If I had to bet, I’d say chairs and coffee pots started flying in the White House today after the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to allow Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance to obtain Donald Trump’s financial records. The court also voted that House Democrats’ efforts to obtain same be remanded to a lower court. And the explosion on Twitter following the rulings was as predictable as thunder following lightning.
Predictably, the three-year-old in the Oval Office kicked over his blocks and launched a Tweet storm into the ethernet.
The Supreme Court sends case back to Lower Court, arguments to continue. This is all a political prosecution. I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020
NOT FAIR!!! NOT FAIR!!! WAAAAAAAAAA!!! (stomps feet and smashes glass) And he was just warming up.
….No Republican Senate Judiciary response, NO “JUSTICE”, NO FBI, NO NOTHING. Major horror show REPORTS on Comey & McCabe, guilty as hell, nothing happens. Catch Obama & Biden cold, nothing. A 3 year, $45,000,000 Mueller HOAX, failed – investigated everything….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020
NO ‘JUSTICE’!!!! NO NOTHING!!!! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! (hurls paperweight, lies on floor, turning red and kicking, while Ivanka calls White House doctor)
….for another President. This is about PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT. We catch the other side SPYING on my campaign, the biggest political crime and scandal in U.S. history, and NOTHING HAPPENS. But despite this, I have done more than any President in history in first 3 1/2 years!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020
WAAAAAAAA!!! They were SPYING!!! They sent spies!!! WAAAAA!!! And the spies GOT CAUGHT and nobody spanked them!!!! WAAAAAA!!! i want Obama and Biden spanked!!!! Right now!!!!
Courts in the past have given “broad deference”. BUT NOT ME!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020
NOT ME!!!!! WHAT ABOUT ME!!!! IT’S ALL ABOUT MEEEEEE!!!! (pounds fists on floor, while sweat pours off him)
The Supreme Court sends case back to Lower Court, arguments to continue. This is all a political prosecution. I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020
PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020
(doctor administers Thorazine as Trump turns purple)
Snark or not, I don’t think the foregoing is too far afield from what really goes on day to day in the White House.
The rulings can be viewed in a glass half empty, glass half full light. On the good side, and this is why Little Donnie is losing his mind, he’s not off the hook. The legal fight is still alive, and Trump depended upon Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to shut it down, and they did not. The big picture is that a president is not immune from investigation and Trump can scream PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT! until his tonsils explode, but nothing is going to change the fact that his reckoning with justice is still going on. That’s the glass half full.
John Roberts said, “The president is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need.” And Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan D.A. said, “a tremendous victory for our nation’s system of justice and its founding principle that no one — not even a president — is above the law.”
The glass half empty is that Trump’s records will not be made available before the election. And it may be darker than that. Trump biographer David Cay Johnson sees today’s rulings as part of a disturbing pattern. Raw Story:
The pattern: Once again under Chief Justice John Roberts the Supreme Court has weakened law enforcement when it comes to elected officials.
Four years ago the court, in a Roberts opinion, tightly narrowed the grounds on which politicians can be prosecuted in graft cases, dismissing the conviction of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell on bribery charges. In May the court unanimously dismissed all felony convictions in the New Jersey Bridgegate case, creating a much wider highway for corrupt conduct and abuse of office.
All of these cases involved corrupt Republican office holders and aides.
Under Roberts the Supreme Court has essentially legalized bribery and other misconduct by public officials unless some party explicitly states that their intent is criminal. In essence unless prosecutors can show someone was so stupid as to say “I’m giving you this cash and in return you will do this specific thing for me” there is no crime in the view of the Roberts court.
The delays the court ordered for further procedural gearings stand in sharp contrast to the 1974 unanimous decision that President Richard Nixon had to immediately turn over his secret Oval Office tapes to Watergate prosecutors. Nixon resigned days later knowing the tapes would provide irrefutable evidence of his criminal conduct.
This argument is meritorious, certainly. And it doesn’t bode well for future cases of corruption and that is a warning sign blinking in red. However, while it would have been great to see the tax returns immediately like we got the Watergate tapes, and that is a loss, at least we have the satisfaction of knowing that eventually Trump is going to have to pay the piper. And he knows it too, or he wouldn’t be losing it on Twitter this morning. That is a victory. And the icing on the cake is that Trump naively thought that “his boys,” his five conservatives, would twist and mangle the law any which way, just to keep him happy and in office. Disillusionment is a dish best served with lots of sugar. It’s very bitter. And it makes the schadenfreude that much more sweet.
Granma always said the chickens always come home to roost…even if they sit in the woods for a night. You never hear the last part but my farming families understood some fruits are slow to ripen.
I never heard that the chickens sit in the woods for a night and then come home. I like that. That’s like it’s always darkest before the dawn.
Great news to me
I like it.
I agree with David Cay Johnston. He makes a damn good point. But still and all, at least it didn’t go the way we feared with SCOTUS blocking the tax returns. My God, think of what that would have been like.
There goes Roberts, splitting the baby, hedging the Republicans’ bets for them again, but you’re right—this ruling was bound to have been a nuclear event in Trumpland.
