Category: Uncategorized

If you don’t have time to watch read the full roundup this week, you could do worse than to watch this week’s SNL cold open, which summarizes at least 75% of what I’m about to type with startlingly accuracy. (And is probably funnier than me. But please read the news anyway, because you will definitely like some of the remaining 25%!)

Standard standing reminders apply: I am no journalist, though I play one in your inbox or browser, so I’m only summarizing the news within my area of expertise. This week’s news contains some detailed analysis that’s outside my expertise — I’m a lawyer, not a news station! — but all offroad adventures are marked with an asterisk. Okay, I think that’s about it for the disclaimers. Onward to the news!

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

This week included yet another couple stories regarding Casual Disregard of Governing Norms, cementing my suspicion that this subsection is a new staple in the roundup. It’s less than the last few weeks, on the plus side, and most of it this week involves Scott Pruitt. Here’s what’s going on now:

• Pruitt Prurience Persists. Pruitt’s aides are starting to jump ship as the scandals keep multiplying all around him like tribbles. New this week: Demoting senior EPA staff for whistle-blowing; granting large raises to favored aides without authorization or merit (and then lying about it); and a statement from an ethics official that yes, renting below market value from a lobbyist is an ethical no-no. Yet Trump keeps on sheltering him — allegedly going so far as to consider him to replace Sessions as Attorney General, and publicly calling him ‘courageous’ — even while the scandals pile up. Trump’s strange reticence might be because Pruitt has done so much deregulation in his field, because Pruitt was smart enough to talk to Fox News, or simply to spite Chief of Staff John Kelly, who apparently wants Pruitt out. Whatever the reason, it remains obvious that Pruitt has significant protection despite (or perhaps because of) his flagrant abuses, and that’s definitely not normal. It’s worth supporting the efforts of the 64 House Democrats calling for his resignation.
• Stormy Daniels and Other Oncoming Trains. The other story of this type was Trump claiming he didn’t know that Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. The move undermines their defense to Daniels’s suit, because as Avenetti notes, “You can’t have an agreement when one party claims to know nothing about it.” But we’ve also seen some amazing additional repercussions by Monday evening — more about that below.

There was also significant movement on the Threats to the First Amendment front, which had been pleasantly absent in the roundup for a good while now. (Its resurgence is not a welcome change, I assure you.) Here’s the main story to know there:

• Sinclair Syndication. News has been brewing for a little while that Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns over 200 local stations throughout the country, coerced ‘forced reads’ of a specific anti ‘fake-news’ script throughout the country. (And if you really want to freak yourself out, you can watch this creepy video of anchors reciting the script in unison). The message that first broke, warning of ‘fake news,’ might not seem that insidious on its face. But as more of the story unfolded it began to look worse and worse, making the Sinclair message seem more pointed — we learned that a recent must-run piece about the ‘deep state’ had been produced by a former Kremlin reporter, and news also broke that the Department of Homeland Security is starting a media watchlist. Meanwhile, more information leaked about stringent contract terms nationwide that penalized anchors heavily for quitting. Sinclair’s problematic nature is not news from this week — John Oliver did a segment on them almost a year ago — but their unusual multi-network presence would not have been possible before 2017, because it relies on recent repeal of an FCC regulation that kept local networks in local hands. And enforcement seems as varied as the locations; while two anchors in Eugene, Oregon appear to have gotten away with not reading the script, anchors the next state over in Seattle were warned there would be dire consequences if they even discussed being forced to read it. Since Sinclair is in the middle of purchasing Tribunal Media, a merger which would give them access to seventy percent of American households, the entire story is definitely worth watching and calling about.

