Latest news with #SupremeCourt-backed
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Abrego Garcia Wants A Judge To Seize Pam Bondi's Phone
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. The slo-mo constitutional clash in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia inched forward with a new filing overnight in which his attorneys are now seeking sanctions against the Trump administration – including individual officials – for stonewalling and defying court-ordered discovery into his wrongful deportation to prison in El Salvador. Among the wide-ranging sanctions Abrego Garcia is seeking is a possible court order for Attorney General Pam Bondi and other key officials to turn over their personal devices for U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to review privately in her chambers. The move to impose sanctions comes after what was supposed to be an expedited two-week discovery sprint ordered by Xinis on April 15 turned into a nearly two-month discovery marathon. Xinis ordered the discovery in part to determine with the Trump administration should be held in contempt of court for refusing to abide by her Supreme Court-backed order to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. In court the day she ordered the discovery, Xinis was adamant that she would brook no more delays or foot-dragging and ordered lawyers to cancel vacations and drop everything else. 'Nearly sixty days, ten orders, three depositions, three discovery disputes, three motions for stay, two hearings, a week-long stay, and a failed appeal later, the Plaintiffs still have seen no evidence to suggest that the Defendants took any steps, much less 'all available steps,' to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return to the United States 'as soon as possible' so that his case could be handled as it would have been had he not been unlawfully deported,' Abrego Garcia's lawyers argue in the latest filing. The sanctions Abrego Garcia seeks asks the judge: to make factual determinations that are adverse to the administration, such as formally finding that it did not communicate with El Salvador to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release prior to his May 21 indictment; order the administration over its objections to produce the documents it has withheld in discovery thus far, deeming some its privileges waived by its misconduct; or appoint a special master to investigate the administration's 'willful noncompliance' and identify which officials by name 'willfully evaded' the court-ordered discovery, including possibly ordering the personal devices of key officials like Bondi turned over for the judge's review; impose accumulating fines on officials for each day the discovery defiance continues; and hold the administration in civil contempt of court. Notably Abrego Garcia, who was secretly indicted while this discovery dispute raged and subsequently returned to the United States to face charges of conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants, is not yet seeking sanctions for the weeks-long delay in complying with the court's order to facilitate his return. Instead, he is focused on the administration's alleged misconduct in defying the court's discovery order by failing to produce the required materials and witness and raising frivolous objections and privileges. That seems to be a strategic decision to avoid the harder questions of whether the courts can order the president to engage in negotiations with a foreign country, to demand the release from a foreign prison of someone wrongfully deported to their home country, and other stickier elements of this case about which the Supreme Court has already expressed reservations. Meanwhile, in his criminal case, Abrego Garcia asked the judge to release him pending trial. In another wrongful deportation case, the Trump administration claimed a 'perfect storm of errors' led it to deport Jordin Melgar-Salmeron to El Salvador on May 7 despite an order from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals barring his removal. In the new filing this week, the administration also changed what it had previously told the appeals court about how the wrongful deportation happened. It took long enough, but U.S. District Judge Michael E. Farbiarz of New Jersey ruled that the Trump administration cannot detain or deport Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. But Khalil won't be released immediately, as the judge stayed his order until tomorrow to give the administration time to appeal his ruling. The Trump DOJ fired two more people who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith's team investigating, including a non-lawyer member of the support staff, Reuters reports. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has made an unprecedented demand for a huge volume of 2020 and 2024 election data from the state of Colorado, NPR reports. While the data demand is not explicitly connected the criminal conviction of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, the Trump DOJ has already taken the unprecedented step of intervening in her federal appeal of her state New reporting from on the highly politicized speech President Trump gave this week at Ft. Bragg: Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump's recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. One unit-level message bluntly saying: 'No fat soldiers.' 'If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,' another note to troops said. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced eight new appointees to the CDC vaccine advisory committee he sacked – and at least a couple of them are real doozies, he NYT reports. The entire board of the Fulbright program resigned over what it said was political interference from the Trump administration in its selection of this year's Fulbright scholars. The NYT reported: The board approved those scholars over the winter after a yearlong selection process, and the State Department was supposed to send acceptance letters by April, the people said. But instead, the board learned that the office of public diplomacy at the agency had begun sending rejection letters to the scholars based mainly on their research topics, they said. The board posted its resignation statement here. 'It angers me when I see these rioters trying to pull barricades out of the hands of police officers and shoving police officers to try and grab the barricades and break the perimeter … I can tell you that if they try to do that in Mobile, Alabama, the orthopedic hand surgeons will have one hell of a weekend fixing hands. That barricade can become a weapon.'–Mobile County, Alabama Sheriff Paul Burch, commenting on this weekend's planned 'No Kings' rally
