Last year when our podcast Law and Chaos filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Justice Department, we knew things might get weird.

And they did!

What we didn’t expect is that we’d be making common cause with the conservative Heritage Foundation as it seeks to embarrass Joe Biden years after he left office. Politics really does lead to strange bedfellows — and so does litigation.

Judicial intimidation — I know you are, but what am I

Almost exactly a year ago, DOJ Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle hand-delivered an ethics complaint to the DC Circuit. The complaint accused Chief Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia of “attempt[ing] to improperly influence Chief Justice Roberts and roughly two dozen other federal judges.” It alleged that Judge Boasberg inappropriately suggested at the March 2025 meeting of the Judicial Conference that the Trump Administration was prepared to “disregard rulings of federal courts” and thereby “trigger a constitutional crisis.”

Of course, that is exactly what came to pass in Judge Boasberg’s courtroom, just a few days later on March 15. Instead of turning around the plane stuffed with men headed for CECOT in El Salvador, the government launched two additional flights, and Judge Boasberg has been trying to get to the bottom of the contempt ever since.

Mizelle’s nastygram was vague on the source of its information, simply dropping a footnote to “Attachment A at 16.” But no such attachment was included in the copy of the complaint slipped to reporters last July, and, as Law and Chaos later found out, the attachment wasn’t given to Judge Srinivasan either. All of which strongly implies that this “complaint” was nothing more than a publicity stunt and an attempt to engage in some of that judicial intimidation the DOJ says it despises.

Initially we filed a FOIA request asking the Justice Department to give us Attachment A. We expected the government to refuse — which they did. We did not expect them to put our request for a single document on the “complex” track while claiming that we had failed to show that our request was tied to a “matter of widespread and exceptional media interest.” After all, then-AG Pam Bondi was fulminating on X that Judge Boasberg’s comments “have undermined the integrity of the judiciary, and we will not stand for that.” So in August we sued the DOJ in federal court in Maryland.

In this litigation, the government has taken the very odd position that “Attachment A” is not subject to FOIA because it was created by the judiciary and thus is not an executive “agency record.”

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That argument is simply wrong. As our lawyer, Kel McClanahan, Executive Director at National Security Counselors, explained:

FOIA applies to all agency records. It does not apply to Congressional or Judicial records. But it does apply to records which originated outside an agency but were later put into the agency’s files for its own purposes.

In other words, even if “Attachment A” was initially drafted by the judiciary, once the executive branch received it and relied upon it in crafting that ethics complaint against Judge Boasberg, “Attachment A”was transformed into an agency record.

And last week the DC Circuit agreed with us … sort of.

‘Agency record’ is not in the eye of the beholder

The case in DC involved approximately 70 hours of audio recordings and transcripts of Biden speaking with his biographer Mark Zwonitzer. The tapes resurfaced during Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into the retention of classified materials after Biden’s vice presidency ended in 2016.

Hur recommended that no charges be filed because, in his view, a jury wouldn’t convict a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He described Biden’s “painfully slow” cadence, with the then-president “struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”

Republicans are still hoping to lock up Hillary Clinton, who hasn’t been a government employee since 2013, so naturally the “Biden Tapes” are a prime target.

The Heritage Foundation requested the recordings in February of 2024, and got rebuffed by the Biden DOJ. The following month, Heritage filed a FOIA suit in DC that landed on the docket of Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee. That case dragged along for two years, but, in the meantime, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan sent a formal request to the DOJ in March of 2026 requesting that it release the tapes.

Naturally, AG Bondi agreed — it was one of her final official acts before getting fired. Biden moved for a preliminary injunction, but Judge Friedrich refused to enjoin the release. Biden appealed to the DC Circuit, which declined last week to block the release. Rather than press on to the Supreme Court, Biden decided to throw in the towel on Friday the 24th.

The DC Circuit found that, while the tapes were created as non-agency records, “they became subject to FOIA’s disclosure mandate when the Special Counsel obtained possession of them as part of his investigation.”