On the plus side, there was a veritable renaissance of noteworthy Russia Investigation movement this week. (I’m sure we’ll be seeing the humanist Mueller paintings any time now.) Here’s a summary of the main things to know:

• Mueller Investigation Updates. Mueller had his first sentence issued this past week, as former Skadden attorney Alex van der Zwaan was sentenced to thirty days in prison. The special counsel’s been stepping up his investigation in all kinds of ways lately, from questioning Russian oligarchs to approaching witnesses at airports to drilling down on the Seychelles story, and the latest in this trend is a surprise raid of Trump’s lawyer’s office. Mueller is escalating, and that will likely be a rough ride even though it may lead to a better future.
• Mueller Says Trump Not a Target. Despite all of the activity above, news also broke that Mueller advised Trump’s attorneys last month that he’s still under investigation but is not currently a criminal target. That doesn’t necessarily mean he thinks Trump has committed no crimes, but clearly it has soothed said not-a-target, who is starting to prep for an interview with Mueller. The raid on Cohen’s office may have changed the course on that, however; it will definitely be interesting to see what happens there.
• (Don’t) Analyze This. Social media giant Facebook is looking a bit harried in the wake of news that up to 87 million people had their data scraped by Cambridge Analytica, a research firm, and that “most” of their 2 million users have had their data harvested by third-party apps. The company has been battening down the proverbial hatches by changing their rules to prevent further user manipulation, doing their best to look innocent as their chief executive testifies to Congress, and, in the case of their COO, trying to convince the public that data farming is how platforms show they care. That said, all of the spin in the world won’t change the fact that Zuckerberg faces “a reckoning” for Facebook’s present and past mishandling of user data when he testifies.
• Russian Sanctions for Fun and Profit. This was a deeply weird week in terms of Trump’s relations with Russia. On the one hand, he issued sanctions against twenty-four Russian oligarchs and officials, including many closely tied to Putin and, frankly, several tied to his own campaign. But on the other hand, this happened the same week that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that Trump discussed meeting venues with Putin like they were planning a freaking wedding. On, you know, the phone call when he also congratulated him for winning a rigged election. Which I’m inclined to think carries more weight than the sanctions, particularly when Mueller’s investigating oligarchs and Trump’s mistreating half his cabinet — why would Russian contacts be any different?

Your “Normal” Weird:

• Ongoing Amazon Animosity. The President, always eager to blur the lines between personal and presidential behavior, tweeted while traveling to his golf course that global shipping company Amazon uses The Washington Post as a lobbyist. Of course Trump cited no evidence whatsoever, and the best theory any news outlet could come up with was that Trump misunderstood the meaning of numbers (which, by the way, he didn’t even cite correctly). It’s either that or Projection Central: Trump believes that Jeff Bezos, who owns both companies, must be using one to prop up the other because it’s what Trump would do.
• John Bolton’s Conflicts of Interest. John Bolton met with white house attorneys over emergent ethics issues this past week, which I had hoped would slow down his intended April 9 start date. But alas, he appears to have started right on time, which is poor timing indeed given the current Syria situation (but more about that below).

The Bad:

• The YouTube Shooting. On April 3rd, Nasim Najafi Aghdam left a pistol range and went to the YouTube California Headquarters and opened fire, injuring three people before turning the gun on herself. Though police say that they had no reason to anticipate her violent behavior, Aghdam’s family tells a different story: She legally purchased the pistol used in the shooting in January, several months before her father filed a missing person report and warned the police that she “hated YouTube” and “might do something.” Tech companies are beginning to respond with tighter security measures, which mesh poorly with their frequently open layout and casual attitude regarding entry.
• Moving Troops on the Risk Board. Trump announced this week that he wants to station military troops on the Mexican border until a wall is built. He then followed up this announcement by signing a proclamation to that effect, and by Friday the first state had sent the national guard to the border. So that’s… terrifying, and probably the motivation behind Trump’s sudden desire to withdraw from Syria at the end of the week. That said, Trump was forced to walk back that instruction when, as experts predicted, a vicious chemical attack killed sixty people in Damascus on Saturday. We’re now left wondering what next moves will be.
• Other Immigration Updates. This was a pretty rough week all around on immigration. In addition to the news about the Mexican border, Trump also abandoned a tax speech in West Virginia to make a bunch of stuff up about immigration — but that’s barely a blip on the radar when a hundred people were rounded up at a meatpacking plant on the same day. The raid was the largest of its kind in a decade, and a stunning 86 of those people were simply held for failing to produce papers. Trump also signed paperwork designed to hold more people when they first arrive at the border, which probably is intended to coincide with stationing troops, and imposed quotas of deportation tied to immigration judges’ performance reviews.
• China Tariffs (Part III).* At the end of the week, Trump finally responded to China’s escalation of the brewing trade war by announcing another $100 billion in tariffs. But China remains confident that they can get the upper hand, saying they would fight Trump’s efforts “at any cost.” The whole thing is hitting farmers (and the stock market) hard, with Trump vaguely promising to ‘make it up’ to Middle America. (I hope he wasn’t planning to make it up to them with anything involving medicine, which is likely to skyrocket in price as well.)

