Dear listeners,
Jeanine Pirro has returned to her roots as a prosecutor, but not everything is going swimmingly. Prosecutors in her office have failed to secure felony indictments in at least three cases they brought to grand juries, including the case of “Sandwich Guy” Sean Dunn, who will face only misdemeanor charges for launching a submarine sandwich at a CBP officer. As Ken notes, this is highly unusual. Partly, it reflects the government’s aggressive and slapdash choices about how to charge cases, but it likely also reflects the grand jurors’ political resistance to the administration’s efforts to intervene in the capital city’s affairs.
Trump also lost another appeal related to many of his tariffs. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled 7-4 that IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, does not allow the president to impose these tariffs, though the seven judges in the majority did not all agree on why the tariffs were illegal. This is an issue that scrambles usual ideological groupings — there were Republican and Democratic appointees in both the minority and majority — and the Supreme Court will have a variety of different tools it can use to reach different conclusions when the case gets to them.
Also this week: Trump’s weird lawsuit against federal judges in Maryland was thrown out; Alan Dershowitz lost his appeal of his defamation lawsuit against CNN; Kash Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Williams has filed a Macron-like lawsuit against a conspiracy theorist who says she can’t actually be attracted to him; the Trump administration continues to try to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia; and we take a look at the administration’s new tool for pursuing political enemies: allegations of mortgage fraud.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
