A Thursday Legal Lightning Round, With Memes!

As a Star Trek aficionado and someone often surveying the multiple court battles playing out, this meme pops into my head with each development:

The good news is, in this week’s courtroom volleys, justice has advanced in some important ways. 

Let’s play a legal lightning round! And since I’m lying in bed dizzy with a stomach bug, let’s lighten it up with some memes. Because this is all just too much otherwise.

Person, woman, man, camera, TV!

The first televised hearing of CSI: Georgia RICO took place yesterday. There were a few key takeaways, summed up nicely using those famous five Trump words: The person that the woman and the man don’t want next to them on camera and national TV.

Both conspiracy Kraken lawyer, Sidney Powell, and Harvard lawyer turned January 6 Alex Jones fanboy, Kenneth Chesebro, had requested speedy trials and want to be tried separately. Specifically, Chesebro did not want to be tried at the same time as Powell, who is certifiably crazy. He tried hard to emphasize how little his case has to do with hers.

But Judge Scott McAfee, who seemed poised, prepared, no-nonsense, and in charge, ruled that they could move forward together with a trial beginning October 23, 2023. That’s in just under over six weeks. 

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. The two are both charged with the same RICO violations as Trump and the others. That means Fani Willis will have to lay out facts showing they were associated with a criminal enterprise that executed a plan to overturn the Georgia election results. That is essentially most of the case, with an emphasis on Powell’s and Chesebro’s participation in the conspiracy. The nation will get a preview of the case against Trump, but then again, so will Trump’s lawyers.

The judge seemed highly skeptical that the other defendants could realistically move forward with the first two defendants. In all likelihood, he will sever Chesebro and Powell from Trump and the other 16 defendants. And because a trial, not including jury selection, will take at least four months, according to the DA’s office, we shouldn’t expect Trump’s Georgia trial to even begin before next summer at the earliest now.

The wild card here is the removal request now pending before federal district court Judge Steve Jones. No matter how he rules, there will be appeals that likely won’t get fully resolved before Chesebro’s and Powell’s case goes to trial. I could see Chesebro having second thoughts about a speedy trial if it means he’s at the same table as Powell, so he may wind up trying to buy more time or get out from under this ruling somehow. 

Protecting jurors and court officials

The names of the grand jurors who indicted 45 and the other 18 defendants were a matter of public record, per Georgia law. Because of this, however, the jurors were doxed online with far-right calls to terrorize and punish them. DA Willis is deeply concerned about the safety of jurors in the upcoming trials, so she has moved for secrecy. Specifically, she asked the court to “restrict dissemination of jurors’ identities” by any defendant or media.

In her filing, some dark aspects of online pressure campaigns became clearer. Along with the grand jurors, there was doxing of “members of the Fulton County DA’s Office, including the DA herself and members of her family.” As to the latter, the doxing was laden with “derogatory and racist remarks.”

One thing that almost went unnoticed: According to the Atlanta Police Chief, the site that performed the doxing is a Russian website that has refused to remove the information. This underscores a hard truth: The enemies of the U.S. will seek to foment chaos and even terror around our legal proceedings in an attempt to destabilize our system. MAGA extremists may not be acting alone, but rather, and per usual, under Russian disinformation and influence.

Flip-a-dee doo-da

This next development wasn’t so much a surprise as a confirmation. As I wrote about earlier, Jack Smith successfully peeled off a key witness, Mar-a-Lago IT worker Yuscil Taveras, by getting a federal judge to explain the conflict that Yuscil’s counsel had created by representing multiple possible defendants, even while getting paid by Trump’s political action committee. 

As soon as Taveras got assigned a federally-appointed public defender, he decided to change his grand jury testimony and implicate Trump and two Mar-a-Lago workers, Trump’s valet Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos de Oliveira. He IDed them as part of an effort, requested by Trump, to obstruct the investigation by trying to delete video surveillance tapes.

CNN has now reported that Taveras has indeed become a cooperating witness as part of a deal that spares him any prosecution. It’s a smart move by both sides that adds a great deal of pressure to Nauta and Oliveira, who face the prospect of significant jail time. 

The longer these other defendants wait to flip, the less useful their cooperation becomes to the Justice Department, making any ultimate deal less favorable. But they have the same issue Taveras had: lawyers representing them who have deep conflicts because they may be serving Trump’s best interests, not theirs. The issue here is, any further Garcia hearing—where a defendant or witness has their lawyer conflicts explained by a judge—would take place before the brilliant and famously unbiased Judge Aileen Cannon. 

And she probably just doesn't see any problem here.

No, really, you’re going to trial

One of my favorite legal stories yesterday came courtesy of Judge Arthur F. Engoron in New York. Trump had attempted, yet again, to delay the trial for civil fraud brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. His lawyers submitted a proposed order, which Engoron rejected. But it was how he did it that is rather epic — in handwriting in a single terse order:

Okay, so we definitely need a meme with that phrase on it.

No really, it’s just about how much you owe her

Trump has joined Rudy Giuliani in an unenviable club: bad men accused of defamation where the only issue is how much they owe in damages.

The development involves E. Jean Carroll’s first defamation case—the one that had been tied up for a long time over the question of whether the president could be sued civilly for defamation for things he said about her while in office. The Department of Justice finally decided that Trump’s comments were outside his official duties as president, and with that obstacle gone, the case could move forward.  

The trial is in January, but it won’t have to rehash the question of liability. The judge tacked on the earlier jury’s findings from Trump’s trial loss, granting Carroll “partial summary judgment” on the question of liability. All that remains is damages, and those could include hefty punitives.

Trump has asked the Second Circuit to delay the trial until an appeal by Trump related to the case is resolved. No word yet on whether that will be granted.

Other action

There were other developments not related to Trump’s legal woes.

A federal judge has ordered Texas to remove the deadly razor wire-coated buoys that Gov. Abbott had placed in the Rio Grande to try to prevent migrants from crossing. That will face an appeal, but even this SCOTUS isn’t likely to rule in Texas’s favor given how clear the law is on who has say over border security, the feds or the state. (Spoiler alert: It’s the feds.)

In other great news, President Biden has issued an executive order terminating existing Trump-era oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and forbidding new drilling on some 13 million acres of pristine wilderness in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. This could be hugely consequential for reducing fossil fuel extraction and addressing climate change, but it is sure to face challenges from the fossil fuel industry and the politicians it has bought.

Finally, Special Counsel David Weiss indicated that he intends to indict Hunter Biden on a gun charge later this month for having lied on his application about being a drug addict. The move comes after plea deal talks ended without resolution of the issues identified earlier by the judge in the proposed deal. And yes, if this feels like a politicized case, that’s because it is. The younger Biden simply wouldn’t be facing charges and jail time and have a special counsel assigned if he were anyone else’s son. But such is the state of our political dysfunction. 

And Republicans should keep this in mind: