It will be interesting to see how Judge Chutkan deals with Donald Trump when he violates the gag order she imposed yesterday. Even the judge recognized that putting him in jail during campaign season will be a challenge. From the AP:
“You keep talking about censorship like the defendant has unfettered First Amendment rights. He doesn’t,” Chutkan told Lauro. “We’re not talking about censorship here. We’re talking restrictions to ensure there is a fair administration of justice on this case.”
She also cut off Trump’s lawyer when he suggested the case was politically motivated, telling him: “Obviously, you have an audience other than me in mind.” And she rejected a defense bid to delay the trial, currently scheduled to begin in March, until after the 2024 election, saying “this trial will not yield to the election cycle.”
Lauro said Trump had not violated his pretrial conditions, and those were enough to keep him in check for the future. He told the judge, “What you have put in place is working.” Chutkan burst out laughing.
“I’m going to have to take issue with that,” the judge said.
There's another power struggle going on -- this one in the SDFLA. I'm sure you remember the commutation Trump granted to Philip Esformes. That was after the jury convicted him on some counts and hung on others. Judge Scola sentenced him to 20 years and he had served about 5 when Trump ended his sentence. The issue -- DOJ now wants to try him on the hung counts. The Washington Post has an in depth article about the political hot potato that the case has turned into:
But Esformes’s reprieve is now in peril, thrust to the center of an extraordinary legal and political collision between two administrations pushing the bounds of executive authority. The Biden Justice Department is seeking to retry him — a move made possible because the jury that convicted him reached no verdict on six counts, including the most serious charge of conspiracy to commit health-care fraud. Because Trump’s clemency order was silent on those charges, prosecutors say they are able to take him back to court.
At stake is whether the government’s move to reprosecute the architect of one of the largest-ever health-care scams undermines Trump’s decision based on presidential powers laid out in the Constitution and historically considered the last word on a criminal conviction.
The highly unusual decision to retry a clemency recipient on hung charges has emerged as yet another flash point in the broader battle between the far right, which portrays the Justice Department as an arm of an out-of-control “deep state” opposed to anyone associated with Trump, and law-and-order proponents seeking to defend institutions of democracy against incursions by the former president and his allies. Experts say they know of no precedent for this dispute.
In recent months, House Republicans orchestrated a hearing portraying the case against Esformes as a political attack, while an array of Trump acolytes have taken to conservative airwaves and social media to denounce the Justice Department.
“In the annals of American history, no prosecutor has ever tried to reverse a presidential commutation in this manner,” co-wrote Matthew G. Whitaker, who briefly served as acting attorney general under Trump, in a Fox News column. “Does the DOJ have no sense of propriety at all?” tweeted Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican National Committee official from California, whose law firm has represented Trump.
But some former prosecutors say a retrial is a chance to correct a grievous mistake in which Trump bypassed long-standing protocols to grant clemency to a corrupt nursing home executive. If the Justice Department succeeds, Esformes could be sent back to prison, undoing Trump’s executive order that had made him a free man.
“It’s an opportunity for justice,” said Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor for 27 years who led the agency’s fraud section before it criminally charged Esformes. “We use the law to hold people accountable as best as we can.”
3 comments:
The Esformes question is interesting because it fundamentally addresses whether the executive's clemency privilege is constitutionally intended as an unchecked power to override justice without justification and seemingly on the basis of wealth, status, and personal relationships.
You’re joking right? You do remember all the Clinton end of term pardons? Of course it is subject to abuse. But that is not abuse in the sense of legally wrong. It is executive’s privilege to abuse and misuse. The voters check it in our system. And, if our system is to work, prosecutors and the court should not try and correct what they perceive as an injustice concerning pardon power. I suspect that judge Scola will not go along with what doj is trying to do here if he is convicted.
10:59am asks "whether the executive's clemency privilege is constitutionally intended as an unchecked power to override justice without justification and seemingly on the basis of wealth, status, and personal relationships."
The answer is an unambiguous yes. The people who wrote the constitution were the wealthiest, most high status, and well connected people of their time. They unquestionably intended for the President, the leader of their club, to have such power.
Any other silly questions?
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