Dear listeners,
Acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin has sought to impanel a grand jury to hear evidence about heated political remarks Sen. Chuck Schumer made in 2020 about Supreme Court justices. So far, according to The New York Times, main justice has rebuffed his efforts to take this step regarding Schumer’s (obviously non-criminal) comments.
It’s just the latest instance of Martin trying to make bizarre and political use of the DOJ for Trump’s political purposes, and also one of the instances in which it hasn’t worked. Martin also couldn’t get a magistrate judge to approve a warrant to freeze the bank account of an environmental organization he insists was illegally awarded a large EPA grant in the waning days of the Biden administration. But multiple organizations have told The Washington Post that Citibank has locked them out of their account anyways. As Ken notes, banks are terrified of the federal government, and there are federal powers that could make Citi tie up the funds (for a time) without a formal court-ordered freeze. It may take litigation from the grantees to shake the funds loose, and for all of us to learn why they aren’t flowing.
Remember Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, who’s serving a nine-year prison sentence for hacking her county’s voting machines as part of an effort to investigate a vote fraud conspiracy theory? That’s a state sentence, so President Trump can’t do much about it. But the Department of Justice is making noise about looking into whether her prosecution entailed “weaponization” of justice.
There’s a theme emerging in some of the litigation where the government is defending Trump’s executive orders from challenges: a lot of the lawyers are coming in without information they might be expected to know. They are pleading that they are swamped — though as Ken notes, the bigger issue might be that political officials are withholding information. In any case, judges are not sympathetic to this, but they face difficult questions about how to induce compliance when the litigant is the federal government.
“I’ll fuck you up like you’ve never been fucked up before, I’ll make sure you never do business in this town again” doesn’t sound like an extortionate threat to a New Jersey judge, and that’s great news for political boss George Norcross III, whose racketeering indictment related to the redevelopment of the Camden waterfront has been thrown out.
Plus, we take a look at where you ought to sue if you have a Brazilian business dispute. The answer might surprise you.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
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