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
New Details Emerge On Trump Administration's Defiance Of The Courts
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. New details about the extent of the Trump administration's stonewalling in the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia were revealed in a court filing Thursday. After six weeks of what was originally supposed to be two weeks of expedited discovery, the government has provided virtually no meaningful discovery responses, Abrego Garcia's lawyers report. Normal discovery disputes would not usually be newsworthy, but this comes in the context of a contempt of court inquiry. The administration's defiance on discovery and the associated gamesmanship cut against its already-dubious claims that it has complied with the order by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return – an order endorsed and echoed by the Supreme Court. Judge Xinis had ordered the discovery into Abrego Garcia's status and what the government had done and planned to do to facilitate his release from imprisonment in his native El Salvador for two reasons: (i) to pressure the Trump administration to abide by her Supreme Court-backed order to facilitate his return; and (ii) to determine whether the administration had violated her order with sufficient bad faith to constitute contempt of court. After the Trump administration late Wednesday asked for an extension of the May 30 deadline by which all discovery is to be completed, Abrego Garcia's lawyers filed a blistering response demonstrating how little discovery the government has produced so far. It was already clear from public filings that the government had offered witnesses for deposition who had little or no personal knowledge of the facts of the case, in contravention of the judge's order. The precise details of that defiance are unclear because many filings remain under seal. The new details show how desultory the government's document production has been, too. As of two weeks ago, the government had only produced 34 actual documents. In the subsequent two weeks it was given in which to produce rolling discovery, it coughed up a total of one additional partial document, according to Abrego Garcia's filing. 'This is far from a good faith effort to comply with court ordered discovery. It is reflective of a pattern of deliberate delay and bad faith refusal to comply with court orders,' Abrego Garcia's lawyers argued in opposing the extension request. 'The patina of promises by Government lawyers to do tomorrow that which they were already obligated to do yesterday has worn thin.' Abrego Garcia's lawyers say the government document production has included what they characterize as 'makeweight,' non-responsive copies of existing filings in the case and of other publicly available materials that aren't new or pertinent. 'Zero documents produced to Plaintiffs to date reflect any efforts made to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release and return to the United States,' they say (emphasis theirs). Judge Xinis wasn't buying it either. 'Assertions of diligence notwithstanding, Defendants have offered no explanation as to why they could not produce any additional documents on a rolling basis, as they had agreed could be accomplished during the May 16, 2025 hearing,' Xinis wrote yesterday when she denied the administration's request to extend the discovery deadline. In addition to the paucity of document production, the government has still not fully responded to the limited set of interrogatories that the judge approved for the expedited discovery, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. The Trump DOJ lawyers have also engaged in low-rent gamesmanship, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. While the government told the court that it had attempted to confer with them about the request to extend the deadline, in fact the DOJ lawyers reached out at 11:35 p.m. and filed their request an hour later without waiting for Abrego Garcia's lawyers to respond. 'This is hardly a good faith attempt to obtain Plaintiffs' position,' Xinis observed in a footnote. Petty gamesmanship aside, the constitutional and real-world implications of the Abrego Garcia case remain enormous. The pace of the defiance has slowed since the flurry of activity in mid-March, but the constitutional clash is no less real now that it was then. '[T]he Government has engaged in a pattern of intentional stonewalling and obfuscation—all in service of delaying the inevitable conclusion, which is that it has not done anything to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return,' his lawyers concluded in their latest filing. 'More time will not change this, but it will multiply the prejudice to Abrego Garcia, who remains in unlawful custody in El Salvador.' The big constitutional clashes are happening in anti-immigration cases where the underlying facts are often less important than the Trump administration's conduct in court, which can be hard for laypeople to follow. The action (and often inaction) can devolve into complicated procedural maneuvering and legal arguments, so the challenge in covering these cases is to find ways to breathe life into them because they're so important: In one of the best pieces I've read in a while, Adam Unikowsky unpacks the Alien Enemies Act case out of Texas that the Supreme Court has already weighed in on and which appears to be a likely vehicle for the big decisions it will make on the AEA. Steve Vladeck unravels the third country deportations case out of Massachusetts which didn't seem nearly as urgent as the AEA cases until the Trump administration started its extreme shenanigans. President Trump has gone after the courts, his own judicial appointees, the Federalist Society, and now his Supreme Court whisperer Leonard Leo. NYT: Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans Passing through Nashville last night, I caught a freewheeling set of mostly Beatles covers by the bluegrass band Greenwood Rye. Here's a recent sampling (with a different lineup of musicians):