The Good:

• Recent Suits of Armor. There have been a number of protective lawsuits either filed or expanded this week, which I’ve come to view as an important sign of organized resistance in the past year. First on the docket, there’s the five additional states and various cities that have joined the census lawsuit, bringing the total to about a third of the country and counting. But for more happy-making news, there’s also the fifteen Attorneys General suing the EPA for its failure to enforce pollution law, and the San Francisco suit being brought against Sessions for his decision to remove civil rights guidelines.
• Teacher Strikes in Three States. Inspired by the example set in West Virginia, teachers in Arizona, Oklahoma and Kentucky have begun to strike as well. In all three states, teachers are asking for adequate teaching budgets and salaries in line with other states, hoping to correct systemic troubles in their states’ education systems that have lingered since the 2008 recession. It’s a brave and understandable move that I hope results in improved circumstances, especially in Arizona and Oklahoma, which are both among the bottom five states in the country for educational spending.
• Opioid Options. The Surgeon General issued a statement this week supporting dissemination and trained use of Naloxone to address opioid emergencies. Naloxone, most commonly available as a nasal spray called Narcan, can be used as an antidote to overdose, making it extremely helpful in emergency and first-response situations. This is an exciting and noteworthy statement both because Surgeon General advisories are infrequent and because this is actually consistent with best evidence-based practices, which is not exactly a common occurrence in this administration. And that’s refreshing, to say the least!
• Mueller Office Raid. The incredible news broke today that Mueller conducted a raid on the office, home, and hotel room of Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, looking for documents relating to the Stormy Daniels case. Unsurprisingly, the raid was court authorized, meaning that Mueller had warrants (and therefore official permission) for the search. This type of approval is, needless to say, usually very hard to get, especially for searching an attorney’s office — traditionally an attorney’s work product is protected by attorney-client privilege. My personal theory on this (and only a theory, to be clear) is that Trump waived his privilege by denying knowledge of the hush money payment — if he had no knowledge, that means that Cohen wasn’t acting as his attorney when he made the payment, which means that none of it was attorney work product. Which means that this was brought on, in part, by Trump’s poor planning, and I find that delightful. Trump, to warn, has wasted no time in calling the raid “an attack on our country,” but activists are already organizing for the possibility that Trump will try to fire Mueller — and Mueller, of course, has plans upon plans for this contingency.

There’s still a bit of Roundup news to round out the week; since I didn’t get much done, expect to hear from me soon (no really this time) about finalizing any offered volunteer tasks and further refining the Roundup to meet reader needs. And in the interim, if you need anything, there’s always the National News Roundup ask box — send me questions! Send me feedback! Send me pictures of your lizard!

Ho boy, what a week. I guess we’ll see what next week brings.

This week wasn’t quite as bad as last week, but that’s sort of like saying “Well this week, we only got six inches of snow” (which, incidentally, was also true). Still, progress is progress, I guess!

Standard standing reminders apply: I am no journalist, though I play one in your inbox or browser, so I’m only summarizing the news within my area of expertise. This week’s news contains some detailed analysis that’s outside my expertise — I’m a lawyer, not a million dollar loan! — but all offroad adventures are marked with an asterisk. Okay, I think that’s about it for the disclaimers. Onward to the news!

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

Just last week, this week had an impressive amount of Casual Disregard of Governing Norms. I’m starting to become concerned that this is going to be a new staple in the roundup, particularly because it seems to be accelerating as news of the Russia Investigation languishes. Here are the things to track this week:

