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Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
Suddenly, Donald Trump likes securities regulation, but only as it relates to people who don’t like Trump.
The Trump administration has been feverishly weakening government oversight of financial fraud, including dismissing over a dozen cases about crypto scammers brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s pretty clear that the general stance is that the administration will just let white-collar criminals go buck wild and rob people blind, because freedom.
However, when it comes to Trump’s pocketbook, Trump thinks the SEC should bring the hammer down.
The administration has already taken steps to limit oversight of Trump Media, the corruption machine in which the president of the United States is the largest shareholder. Trump also issued an executive order back in February saying the SEC is subject to his authority and not an independent regulator.
But Trump isn’t content just to use the government to protect his private company from scrutiny. He also wants to use the government to go after private companies that are betting against his private company.
Trump Media’s stock price has been in free fall ever since its SEC filing earlier this month proposed allowing Trump’s trust, which holds his shares, to sell about $2 billion worth of stock. It’s not unusual, when a stock is tanking, for an investor to take a short position, basically betting the stock will continue to fall. A hedge fund disclosed that it has taken a $105 million short position against Trump Media, which the company claims is “market manipulation” and therefore illegal. Now, the president’s company is asking the president’s SEC nominee to investigate the hedge fund.
Call it regulations for me, but not for thee.
What’s Trump running to the Supreme Court for this week?
Trump’s gotta get his weekly treats from the conservative wing of the Supreme Court or he gets withdrawal symptoms. This week, he’s begging them just to let him dismantle the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship protections, just a little bit, c’mon.
Related | Trump vows to end birthright citizenship, Constitution be damned
Multiple lower courts issued nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s unconstitutional executive order. Republicans have recently decided that those types of injunctions are unfair because they really should only be used to thwart Democratic presidents.
Trump wants the Supreme Court to stay those nationwide injunctions. Instead, he proposes the injunctions should apply only to the individual plaintiffs and members of organizations that brought the lawsuits, as well as anyone who lives in a state that challenged the order. Everywhere else, proposes Trump, the Supreme Court should let him start stripping people of birthright citizenship protections while the litigation over his order continues.
Imagine a country where citizenship rights differ from state to state. Worse, imagine a country where some members of an organization live in a state that sued to protect birthright citizenship, but some do not.
Trump is asking the entire country to live in an unworkable mess because he just cannot wait one minute longer to gut the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on May 15, and you can expect it to be a hot mess.
What’s happening with Kilmar Abrego Garcia now?
Honestly, on any given day, it’s tough to keep up. Right now, the apparent stance of the presidents of both the United States and El Salvador is that they are both powerless little creatures who cannot get Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the man the government has admitted it mistakenly deported—back home. Trump is also pretending he has no involvement in the case, so he can’t possibly answer questions about it.
Related | Bukele and Trump pretend they can’t return wrongfully deported man
Nearly two weeks ago, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. The government fought that all the way up to the Supreme Court but lost.
Now the case is back at the lower court, but the Trump administration doesn’t want to follow Xinis’s order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, and it definitely does not want to follow her order granting Abrego Garcia’s motion for expedited discovery.
Following a now well-worn path, the government filed an emergency appeal, asking the Fourth Circuit to stay both orders, which would mean that it is not required to bring Abrego Garcia home and is not even required to answer questions about it.
It did not go well. In fact, the appellate court denied the request within a day.
The order, written by Reagan appointee Judge Harvey Wilkinson, who is not exactly a liberal scold, shows just how incredulous the court was about the government’s argument that it could deport residents to foreign prisons with no due process. Wilkinson said that position “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
The ruling was so scathing that Rachel Maddow read highlights from it for five minutes straight on her show Thursday night.
Outside the courtroom, the Trump administration is spinning lie after lie about Abrego Garcia, framing him into some sort of murderous gang kingpin, and vowing they’ll never bring him home. It’s unending and unbelievable.
At long last, contempt. Sort of. Maybe. Soon.
The Trump administration has made it exceedingly clear that it believes it doesn’t have to follow lower court orders. It’s well past the time for lower court judges to start treating this position with the contempt it deserves … literally. Finally, at least one judge is doing so.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found that there is probable cause to hold Trump officials in criminal contempt because of their “willful disregard” of his order to turn around planes ferrying hundreds of deportees to El Salvador. Boasberg’s probable cause order details the opportunities he gave the administration to satisfactorily explain its actions and its utter failure to do so.
The government rarely faces civil or criminal contempt proceedings, but judges really have no choice but to start using the tools they would use against any other litigant. No other party can openly defy court orders, brag about it, and refuse to explain it in court.
The probable cause finding doesn’t mean that Boasberg can try to toss Attorney General Pam Bondi, or whoever, in jail ASAP.
First, the Trump administration gets a chance to “purge” the contempt by complying with the judge’s original order. Of course, there’s no way to turn those planes back around now, but Boasberg suggested the administration could bring the deportees back to America and allow them to file habeas petitions challenging their detention. If the government doesn’t do that, then Boasberg will require Trump officials to testify under oath about the decision not to turn the planes around.
Surprising no one, the administration has already appealed to the Fourth Circuit, hyperventilating about how it’s unconstitutional to order the executive branch to do anything, basically. However, there’s nothing to appeal yet. Boasberg hasn’t found anyone in contempt or referred anyone for prosecution.
But for this administration, the mere notion that laws might apply to them is too much to bear.
Who is Ed Martin threatening this week?
It’s always worth checking in on Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin. He displays no interest in his actual job, but has proven very eager to use his position to dispense favors to Republicans and launch spurious investigations into others, regardless of whether he has jurisdiction.
This week’s wild overreach came in the form of a pugnacious letter to CHEST, an Illinois-based medical journal covering chest diseases. You might wonder what authority a criminal prosecutor in D.C. has over a scientific publication 1,000 miles away.
However, you’ll still be wondering after you read Martin’s letter: “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Joumal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates - that is, that they have a position for which they are advocating either due to advertisement (under postal code) or sponsorship (under relevant fraud regulations).”
This sentence could only be written by someone confident they’re the smartest guy in the room when actually they’d lose a fight with a laundry hamper if it had a lid. It seems like Martin is saying that advertisers or sponsors are secretly paying off CHEST to adopt scientific positions and they could be prosecuted for it.
It bears mentioning, as always, that Martin has no jurisdiction outside the confines of D.C. and the only response to this letter should be to tell him that.
What do they teach at Yale Law anyway?
Though he now cosplays as a real salt-of-the-earth type, JD Vance went to Yale Law School, currently ranked No. 1 in the nation and an elite institution by any measure. That’s why it’s especially worrisome that the vice president seems to have no idea what due process is.
In a lengthy post on X, Vance whined about how the Trump administration can’t possibly provide due process because Joe Biden let in too many undocumented people when he was president.
That statement, on its own, is bad enough, as it’s an assertion that millions of people can be deported without any meaningful way to challenge their removal. But what’s worse is Vance’s very odd understanding of what due process means.
“To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors,” Vance tweeted.
Whether someone is owed due process is in no way related to whether the government has enough resources. It’s also not related to the public interest, etc. There’s no means test or balancing of equities or whatever it is Vance is nattering on about here. It’s literally a thing guaranteed by both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Seriously, did he skip Con Law and just spend all that time writing his terrible book?
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