Tonight in Your Rights: "Petition DENIED"
The Supreme Court rejected two petitions of great interest to Donald Trump today. Ghislaine Maxwell's case was only one of them.
Don’t miss the important legal news overshadowed by the other important legal news.
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected two cases of great interest to Donald Trump. The justices declined to hear the criminal appeal of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who hoped to overturn her guilty verdicts based on a non-prosecution agreement protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators.
The other case, involving Turkish state-run bank Halkbank, produced one of the longest-running scandals of Trump’s first term, as multiple U.S. Attorneys and cabinet members denounced his attempts to interfere with the prosecution of a multi-billion dollar money laundering operation involving Iran.
“Where she belongs”
In the wake of the first decision, family members of late Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre called upon Trump’s Justice Department to stop giving Maxwell special treatment.
“We are committed to ensuring that convicted child sex trafficker Maxwell serves out the entirety of her 20-year sentence in prison, where she belongs,” relatives Sky and Amanda Roberts and Danny and Lanette Wilson wrote in a statement. “We remain hopeful that the DOJ will realize that she belongs in a maximum security prison, not the country club one she is currently in, the first human trafficker ever to have been afforded that privilege.”
Maxwell received a transfer to a low security prison in Texas after sitting for a two-day interview with Trump’s personal attorney Todd Blanche, who did not challenge the convicted sex trafficker’s denials, minimization and alternative histories of her crimes.
That transfer required the Bureau of Prisons to suspend Maxwell’s sex offender status.
Trump, who did not rule out a pardon for Maxwell, wished her well before her criminal trial during his first term.
Halkbank, Trump, and the ‘dictators he liked’
Largely overshadowed by Maxwell’s defeat, the Supreme Court issued another ruling on Monday in a case marked by Trump’s attempts to meddle in the docket.
On Monday, the Supreme Court also declined to hear the criminal appeal of Türkiye’s state-run Halkbank, a financial institution whose prosecution Trump spent much of his first presidential term trying to subterfuge.
Halkbank stands accused of helping launder billions of dollars for Iran, in defiance of U.S. sanctions. The case has its origins in the prosecution of gold trader Reza Zarrab, who pleaded guilty to funneling Iranian oil money through Halkbank and converting it to gold, which Zarrab’s couriers delivered in suitcases into Dubai to launder into the international market.
Before pleading guilty, Zarrab retained Rudy Giuliani as his attorney to try to arrange a prisoner swap that would have torpedoed the case. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that Trump unsuccessfully pressured him to try to scrap the case during an Oval Office meeting with Giuliani. (Then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who brought the money laundering case, was fired by Trump around this time.) Giuliani’s campaign of shadow diplomacy failed, and Zarrab became a star witness against Halkbank’s ex-manager Hakan Atilla. During his testimony, Zarrab implicated Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the witness stand of a federal court in New York, telling a jury that Erdoğan personally ordered sanctions-busting trades.
Multiple U.S. Attorneys for the Southern District of New York who prosecuted the sanctions-busting scheme lost their jobs. After Bharara, ex-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman brought the subsequent criminal case against Halkbank, and he was forced to resign after an extraordinary standoff with then-Attorney General Bill Barr. Berman later revealed in a memoir that Barr pressured him to drop that case.
Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton cited the Halkbank case in his memoirs as an example of Trump’s willingness “to, in effect, give personal favours to dictators he liked,” referring to Erdoğan.
Halkbank hoped that the Supreme Court would find that, as a foreign state-run bank, they were entitled to sovereign immunity from criminal prosecution.
With the failure of that appeal, the Halkbank case continues in the Southern District of New York, six years after it began, in a new Trump administration.
Judge puts off bid to block “Trump’s invasion” of Chicago
On the heels of legal victories in Portland, Ore., the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago filed a federal lawsuit in an attempt to call off Trump’s “unlawful and dangerous” deployment of the military on their soil.
“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” the lawsuit begins. “To guard against this, foundational principles of American law limit the president’s authority to involve the military in domestic affairs. Those bedrock principles are in peril.”
In a press conference on Sunday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said: “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion.”
U.S. District Judge April Perry, a Joe Biden appointee, reportedly declined to immediately issue a temporary restraining order blocking the deployment, but she scheduled a hearing on the question on Thursday.
Throughout the complaint, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul catalogues Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s war-like rhetoric, including Trump’s social media post depicting himself as fictitious warmonger Lt. Col. Kilgore from the film Apocalypse Now.
Refusing to use Trump and Hegseth’s rebrand for the Department of Defense, the lawsuit notes that only Congress has the power to create or name government agencies.
Like other lawsuits challenging the federalization of the National Guard, the Illinois and Chicago complaint challenges the legal basis for the deployment: 10 U.S.C. § 12406, which only allows the president to activate the troops in the event of an invasion, rebellion, or a failure to execute the laws with regular forces.
The lawsuit also seeks a declaration that Trump’s actions violate the Posse Comitatus Act, the 10th Amendment, and other statutory and constitutional protections.
Read the lawsuit here.
Show me the (recording of the) money
Pressure continues to build for the release of the recording capturing undercover agents handing $50,000 to now-White House border czar Tom Homan in a paper bag shortly before the election, in exchange for contracts in a new Trump administration.
On Monday, the advocacy group Democracy Forward Foundation filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Department of Justice and FBI for the tapes.
Democracy Forward said that they made their request to “shed light on the actions of a senior White House official shortly before he entered government and the context of the Trump-Vance Administration’s decision to close a criminal matter involving that official.”
Senate Democrats also have pushed for the release of the recording.
Whispers of the next Trump-ordered prosecution
MSNBC exclusively reported on Monday that a top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia will recommend not to pursue any case against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Other prosecutors in the district, where James Comey was charged, are reportedly bracing for their colleague to be fired.
Read the network’s report here.
Scheduling notes
Comey’s arraignment has been rescheduled to the morning of Weds., Oct. 8.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s attorneys will demand their client’s release from immigration custody at an evidentiary hearing in Maryland scheduled for Friday morning.
Adam, what an array of updates on these big cases. Excellent work!