Hello! And welcome to another edition of the Deadline: Legal Newsletter.
Another week with no blockbuster Supreme Court opinions. Still, there were several important decisions, including Texas and Louisiana losing a fringe lawsuit on Friday. Samuel Alito was the lone dissenter in the red states' quest to control federal immigration policy. Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority ruling rejecting the "highly unusual" suit that tried to block President Joe Biden's enforcement guidelines. The problem, Kavanaugh explained in United States v. Texas, was that the states had no legal standing to make their claim. "They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests," the Donald Trump appointee wrote, adding that they "cite no precedent for a lawsuit like this." We'll see if a majority takes a similarly sane approach to standing in the similarly fringe challenge to Biden's student debt relief program, which we may finally get a ruling on next week. Ten cases are left to decide this term.
Neil Gorsuch continued his streak on Thursday of championing Native American rights. The Trump appointee dissented, for himself and the three Democratic appointees, from Kavanaugh's majority opinion rejecting the Navajo Nation's suit that sought clarity from the federal government on the tribe's water rights. To be sure, Gorsuch's noble writings on federal Native American law are an exception to his stingy jurisprudence elsewhere. That was evident when, that same day, he joined the all-GOP majority in a 6-3 decision, authored by Clarence Thomas, that can shockingly keep innocent people behind bars. In a rare joint dissent, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor called the majority opinion in Jones v. Hendrix "disturbing," while Ketanji Brown Jackson forcefully denounced the court "forever slamming the courtroom doors to a possibly innocent person."
Amid continuing backlash to Thomas' Harlan Crow saga, we learned Alito had his own shady dealings with a GOP billionaire. ProPublica's latest bombshell Supreme Court ethics investigation detailed how Alito hitched a free private jet ride to a fancy Alaska fishing trip in 2008 with hedge funder Paul Singer. Alito failed to list the largesse in his financial disclosure, and he also failed to recuse himself from Singer-related matters at the court, including a 2014 decision in which Alito sided with Singer's financial interest. A fun feature in this latest scandal is that, unlike Thomas, Alito broke the news himself! Alito scooped Tuesday's ProPublica story with a pre-emptive opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, pleading his case. As I explained, Alito's bizarre argument — in both form and substance — withers under scrutiny and, indeed, reeks of desperation. On "Deadline: White House" this week, Nicolle aptly called the GOP justice's op-ed "the dumbest press strategy I have ever seen in my life."
Meanwhile, on the busy legal docket of the man who helped create the current Supreme Court, Trump's classified documents case is off to a quick start — at least on paper. Judge Aileen Cannon technically set an August trial date, but don't read too much into that; it's a formality that will inevitably be pushed back. This is the same Trump appointee who previously tried to throw the case for the former president — before he was charged with violating the Espionage Act and other federal statutes. To her credit, Cannon hasn't done anything shady yet in the criminal case. And special counsel Jack Smith, who vowed to seek a speedy trial, is doing his part to move things along by getting out in front of pretrial discovery disclosures. But whenever Trump's trial happens — if it happens — it really needs to be televised, my MSNBC colleague Ayman Mohyeldin explained.
While their leader's legal troubles pile up, we saw a couple Republican fever dreams fizzle out this week — with a misdemeanor plea deal expected for Hunter Biden and the John Durham probe being further exposed for… not really exposing anything beyond the usual GOP mix of incompetence and malevolence. The president's son will apparently accept responsibility for some low-level tax violations and get pretrial diversion for a gun charge. That's a far cry from what Republicans hoped would be a sprawling prosecution into what they claim is a shadowy, sinister Biden family crime syndicate. On the Durham debacle, we owe a great debt to my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown, for subjecting himself to Wednesday's House hearing and emerging to bring us the bottom line: "John Durham found nothing to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation." Speaking of special counsels, check out this skeptical take on them generally from the Mueller team's own — and now MSNBC's own — Andrew Weissmann.
