever* rules the justices *say* they are bound to follow, *who* is going to enforce those rules—and how?" Stephen I. Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright chair in federal courts at the University of Texas School of Law, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman responded to the post from Vladeck and said, "I think the answer is clear from the silence..."

Other social media users also mocked the code of conduct, such as law professor Anthony Michael Kreis, who wrote on X: "A Code of Conduct with no meaningful enforcement mechanism is a mere gesture."

X user Jamison Foser wrote: "The word 'must' appears 6 times in the Supreme Court's new ethics code. The word 'should' appears 53 times."

The X account for the No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen podcast wrote: "The Supreme Court just announced an arbitrary "ethics code" for justices. They didn't explain how it would work, who would enforce it, and it doesn't include financial disclosures. The effort is a PR attempt to save face."

Newsweek reached out to the U.S. Supreme Court via email for comment.>

<D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb won’t share with Congress information about his investigation into whether judicial activist Leonard Leo abused nonprofit tax laws, according to a Monday letter obtained by POLITICO.

Leo presides over a multi-billion-dollar network of tax-exempt nonprofit groups and used it, in part, to organize campaigns over the past decade to install the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. The question at issue is the transfer of tens of millions of dollars collected by one of his aligned nonprofit organizations to his for-profit entity.

On Oct. 30, GOP Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and James Comer (R-Ky.), chairs of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, respectively, demanded all materials from Schwalb related to Leo.

In his letter, Schwalb rejected both the request and its premise — that any probe might be politically motivated. “Contrary to your letter’s suggestion, [the office] is committed to the impartial pursuit of justice, without regard to political affiliation or motivation and without fear or favor,” wrote Schwalb.

It’s the latest attempt by Leo allies to throw sand in the gears of Schwalb’s investigation. (Though in keeping with law enforcement protocol, Schwalb still has not confirmed or denied its existence.) Whether the probe uncovers wrongdoing is significant given the sheer scale of Leo’s work: He is also the beneficiary of a $1.6 billion contribution, believed to be the biggest political donation in U.S. history.

Jordan and Comer had claimed it appears Schwalb does not have jurisdiction to investigate nonprofits and other entities that were incorporated outside of Washington, D.C.

“I am concerned that your letter may misapprehend jurisdiction over nonprofit organizations operating in the District,” Schwalb said. “No corporation, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, is exempt from the laws of a jurisdiction in which it chooses to be present and do business.”

Leo’s attorney previously told POLITICO his client is not cooperating with Schwalb’s investigation.

Leo’s network of nonprofits, often referred to as “dark money” groups, are exempt from tax and do not have to disclose their donors because they are registered as charitable or social welfare organizations. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns to promote the nominations of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. But many partisan groups operate as nonprofits shielded from federal tax, and that’s not why Schwalb is investigating.

In March. POLITICO reported that a total of $43 million flowed to Leo’s company, CRC Advisors, over two years and that the bulk of it came from one of his charitable groups, The 85 Fund. A few months later, a Democrat-aligned watchdog group filed a complaint with the IRS and with Schwalb’s office alleging the total amount of money that flowed from Leo-aligned nonprofits to his for-profit firms was $73 million over six years beginning in 2016. That’s the year Leo was tapped as an unpaid judicial adviser to former President Donald Trump....>

<....A review of real estate and other public records also illustrated that the lifestyle of Leo and a handful of his allies took a lavish turn beginning the same year.

Jordan has also tried to investigate prosecutors going after former President Donald Trump. The congressman issued a similar demand to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia, which she strongly rebuked, as well as to special counsel Jack Smith related to the federal prosecution of Trump over his handling of classified documents.

In his letter, Schwalb told Comer and Jordan that potential abuse of nonprofit tax laws is a serious offense. “Because nonprofits are supported by tax-exempt contributions, they operate as a public trust. For that reason, every nonprofit registered and doing business in the District must use the funds it receives solely for its stated public purpose, and not for the private inurement or benefit of others,” he said.

The idea that Schwalb doesn’t have jurisdiction — disputed by nonprofit tax law experts — was first floated in a letter from a group of Republican attorneys general who based their claim on the fact that The 85 Fund was first incorporated outside of the District of Columbia. Their argument was picked up in a Wall Street Journal opinion editorial.

But the Leo-aligned group, previously called the Judicial Education Project, operated from a Washington, D.C. PO Box in Georgetown for more than a decade. CRC Advisors is also registered in DC. The biggest funder of the Republican Attorneys General Association so far in 2023 is a Leo-aligned group, the Concord Fund, which has given RAGA at least $9.5 million since 2020.

Nonprofit legal experts say the argument seeking to discredit Schwalb’s investigative authority isn’t credible.

“The D.C. Attorney General has very broad jurisdiction over business in D.C.,” said Yael Fuchs, who was a senior lawyer on a New York case against the National Rifle Association’s alleged abuse of nonprofit tax law.

“Nonprofits generally are governed by multiple legal systems — the laws of the state where they are incorporated, the laws of the jurisdictions in which they conduct business, and if federally tax-exempt, by the Internal Revenue Code,” Fuchs said in an email to POLITICO. “The D.C. Attorney General has very broad jurisdiction over business in DC,” she said.

The group at issue, The 85 Fund, quietly relocated in recent months from the capital area to Texas, where it is unlikely to face the same scrutiny.>

<In what might be seen as a microcosm of how delay tactics are going in Donald Trump’s cases, the former president’s lawyers on Sunday asked Jan. 6 U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to push back deadlines for defense filings supporting various theories that special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution should be dismissed.

Defense attorney John Lauro requested extensions so that Trump “may better balance […] conflicting obligations,” for instance appealing the trial judge’s gag order of the former president at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Recall: the judge issued the partial gag order and then temporarily stayed that order, only to reinstate it when — during the administrative stay — Trump posted on Truth Social on Oct. 24 about former chief of staff Mark Meadows and “Deranged Prosecutor” Jack Smith.

That Truth Social post, as the Barack Obama-appointed trial judge read it, “single[d] out a foreseeable witness for purposes of characterizing his potentially unfavorable testimony as a ‘lie’ ‘mad[e] up’ to secure immunity, and it attacks him as a ‘weakling[] and coward[]’ if he provides that unfavorable testimony — an attack that could readily be interpreted as an attempt to influence or prevent the witness’s participation in this case.”

In other words, the judge issued an order and then briefly reversed herself, the defendant took advantage of the paused order by posting something that, in the judge’s view, would have almost certainly violated the gag order if it was in effect at the time the post went online, the judge responded by reversing her reversal, and Trump’s attorneys filed an emergency motion in the D.C. Circuit accusing Chutkan of violating 100 million Americans’ rights to hear Trump’s voice and violating the former president’s First Amendment rights.

Here’s where the latest request for extensions comes in. Trump’s legal team is citing upcoming Nov. 20 oral arguments in the D.C. Circuit over the gag order as one reason, among several others, why the defense should get until Thanksgiving to file documents in the Jan. 6 case that support pending motions to dismiss the prosecution on three separate statutory, constitutional, and selective prosecution grounds.

The “Non-Immunity MTD” deadlines, “which address numerous significant and complex legal issues,” as the filing put it, should be moved from Nov. 16 to Nov. 23, Lauro said:

On November 6, 2023, the prosecution filed its responses to these motions, including, with leave of Court, an oversized, 64-page omnibus response (Doc. 139) to President Trump’s Constitutional and statutory motions to dismiss. President Trump’s replies are currently due Monday, November 13, 2023 (for the motions to stay and strike) and Thursday, November 16, 2023 (for the Non-Immunity MTDs). Simultaneously, President Trump has appealed this Court’s order limiting President Trump’s speech (Doc. 105). Following extensive briefing, the Court denied President Trump’s motion to stay this order pending appeal (Doc. 124). Thereafter, President Trump sought an emergency stay in the D.C. Circuit. USCA Case. No. 23-3190, Doc. 2025149. The Circuit Court then entered an administrative stay, while ordering an expedited briefing schedule, requiring President Trump to file his opening brief on November 8, 2023, and his reply brief this coming Friday (November 17, 2023). (Id. at Doc. 2025399). Moreover, the Circuit Court scheduled oral argument for Monday, November 20, 2023.....>

Oh, I forgot; no-one will work for him:

<.....But there’s more. The Sunday filing asked for a two-day extension of a Monday deadline to file a motion in support of an attempt to strike “inflammatory allegations” from the Jan. 6 indictment and a motion in support of the argument that “all proceedings” in the Jan. 6 federal case should be paused until Trump’s “presidential immunity” claims are resolved.

In essence, the latter is a request for a brief delay to argue in favor of an indefinite delay.

“Accordingly, President Trump faces deadlines for six briefs on dispositive and other crucially important issues this coming week. At the same time, President Trump’s legal team must prepare for oral argument in the D.C. Circuit on an unprecedented First Amendment issue,” Lauro argued. “President Trump seeks the requested extensions so that he may better balance these conflicting obligations, while also continuing his trial preparation work, which cannot stop given the enormity of discovery and the potential March 4, 2024, trial date.”

Sign up for the Law&Crime Daily Newsletter for more breaking news and updates The defense asserted, however, that the requested extensions of the “Non-Immunity MTD” deadlines for motions in support, which would at most amount to 11 days, will neither impact other deadlines nor “cause any prejudice.”

Even if these particular extension requests would not impact the pretrial schedule, requests like these are worth watching down the line because they could affect the trial date in the Mar-a-Lago case, and we already know that Trump’s goal is to push that case past the 2024 election. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon last week declined to make a decision until March 1, 2024, on moving back the preliminary May 2024 trial date — and one of the reasons the Trump-appointed judge cited was the uncertainty posed by competing deadlines.

“Although the Special Counsel is correct that the trajectory of these matters potentially remains in flux, the schedules as they currently stand overlap substantially with the deadlines in this case, presenting additional challenges to ensuring Defendant Trump has adequate time to prepare for trial and to assist in his defense,” the judge wrote.>

<Retired conservative Judge Michael Luttig is raising the alarm about the possibility of former President Donald Trump being re-elected in an interview released on Monday by The Guardian.

“I am more worried for America today than I was on January 6,” said Luttig, a former clerk for Antonin Scalia and an appeals court judge who was considered by many to be the father of the modern conservative legal movement.

“For all the reasons that we know, his election would be catastrophic for America’s democracy.”

“All that he has done beginning with January 6 has corrupted American democracy and corrupted American elections and laid waste to Americans’ faith and confidence in their democracy to the extent that today millions and millions and millions of Americans no longer have faith and confidence in their elections," said Luttig.

"He’s the presumptive nominee of the Republican party in 2024 and indeed many people believe that he will be the next president."

Luttig added that such a presidency would be "ruinous" to the rule of law.

Luttig has become increasingly vocal against the former president in recent years, arguing alongside former Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe that the Fourteenth Amendment's Insurrection Clause should in fact disqualify Trump from holding office again.

Multiple cases trying to remove Trump from the ballot on those grounds have been advanced in states around the country. One of the largest cases, in Minnesota, was recently dealt a blow by the state Supreme Court, which held state officials couldn't keep Trump off the primary ballot — but could potentially re-file the case with respect to the general election.

Luttig has more broadly warned about the direction of his longtime political party, saying that as of now, "there is no Republican Party" as a functional democratic political organization.>

<Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s family kept leftover money from a legal defence fund set up for him, a lawsuit states.

The family of the former general, who lasted less than a month in the Trump administration and subsequently has become a major figure among followers of the QAnon conspiracy, reportedly kept hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fund, according to the lawsuit that was made public on Thursday.

The fund was set up as Mr Flynn was the subject of a federal investigation regarding the 2016 election, the ex-general’s sister testified in a defamation case against CNN, Semafor notes.

Mr Flynn took part in a sworn deposition in the case, which surrounds allegations made by his wife and sister-in-law that the network defamed them when it connected them to the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to legal filings. Mr Flynn’s deposition is sealed. CNN asked a Florida federal judge in a filing on Thursday to dismiss the lawsuit before it goes to trial. The filing claims that the family was connected to the conspiracy theory and that they “exploited” Mr Flynn’s connection to the movement behind it as they supposedly fundraised from its backers.

Lori and Valerie Flynn’s argument in a lawsuit filed early last year is based on a 2021 CNN report in which a two-second clip of Mr Flynn appearing to take a QAnon oath at a Fourth of July barbecue. The CNN screenshot in the lawsuit states that the clip appeared on Mr Flynn’s Twitter account in July 2020. The video shows Mr Flynn’s family at his sides, also holding up their right hands. They have each asked for $100m in damages.

The CNN report mostly focuses not on the Flynn family, but on a QAnon conference with a chyron stating, “CNN Goes Inside a Gathering of QAnon Followers”.

Lori and Valeri Flynn argue that they were defamed when they were included in the CNN report, stating that they’re not followers of the conspiracy theory.

Mr Flynn’s brother Jack and sister-in-law Leslie have also sued CNN in connection to the QAnon report, Semafor notes. The case is pending in a New York federal court.

Mr Flynn resigned from the Trump administration after 22 days following reports that he misled White House officials regarding contact he had with the Russian Ambassador to the US at the time – Sergey Kislyak.

After playing a major role in the story surrounding former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by former President Donald Trump, and the Russia probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, also a former FBI director, Mr Flynn pled guilty to lying to the agency about the conversations with Mr Kislyak, who left the post eight months into the Trump administration in August 2017.

The Justice Department moved to dismiss the case several years later, ahead of Mr Flynn being sentenced and Mr Trump pardoning him in 2020. Mr Flynn has also shared conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and Covid-19.

In 2020, the Flynn family took part in the so-called #TakeTheOath movement – supporters were encouraged to recite the federal oath of office and add the QAnon-connected slogan “Where We Go One, We Go All”, according to the legal filing. Mr Flynn tweeted a video of himself and his family taking the oath at the Fourth of July barbecue in 2020.

CNN states that its report never names Lori and Valeri Flynn and notes Mr Flynn’s connection to the movement only briefly. The CNN filing argues that his family remained connected to the movement because they “relentlessly fundraised … from the QAnon community” for the defence fund between 2018 and 2021.

