Dear listeners,
The Supreme Court declined to save Donald Trump from being sentenced in his New York criminal case, but the justices said that decision was in part because there wasn’t much to save him from: Judge Juan Merchan had indicated that he would sentence Trump to an unconditional discharge, i.e. no punishment, which would impose a “relatively insubstantial” burden on his ability to execute his duties as president. Plus, Trump can appeal his non-sentence sentence through ordinary channels if he wants to. There are a lot of ad hoc decisions being made here, including Merchan’s own choice of a sentence he’d be very unlikely to use for another defendant, and those decisions kinda make sense in the very unusual context this case poses, but they also sort of undermine the idea of the law as a knowable thing that is applied by judges rather than made by them.
In other Trump-criminal-case-wind-down news, Judge Aileen Cannon has continued to make trouble for DOJ officials seeking to release parts of a report about Trump’s two federal criminal prosecutions. They only want to release volume one — the part about the DC prosecution related to the 2020 election — to the public, and Cannon has relented in her objections to that. (That case had never even been before her, as exasperated prosecutors kept pointing out.) Volume two, about the documents case that was before Cannon, would only be released confidentially to members of Congress, but Cannon worries that even that could prejudice Trump’s co-defendants if they are ever prosecuted in the future. She wants to have a hearing about that on Friday, which sets a tight timeline before Trump’s inauguration on Monday. We wait to see whether the Eleventh Circuit will intervene in her interventions.
Smartmatic’s defamation case against Fox News (and Fox Corporation) moves closer to trial, with an appeals court having ruled that the larger, richer parent company can be held liable in the case. Smartmatic’s competitor Dominion got a very rich settlement in 2023 in its similar lawsuit, but that lawsuit came in a more favorable political moment for opponents of Donald Trump — and also came from a company whose executives had not recently been indicted for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which Smartmatic, alas, cannot say about itself.
Alexander Smirnov, an FBI informant, claimed Joe and Hunter Biden received $10 million in bribes from Ukrainian sources, a claim that got a lot of attention during the House Republican impeachment inquiry into Biden. But Smirnov was lying to the government, and he was also evading taxes, and so he ended up being prosecuted by the same prosecutor who was prosecuting Hunter Biden for evading taxes, and he pleaded guilty, and now he’s been sentenced to six years in prison. Not a smart set of choices to make!
And Rudy Giuliani is now in double contempt, in federal courts in New York and Washington. His latest problem is that he can’t stop lying about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss even after he promised it would stop. Giuliani told Judge Beryl Howell he’s mostly been good about not lying about them, but Howell was not amused, and she has some specific remedies she wants Giuliani to undertake. If he doesn’t, he could be at risk of jail.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
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