In other words: even though the recordings were not agency records when Biden and Zwonitzer created them, they become agency records when the Department of Justice relied upon them as part of Hur’s work.

Obviously, we took notice!

Cough it up, Blanche

Last week we filed a notice of supplemental authority, highlighting the DOJ’s rank hypocrisy. The Federal Programs Branch vehemently opposes our FOIA request on the theory that “Attachment A” is not a government record. And yet it never once made that argument about recordings which would embarrass the president’s rival. The DOJ never attempted to claim that the Biden Tapes were outside FOIA simply because they had been created outside of the executive branch. Indeed, none of the DOJ’s argumentation in that case even mentioned “agency records” at all.

We’re not saying that we enjoy sitting on the bench with the Heritage Foundation. But getting our hands on “Attachment A” will certainly soften the blow.

This afternoon in New York, Judge Arun Subramanian will hold a hearing on a motion to quash grand jury subpoenas served on several prominent New York Times journalists. The government hopes to put them in front of a grand jury and compel them to disclose their confidential sources. The FBI calls it an issue of national security. The Times calls it a gross assault on the freedom of the press.

Obviously, it’s that second one. It’s also CRINGE AS F***.

The bribe jet

On July 6, 2026, President Trump flew his spiffy new plane to a NATO summit in Ankara. The Boeing 747 was a “gift” to America from the Kingdom of Qatar, with the proviso that it will be conveyed to the Trump Presidential Library when he leaves office — a grift so brazen that it would have resulted in the immediate impeachment of any prior president, but which barely merits a news cycle at this point.

Luckily Trump was able to get his bribe jet blinged out on the taxpayer dime. And yet, on July 8, Trump returned home on the old, Cold War-era Air Force One, abruptly boarding before traveling journalists could photograph him and taking off with the window shades conspicuously down.

Trump said the swap was so the new plane could go on a beauty pageant to entertain the troops. His pugilistic press flack Stephen Cheung released a statement saying that “there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal — including distraction and misdirection — to address those threats.”

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Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” Yale Law Journal Vol. 94 (1985)

https://openyls.law…

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The president has a tried-and-true business model for media trollsuits: fire off a bumptious shakedown letter, sue for billions in damages, and wait for a nervous corporate defendant with business before the government to hand him a check. It worked with Twitter, Meta, Google, and CBS. But it has never once worked in an actual courtroom.

Last November, after a conservative British newspaper published an internal memo accusing the British Broadcasting Corporation of splicing together two sections of Trump’s January 6 speech to imply that he’d exhorted his supporters to violently attack the Capitol, Trump ran the same play. His current defamation lawyer, Alejandro Brito, fired off a nastygram demanding a retraction, an apology, and “appropriate compensation.”

The BBC duly apologized and retracted the segment. It did not, however, cut him a check — something which would have been a bigger scandal for the taxpayer-funded broadcaster than the original screw-up. Instead it hired Charles Tobin, one of the best media lawyers in America, and spent the past seven months kicking Trump in the bollocks.

Turns out, when you file a $10 billion defamation suit, you have to participate in discovery! Who knew!

Always be trolling

Trump’s complaint, filed in the Southern District of Florida, suffers from a fatal flaw: The offending program never aired in the US, wasn’t available on the American cable channel BritBox, and wouldn’t play on BBC.com from a US IP address. The plaintiffs’ current theories are: 1) Maybe it actually was available in America??? or 2) Floridians’ use of VPNs spiked in January of 2025, and so someone in Florida must have watched it there.

(Sure, Florida’s age-verification law for adult content took effect January 1, 2025. But doesn’t it seem more likely that people were using VPNs to fap to Auntie Beeb than boring, old porn?)