The CNN motion states that Mr Flynn’s sister Barbara Flynn, who served as the trustee of the fund, testified that she “didn’t mind taking money from people who [used QAnon] hashtags” as long as they were “directing [people] to the legal defense fund,” Semafor notes.

The fund was used to pay for Mr Flynn’s legal team, but Ms Flynn testified that after that, she was paid around $265,000 and that her brother received “whatever was [left over] in the account” – a sum which she said was between a quarter of a million and a million dollars.

CNN argues that the prosecution of Mr Flynn and the pardon from Mr Trump “galvanized support from QAnon followers, who acted like ‘groupies’”.

The CNN motion asks “whether the purpose of this lawsuit is to really vindicate an emotional harm or simply to ‘get CNN’”.

A lawsuit from Valerie Flynn, which was filed separately but was later merged with the lawsuit filed by Lori Flynn, claims that CNN shared the notion that Valerie pledged allegiance to QAnon and that it connected the Flynns to a “violent extremist group”.

<The New York Times is facing intense criticism over a headline on an article about former President Donald Trump's Veteran's Day speech calling his political enemies "vermin."

The Times article, according to screenshots of the headline, was originally titled "Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction." Based on a Sunday social media post stating the original headline and linking to the article, the outlet appears to have since changed the headline to "In Veterans Day Speech, Trump Promises to 'Root Out' the Left."

According to The Washington Post, the GOP frontrunner vilified his domestic opponents and critics during the Saturday speech, calling them "vermin" and suggesting that they present a greater threat to the nation than countries like Russia, China or North Korea. The comments also drew a sharp rebuke from historians who connected the language to that of fascist dictators Hitler and Mussolini. “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said near the end of his remarks, regurgitating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”

Trump went on to state that the threats against the country from forces outside the United States are "far less sinister, dangerous and grave" than the internal threats.

"Our threat is from within," he said. "Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”

Trump used the New Hampshire speech to reiterate his messages of vengeance and grievance as he dubbed himself a "very proud election denier" and bemoaned his ongoing legal battles by again taking aim at the judge overseeing his New York civil trial and special counsel Jack Smith, who has brought two federal indictments accusing the former president of illegally retaining national security documents and scheming to overturn the 2020 election.

“The Trump-hating prosecutor in the case, his wife and family despise me much more than he does and I think he’s about a ten,” Trump said. “They’re about a 15, on a scale of ten. … He’s a disgrace to America.”

In his remarks, Trump also portrayed himself as a victim of a political system bent on going after him and his supporters. But his use of the word "vermin" in the remarks and in a Truth Social post on Saturday drew magnified backlash....>

<.....“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told The Washington Post. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”

Longtime Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe called Trump's comments "straight-up Nazi talk."

New York University historian Ruth Ben Ghiat told the Post via email that "calling people 'vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”

“Trump is also using projection: note that he mentions all kinds of authoritarians ‘communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left’ to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom,” Ben-Ghiat added. “Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

Presidential historian Jon Meacham warned on MSNBC that "to call your opponents vermin and to dehumanize them is to not only open the door but to walk through the door toward the most ghastly kinds of crimes."

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung pushed back on the comparisons, telling the Post that “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

Fascism expert and Yale University professor Jason Stanley, however, echoed the historians' sentiments during a Sunday MSNBC appearance, telling host Mehdi Hasan that Trump's speech "doesn't echo 'Mein Kampf'" — the title of Hitler's 1925 autobiographical manifesto detailing his political ideology — "this is textbook ‘Mein Kampf.’”

“Any antisemite will hear this vocabulary as directed against Jews,” Stanley argued.

Ian Bassin, the founder of nonpartisan group Protect Democracy compared The Times headline to Forbes', which reads "Trump Compares Political Foes to 'Vermin" on Veterans Day — Echoing Nazi Propaganda."

"One of these might save us from a nightmare; the other might help deliver it. Cmon NYT. Do better," Bassin, a former associate White House counsel, wrote on X/Twitter.

"The Washington Post's headline — late in arriving, but on the mark when it did — makes the original header at the New York Times sound almost surreal: 'Trump takes Veterans day speech in a very different direction,'" New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said, highlighting the Post's "Trump calls political enemies 'vermin' echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini" headline. "That's quiescent."

"Has the media not learned anything?" tweeted former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman. "BE TRUTHFUL means not sugar coating lies and branding the material editorializing. Trump plays on that weakness."

"I study the breakdown of democracy, and I don't know how to say this more clearly," Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, warned on MSNBC. "We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.">

<A baby rarely cries for no reason. It's usually to alert you of his or her discomfort. Without the protesting of climate change, women's reproductive rights, and global wars, these issues would have even less of a chance of being addressed. Change comes slowly but the right to peacefully assemble is the key to anything of substance occurring. You can't ignore the protesting students. People who lived through World War II insist that ignoring the protests helped ignite it. However, the line should be drawn going from diversity, equity, and inclusion to embracing terrorism.

As far as the current Middle East fiasco is concerned, the right-wing governments of Hamas, Israel, and America helped to perpetuate this tragic mess—intentionally. The right continually leaves us with massive budget deficits, wars to wriggle out of, and like clockwork puts us on the precipice of future wars. A few glaring examples are backing out of the Iran nuclear deal, moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, and invading Afghanistan.

But the left is conditioned for this by now. We're like the planet's caretaker. The left is always tasked with cleaning up the economic and political messes the right creates.

Evangelicals professing their "love" for Israel and pushing us toward World War III, which will invariably be the final battle in the trilogy, is beyond hypocrisy. The sole reason for their "love" is self-serving. Only when all the Jews in Israel are dead will their messiah (not the orange one) come. Evangelical Christian buzzwords like "love" and "peace" do not apply in this context so they should stop preaching.

Yet the inconsistencies on the right remain mind-boggling. Supporting Israel but not supporting Ukraine is sheer madness. We are giving Ukraine approximately 5 percent of our military budget without having to send a single troop to fight. If you fail to see how that's a bargain to deplete and weaken our biggest military threat (sorry, China) and support a country with free elections that was egregiously attacked for no reason other than to exponentially expand its land mass, I can't help you. Also, if you profess to be a fiscal conservative then you had no business rooting (or voting) for the $1.7 trillion Trump tax cuts. Breaking news: The only money that trickles down is from the shirt pockets of the wealthy to their cargo shorts.

There are only two reasons to be against Ukraine. Watching Fox News and the repeated verbal assaults by Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) spewing their pro-Russian dogma have permanently penetrated conservative brains. Or, you happen to be Ron Johnson, Rand Paul or MTG, who are undoubtedly on Vladimir Putin's payroll. It's not even Occam's razor. There is simply no other worthy explanation. If I were Putin funneling money to the GOP, as he did to the NRA, buying Congress members would be an excellent investment.

Besides, for a professed pro-military group, the right doesn't really care about burn pits, or vets, or for that matter, actually staffing the military. The Tommy Tuberville stunt was a good example.

At least the left cares about rights and not literally and figuratively tearing down the walls of our democracy. As of this writing there are still exactly zero members of antifa who tried to overthrow our government on Jan. 6. And the right perpetually screams about "law and order" while they applaud Capitol cops who got beaten by flag poles while kowtowing to Mr. 91 Indictments, who has never met a dictator he didn't like.