I do wish Roberts would quit with the King Solomon schtick. He’s trying to satisfy everybody and only comes off as an enabling prick whom history will judge harshly.
“Splitting the baby!” Great analogy!
My man Hoarse Whisperer was PISSED about this ruling, denouncing Roberts as a hair-splitting clown trying to have it both ways. But if Trump is throwing this tantrum, it means we still got something out of it. Another observation from Hoarse: look for Trump to be better with losing after his upcoming vacay at his resort. Since he won’t be publicly exposed any time soon, he can lie to himself easier.
I’ll have to go look up Hoarse’s comments. Trump will be “better with losing?”
Yeah, Hoarse traces that reaction to Trump’s narcissism. You’ll find Hoarse’s comments easy enough because he is being really whiny about it.
You are NO different than any other President,that has to show their taxes to the people…of the USA… Stop crying about it!!!
He can’t ever be part of a group. He always has to be special. It’s like how he gets two scoops of ice cream.
Every time he starts that “NOT FAIR!!!!!!” sh!t, he sounds like a damn three year old. If he had to live like a lot of us do, he’d find out pretty damn quick what “not fair” really means.
Mentally, he IS three years old.
That is everybody’s reaction to it. He doesn’t know what it is to wear hand me down clothes, or not have a warm coat, or shoes that don’t fit right. A lot of us do. I did. There were some rough years when I was a kid. So we’re not inclined to listen to his baby shit.
Here’s a thought to ponder regarding the glass half empty view. The cases have been remanded back to the lower courts, with a couple of important now SCOTUS declared reminders – that no one including a President is above the law AND that while a President is entitled to raise the same objections as to the validity (IOW is it a so-called fishing expedition or was it properly secured by the weight of evidence presented supporting its issuance?) and/or the scope as in is it overly broad a President isn’t entitled to any more deference from the courts than any other person would be.
In practical terms that means Trump can, and surely will try to re-litigate the subpoenas again with some other type bullshit. However, the basic information and arguments have already been considered and no less than SCOTUS has confirmed the rules so any new arguments will be relatively quickly dealt with. Certain, if not virtually any argument Trump’s lawyers might make will be quickly shot down both at the District and Appellate level. “Quickly” can be a maddeningly slow thing in the federal courts to be sure, but I have a sense that this moving forward it will be fairly quick, albeit still unlikely before the election.
However, where the real fun will happen is when it gets up to SCOTUS again. IANAL but I’ve been around enough to have heard many an expert with experience before the Supreme Court either as a litigant or as a legal correspondent to know that reading tea leaves with SCOTUS is fraught with the possibility of getting eggs on one’s face. However, with not one but BOTH of Trump’s appointees joining today’s decisions I think a message has been sent and it’s one that made the lawyers in the WH Counsel’s office and Trump’s private lawyer’s assholes snap shut. I think what they have signaled is that SCOTUS won’t be granting Certiorari next time around. Maybe even that it will not just be denied but denied quickly. If that’s the case it’s a huge “Uh Oh” for Trump.
For those who don’t know it takes at least four Justices voting yes for a case to be heard by SCOTUS – that what the legal types mean when they talk about them granting “Cert” or Certiorari. If four Justices vote to hear a case that means we go through the better part of a year before getting a decision. Trump was at least counting on that much, in the hopes that a favorable ruling today would have sent a signal to lower courts to take their time for fear of risking being overturned. And then if things dragged out long enough he could maybe run out the clock on statute of limitations making the whole thing moot.
Now? SCOTUS has made it pretty clear that Trump is entitled to the same legal protections as anyone else – and nothing more. Having read Robert’s opinions (again, IANAL but I think I can follow a fair amount of it) and even Brewksi Brett’s concurrence (I enjoy speculating on the tortured thoughts he’s been having given his role in Clinton v Jones and how he helped box himself in now that he’s on SCOTUS) it looks to me as though in remanding the cases back Roberts has basically said to lower courts: “Take one last look to make sure all the I’s are dotted and T’s crossed, and if Team Trump comes up with any new stuff now you know what the standards are so deal with it and get this mess out of our courts. We don’t intend to deal with any of this shit again.”
I could be wrong but that’s my reaction this afternoon. Roberts has convinced his two newest members Trump’s legal woes aren’t a hill worth fighting on, and that they will have other chances down the road when Trump and Trumpism are no longer dominating the national discussion to engage in their Federalist Society fuckery. That it’s time they lead the way in helping conservatives cut him loose. If I’m right about that, and it’s being whispered or at least hinted at in the upper echelons of the DC legal power structure in that coded language lawyers use with each other then Trump is well and truly fucked. Hell, even Barr and Cippilone have been begging Trump not to pardon Roger Stone, which leads me to believe they knew what was coming today. As in it’s like seem to do anything but it weakened the dam and all that water pressure quickly caused it to crack and then crumble. A helluva lot of water has built up during the Trump years and my feeling is that Roberts is the explosives genius Sgt. Miller who sent the two officers down there to set off what seemed at first to be a minor “Pfffft” but in fact was devastating and quickly. And he convinced Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to play the roles of Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw.