• Jared Kusher and the No Good, Very Bad, Multi-Million Dollar Loans.* The administration’s Office of Government Ethics apparently is now saying that White House counsel are looking into Jared Kushner’s infamous meetings with creditors at the White House last year, which of course has nothing to do with the $500 million loans the creditors gave his company only a few days later. This is unquestionably a step up from refusing to acknowledge or look into the matter, which the White House was doing at the beginning of the week. But as former OGE head Walter Shaub notes it strains credulity to suggest that White House counsel is going to seriously investigate the President’s son-in-law. At minimum, it certainly looks like a conflict of interest for Kushner to be meeting with these creditors when they are still having dealings with his family business, from which he never fully divested. That said, frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be a full-blown quid-pro-quo arrangement.
• White House Staff Shuffle Persists (Again). The White House walkouts are still ongoing, and they are something to behold:
• Just as I predicted last week, Veteran Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was indeed prematurely dismissed via tweet this past week, marking the third such firing in three weeks. Though Shulkin was ostensibly let go for corrupt use of government resources, he’s probably correct that he was really fired over his reluctance to privatize the VA, because Trump has never met a government program he didn’t view as a cash cow. (Shulkin was also the only member of the Cabinet who served under Obama.) While it’s topical, folks, I can’t stress enough just how messed up it is that we’re firing cabinet members by tweet now.
• To replace Shulkin, Trump wants to hire Ronny Jackson, who to be fair was an admiral in the Navy at some point although he’s most recently known for inexplicably claiming Trump has great genes when he did an annual physical on him a few months ago. As this anecdote may suggest, Jackson has zero experience in managing benefits of any kind, because his background is in practicing medicine. At this point, aides aren’t even trying to hide the fact that Trump cares more about whether he likes a person than he does about whether that person can do the job they are hired to perform.
• Only half of last week’s predictions came true, but rumors have continued that Trump’s advisers are telling him he doesn’t need a Chief of Staff and that Trump’s tolerance of Kelly is waning. So despite a late showing, this still wins this week’s Probably Going To Be Prematurely Enacted Next Week Prophecy Award.
• Stormy Daniels Saga Continues. This week’s Stormy Daniels news is that her attorney filed a motion to depose Donald Trump and his attorney Michael Cohen, which sadly is a legal term that means asking Trump questions rather than kicking him out of office. In other sad news, it was also denied by the judge as premature. Because it was an issue of timing rather than an issue of the merits, Daniels’s attorney Michael Avenatti has indicated he plans to try again later, so I doubt we’ve heard the end of this. Also, a third woman is suing to break a Trump-related NDA, this time about sexual harassment she experienced while she helped on the campaign trail.
• Pruitt Prurience.* There has been a lot of news about EPA head Scott Pruitt’s bizarre excesses this past week, though mysteriously he never seems to get censured for any of it (which is one of many reasons I think Shulkin is likely accurately reporting above). There was a lot of focus on the news that Pruitt had a sweetheart deal with an energy lobbyist that involved both him and his daughter renting the lobbyist’s condo at favorable rates for personal use; news also broke that Pruitt took his 24-hour security detail to the Rose Bowl and Disneyland. In response to these stories, Pruitt went onto conservative talk radio shows to claim all of his behaviors were perfectly normal (which they aren’t) and that Obama’s EPA spent more taxdollar money on travel (which they didn’t, and would be irrelevant anyway). It’s the last bit that lands this story in the Constitutional Crisis section; his blatant use of tax dollars for personal enrichment would be bad enough, but the protection Pruitt seems to enjoy from both Trump implicitly and from conservative media explicitly are definitely not normal.

One major difference from last week is that there was a lot of noteworthy Russia Investigation movement. Here’s a summary of the main things to know:

• NRA, Foreign Money, and You.* The NRA acknowledged this week that it receives money from foreign entities as the Federal Election Commission investigates whether Russia used the NRA to illegally funnel money into the 2016 election. Brad Woodhouse, treasurer for the American Democracy Legal Fund, pretty much summed this up by noting: “This story sounds more like a Tom Clancy novel than a reality, [b]ut in the age of Donald Trump and possible collusion with Russia, not only is it possible that it’s true, but it’s possible enough that it needs to be fully investigated.”
• Mueller’s Current Manafort Filing.* It’s been a busy week for Robert Mueller, I Tell You What. First on the docket is Mueller’s new allegation that Gates (and through him, Manafort) maintained connection to Russia through fall 2016 in the form of contact with a mysterious ‘Person A.’ Mueller’s filing, which was issued as part of sentencing for Dutch attorney Alex van der Zwaan, notes that Person A was a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the G.R.U. believed to have maintained ties during the 2016 election. Several outlets have identified Person A as Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of Manafort’s from his days working on behalf of a Kremlin-aligned Ukrainian political party. Mueller alleges Manafort had been in contact with Kilimnik as recently as this past November, well into the point where the latter was charged with money laundering and being an unregistered agent of the Ukraine.
• Beg Your Pardon? Also in the news this week is Trump’s former attorney John Dowd, who apparently discussed preemptive pardons for Manafort and Flynn with their attorneys before he left the White House legal team. It’s unclear at this time whether the pardon-in-exchange-for-silence part of the equation was subtext or text in those conversations, although it’s quite possibly obstruction of justice either way and I’m consequently not sure it matters. Also, and perhaps of more importance to the Trump team, if they accept pardons they no longer have a fifth amendment to invoke, and therefore can be compelled to testify more easily in a criminal proceeding. So much like everything else in the Trump administration, the move was both corrupt and foolish.
• Russian Diplomat Purging for Fun and Profit.* The U.S. expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle this week, as part of a coordinated statement by twenty-seven countries in response to Russia poisoning a former spy on British soil. Russia retaliated by expelling diplomats from America as well as twenty-three other countries by the end of the week. (They also closed the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg.) But while that appeared to escalate quickly, it’s worth remembering that Trump called to congratulate Putin only last week, and news broke today by way of the Kremlin that he invited Putin to the White House when making said call.

Your “Normal” Weird:

• Stevens and the Second Amendment. Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote an unusual op-ed this week arguing for the repeal of the Second Amendment. While he had written a prior op-ed on the subject in 2014, and wrote a book that touched on it as well, this is the first time Stevens has ever advocated repealing the amendment wholesale rather than adding more language to contextualize it. Unsurprisingly, people had a lot of reactions to this suggestion; Trump yelled about it on Twitter while some experts noted the technical difficulties of the suggestion, some liberals expressed uneasy disapproval, some liberals appreciated the position, and the NRA called our longest-serving Supreme Court justice to date “a disgrace to America.” (In case anyone was curious about my own opinion, I think it’s very interesting that Stevens wrote it and see his logic, but respectfully agree with Larry Tribe that our current issues are political rather than legal.)
• Military Wall Pipe Dreams.* This week’s How Is This Real News? award goes to Trump trying to use military funding to pay for his wall, because nothing says ‘I support our troops’ quite like asking for their budgetary lunch money. It’s unclear how much of this is simply him being mad that Congress wouldn’t fund it and how much of this is an actual suggestion, but either way he’s arguing that the wall is “a matter of national security.” It’s also unclear why he thinks the military should fund a matter of national security when the Department of Homeland Security literally exists for this purpose and the military is prohibited from being used as a police force domestically, but I’m going to assume that Trump refused to read the briefing telling him this (if they’re even still giving him one). At any rate, since this reappropriation of funds would require a sixty-person vote from Congress, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that’s why he’s moved onto yelling about using the nuclear option in the Senate.
• Voting is Fraud, Apparently. A woman in Texas, Crystal Mason, was sentenced to five years in prison for voting in the 2016 election. Though Texas governor Greg Abbott describes this as a “voter fraud” issue, the actual issue with Mason’s ballot was that she voted while on probation, which apparently is illegal in Texas. Folks, I don’t think it’s obvious on its face just what an unreasoning horrorshow this story is, so I’m going to spend a bit of time unpacking. First of all, apparently in Texas voting while on probation — an action that is completely legal in about half of the United States — is not only a felony conviction, but the second-most serious class they recognize, punishable by up to 20 years in prison and directly comparable to manslaughter and possession of a full ton of marijuana. Second of all, I haven’t found a single article that suggests Mason misrepresented a single thing when she voted; she merely filled out a ballot at the poll while unaware it wasn’t permitted. Third of all, voter disenfranchisement in general is a serious problem for Black Americans, and sending people who try to vote away to jail for five years is its own political message. It’s almost certainly not an accident that the election in question occurred in November 2016. We have to pay attention to stories like these if we want a fair and representative election this fall.