In fact, the only things Trump worships more than Putin, is chaos and himself. His followers are the model of inconsistency and anything he or his crumbling party does that are antithetical to their alleged "values" like infidelity, cheating, violence, fascism, stealing, or lying, are merely written off as minor indiscretions. The only thing that's "rigged" is the GOP.

At least the left has a modicum of consistency.>

<Portions of interviews between attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell and Fulton County, Georgia prosecutors was shared with ABC News and contain multiple revelations, including a Rudy Giuiliani argument and Donald Trump's alleged plan to simply remain in the White House despite losing the 2020 election.

Both Ellis and Powell pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in a racketeering case where Trump and over a dozen allies are facing charges over their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.

Trump has denied all wrongdoing and called the case politically motivated.

Ellis claimed Dan Scavino, the former White House deputy chief of staff, told her at a December 2020 party that Trump planned on remaining in the White House, regardless of the results of his legal battles to challenge Joe Biden's victory.

"The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances," Ellis recalled Scavino saying, according to ABC's report on the partial video.

Ellis alleged she told Scavino this is not how the legal system works and he responded, "Well, we don't care, and we're not going to leave."

Steve Sadow, Trump's counsel in his Fulton County case, dismissed the proffer interviews as "absolutely meaningless."

"If this is the type of bogus, ridiculous 'evidence' DA Willis intends to rely upon, it is one more reason that this political, travesty of a case must be dismissed," Sadow said in a statement.

Powell, who Trump has said was never officially his lawyer, alleged during her proffer interview that she was in daily contact with Trump and he was even considering making her "special counsel" to deal with election fraud, which would have included seizing voting machines from multiple swing states Trump claimed he won when he actually lost.

"Did I know anything about election law? No," Powell admitted at one point to prosecutors. "But I understand fraud from having been a prosecutor for 10 years, and knew generally what the fraud suit should be if the evidence showed what I thought it showed."

Powell also described a shouting match with Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who represented Trump and spearheaded many of his efforts to challenge the 2020 results.

Giuliani was allegedly frustrated with Powell's work on challenging the 2020 results.

"There was a big shouting match in which Rudy called me every name in the book and I was the worst lawyer he'd ever seen in his life," she said. "There were no circumstances under which he'd work with me on anything. He called me a b—h and I don't know what all, and that's pretty much all I remember about that one."

She also claimed she told several people planning on attending Trump's January 6 rally in Washington D.C. not to attend because she thought it was a recipe for something bad. Protesters eventually rioted and entered the Capitol.

"I just saw it as a really bad idea to have a rally over the end of the Trump presidency. I just wouldn't have encouraged people," she said.>

<For weeks, former President Donald Trump has refused to tip his hand about whether he will invoke an advice-of-counsel defense in the federal 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith. It is a move that would potentially be his only decent defense, but it would also come with substantial caveats.

Now, Judge Tanya Chutkan has ordered him to clarify whether he will use the defense — and, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman wrote for the Los Angeles Times, that strategy has significant implications.

"It will probably preempt a whole lot of mischief and delay by the defendant," wrote Litman. "Trump has repeatedly suggested that he relied on his attorneys’ advice in undertaking his flagrantly unconstitutional conduct after the election. Most expressly, Trump’s lawyer John Lauro claimed on 'Meet the Press' in August that what his client was 'indicted for, ultimately, is following legal advice from an esteemed scholar, John Eastman.' Lauro added that Trump was also following Eastman’s advice when he 'petitioned Mike Pence' to refuse to certify Joe Biden’s election."

But that is not so simple a defense to make, noted Litman.

"A defendant asserting it must be able to show that he relied in good faith on his counsel’s advice that the course of conduct was legal — that is, not just that he received the faulty advice but that he took it to heart. And he must also show that he fully disclosed all material facts to his attorney before receiving the advice," he wrote. "The latter requires a step that few defendants are willing to take: waiving attorney-client privilege and disclosing all communications that will be used to establish the defense. Beyond that, a defendant must reveal otherwise privileged communications that are relevant to proving or undermining the defense even though they won’t be used at trial."

There are other obstacles to this defense that other experts have noted. For example, Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro's plea deal in the Georgia election racketeering case could ultimately lead him to testify against the former president, revealing his state of mind in his efforts to overthrow the election.

Ultimately, concluded Litman, "Thanks to the judge’s order, Trump won’t be able to blame his lawyers for Jan. 6 without producing a wealth of otherwise privileged materials and taking the stand to testify to his own good faith."

It might simply be better for Trump to "give it up entirely" as a defense.>

<Former President Donald Trump has breathed new life into a push by media companies to televise his federal trial on election-subversion charges, but the odds of cameras being in the courtroom remain slim.

On Friday, Trump’s lawyers urged U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to allow broadcasting of the trial, scheduled to begin in March, saying that the “prosecution wishes to continue this travesty in darkness” and that “President Trump calls for sunlight.”

It marked a rare moment of Trump agreeing with congressional Democrats such as Reps. Adam Schiff, of California, and Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi. In August, just hours after Trump was indicted in Washington, they signed a letter asserting that “it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings.”

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team, meanwhile, has cited the longstanding prohibition on broadcasting federal criminal trials and raised concerns that televising the proceedings could have an intimidating effect on witnesses. In a four-page filing on Monday, lawyers from Smith’s office said Trump was demanding “special treatment” and attempting to “try his case in the courtroom of public opinion, and turn his trial into a media event.”

The dispute stems from a bid by a coalition of media companies to record and telecast Trump’s trial on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election results. The outlets backing the effort include Bloomberg LP, the New York Times Company, and Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

In a court filing last month, lawyers for the coalition underscored the case’s profile and Trump’s status as a former president and current front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. The coalition framed its bid to televise Trump’s trial as rooted in the principle of public access to criminal proceedings, arguing that rules prohibiting the broadcast of trials “cannot contravene a First Amendment right.”

“Since the founding of our Nation, we have never had a criminal case where securing the public’s confidence will be more important than with United States v. Donald J. Trump,” the lawyers wrote. “The prosecution of a former President, now a presidential contender, on charges of subverting the electoral process, presents the strongest possible circumstances for continuous public oversight of the justice system.”

The coalition has a Friday deadline to file additional briefings but it still faces stiff headwinds in a federal court system bound by tradition.

“This is just such a once-in-a-lifetime case, so there seems to be a very compelling argument” for televising the trial, said Jane Kirtley, director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota. But, she added, “to expect that to happen in this case is unrealistic. There’s a very strong rule in the federal system.”

The federal rules of criminal procedure, first adopted by the Supreme Court in the 1940s, explicitly prohibit “the broadcasting of judicial proceedings from the courtroom” subject to limited exceptions. Those restrictions can be traced back to the 1935 trial for the man convicted of kidnapping and murdering aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Reporters descended on a New Jersey county courthouse, and the media coverage devolved into a feeding frenzy. The judge grew irate when newsreel companies surreptitiously recorded and published testimony in defiance of his orders.