I sure hope I’m right because if I am word will spread quickly through elite DC legal circles and from there all around official Washington, DC. Which means a lot of people will suddenly be spending lots of billable hours with their lawyers trying to first get the hell out of Trump World and then avoid legal fallout from having spent time there. In my wildest fantasies I see panic setting in and a mass exodus from this administration starting by September and becoming a full blown disaster movie style scene of people running for their lives!
A message was sent, indeed, and that’s putting it mildly. I wouldn’t want to be in Cipplone’s or Sekulow’s shoes for the world, explaining it to Baby Donny.
I can only imagine what Billy Barr is hearing. Trump’s “Roy Cohn” is probably fielding orders to arrest Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for “betraying” him, and probably Roberts too for good measure. Barr of course won’t do it and any protests about needing grounds to make arrests are probably met with orders to make shit up! I honestly think that kind of thing might be going on today, even as I write this.
The more I think about it the more I think that Barr knew what was coming. Lawyers do have that way of communicating with someone they can trust in which they reveal all manner of things without saying anything close to what’s being conveyed. What people often overlook with SCOTUS is that when they vote on a case they sit in their room and say which way they are voting, right there too each other. Then the Chief Justice decides who will write the majority opinion and that takes a while, especially in controversial cases. Since everyone knows where everyone stands it’s also pretty easy to know who will want to file concurring or dissenting opinions so even in a case where the Chief Justice has already decided in advance to write the majority opinion and has a head start time is given so that others can draft their own. They too might have had head starts but it’s common for everyone to share their drafts and that means adjusting their own to counter what others are saying. The main thing though is that the ruling and the margin were known a while ago.
SCOTUS and the law clerks are famously tight lipped about how they will rule, and evidence of surprises over the years proves it. However, when coming down to the wire at the end of term with their most trusted colleagues and confidants outside the inner circle of Justices and clerks having those cryptic chats I mentioned is surely something that once in a blue moon happens. I would be the least bit surprised if Roberts made it a point to communicate to Barr it would be a really, really bad time for him to go issuing certain pardons, especially given what went down when Barr botched his attack on SDNY. Hence the news about Barr and Cippilone too standing up to Trump and telling him not to pardon Stone.
I hope they keep the entire WH staff on duty tonight so that Trump doesn’t roam the hallways trashing things.
Denis,
Great analysis!
Maybe you can explain something that bothers me: Frumpie was able to fire that states attorney from New York with ease. What is stopping him from doing that again on mega-scale to stop all investigations into his criminal past?
Since the pandemic, my internet connection is barely functional, so I am unable to check all my facts before I post as I usually do, so please forgive me for any misstatements I may have made.
Can you explain how the president can just simply fire a states attorney at all?
And, if it is that easy, couldn’t the next president or a later more progressive (than Biden) leader with a Democratic Senate and House fire all these federalist society jerks that Moscow Mitch is saddling us with? Didn’t a former Republican President fire a bunch of liberal attorneys in the West Coast in the past?
Enquiring minds want to know.
I have lived a somewhat checkered past and the one thing I did notice is that all criminals when they are in the crosshairs of the law enforcement is that it’s just not fair that they are targeted. And as far as his campaign. Their were people in his campaign being targeted in investigations. My advice would be don’t associate with criminals and you just might not get investigated. But the problem there was trump was involved in illegal activity and conspiracy to commit illegal acts. Hence you get investigated.
Pretty simple rule of life: if you don’t want to do the time, don’t do the crime. tRump is NOT above the law.
To those who think this was somehow a setback cuz we won’t see the taxes b4 nov. , we were never gonna see them in time no matter which way it went. It is an absolute loss 4 his narcissism, which expected nothing less than the same green light the Republican senators gave him. He is the Jordan of narcissism. He will seek revenge & double down on any means necessary to stay in power. He knows now that, once he loses the cocoon of presidential protection, he & Barr could be future cellmates. He may be on the run, but he can hear the hounds tracking him. Stroke city.
Optimism from you on a matter relating to Trump, Scott? The end must be in sight. Seriously, I can get behind all that, though. I often compare this nightmare to a John Le Carre or Bill Granger novel. And this certainly fits the pattern for such.
I figure it’s not so much about actually seeing the returns, but about the unwillingness to release them indicating that there are things that are illegal or very questionable, and some will show up in the tax returns – valuations that don’t match up, probably.
PJ,
My pie in the sky dream is that Mary Trump leaks the records she has about the court case over her inheritance.
Is that even possible?
Hallelujah ! Game Over !
Certainly a good move, or we could even consider the SCOTUS rulings of the past few weeks a good series of moves.
Sounds like someone will need to call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAmbulance for Donny Dip$**t
GREAT PIECE .. TY Ursula Faw
You have to read it all folks lots of Trump twitter raving. And Brilliant evaluation from #RawStory on how ROBERTS court finally woke up to see his dementia and need to COVER THEIR ASSES now for having let RETHUGS get away w their crimes for years. #Schadenfreude INDEED.
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zoya
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Forgot to comment that everyone should realize the only two tweets in that storm that were demented Trumps were the two little caps screams. ALL others are by Scavino or MILLER .. even Kushner can’t tweet leagalese