Dear listeners,
As we discussed last week, Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade rather impatiently told the Trump Administration to stop charging IEEPA tariffs already, since the Supreme Court has deemed them illegal. The Customs Service responded, claiming that’s literally impossible — too many importers have already made estimated tariff payments, and their computers aren’t programmed to separate out IEEPA from non-IEEPA tariffs when finalizing the bills due. Give us 45 days to reprogram our computers, they ask, and then we’ll refund all the money. As Ken notes, you might want to lead with “we can fix this in seven weeks” rather than sticking it at the end of your brief explaining why you won’t do what a judge has already ordered you to do.
Free subscribers this week get our conversation about that, plus more situations where courts are telling the Trump Administration it can’t just ignore the need to get officials confirmed by the Senate — including at Voice of America, where Kari Lake has now been robbed not just of two statewide offices but also her role as CEO.
For paying subscribers, we cover a number of additional lawsuits, including some especially weird ones:
Voting machine maker Smartmatic’s parent company under indictment over bribes its former executives are alleged to have paid in the Philippines, alleges that it is being selectively and vindictively prosecuted.
Anthropic is suing over the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” designation that threatens the company’s business. The company makes First Amendment claims, but Ken thinks its less glamorous arguments — like that the designation violated everyone’s favorite law, the Administrative Procedure Act — are more persuasive.
Nippon Life Insurance Company of America is suing OpenAI, the makers of the ChatGPT AI engine. Nippon says it has been dogged by a vexatious litigant — she decided she didn’t like the settlement she’d signed with the company, and when her human lawyer advised her that settlements are a no-backsies kind of situation, she fired him in favor of the AI engine that gave her the advice she wanted to hear: sue, sue, sue. Nippon says this is tortious interference with the valid settlement contract they’d entered with their aggrieved former policyholder. Because tortious interference requires knowledge of the contract you’re interfering with, this lawsuit turns an interesting philosophical question into an interesting legal one — did OpenAI “know” that Nippon had a settlement, simply because their former policyholder told ChatGPT about it?
And Ed Martin appears to be the Justice Department official with some especially stupid bar trouble.
This is an especially meaty show (oh, and we also look at another decision about ICE) so we hope you all get the full thing so you can hear all of it. If you’re not a subscriber and you want to be, hit the button below.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