The federal judiciary’s policy-making arm has signaled an openness to relaxing the prohibition on broadcasting criminal proceedings, but any change is unlikely to come in time for Trump’s trials. Last month, when a judicial panel established a subcommittee to examine the issue, its chairman cautioned that any change wouldn’t take effect until 2026 or 2027.

Congress could also pass a law that allows federal trials to be televised, though so far such legislation has gotten little traction. In March, before Trump’s indictments, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) introduced a bill that would grant federal judges the discretion to allow cameras in the courtroom.>

'Calls for sunlight', my ass....

<House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-Louisiana) financial disclosure forms — in which he didn't even disclose a personal checking or savings account — have prompted an anti-corruption watchdog group to file an ethics complaint against the new speaker.

The Daily Beast reported that End Citizens United's new ethics complaint includes allegations of Johnson failing to disclose certain gifts, overlooking blind spots in his spouse's income, making "contradictory" financial statements relating to his work as an attorney for far-right groups, and various other "inconsistencies." End Citizens United president Tiffany Muller said the American public deserves to know whether the new speaker of the House has financial conflicts of interest.

"It’s laughable to believe that the person leading government funding negotiations doesn’t have a reportable savings or retirement account," Muller told the Beast. "But beyond his own potential financial mismanagement, failing to disclose travel and his spouse’s sources of income is against the law and the Office of Congressional Ethics must investigate and hold him accountable."

In the six-page complaint, End Citizens United found evidence of Johnson failing to report an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel in February of 2020 paid for by the 12 Tribes Film Foundation that cost a total of $17,950. Congressional ethics reporting laws dictate that all travel costing more than $415 needs to be reported. Johnson also accepted another paid trip by young Earth creationist group Answers in Genesis to Williamstown, Kentucky in 2022 that exceeded the $415 threshold.

"These blatant omissions are clear violations of federal law and show a disregard for the Act’s important transparency goals that allow the public to know what groups have privately funded the Speaker’s travel," End Citizens United wrote.

The group also pointed to Johnson's lack of disclosure of his spouse's income from her LLC, Onward Christian Counseling Services, which was founded in 2017 and remains active as of 2023. According to the complaint, the company's website was recently taken down, though the archived version shows that Johnson's wife advertised "confidential, biblically based individual, marriage and family counseling to the people of Northwestern Louisiana."

Federal law concerning statements submitted to government agencies states that anyone who "falsifies, conceals, or covers up material facts, "makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation" could be fined and/or jailed for up to five years.>

<Drowning in legal trouble, Donald Trump has one strategy: delay, delay and more delay.

If he can somehow push his criminal trials past November 2024 and get reelected, he just might be able to wriggle out of trouble. While Judge Tanya Chutkan in his first federal criminal trial seems determined to stay on schedule, Trump has an ace up his sleeve: He can fire his lawyers.

Former President Trump is the most self-interested, disloyal backstabber in all of politics — that’s an impressive accomplishment. He treats everyone, even his most fervent defenders, like a disposable ketchup packet: squeeze out every drop and then throw it away. His legal team could be the next Trump throwaway. If Trump dumps his legal team on the eve of the first criminal trial, he is certain to get a delay, and likely a significant one — which is just what he wants.

For a typical criminal defendant, firing your lawyers is a risky move. Not only is it expensive, it just delays the inevitable. But that’s not the case for Trump. Delay is the strategy to thwart the inevitable. If Trump can push his trials back enough and win back the presidency, he could force a new attorney general to drop the whole prosecution.

If Trump ditches his legal team right before his March trial date, the judge will have little choice but to delay. Trump will need time to find a new legal team, and that team will need time to prepare for the trial. Could that mean a 90-day delay? Or 120 days?

Actually, it could be a lot more. Once Trump finds that a new trick works, he always pushes the envelope. Expect Trump to be as slow as possible in finding new counsel.

To be fair to Trump, he does not have a lot of options. Who wants to work for this guy? From all the public evidence, Trump is a nightmare client. He doesn’t listen to advice and expects his lawyers to be as over-the-top as he is. He cannot just hire anybody — any lawyer must be admitted to the relevant court, which narrows the field. Plus, if Trump has a crew inexperienced at criminal defense, he is set up for an appeal based on ineffective counsel.

Making things even more difficult, Trump will surely trash his current legal team as they head out the door. He will want to absolutely burn any bridge so that he cannot be compelled to keep his current counsel. Not to mention that nothing is ever Trump’s fault — he is going to make sure everyone knows he is the victim. Further, Trump is notoriously cheap. Is there any doubt that he will try to chisel down any prospect? Any law firm is going to want a big up-front cash payment.

For Judge Chutkan, Trump’s initial move would be just the start of a nightmare bringing him to trial. As Trump delays and delays, at what point could she force him to hire counsel? He could have all kinds of excuses — can’t find the right lawyers, they are gouging him, his last lawyers screwed everything up, etc. What happens if he fires his next legal team? Can Chutkan force Trump to use the Office of the Federal Public Defender?

The potential for mischief is extraordinary, as the legal situation and potential problems are absolutely unprecedented. The federal courts may have to make judgments that have never been made before, and might not ever apply again. And there can be no doubt that Trump will make as much trouble as he can and stretch the rules to the breaking point.

Collateral effects

Once Trump scrams the March trial, everything else gets pushed. The classified documents case date in May certainly would be gone. Trump won’t have to fire his lawyers for that case right away, but that’s probably in the offing if his first gambit works. Cited as the most open-and-shut case, delaying this trial must be paramount for Trump.....>

<.....The Georgia case before Judge Scott McAfee has yet to be scheduled and is beyond Trump’s ability to cancel, although as president it would be difficult to move forward. The Fulton County prosecution has already stated that this trial could last four months or more, meaning Trump does not have to push things back much to ensure that any trial would not finish prior to Inauguration Day 2025.

And then there are the entertainment effects. The Trump-hating left will have an absolute, all-consuming meltdown over Trump’s move. Imagine the Tsar Bomba explosion plus the Mount Pinatubo eruption and the Chicxulub meteor strike all in one. It will be day after day of rage and teeth-gnashing for weeks and perhaps months.

Adding to the amusement will be the spectacle of yet another troop of Trump loyalists utterly humiliated by Trump. My guess is that Christopher Kise and John Lauro will try to slink back to their respective homes and drop out of sight, hoping against hope that they can salvage their legal careers. As for Alina Habba, she has Stockholm Syndrome written all over her. I have little doubt she will accept blame and grovel for forgiveness on any media outlet she can find. To be fair, she was a total nobody before connecting with Trump. Even in humiliation, Habba will profit from her boot-licking absence of self-esteem.

Chutkan and McAfee’s nuclear option

Firing the lawyers is Trump’s nuclear option. Judges Chutkan and McAfee have their own nuclear option: revoke Trump’s bail and remand for trial.

The key for Trump is not just delaying trial but staying out of prison. If Trump is stewing in the stir, his electoral prospects are likely to diminish severely. Additionally, the prospect of sitting in a jail cell, subsisting on prison grub while lawyer after lawyer refuses his case, might be intolerable. Trump could make the decision he needs to get to trial and hopefully get out on bail during his inevitable appeal.