In January, the BBC moved to stay merits discovery until its motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction was resolved. Judge Roy Altman, who was initially quite solicitous of the guy who appointed him, denied the motion. BBC then did what any competent lawyer could have predicted: First, it subpoenaed every person and entity that was anywhere near Trump in January of 2021 for evidence that he actually did intend for his followers to violently attack the Capitol. Then it demanded Trump hand over his financial records to prove that there was no “massive economic damage to his brand value and significant damage and injury to his future financial prospects.”

As of a July 6, nearly four months after being served requests and with a protective order in place since April, Trump had produced zero documents to the BBC. In that time, the BBC produced over 5,200 documents spanning roughly 47,500 pages in response to 503 discovery requests. Trump’s counsel promised update dates in May, then June, then blew past both, before finally proposing an initial production for July 20 — one day before the discovery hearing on Tuesday. His Requests for Admission responses gave the same boilerplate objection to 114 of 152 requests, including refusing to admit or deny whether he’d spoken with Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, or John Eastman in the 24 hours before his speech on the Ellipse.

Along the way, Trump’s team managed to squander its home court advantage. First Brito failed to respond to the BBC’s motion to dismiss, prompting Judge Altman (who uses the royal “we”) to ask “(1) whether we should consider the Motion to Dismiss unopposed and (2) why we shouldn’t sanction the Plaintiff’s counsel for their apparent disregard of court deadlines.” Then Brito refused to confer with opposing counsel, eliciting a furious response from Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué A. Lett:

While counsel are free to disagree with the relief and basis on which the opposing party may seek said relief, they are not permitted to disregard the Court's orders and procedures.

Brito followed this up with an unsuccessful campaign to get Judge Lett thrown off the case.

At some point, it appears to have occurred to the plaintiff that it was probably a bad idea to pit an eight-lawyer boutique firm against the megafirm Ballard Spahr and a defendant who wasn’t about to roll over and write a check.

Call in the cavalry

On July 14, DOJ filed a “statement of interest” in the case, objecting to the BBC’s subpoenas as overbroad, burdensome, and duplicative of documents already in the public record. Bizarrely, the government objects to subpoenas sent to purely private parties — Sidney Powell, Roger Stone, Donald Trump Jr., the RNC, WinRed — in addition to the twelve federal agencies. As the BBC notes, it’s more than a little ironic for the DOJ to complained about a subpoena for Don Jr. when his Secret Service detail has thus far blocked BBC from serving him at all.

Procedurally, though, the government’s attempt to bigfoot into this case is even weirder. Every federal agency has Touhy regulations (named for the 1951 Supreme Court case United States ex rel. Touhy v. Ragen), dictating how employees should respond to litigation demands. The agencies are, of course, entitled to challenge those subpoenas individually. But they can’t just pile together as a Trojan Horse to insert themselves into a civil suit as a means for the Justice Department to ride to Trump’s rescue.

Meanwhile in Washington, there’s another discovery fight underway with respect to evidence from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump.

Back in May, the BBC petitioned Chief Judge James Boasberg in DC to unseal the 2022 rulings in which then-Chief Judge Beryl Howell rejected Trump’s executive privilege claims with respect to fourteen witnesses. The BBC would like to subpoena many of those same “Stop the Steal” goons, and they hope to head off any argument over executive privilege. They reason that, if Trump already lost those same privilege fights in DC, he shouldn’t get to relitigate them anew in Florida.

DOJ’s opposition makes a great fuss about the New York Times’s failed effort to unseal those same records last year.

“Journalists represented by the same counsel as Petitioners here argued for full access to these rulings, yet this Court ruled that the government’s redactions were proper because the redacted information was secret grand jury information protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e),” they snark, adding that the BBC hasn’t shown the “particularized need” required to unlock grand jury materials.

And perhaps that’s right as a matter of law. But it’s pretty nervy to file a “statement of interest” that never mentions executive privilege, even though Trump’s use of his office to block the subpoenas is clearly going to be the biggest discovery issue in this case. As the BBC pointed out, the DOJ’s supposedly neutral concern about non-party burden conveniently skips the part where the plaintiff himself controls all the non-parties! Trump wants it both ways: privilege as a sword to block discovery in Florida, and the record of him losing that same privilege fight in DC kept out of view.

