Judicial Notice (02.09.25): Everything Enjoined Everywhere, All At Once
Latham raids Wachtell and Simpson, Tom Goldstein fights the feds, a ‘Trump judge’ rules against Trump, and Pam Bondi gets down to business.
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Last week was much better for me than the week before, thank you very much. Although I’m not 100 percent back to normal, I’m mostly over whatever bug I caught.
I returned to exercising, averaging almost 5 miles and more than 100 zone minutes a day on my trusty Fitbit, and this greatly improved my mood. I got lots of errands out of the way—including a Costco run, which definitely lifted my spirits. (But if you have a flexible schedule, as I do, avoid going on Friday rather than some other weekday.)
Now, on to the news.
Lawyer of the Week: Pam Bondi.
Last week, the Senate confirmed several Trump nominees, including a few lawyers. It confirmed Russell Vought, a GW Law grad who played a major role in crafting Project 2025, to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—which he led during the first Trump administration. And it confirmed Doug Collins—an alum of Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, who has served in both the Navy and the Air Force—to serve as Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
The biggest confirmation of a lawyer, of course, was that of Pam Bondi. On Tuesday night, the Senate confirmed Bondi to serve as the 87th Attorney General of the United States, by a vote of 54-46 (all 53 Republicans, plus Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania). The following morning, she was sworn into office by Justice Clarence Thomas (who has become, according to CNN, “the go-to justice to swear in Trump’s Cabinet,” administering oaths of office to at least five of its members). Bondi is only the third woman to serve as a Senate-confirmed AG, after Janet Reno (1993-2001) and Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), and the first to do so in a Republican administration.
And just like her boss Donald Trump, Bondi, 59, has not wasted any time since taking office. On Wednesday, her first day as head of the 115,000-employee Department of Justice (DOJ), she issued more than a dozen memos, in which she took the following actions (among many others):
Established a “Weaponization Working Group,” which “will conduct a review the activities of all departments and agencies exercising civil or criminal enforcement authority of the United States over the last four years… to identify instances where a department’s or agency’s conduct appears to have been designed to achieve political objectives or other improper aims.”
Promulgated “Sanctuary Jurisdiction Directives,” which will cut off funding to and/or pursue enforcement actions against “state and local jurisdictions that unlawfully interfere with federal law enforcement operations,” especially “jurisdictions that facilitate violations of federal immigration laws.”
Announced the goal of “Total Elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs).” This appears to involve a shift in resources and emphasis away from white-collar offenses and toward violent or drug-related crimes.
Declared the DOJ’s Commitment to “Ending Illegal DEI and DEIA Discrimination and Preferences.” To the extent the Department remains interested in pursuing corporations, it seems it will be more focused on their programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—or diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), to use the au courant terminology.
These developments might be troubling to some, but they’re not exactly “surprises.” They’re all broadly consistent with promises or themes from Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign—and as the old saying goes, “Elections have consequences.”
Other lawyers in the news:
Superstar Supreme Court litigator and SCOTUSblog founder Tom Goldstein filed a motion in his federal criminal tax prosecution, asking Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby (D. Md.) to reverse a magistrate judge’s ruling and let him substitute three South Carolina properties owned by his relatives as collateral for his appearance bond. This would in turn allow him to use the roughly $700,000 he has in equity in his $3.2 million D.C. home, currently being used to secure his bond, to pay his legal fees. Federal prosecutors responded by moving to strike Goldstein’s motion, since he filed it pro se despite having counsel. This struck me as petty on the feds’ part: Goldstein’s lawyers, John Lauro and Christopher Kise, entered limited appearances in the case, and I’m guessing Goldstein filed the motion pro se because Lauro and Kise didn’t want to put in more work until they’re sure they’ll get paid. But the DOJ, by opposing his motion to substitute the properties, is hamstringing him in his ability to pay his counsel.
[UPDATE (2/10/2025, 3:45 p.m.): Per Law360, “U.S. Supreme Court lawyer and SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein was arrested again Monday following his earlier release on criminal tax-evasion charges, after prosecutors alleged that he secretly made millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency transactions in recent days…. [The government also claimed] that Goldstein has $250,000 in a bank account and is spending $5,000 a month on a housekeeper, $8,000 a month on a personal assistant, and $20,000 a month for an apartment in Dallas, undermining his claim that he lacks sufficient funds to pay counsel.”]
[UPDATE (2/13/2025, 2:55 p.m.): Again from Law360, “A Maryland federal magistrate judge on Thursday ordered Tom Goldstein released from jail after expressing skepticism toward federal prosecutors' claims that the SCOTUSblog publisher and U.S. Supreme Court advocate secretly made millions of dollars' worth of cryptocurrency transactions in recent days. Goldstein was jailed Monday after prosecutors accused him of making a series of surreptitious crypto transactions that raised concerns he could try to evade justice. But after Goldstein offered WhatsApp messages that he said showed the crypto wallets in question did not belong to him—as well as a $2 million transaction that took place while he was in jail and cut off from electronics—U.S. Magistrate Judge Timothy J. Sullivan agreed to free him following a hearing Thursday morning.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers from Morgan and Morgan appear to have acknowledged their ChatGPT fail: they withdrew their motions featuring a slew of fake cases, as noted in an update to my Friday story.