For Chutkan and McAfee, Trump will surely provide legitimate grounds to revoke bail. Trump continues to be completely undisciplined, and nobody seems to be able to rein him in — or is willing to try. Trump’s mouth is his own worst enemy. The question is whether Chutkan or McAfee have the chutzpah to pull this move.

We know Trump has no boundaries. For him, choosing the nuclear option is like ordering a Big Mac and Diet Coke. Trump won’t blink. He plays chicken better than anyone in politics.

But what about Chutkan and McAfee? Are they willing to raise the stakes beyond what even Trump can handle? Trump cannot make his move until February; that leaves Chutkan and McAfee roughly 90 days to make their move. Will one of them do it?>

<Rules are just empty words if there’s no hope they’ll be followed. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once wrote that “if put to the choice, one might well prefer to live under Soviet substantive law applied in good faith by our common-law procedures than under our substantive law enforced by Soviet procedural practices.” Jackson’s point, coming at the height of the Cold War, was that rules don’t matter all that much without some faith that they’ll be applied and enforced in a fair, nonarbitrary way.

That mantra was ringing in my head as I reviewed the code of conduct voluntarily adopted by the Supreme Court on Monday, the first such formal code to govern the justices. It contains 14 pages of ethics principles and commentary to which the justices say they will now adhere. This move comes after months of mounting public pressure in response to media reports documenting troubling (and previously undisclosed) financial relationships involving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and wealthy conservative benefactors. (The justices have pushed back on or disputed some of these reports.)

We can debate (and folks are debating) the substance of these new (or not-so-new) rules; the real question is how we, the public, are supposed to have faith that they’ll be followed. In adopting these rules, the Supreme Court didn’t address that issue at all.

Most people enforce rules with carrots or sticks — incentives for following the rules or penalties for breaking them. In this case, though, the Constitution gets in the way of either. Article III (the one about the courts) demands that there be “one supreme Court” (emphasis added), which the justices have long interpreted, not unreasonably, to mean that no one else can sit in direct judgment of their rulings or their behavior (except, in extreme cases, Congress through its power to impeach sitting justices).

Thus, the way that we typically enforce ethics rules and financial disclosure requirements against lower court judges — a body known as the Judicial Conference of the United States oversees them — won’t work for the justices. Perhaps that explains why some conservative commentators view the matter now as being closed despite the new ethics code not having an enforcement mechanism: The court has done all that we can reasonably expect it to have done, and no one else has any power to do anything further.

But even if the Constitution prohibits a direct enforcement mechanism, Congress has, for most of our history, used an array of other powers as sideways leverage against the court — not-so-subtle reminders that Congress can “punish” the court in other ways.

Among other things, Congress controls (almost all of) the court’s budget — a power it has used historically not just to encourage changes in institutional behaviors, but even to influence the timing of individual justices’ retirements. (Pensions are powerful things.) Congress controls when and where the court sits; until 1935, the court sat in the Capitol — a powerful reminder of which branch was beholden to which.

And Congress made the court’s entire 1802 term disappear in a shot across the bow of Chief Justice John Marshall while the justices considered the constitutionality of major legislation passed by the newly elected Democratic-Republicans. Congress has also regularly exercised leverage over the court’s docket; until 1891, all of the court’s jurisdiction was mandatory (meaning that the justices had to hear any appeal Congress told it to hear). That the court’s docket today is almost entirely discretionary is a policy choice by the legislature — one that could be reversed if, again, Congress was looking for sticks. In the past, Congress has even stopped the court from resolving individual cases, including an especially significant 1868 dispute over the constitutionality of the military government in the South during Reconstruction....>

<.....This is where the conversation about the justices’ behavior off the bench should go now. What’s needed is more than substantive rules adopted by the justices; even if the new rules were perfect (and they’re not), it’s not obvious why justices who in the past have flouted financial disclosure requirements would all of a sudden go out of their way to over-enforce these new rules against themselves.

Instead, what’s needed is some mechanism for obtaining the justices’ compliance with the rules. One possibility is the creation of an Article III inspector general. It’s a position that has long been proposed for lower federal courts but that could also have at least a modicum of authority to monitor the justices’ behavior as well.

As I’ve suggested before, even if such an officer couldn’t directly punish justices for violating the relevant rules, Congress unquestionably could invest that position with the power to investigate and report upon compliance with those rules — reports that would provide a strong incentive for justices to adhere to the rules, lest they end up on some official, undismissable list (rather than just in media reports) of justices who have misbehaved; and, in extreme cases, provide a basis for the impeachment of justices who continually cross the line.

Instead of every new media report about a justice’s personal behavior dividing us into predictable ideological camps, now there would be an ostensibly neutral ombudsperson whose reports could build a record, one way or the other, from which to assess whether and to what extent an individual justice, or the court as a whole, is behaving badly.

An Article III inspector general is no panacea. But it’s the least-worst alternative to a problem that the Constitution necessarily creates: how to have an independent Supreme Court that is nevertheless at least loosely accountable to the political branches.

Accountability and independence aren’t mutually exclusive — something the justices are tacitly conceding by agreeing for the first time to formally adopt a code of conduct. But saying “trust us” isn’t, and shouldn’t be, enough. To quote the old Russian proverb (as appropriated by President Ronald Reagan), “Trust, but verify.”>

<Donald Trump's campaign is defending the former president's use of the word "vermin" to describe his opponents and detractors after receiving backlash for echoing a term used by brutal authoritarian dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections," Trump said in a Veterans Day speech on Saturday after using the term in a social-media post earlier that same day.

Trump also said in his speech that "the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they're not going to want to play with us."

The speech prompted reactions from historians, including John Meacham, who said Monday on MSNBC's Morning Joe that Trump is "lifting" rhetoric from Mussolini and other historic fascists. "And from the Third Reich, and using the 1930s as an example of anything is a fraught enterprise," Meacham added. "Because to call your opponent vermin, to dehumanize them, is to not only open the door, but to walk through the door toward the most ghastly kinds of crimes."

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, responded to the backlash by calling critics "snowflakes" and promising that "their existence will be crushed" by Trump. In a statement to The Washington Post, Cheung said: "Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House."

Cheung later clarified to The Post that he meant to say their "sad, miserable existence" rather than their "entire existence."

Trump's remarks prompted a response from the Biden-Harris campaign as well as the White House. "On a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation's heroes, Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini - two dictators many U.S. veterans gave their lives fighting," Biden-Harris spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement.

The White House called out Trump's remarks in a statement from spokesperson Andrew Bates, who said that Trump "using terms like that about dissent would be unrecognizable to our founders, but horrifyingly recognizable to American veterans who put on their country's uniform in the 1940s."

Trump was far from deterred by the outrage and instead chose to attack his perceived enemies even further. In a post to Truth Social on Monday, he wrote that those involved in the prosecution of his legal cases - namely Special Counsel Jack Smith, former special counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco - "will end up in a Mental Institution by the time my next term as President is successfully completed.">

<Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday dropped his effort to move a criminal case against him in connection with hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels from state court to federal court.

The development, made public via a one-page notice from Trump's lawyers to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, means that the case will remain in state jurisdiction before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with dozens of counts of falsifying business records, stemming from the former president's repayments to his ex-fixer Michael Cohen of a six-figure payout to Daniels, in order to silence an alleged affair.

A trial in the matter has been tentatively scheduled for March 25, 2024, though the judge said in September it is likely to be postponed to avoid overlap with Trump's election-interference case in Washington, D.C. Trump's lawyers in late July filed their appeal to try to get the case moved into federal court following a ruling from U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein denying the request.

The former president's lawyers had argued he'd been acting in his official capacity when he allegedly reimbursed Cohen for hush-money payments made to Daniels.

But Hellerstein formally rejected Trump’s bid in an opinion on July 19, writing that the payments had nothing to do with his official duties as president.

Tuesday's decision came a day before Trump's lawyers were due to file an opening brief in their appeal. In a declaration to the court, Trump lawyer Gedelia Stern said Bragg's office was made aware of the former president's plans to dismiss the appeal and told Trump's lawyers "they do not oppose voluntary dismissal with prejudice."

This marks the second time Trump's lawyers have backed away from seeking federal court intervention in his state-related criminal cases. In September, the former president's lawyers decided against trying to get Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' charges removed to U.S. court after initially saying they were considering the strategy.>

<Jack Smith Tuesday called for a gag order against Donald Trump to be reissued after the former president doubled down on threats against the special counsel’s family, according to court filings and reports.

Smith filed a 67-page motion with a Washington federal appeals court requesting Judge Tanya Chutkan’s suspended gag order, appealed by Trump, be reinstated to curtail attacks on prosecutors and witnesses, Politico was among the first to report.

In the filing, Smith’s team likened Trump’s social media rants to a famous request made by a medieval king that led to his former lord chancellor’s death.

“Targeted disparagement of this sort poses a danger even when it does not explicitly call for harassment or violence,” the filing states. “Repeated attacks are often understood as a signal to act—just as King Henry II’s remark, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ resulted in Thomas à Becket’s murder.” The filing also cites a violent threat, which includes racial and gendered slurs, that one of his followers phoned into the district court’s chambers: “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you.”

(The accused caller was subsequently arrested, the New York Times reported at the time.)

The filing arrives less than a week before a three-judge panel will consider the Chutkun's gag order in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Nov. 20, the New York Times notes.

Chutkan is overseeing the federal election fraud case filed in Washington D.C. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

Trump’s challenge to court-issued gag orders relies heavily on his status as a frontrunner in the 2024 presidential campaign and protections the Constitution provides political speech.

Prosecutors argued Tuesday that Chutkan’s gag order does not prevent Trump from speaking publicly about the Biden administration or claiming he’s being prosecuted unfairly.

“But, like every other criminal defendant, he does not have ‘carte blanche to vilify and implicitly encourage violence against public servants,’” the filing states.

“He may not ‘launch a pretrial smear campaign against participating government staff, their families, and foreseeable witnesses.’”>

<A top source of funding for conservative groups — including some connected to legal activist Leonard Leo — escalated giving by 27% in 2022, according to tax records.

But groups with ties to Leo, including the Federalist Society and the 85 Fund’s Honest Elections Project, collectively received far less than the previous year, according to the tax records from DonorsTrust Inc.

DonorsTrust raised $303 million, a 72% drop from the year before, but still increased giving to $242 million — up $52 million from a year prior, according to its 2022 tax filing obtained by Bloomberg News. The names of its contributors aren’t required to be disclosed, but the more than 1,100 recipients of its largess [sic] are.

The 85 Fund, part of Leo’s network of nonprofit organizations and a major source of conservative philanthropy, received just $50,000 for its Honest Elections Project, which advocates for more restrictive voting laws. That amount was down drastically from the $17.1 million the 85 Fund received in 2021. A representative for the 85 Fund did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

The decline in funding came well before questions arose regarding the ethics of two conservative members of the Supreme Court and benefactors, including Leo and billionaire Harlan Crow. ProPublica reported in April that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose private jet trips, lodging and other gifts he received over the years from Crow, touching off a major examination of the ethics and potential conflicts of interest of members of the court.

A trip Leo arranged in 2008 involving travel on a private jet for Justice Samuel Alito also came under scrutiny. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee probing the nation’s highest court considered issuing subpoenas to Leo and Crow, but have faced opposition from Republican members of the panel.

The Federalist Society, an organization co-chaired by Leo, received $4.3 million in 2022 from DonorsTrust, up slightly from $3.7 million the year before. Former President Donald Trump said he consulted the group, which has close ties to Thomas and Alito, when drawing up lists of potential Supreme Court nominees.

Lawson Bader, president and chief executive officer of DonorsTrust, says the organization is dedicated to preserving philanthropic freedom for donors. “People of good faith hold different deeply held beliefs on a variety of issues,” he adds, “and have different philanthropic strategies and interests in addressing those issues.”

Donation Rules

DonorsTrust is a donor-advised fund, which means donors can set aside money to claim an immediate tax deduction but distribute donations to charity later. The organization is barred from engaging in partisan activities, but some of the groups it supports have had an out-sized, if indirect, influence on politics.

The largest donation to the group was $92 million, and there were several other multi-million-dollar gifts. It also received donations in the form of stocks, including 650,000 shares of Uber Technologies Inc., valued at $15.5 million. DonorsTrust says it has about 450 donors. It ended 2022 with $1.4 billion in assets.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a biomedical research foundation on Long Island received the largest grant, at $14.5 million. One donor moved $12.7 million to an account at Bradley Impact Fund, another donor-advised fund for conservatives. Consumers’ Research Inc., a group focused on attacking environment, social and governance investment strategies, received $9 million.

Other grantees include longstanding conservative policy organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation as well as the America First Policy Institute, established in 2021 to advance policies developed during the Trump administration.

The fund also supports right-leaning news and commentary with the American Spectator Foundation, the Center for American Greatness, the National Review Institute and the Reason Foundation, publisher of Reason magazine, all receiving grants. Conservative watchdog groups like Americans for Public Trust and the Foundation for Government Accountability also got money.

Universities, churches and humane societies also received money. They include Hillsdale and Patrick Henry Colleges, which are admired in conservative circles.>

<In the wake of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump was considered mentally unfit for office — by people closest to him.

That's the view of ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl, the author of the Trump exposé "Tired of Winning," who discussed the matter on MSNBC's "The ReidOut" Tuesday evening.

"You have covered Donald Trump a long time. Talk about his mental state," said anchor Joy Reid. "You write about the fact that Mike Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, at some point discussed the 25th Amendment regarding Trump, that Mitch McConnell spearheaded a move to ban him from the inauguration. He threatened to run as a third-party candidate and had to be threatened not to do it. The 25th Amendment piece stands out to me. As your reporting would suggest, is Donald Trump fully there mentally?"

"I can't really make that judgment, but what I can tell you is people who have raised questions about whether or not he is fully there mentally have been the people closest to him," said Karl. "The people that have raised the alarms about what it would be if he came back are the people who are closest to him. And yes, in those hours after the January 6th attack, as they watched what he did and what he didn't do, while the United States Capitol was under assault by his own supporters, it was the people that were closest to him that were talking about whether or not they needed to remove him from office because he was mentally unstable, mentally unable to carry out the duties of the president."