The Bad:

• Census Sent Us.* The Trump administration announced on Monday that it plans to ask about citizenship in the upcoming 2020 census, which hasn’t been done since 1950. This isn’t the first questionable thing that has been announced — they also recently announced that they’ll be asking Black Americans for their country of origin and last year proclaimed they won’t be tracking LGBT Americans anymore — but it has understandably angered people who view this as disincentive for noncitizen residents to engage in the census process. An accurate census count is very important to the functioning of our society, for everything from accurate political districts to where we place hospitals, and noncitizen residents must be included in the process by law. It’s not surprising against this backdrop that twelve states are already suing the administration over this, and it’s very likely this will turn into a giant fight. We should definitely keep track of developments.
• Good Morning, Ben Carson. Ben Carson apparently woke up and remembered he runs an agency this week, which of course is bad news for anybody who was hoping HUD would continue to function properly. The biggest news item to hit is that HUD is discontinuing several ongoing attempts to enforce fair housing practices, and if you’re currently asking yourself “Isn’t that literally part of HUD’s mission statement?” I feel you, but the answer apparently is “Not anymore!” Not coincidentally, the move coincided with Carson removing anti-discrimination language from the HUD mission statement. Ugh, Carson, do your department a favor and go back to sleep.
• Immigration Updates. This was another bad week for immigration updates, despite no obvious policy setting. The administration is moving forward with its threat to punish legal residents for accessing benefits to which they are legally entitled, sending a draft regulation to the Office of Management and Budget this week. The draft is… well, it’s bad, but I’m going to hold off on analyzing it until we have a final version. Meanwhile, more moderate Republicans are beginning their bi-annual Anti Immigration Shuffle, with Mitt Romney announcing he’s now in favor of merit-based immigration because he’s also in favor of being a senator. And the week was capped off with a scary twitter tirade that was disturbing even for Trump; he ended up declaring DACA ‘dead’ (which is definitely not true; see below), threatening to withdraw from NAFTA if Mexico didn’t stop people from crossing over, and seemingly insinuating that he wanted to make seeking asylum illegal. So all of that… happened. Although we also did get a bit of positive news, which I’ve listed below.
• China Tariffs (Part II).* As forecast last week, China increased tariffs on 128 different U.S. exports this week, including but not limited to pork, fruits, and pipes. Though they stated it was in response to the aluminium and steel tariffs Trump set earlier in the month, this move almost certainly is also influenced by Trump’s decision to impose tech tariffs on Chinese exports in particular; they’re probably hoping Trump will back off of that threat if the United States is unable to export to China. Trump hasn’t really said anything about the retaliation yet, but I’m currently taking over/unders on how long it takes him to start yelling about it on Twitter.

The Good:

• Census Suit. As I mentioned briefly above, at least twelve states are already suing over the citizenship question on the 2020 census. The states’ argument is that the government has a constitutional requirement to track all residents in the United States and including the question will have a chilling effect that leads to under-counting. Since all of these things have the benefit of being true, I think it’s a fairly sound argument; I’m excited to see what happens in the suit.
• DACA Big Deal. In related and also positive news, a Brooklyn court this week permitted the DACA suit brought by fifteen attorneys general to continue, declining to dismiss the case. In his decision, the judge cited Trump’s “racially charged language” as prima facie evidence of discrimination and therefore potential equal protection violation. It’s particularly edifying, given everything else going on, to read a judge write, “One might reasonably infer that a candidate who makes overtly bigoted statements on the campaign trail might be more likely to engage in similarly bigoted action in office.” Thank you for keeping us company in Reasonable Human land, Judge Garaufis!

There’s still a bit of Roundup news to round out the week; expect to hear from me soon (if you haven’t already) about finalizing any offered volunteer tasks and further refining the Roundup to meet reader needs. And in the interim, if you need anything, there’s always the National News Roundup ask box — send me questions! Send me feedback! Send me pictures of your dog!

And that’s all I have this week. Until next time, I have the honor to be your obedient servant, K.H.

Last week, the news was so overwhelming and demoralizing that I kicked a few stories from Monday out to the following roundup, hoping that things would be calmer then. I of course should have realized that by doing this, I virtually guaranteed that this week would be even more Chaotic Terrible than the last one. Sorry for jinxing all of us, folks!

