Dear listeners,
On this week’s show, Ken and I look at two court decisions directing the Trump administration to continue sending SNAP (food stamp) funds to states, despite the fact that Congress has not passed a government-funding bill with additional funds for SNAP. The administration has chosen not to appeal these orders — likely not relishing the politics of withholding SNAP funds — but the SNAP contingency account only has enough money to fund the program for a few weeks anyway, so the legal situation may get more complicated if the shutdown does not end soon.
Meanwhile, James Comey has filed more motions. One seeks to dismiss his indictments on the grounds that his answers to questions were literally true. Some of his arguments about literal truth would strain belief in an ordinary conversation — “Mr. Comey’s statement that he stood by his prior testimony was truthful regardless of whether that prior testimony was itself truthful,” his attorneys say — but as Ken notes, the bar for proving perjury is supposed to be high, and prosecutors and investigators try to frame questions very precisely so witnesses can’t wiggle their way through (non-)answering. But Comey was being questioned by a U.S. Senator, who was trying to grandstand, not lay a trap for a false statement indictment. Comey also wants a “bill of particulars” — as Ken notes, this is very difficult to get, but a government motion filed after we recorded actually contains a lot of the information Comey said he was looking for anyway.
That’s this week’s free show. Paying subscribers also get our look at legal wrangling over federal immigration enforcement in Chicago (a federal judge there has been told she can’t force the CBP chief for the area to explain himself in her courtroom every day), and at federal charges for a congressional candidate arrested at an anti-ICE protest there. We also talk about some AUSAs who were placed on leave for daring to call January 6 a “mob” “riot” in a sentencing memo, and about a Tennessee man who spent a month in jail on the extremely thin claim that a political meme he posted was a terroristic threat.
And we look at a very strange scandal at the FDA. The pharmaceutical company Aurinia is suing George Tidmarsh, who was a top official overseeing drug approvals at the agency until about five minutes ago, for defamation. The company alleges that Tidmarsh, a former pharmaceutical executive, had a longstanding business dispute with one of Aurinia’s investors, Kevin Tang, and that Tidmarsh used his recently-obtained perch at the FDA to undermine Tang’s business interests, including by making a defamatory claim on LinkedIn that one of Aurinia’s drugs was ineffective and should be pulled from the market. The LinkedIn post caused Aurinia’s stock to lose hundreds of millions of dollars of market capitalization. Tidmarsh — who had also, according to the lawsuit, sent Tang a number of I’m-not-going-to-be-ignored emails reminiscent of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and made a demand for payments that Tang understood to be a solicitation for a bribe — ultimately pulled down the LinkedIn post and said it had been made in his personal capacity. (As we discuss in the show, the statements being non-official is important legally and makes Aurinia a lot likelier to actually be able to win damages.) Tidmarsh resigned from the FDA on Sunday, the same day the lawsuit was filed, and Trump administration officials told the Associated Press they have “serious concerns about his personal conduct.” Ken says he would ordinarily advise Tidmarsh to get a good criminal lawyer in addition to a civil one, but then, who knows if corruption is even illegal anymore these days.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
