Trump's lawyers and a toady draw separate fire from prominent judges
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in September. Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin
The Nevada caucus, coronavirus and President Donald Trump’s India trip all eclipsed in one weekend two remarkable judicial rebukes — one against the administration and its practices, and the other against Trump's most recently convicted adviser.
On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed the frequency with which the White House runs to the top tribunal seeking to stay lower-court decisions against its policies. She also criticized the court for indulging these requests.
“Claiming one emergency after another, the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited court resources in each,” she wrote. “And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow.”
The administration has sought and obtained stays in cases involving the refusal of green cards to immigrants deemed likely to become "public charges" if they sought Medicaid or other assistance.
“It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the court would grant it,” Sotomayor said in her latest dissent.
Death row inmates seeking last-minute stays of execution don't get the same priority in getting their cases heard, she said.
“I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decision-making process that this court must strive to protect," Sotomayor said.
Trump himself repeatedly has spoken of fast-tracking cases to the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, where certain of his policies were expected to play better than in lower courts.
The president also has tried through public statements to tilt the outcome of federal court cases in which he has a personal interest — such as that of convicted "dirty trickster" Roger Stone, who is now pushing for a new trial.
On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who sentenced Stone to 40 months in prison rather than the 8 or 9 years first recommended by prosecutors, rejected his request that she be taken off the case.
Trying to challenge one of the jurors as biased, Stone decried her, thanking jurors during Thursday's sentencing for having "served with integrity under difficult circumstances."
In her decision, Jackson defended herself from nasty personal attacks by Stone that were in part echoed by Trump on Twitter.
She said she "ruled with care and impartiality," decided "important evidentiary motions in his favor" and kept him out on bond "even after he took to social media to intimidate the Court, after he violated conditions imposed by the Court, after he was convicted at trial, and after he was sentenced to a term of incarceration.”
In digital messages used as evidence, Stone urged an ally to deceive Congress on the matter of campaign contacts with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
Despite Trump's shoutout in 2016 that "I love WikiLeaks" — the website that published hacked Democratic emails — federal officials, in Assange's extradition hearing Monday in London, said Trump wants to "make an example" of Assange.
In publishing classified defense documents relating to Iraq and Afghanistan, WikiLeaks revealed evidence of war crimes, Assange's lawyers wrote.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