Standard standing reminders apply: I am no journalist, though I play one in your inbox or browser, so I’m only summarizing the news within my area of expertise. This week’s news contains some detailed analysis that’s outside my expertise — I’m a lawyer, not EPA security detail! — but all offroad adventures are marked with an asterisk. Okay, I think that’s about it for the disclaimers. Onward to the news!

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

This week started out a quiet time for the Russia Investigation, but it definitely ended with a bang! Here’s what I have for you:

• See, This Is Why We Needed Russian Sanctions, Part II.* Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued indictments of thirteen Russian nationals and three corporations on Friday, all of which related back to efforts to subvert the 2016 elections. The indictments allege that as early as 2014, these individuals began stealing U.S. identities and creating false U.S. personae to impact the election, spreading false information on the Internet as a means of confusing and influencing voters. Trump, of course, initially used these indictments to imply that Mueller had no dirt on him and this was the end of the investigation (which is definitely not true, in case anyone was worried). But eventually his opinion on this degenerated into the contents of an impressively deranged Twitter rant, as so often happens. At any rate, regardless of Trump’s disappearing reappearing ire, it was a sound tactical decision to issue these indictments now — intelligence communities are cautioning that Russia is definitely planning to do this again in 2018.
• Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch… As I mentioned a moment ago, Mueller is definitely continuing the collusion investigation, and in fact these indictments are a logical step in continuing that investigation. And it looks like they are working! Mueller is finalizing a guilty plea from Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, offering only eighteen months of sentencing in exchange for testimony against former campaign chairmen Paul Manafort. It’s a classic move that shows Mueller is treating this investigation like a traditional organized crime prosecution, and we’ve seen some very famous success with that playbook against sketchy, powerful New Yorkers in the past. Let’s hope we see it again now.

Your “Normal” Weird:

• What Rules of Professional Ethics? The White House attorney stable (and top DoJ staff, who clearly think they have a stall in that barn) have managed to lower my professional opinion of them further this week — which is kind of a neat trick, because I didn’t even know that was possible by this point. First prize in appalling practice goes to long-time Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who announced this week that he personally paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to shut her up in 2016. For those attorneys reading this and thinking “Wait, did he just admit to a blatant violation of the Rules of Professional Ethics while violating client confidentiality and breaching a nondisclosure contract at the same time?” — why yes, yes he did. Stormy Daniels, bless her, has already announced that she is now free to talk about the whole thing, because Cohen breached the NDA agreement.
• DOJ Deserting and Dog Whistles. Though my best antipathy goes to Cohen this week, there’s still plenty left over for the Department of Justice. Rachel Brand, third in command after Rod Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions, announced that she’s stepping down after just nine months at her current post. Though she’s ostensibly leaving because the legal department at Walmart was just so attractive, several sources note that she was very frustrated by all the vacancies in her department and afraid she might have to supervise Mueller (with all that would entail) if Rosenstein was fired. Against that backdrop, it kind of underscored the point to watch Jeff Sessions discuss “the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement” this week. Though the department defended his statements as a simple reference to common law, you cannot convince me that was anything other than an intentional dog whistle — a normal human being would have simply said “common law,” which is a much more common phrase, and the use of the word ‘heritage’ is kind of a glaring neon sign. To be fair to Rachel Brand, I wouldn’t want to work for Donald “I Fire You Cause It’s Tuesday” Trump and the Racist Brigade anymore, either.
• Weird White House Odds and Ends. Disturbingly, the previous two headers are not the end of the wacky news coming out of the White House this week, because we haven’t even gotten to the non-lawyer shenanigans yet. Despite all probability, somehow the White House is still tossing out Porter-related prevarications, with the never-ending string of lies making it look more and more likely that the White House knew about his domestic violence the entire time and he was affirmatively not cleared for his position because of the blackmail potential his abuse history created. And, as if to punctuate that point, Reince Priebus soundbites have started coming out about his time as White House Chief of Staff as a book about the position gets ready to launch. News outlets are already having a field day with one choice quote, “Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by 50” — probably because this administration is such a goat rodeo that we don’t need more words than that before we believe it. But Vanity Fair gladly gives us a panoply of choice excerpts from the book anyway, and they’re all pretty much exactly as horrorshow as you might expect.

The Bad:

• Tragedy in Parkland. A school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida left seventeen people dead and much of the country completely horrified. The confessed shooter, who is now in police custody, was a former student at the school, and much attention has been given to his troubled past. The tragedy has caused many of us to return to conversations about the roles of mental health, domestic violence, and gun control in causing and preventing gun violence (including me, by the way; I wrote a piece on the complex relationship between mental health and gun violence just like the next guy). Meanwhile, a bunch of GOP politicians’ thoughts and prayers are with the NRA in this difficult, trying time; Russia is already spinning the tragedy to their advantage; and Trump’s only real action (besides somehow making this about collusion) has been seriously pissing off the locals when he visited the area on Friday. And a new generation of Floridians are emerging to forcibly give half of Congress a spine transplant — but more on that below.
• Immigration Updates. (Yup, this section is definitely a fixture.) The biggest piece of news about ICE this week is regional, unusually enough — the head of the Seattle field office has been charged with stealing detainees’ identities to commit bank fraud. He apparently did this for four years with seven different immigrant identities, with the last allegations occurring in October 2017, proving that this administration definitely cares about addressing fraud issues in a timely manner. But the main bad news on the national stage is that there isn’t any, which is itself a problem — we still have no idea what’s going to happen to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, because the White House keeps threatening to veto bill after bipartisan bill offered on the subject and not even some Republicans rejected Trump’s version. Meanwhile, nobody knows whether the March 5 deadline will be honored or not, because the Supreme Court still hasn’t decided whether they will hear arguments on the injunctions keeping it from being enforced.
• Environmental Updates. This was not precisely what you’d call a good week for environmental news. First the Trump administration released its infrastructure proposal, which turned out to be low on funding and high on deregulation of our environmental protections. The proposal also has some bonus unconstitutional ordering around the judicial branch, trying to limit injunctive relief because — and I quote — “a legal challenge to a project . . . can delay the start of a project . . . which at the outset can discourage potential investors.” (Keep in mind that a) injunctive relief can only be offered if there’s a high probability the project is illegal; and b) they’re talking about legal challenges to private drilling here. This is an attempt to make it impossible to stop illegal project practices.) But on top of that, news also broke that EPA Head Scott Pruitt apparently flies first-class everywhere ‘for his safety’ because some people yell at him about his myriad terrible decisions when he flies coach. I don’t know why anybody bothers to call liberal people ‘snowflakes,’ y’all, because this administration clearly has that market cornered.
• Horrible H.R. 620 News. Several days later, I’m still really mad about this next piece of news. On Thursday, the House voted essentially along party lines to approve the ADA Education and Reform Act — and if you’re already suspicious of what ‘reform’ means for disability rights law in 2018, your brain is unfortunately headed in the correct direction. The main thing the bill does is make it harder to sue businesses for noncompliance with accommodations law, requiring a waiting period of 180 days before a suit can effectively begin. That essentially means that a business that is out of compliance with the law can choose to do nothing for six months before someone who lacks access can do anything to try to force them to fix it. The implications of this, particularly for employment and housing protections, are staggering, and disability activists (including myself) are justifiably very upset. About the only good thing I can say is that there’s no companion bill in the Senate, which might suggest that there’s no appetite for this particular type of ‘reform’ there.

The Good:

• Recent Court Case Wins. A second district court enjoined the Department of Homeland Security from enforcing the DACA repeal on March 5 this past week, putting more pressure on the administration to avoid deporting people who participated in the DACA program. (You’d think the first case would be its own deterrent, but let’s face it, this bunch isn’t noted for listening to courts.) And just today, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a new districting map, making good on its threat to turn this judicial car around if Democrats and Republicans couldn’t draw new voting districts on their own. So now that task is definitely done before November elections, which is a really important development in a swing state that just barely broke for Trump in 2016.
• Parkland Kids Owning Politicians Left and Right.* The kids most directly impacted by Wednesday’s shooting are acting more mature and decisively than the rest of us put together, organizing marches and calling out politicians as well as the NRA. Their candor is as exemplary as it is horrifying; I hope the rest of us step up to the plate soon, because traumatized high schoolers should not be forced to be the adults here.

And that’s all the news I have for you this week, in its technicolor and vaguely nauseating glory. Hopefully next week will be better, and you’ll hear from me either way. In the meantime, I’m off to spend some quality time with my freezer’s ice cream selection.