Tonight in Your Rights: Freezing Trump's slush fund?
Trump reportedly puts his $1.776B fund on ice. Also: Trans troops score a Pride Month victory, and a judge fires a warning shot in U.S. v. SPLC.
Inside tonight’s legal roundup:
Trump retreats from his widely panned slush fund. Trans troops prevail on Pride Month, and prosecutors are warned not to violate the SPLC’s right to a fair trial.
Donald Trump could see the writing on the wall.
One federal judge temporarily blocked the operation of his $1.776 billion slush fund until one of several challenges can be fully litigated. Several lawsuits had been filed against the fund from coast to coast, attacking its legal underpinnings from various constitutional and statutory angles, including the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against funding insurrectionists.
On Friday, one federal judge opened an inquiry into whether she should sanction government lawyers for perpetrating a “fraud on the court.” Absent Trump’s anticipated surrender, it remains unclear whether Congress or the judiciary will kill it first.
Ultimately, Trump appears to be deciding to drop plans for the fund on his own, but early reports have been silent on his attempt to prevent the Internal Revenue Service from auditing him or his family, potentially sparing them from paying more than $100 million in back taxes and penalties.
As with the fund itself, attorneys Norm Eisen and Matthew Platkin reminded the public to read the fine print.
“We continue to await formal confirmation, and the devil is always in the details,” they wrote in a statement on behalf of Democracy Defenders Action.
Recently, Eisen and Platkin co-wrote a legal brief on behalf of 35 former federal judges asking the court to reopen Trump v. IRS, the lawsuit upon which the purported settlement was based. In an early success for that effort, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ordered the government to answer whether the lawsuit was a product of “deception,” “fraud” and “collusion” between Trump and the federal agencies that he controls.
Unprompted, Judge Williams raised the prospect of issuing Rule 11 sanctions against the “responsible party.”
“We hope the court will continue its inquiry,” Eisen and Platkin wrote.
Former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who was part of the 35-jurist coalition seeking the inquiry, celebrated their early success.
“The lawyers who are carrying Trump’s water in these cases have to understand that there will be a post-Trump era of reckoning,” Judge Gertner told All Rise News. “They will have to face their peers. There will be a time of reckoning when the representations [they] made in court, and the specious arguments that [they] made will be accounted for.”
For a full analysis of Trump’s retreat, watch my conversation with former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann from earlier today, and look out for another interview with Judge Gertner on Legal AF.
In the rest of tonight’s legal roundup, Pride Month kicks off with a decisive legal victory for transgender armed service members, and the Trump Justice Department is let off with a warning over its extrajudicial sliming of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
‘Arbitrary and based upon animus’
A federal appeals court protected the rights of 28 transgender troops, finding by a 2-1 majority that their combined 180 years of military service were unlawfully cut short because of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “arbitrary” decision.
Hegseth based his directive on Trump’s executive order slurring transgender troops as unable to meet the “rigorous standards necessary for military service.”
Led by transgender Army Lt. Nic Talbott, the plaintiffs collectively earned more than 80 commendations for honorable service, only to be denigrated by a president who received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, four for education and a medical exemption for “bone spurs” in his heels.
“In sum, the Commander-in-Chief declared transgender people as categorically unfit for military service explicitly because of their gender identity,” U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in the lead opinion. “To add insult, the President labeled transgender persons as dishonorable, undisciplined, arrogant, selfish liars.”
Trump Justice Department attorneys didn’t attempt to defend those characterizations in court. Instead, the government argued that the military had the authority to disqualify people from service based on gender dysphoria, a mental health condition associated with the psychological distress resulting from a misalignment between gender identity and sex assigned at birth. The condition is not synonymous with transgender identity itself.
Judge Wilkins said the court could not ignore the “animus” underlying the supposed medical disqualification by sticking “its head in the sand, like the proverbial ostrich.”
“If we are at the point where invidious reasons that were expressly given for a classification can be completely ignored and replaced with our imagined non-invidious reasons, then equal protection jurisprudence has truly become bankrupt,” Wilkins wrote in the lead opinion.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling reining in nationwide injunctions in Trump v. CASA, the immediate ruling only applies to the plaintiffs whose military service was terminated under the transgender service ban. Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Judith Rogers, a Clinton appointee, would have extended the decision to transgender plaintiffs who wished to join the military.
U.S. Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee, dissented and would have upheld the ban.
The New York Times reports that the plaintiffs are expected to seek to extend the ruling to all transgender troops.
Read the ruling in full here.
‘The old values of our profession’
Trump’s Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche avoided a court order compelling the Justice Department to avoid prejudicing the pretrial rights of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But a federal magistrate judge made clear on Monday that Blanche may be skating on thin ice.
After the SPLC’s indictment, Blanche went on a media tour attacking the storied civil rights group. He told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that there’s “no allegation or information” that the SPLC shared information gathered by its informants program with law enforcement, only to retreat from that position with Shannon Bream, the host of the network’s Sunday show.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly Fitzgerald Pate said that the SPLC effectively received the retraction that it wanted.
“The public record made by the Acting Attorney General now reflects the substance of the relief SPLC requested: a correction as to its sharing of informant information with law enforcement,” Pate wrote. “The Court need not wade into a comparison of each program’s ratings and reach or every social media circulation of either clip to find that the substance of the request for relief is now moot.”
SPLC sought an order barring the government from making “further false or misleading statements.” Prosecutors said they were “well aware of [their] obligations under the law and applicable rules” and committed to “act accordingly.”
For Pate, that was enough, but she ended her ruling with a pointed conclusion.
“More fundamentally, ‘[w]e must return to the original principle that, as officers of the court, attorneys are servants of the law rather than servants of the highest bidder. We must rediscover the old values of our profession. The integrity of our justice system depends on it,’” the ruling states. “Like any officer of the court, the prosecutors are bound by their statements to this Court. On this record, the Court finds no further relief is warranted at this time.”
Read the full five-page order here.
One final note
This week, All Rise News is heading out to Milwaukee to cover oral arguments seeking to reverse the conviction of now-former Judge Hannah Dugan, a high-stakes hearing for judicial independence that could erase one of the Trump Justice Department’s rare victories in a high-profile case. It’s extremely uncommon for defendants to overturn a conviction through a post-trial motion for an acquittal, but a recent change in the legal landscape appears to be highly favorable to Dugan. Find out more by clicking here.
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Always happy to read your latest newsletter to catch up with what’s happening. I look forward to hearing what you learn on Wednesday in Milwaukee. Thank you.