April 25: Full Courts

For the past few weeks, non-violent protests in against the Israel-Hamas war have burgeoned in universities across the U.S. as students call for the schools to separate themselves from companies advancing military efforts in Gaza. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) daughter was one of those arrested.  Last week over 100 demonstrators at Columbia University were arrested after they set up a tent encampment. The arrests turned out to be motivational for protests at more universities.

At the University of Texas at Austin, police and state troopers in riot gear and on horseback made 57 arrests, including a journalist, and forced hundreds of peaceful students off the school’s main lawn. A backlash to this treatment led 46 of them to be released, and the university allowed a demonstration on the main square under the school’s clock tower.

Other protests were at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Harvard University locked most gates to limit access to those with school identification. It also warned against tents or tables on campus without permission, but protesters set up 14 tents after the school’s suspension of the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee. At California State Polytechnic University in Humbodt, protesters used furniture, tents, chains, and zip ties to block entrances to an academic and administrative building on Monday. Students occupied a second building on Tuesday, and three students were arrested. At the downtown Boston campus of Emerson College, 108 people were arrested at an encampment. Other encampments were at New York University, Emory University, Northwestern University, Yale University, Fashion Institute of Technology, City College of New York, Indiana University at Bloomington, Michigan State University at East Lansing, University of Connecticut, and The University of Southern California which canceled its main stage graduation ceremony from safety concerns.

Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other GOP lawmakers were loudly heckled and drowned out when they held a press conference at Columbia University on Wednesday to condemn the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus. He told them to “go back to class and stop the nonsense” and called for the resignation of President Nemat (Minouche) Shafik “if she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos.” After meeting with Shafik, he told reporters he wanted President Joe Biden to consider calling in the National Guard to “bring order to these campuses.” Johnson was born two years after the National Guard members killed four unarmed students and wounded another nine at Kent State University during a Cambodian campaign protest in 1970.

Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, told student anti-genocide protesters to “just keep doing it.” He said:

“There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism. If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt.”

Kapos is part of a small group of Shoah survivors and their descendants who “demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of Israel.” He told protesters that they are on the right side of history in demonstrating against slaughter and starvation of Palestinians. Over 122,000 Palestinians have been killed or maimed during 202 days of almost relentless Israeli attacks on Gaza, and 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced. Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked U.S. authorities to crack down harder on students, calling them an “antisemitic mob.” Conservatives call Holocaust survivors who support Palestinian rights “self-hating Jews.”

A day full of court news began with New York’s Court of Appeals overturning Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction for felony sex crime charges, 4-3, because prosecutors allowed testimony describing crimes that Weinstein wasn’t charged with. DA Alvin Bragg must now decide whether he wants a retrial. In 2022, California sentenced Weinstein to 16 years in prison.

DDT Trial Day 7:    DDT was angry because he was required to attend his criminal trial instead of watching the Supreme Court arguments.

More David Pecker testimony about his collusion with DDT to swing the 2016 election with the National Inquirer:Communicating with DDT, he paid Karen McDougal to bury her allegations of an affair with DDT, politically protect him, and influence the election. Pecker also made Dylan Howard remove a negative Radar Online story about DDT and encouraged DDT to buy and bury Stormy Daniel’s story about her alleged affair with DDT. He also testified that DDT’s worries about the affairs becoming public weren’t out of concern for his family. DDT thanked Pecker for saving him from scandals in front of former FBI Director James Comey.

After Pecker’s counsel sensed a legal problem with the contract paying McDougal, Pecker became nervous because he, DDT, and Cohen had created a shell company to confuse the control of McDougal’s contract. Pecker said that he structured the agreement to avoid triggering campaign finance law and sought election law advice. He also said that DDT kept checking with Pecker about “our girl”; even after the election, DDT asked Pecker about “Karen.”

DDT became angry because Pecker amended the agreement to allow McDougal more freedom in publicly speaking despite DDT’s personal lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen’s objections. She then talked to CNN Anderson Cooper after the election. After the interview, DDT set up a conference between two of his White House aides, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Hope Hicks, and Pecker. He told them he planned to extend the agreement with McDougal to keep her from speaking more widely about her affair with DDT. McDougal filed suit against American Media Inc., and Pecker settled the claim and released her from her non-disclosure agreement.

Mark Sumner gave a lengthy summary of Pecker’s testimony with social media commentary by legal experts. Judge Juan Merchan has not yet ruled on the motion to deal with DDT’s first ten violations, but since the hearing on that last week, DDT made another four possible violations. The judge called for another hearing next Wednesday, a day that he usually oversees both the Veteran Treatment and Mental Health courts in New York, “problem-solving” outside incarceration to connect defendants with supervised treatment. Merchan also angrily directed comments to DDT’s lawyer Emil Bove about the lawyer’s attacks on Pecker, trying to make him appear to the jury that Pecker was unreliable or rehearsed.

The few pro-DDT protesters outside the courthouse has dwindled to one person, according to Norm Eisen.

In The Prospect, Harold Meyerson wrote that the pediment over the front doors of the Supreme Court building needs to add these words to “Equal Justice Under Law”: “Except for Republican Presidents, Who Are Henceforth Immune When They Violate It.” His reference was to Supreme Court arguments on Thursday about whether DDT deserved “absolute immunity” for any crimes he might commit.

(Some people considered the proceedings to be a “kangaroo court” because three of the justices were appointed by DDT, and a fourth, Clarence Thomas, is married to a woman who participated in the attempted coup.)

Although a majority of the justices may not have agreed that presidents deserve this unlimited right, they considered how to stall DDT’s trial for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh pondered returning the matter to the D.C. Circuit Court for further analysis; Justice Amy Coney Barrett proposed the creation of a test for presidential defense to prosecution falling short of absolute immunity, also returning to lower courts for further ruling. Therefore DDT’s three appointed judges could save him from any trial until after the election and then for another four years if he is elected in November.

Gorsuch pompously intoned that “we’re writing a rule for the ages,” ignoring the possibility that any future Supreme Court could overturn the ruling, just as he did with Roe v. Wade. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said:

“The most powerful person in the world could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes. What disincentive is there for turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminality in this country?”

A few outrageous, if not surprising, arguments:  

Samuel Alito: Guilty parties in the assaults to U.S. democracy are not the president who incited the insurrection but the prosecutors trying to hold him accountable. Prosecuting DDT is a greater threat than his attempt to overturn the election.

Clarence Thomas: If presidents aren’t prosecuted for foreign coups, they shouldn’t be prosecuted for domestic ones.

John Sauer, DDT’s lawyer: A president should be immune for ordering the killing of an opponent, if he thinks the person is corrupt, and selling nuclear secrets should be covered by immunity. Both these are “official acts.” (Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Sauer the president would be doing it “for personal gain.”)

Conservative justices didn’t want to hear anything that DDT might have done wrong. Whenever government lawyer Michael Dreeben would try to bring up specifics of the case against DDT, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Alito cut him off.

Arizona’s Republicans decided to nullify the fall election on ratifying Supreme Court justices before the election. Law allows voters to decide retention of state Supreme Court justices every six years, and two who voted to keep the 1864 abortion ban are up for election in November. A vote against them could cause vacancies filled by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. To nullify the election results this year, GOP senators voted for a constitutional amendment requiring lack of “good behavior” If the House votes in favor of the bill, it goes to voters in November. With a majority vote, the amendment “applies retroactively” and makes retention elections null and void.