Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. Donald Trump’s first attorney general pick quit before he could be fired (or, rather, not hired), the president-elect’s hush money sentencing was further postponed, and the Supreme Court issued an opinion that wasn’t much of an opinion at all. We’ll get to all that — but first, let’s talk judges.
Not the justices who get most of the attention, but the judges on the nation’s trial and appellate courts. Although Democrats will lose the White House and Senate come January, they’ve been confirming key jurists to these lower courts during the post-election “lame duck” period before Republicans take over.
Among President Joe Biden’s nominees who won lifetime appointments this week is Amir Ali, who’ll serve on Washington, D.C.’s federal trial court. Don’t be surprised if this young and accomplished civil rights lawyer is floated as a high court pick for a future Democratic president. Indeed, Biden’s lone justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, also began her judicial career on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Democrats are closing in on the 234 judges seated in Trump’s first term. Whether they meet or beat that number remains to be seen, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and company race the clock before they lose power.
Meanwhile, Matt Gaetz won’t be attorney general. He withdrew after it became clear the incoming GOP-majority Senate wouldn’t confirm him. In keeping with the Florida loyalist theme, Trump quickly announced Pam Bondi as the next top cop contestant. Like Gaetz, she’s an avatar for MAGA vengeance, but unlike Gaetz, she has criminal experience beyond being investigated. The former Florida attorney general led a “lock her up” chant against Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Republican National Convention. When it turned out that Trump would be the one facing lockup, Bondi said on Fox News last year that his prosecutors “will be prosecuted.”
Bondi also backed Trump’s effort to overturn 2020 election results; she defended him in his first impeachment; and, as Florida AG, she didn’t take action against Trump’s fraudulent for-profit university — after his foundation gave $25,000 to a political action committee supporting her. That last move led Stephen Colbert to call Bondi “the only person in the world ever to make money from Trump University … other than Donald Trump.”
In his criminal cases, the main action (or lack thereof) was in New York. Judge Juan Merchan approved Trump’s request to file a motion to dismiss the case outright due to his impending White House return. That motion is due Dec. 2 and the state’s response is due Dec. 9, after which Merchan can rule on that request as well as Trump’s pending motion to overturn his guilty verdicts based on the Supreme Court immunity ruling. Only then can the case proceed to sentencing, which is by no means a certainty before Trump takes office. (More on that in this week’s “Ask Jordan.”)
We also got a mysterious piece of news in the Georgia election interference case. The state appeals court was supposed to hear arguments next month in the defense effort to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. But the court abruptly canceled the hearing without explanation. The court’s next move could shed light on the cancellation. As in New York, it’s unclear what will happen in the state case that — unlike the federal ones — Trump can’t get dismissed or pardon away by virtue of being president. Unlike the New York case, where Trump is the only defendant, he has many co-defendants in Georgia who could face televised trials while he’s in office.
The Supreme Court issued its first opinion of the term in an argued case on Friday (the court’s first opinion overall was in a capital case summarily decided without argument). But the court’s “ruling” in Facebook v. Amalgamated Bank was a one-sentence order dismissing the case as improvidently granted, meaning the court realized after the fact that it shouldn’t have taken up the appeal in the first place. Whoops! The justices also added to their docket on Friday, taking up a new appeal over the scope of federal agency power. Elsewhere on the high court docket, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pressing his luck with an application to halt misinformation investigations of doctors in Washington state. Justice Elena Kagan rejected his attempt on Wednesday, but now he’s shopping it to Justice Clarence Thomas. Former Trump White House advisor Peter Navarro tried a similar move of turning to another justice when he fought to stay out of prison for Jan. 6 committee contempt, but the full court ultimately rejected him. We’ll see if Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services fares better in his high court quest. Finally, a programming note: The newsletter is off next week for Thanksgiving and will return the first week of December. It should be a busy one, with special counsel Jack Smith slated to update the courts about his plans for Trump’s federal cases, Trump’s New York dismissal motion due to Merchan, and the justices set to hear arguments over transgender rights in United States v. Skrmetti. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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