"That is Pompeo and Mnuchin," Karl continued. "They had both denied it. There is sworn testimony acknowledging that those conversations did happen. They didn't go very far. They didn't have time to go far. Frankly, as you started to have people resign from the Cabinet, there were fewer people who would have voted for it. They were talking about it. It's not just those 25th Amendment conversations. I mean, you read that statement from an anonymous staffer. I think it's a very important statement. This was something that was given to me by the person who wrote it. He wrote it right after all the details came out about the classified documents. This is a very senior official who spent day in and day out with Donald Trump for over a year in the West Wing.

"I can't get any further details to who it was, but there was a lot of attention about Anonymous and we later learned it was Miles Taylor, who worked at the Department of Homeland Security," said Karl. "This is somebody who is more senior and spent a lot more time around Donald Trump who said those words about him, because he saw first-hand how he had operated and was conveying this to me. Didn't want to go public. Worried about the retribution we just talked about. This is somebody who has not been out there publicly taking on the president. Worried about retribution against the family, but deeply concerned about what a second Trump White House would look like.">

<Throughout the criminal investigations of Donald Trump, the former president has expected his co-defendants, alleged co-conspirators, and potential witnesses for the prosecution to stay fiercely loyal to him. This has included - according to people who've discussed the matter with him - his belief that some of his former lieutenants should risk jail time rather than turn on him.

As he's faced an array of criminal charges, Trump's demands for aides and lawyers to martyr themselves for him hasn't saved him. If anything, it's done the opposite, driving several possible key witnesses to consider throwing Trump under the bus before he gets the chance to do it to them.

That's because, as is often the case with the former president, the notion of extreme loyalty only goes one way. Rolling Stone spoke to seven potential witnesses, former Trump confidants ensnared in the Fulton County, Georgia, and federal criminal probes, their legal advisers, and other sources familiar with the situation. All of them say that Trump's willingness to hang them out to dry has fueled legal strategies focused on self-preservation. Three of these sources say that Team Trump's comically unsubtle search for patsies and fall guys - MAGA die-hards who would take the blame and possible prison sentences in lieu of Trump - drove a larger wedge between the ex-president and many of his former fellow travelers.

"If I went to jail for Donald Trump, if I did that, what would that do for me and my family?" says a former Trump administration official who has been interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith's office. "I don't think he would even give us lifetime Mar-a-Lago memberships if I did that for him."

Lawyer Sidney Powell, for example, put her adulation of Trump to work in the aftermath of the election by filing bogus lawsuits and making bizarre false claims against voting-machine company Dominion Voting Systems. The moves got her sanctioned by a Michigan court, sued for a billion dollars by Dominion, and charged alongside Trump in Fulton County.

But her legal ordeal has brought her no meaningful help from the former president. Trump has gone out of his way to claim publicly that Powell was never his attorney while other Trump allies have worked to try to pin the blame for any criminal wrongdoing after the election on her. She has since also taken a plea deal this month, a move that shocked a number of top Trump lawyers and loyalists. Trump's communications aide Liz Harrington has recently claimed the former president was "confused" by his allies' plea deals because, in his apparent belief, "there's no crimes here." Powell, for her part, is still trying to have it both ways, portraying herself as a victim of a zealous prosecution and as a stalwart defender of Trump's election lies.

But as some contemplate potentially cooperating with authorities, others have already publicly flipped, a decision that Trump now associates with "weaklings" who betray him.

In a statement to Rolling Stone, Trump's lead counsel in the Fulton County Steven Sadow wrote that "[Fulton County District Attorney] Fani Willis and her prosecution team have dismissed charges in return for probation. What that shows is this so-called RICO case is nothing more than a bargaining chip for Willis. Truthful testimony will always exonerate President Trump."

Jenna Ellis, an attorney for the Trump campaign charged in the Fulton County election-subversion case, has been vocal about her disappointment in the former president's abandonment of his co-defendants. Ellis wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in August that she had been "reliably informed Trump isn't funding any of us who are indicted," and wondered "why isn't [the pro-Trump Super Pac] MAGA, Inc. funding everyone's defense?"

After an attempt at crowdfunding her legal fees, Ellis accepted a plea deal from prosecutors last week. "If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges," a tearful Ellis said in a courtroom speech accepting responsibility for aiding and abetting false statements about the election that President Joe Biden clearly won.

For much of this year, Trump attorneys had been concerned that Kenneth Chesebro, one of the legal theorists behind the fake-electors scheme, would end up cooperating with prosecutors. The attorney accepted a plea deal in Fulton County and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false documents, but his attorney, Scott Grubman, denied any suggestion that his client was turning against Trump. "I don't think he implicated anyone but himself," Grubman told CNN earlier this month. Still, Chesebro and his legal team have been dropping hints for months that the blame and criminal exposure lay elsewhere in Trumpland, not with him....>

<...."Whether the campaign relied upon that advice as Mr. Chesebro intended," Grubman told Rolling Stone in August, "will have to remain a question to be resolved in court." He continued: "We hope that the Fulton DA and the special counsel fully recognize these issues before deciding who, if anyone, to charge."

These public statements came months after some of Trump's closest allies and legal counselors began amassing informal lists of the best possible fall guys in the Jan. 6 riot-related probes and the Mar-a-Lago documents case. John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Powell, and Chesebro were indeed among the names. The lawyers, such as Chesebro, were easy scapegoats for Team Trump, who have openly signaled that the former president's courtroom strategy will lean on an "advice of counsel" defense.

Asked if Chesebro could tell how much of Trumpland wanted him to take the fall to help insulate Trump, a lawyer who's known Chesebro for years, and has spoken to him about this matter, simply tells Rolling Stone, "Of course."

In private, Trump reserves some of his harshest words for one-time loyalists who are willing to cut deals with prosecutors, securing light sentences in exchange for likely testifying against Trump and others. However, the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner's fury often extends to his lieutenants who don't have formal cooperation agreements - but are simply willing, or legally bound, to answer prosecutors' questions.

According to people close to Trump, the mere act of talking to federal investigators can sometimes be enough to get you branded a traitor or a snitch in the former president's mind. This is because, his longtime associates say, Trump often doesn't see a meaningful difference between witnesses who have formal cooperation agreements (to flip, in other words) and those who happen to tell investigators useful information during interviews.

Further, Trump and several of his closest advisers have been trying for months to find out how generous his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been with prosecutors lately. In June, The New York Times revealed that Meadows had testified before grand juries in both the special counsel's Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case and its investigation into Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election. This has fueled suspicions among Trump's inner orbit this year, with some advisers now simply referring to Meadows in private communications by using the rat emoji.

Last week, ABC News reported that Meadows was "granted immunity" by the special counsel in order to spill potentially damaging details about Trump and the aftermath of the 2020 election. Meadows' lawyer has since disputed much of the report as "inaccurate," though he refused to say what in the story supposedly wasn't correct.

In the days since that news broke, a few of Trump's political and legal advisers have tried to assure him that the ABC story doesn't mean that Meadows has "flipped," and that he is just doing what he is legally compelled to do in these conversations with federal investigators....>