Elon Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is getting lots of media coverage for its teenage tech whizzes with nicknames like “Big Balls.” But it also boasts some legal “Big Brains”—including two former Supreme Court clerks, James Burnham (OT 2020 / Gorsuch) and Keenan Kmiec (OT 2006 / Alito), and one future SCOTUS clerk, Jacob Altik (OT 2025 / Gorsuch). Given Justice Neil Gorsuch’s own concern about excessive government—reflected in both his jurisprudence and latest book, the bestselling Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law—it’s unsurprising that his clerks are with DOGE.
In memoriam:
Leading Wall Street dealmaker Samuel Butler, presiding partner at Cravath Swaine & Moore for almost two decades, passed away at 94.
Fay Vincent—who graduated from Yale Law, made partner at Caplin & Drysdale, and served in a senior role at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), en route to becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball—passed away at 86.
Boston personal-injury lawyer Joseph Donohue, 65, was found dead on his houseboat, with dozens of stab wounds. A 24-year-old woman who answered the door when the police came by for a wellness check was charged with his murder.
May they rest in peace.
Judge of the Week: Judge Carl Nichols.
Here’s my one-sentence summary of the federal judiciary’s response to the Trump administration: “Everything enjoined everywhere, all at once.”
I’m not going to bother trying to recap all the rulings—there are simply too many, and because they’re in a state of constant flux, attempting to summarize them is like trying to board a moving bus. I’ll instead refer you to the Trump litigation trackers of The New York Times (gift link), The Washington Post (gift link), Just Security, and Fix the Courts, and you can look up the cases you’re most interested in. Less than a month into the Trump presidency, we’re seeing legal battles over birthright citizenship, federal funding, the ability of DOGE to access government data and computer systems, programs focused on DEI, and transgender rights—including the Trump administration’s switch of position in the case over gender-affirming care for minors that’s currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. And there are many other valuable resources for following the flood of Trump legal news, including Howard Bashman’s How Appealing and the Advisory Opinions podcast—where Sarah Isgur and David French have been interviewing experts on executive power like constitutional litigator Erin Hawley and Professor Jack Goldsmith (who also addressed these issues in a recent Q&A with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker).
For purposes of these pages, I prefer to pick out key themes. One topic I’ve explored since January 20 is the extent to which judges will provide a check and balance against Trump—including his own appointees to the federal bench.
On Friday afternoon, Judge Carl Nichols (D.D.C.) issued a ruling that Kyle Cheney described in Politico as “an immediate brushback to the demolition of USAID, the government agency responsible for billions of dollars in international aid programs.” In a seven-page order, Judge Nichols barred the Trump administration from placing USAID employees on administrative leave or evacuating them from their host countries. The temporary restraining order (TRO) affects some 2,700 employees of USAID—but it is, of course, temporary, and Judge Nichols could go in a different direction after hearing more from the parties at a follow-up hearing next Thursday.
Some judges who have ruled against Trump could be attacked by the president’s defenders as Democratic partisans. For example, Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. (D.R.I.), who blocked the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to freeze possibly trillions in federal grants and loans, contributed (with his wife) some $700,000 to Democratic candidates, before his 2011 appointment by President Obama. But that’s not Judge Nichols: appointed by Trump in 2019, he clerked for two conservative stalwarts, the late Judge Laurence Silberman and Justice Thomas, and he served in high-level roles at the DOJ during the George W. Bush administration.
Judge Nichols also showed up in the headlines for a less consequential case—less consequential unless you’re Prince Harry, at least. At a Wednesday hearing in a case brought by lawyers from The Heritage Foundation, the judge said he would “likely” order the public release of at least portions of Prince Harry’s immigration files. Heritage is suing the Department of Homeland Security under the Freedom of Information Act for the records, which it seeks to show that the prince lied on his visa application by omitting mention of the past drug use mentioned in his memoir.
Runner-up for Judge of the Week: out on the West Coast, Judge Vince Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) was trending on Law360 after benchslapping some lawyers. As he wrote in an order rejecting what he saw as a frivolous fee request, “At this point, the reader may be asking, ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ It is not. The plaintiffs are actually making these arguments.” One of the reprimanded lawyers, Joseph Alioto, whined that Judge Chhabria doesn’t like plaintiffs’ counsel. But His Honor is actually an equal-opportunity benchslapper: just last month, Judge Chhabria chastised Meta’s defense counsel for what he called their “grossly overbroad” sealing requests.
We don’t have judicial nominees from Trump just yet—but in a sign that we might see some soon, the White House Counsel’s Office hired Stephen Kenny to work on nominations. Kenny is an ally of Mike Davis, a leading Trump legal adviser whose organization, The Article III Project, is counseling the administration on judicial picks. Kenny and Davis collaborated on nominations during the first Trump administration, and Davis praised Kenny as “the secret weapon to then-Chairman Chuck Grassley’s widely successful two-year run of confirming President Trump’s judges.”
Ruling of the Week: Maffei v. Palkon.
Whether you love him or hate him (and polling suggests he’s increasingly unpopular), you have to give credit to Elon Musk. Like Donald Trump, whom the Tesla CEO and world’s richest person loves “as much as a straight man can love another man,” Musk knows how to put issues on the map. Here’s the latest example, per the DealBook newsletter of The New York Times: “Elon Musk has helped bring an esoteric debate around the Delaware Chancery Court to a national stage.”
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