All of this has more than a faint whiff of déjà vu. In 2020, then-AG Bill Barr swooped in to substitute the government as defendant in E. Jean Carroll’s original defamation suit against Trump. Multiple courts rejected the claim that he was acting within the scope of his presidential duties when he said that Carroll was too unattractive to assault, but the DOJ is still making that case to the Supreme Court.

More recently Trump sued the IRS for the wrongful disclosure of his tax returns in 2020, and then “settled” for immunity for all prior tax crimes plus a $1.8 slush fund for his supporters — despite the fact that the case was categorically barred by the statute of limitations. Judge Kathleen Williams blasted the government for effecting a fraud on the court by pretending that there were two adverse parties, rather than Trump “suing” an agency he controlled as a means of conferring legitimacy on a ploy to loot the treasury and secure a get-out-of-jail-free card for himself. Judge Williams referred Brito to the Florida bar for possible discipline and banned Daniel Epstein, who is also entered on the BBC case, from appearing pro hac in the Southern District of Florida for a year.

You should leave now

At this point, any rational litigant would quietly slink away. This case is jurisdictionally DOA, doomed on the merits, and runs the very real risk of getting the president’s lawyers sanctioned again. And on top of all that, the BBC is making it clear that it will make this incredibly expensive and unpleasant — not just for Trump and his lawyers, but for all of his “Stop the Steal” buddies, too.

Instead, the president is trying to get the Justice Department to ride in and save him like the French fleet showing up outside Yorktown. But Donald Trump is no George Washington, and the DOJ’s not going to save him from British.

Washington won the war. Trump can’t win a discovery hearing.

The never-ending dispute over Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms for crimes of “woke” is heating up again. A year ago, the firms that folded got mocked, and the firms that fought got injunctions. After oral argument in May, the DC Circuit seemed almost certain to affirm the four separate trial judges who ruled that the orders were a gross violation of the First Amendment. And yet the matter refuses to die — thanks to the continued involvement of one particular chaos agent: Boris Epshteyn.

Evil Forrest Gump

Ten years into the Trump nightmare, Boris Epshteyn has become famous for his Zelig-like ability to show up wherever Trump is in trouble and make it much, much worse. He was pushed out of his first stint in the administration after drafting a Holocaust Remembrance Day speech that somehow failed to mention Jewish people. He stuck around in Trump’s orbit, serving as Trump’s legal advisor during the Mueller investigation, where his signature move appears to have been maximal, indiscriminate assertions of executive and attorney-client privilege. His efforts to help overturn the 2020 election got him indicted in Arizona and named Co-Conspirator 6 in Trump’s election-interference indictment. And after Trump’s victory in 2024, he was accused of running a straightforward pay-to-play operation, charging a fee to recommend hopefuls for administration jobs.

White House Counsel David Warrington — a former Stop the Steal lawyer with no particular allergy to advancing Trump’s dumbest legal theories — argued that Epshteyn should be kept as far away from the president as possible.

“Epshteyn’s conduct must be stopped and his employment and proximity to President Trump should be terminated. Otherwise, his conduct will likely lead to, at best, a scandal involving the incoming Trump administration, and at worst could lead to criminal indictments,” Warrington wrote last year in a memo reported by the New York Times.

In short, Boris Epshteyn is the last person on earth who should have been anywhere near the negotiating table in 2025, as Trump rolled out executive orders kneecapping the supposedly “liberal” law firms.

Naturally, he was right in the middle of it.

Hold still, I’m retaliating against you for your speech!

Between March and April of 2025, Trump signed five nearly identical executive orders targeting the law firms Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey. While vaguely gesturing in the direction of supposedly illegal DEI, the orders made clear that they were punishing the firms for their political affiliations and professional advocacy. The order targeting Perkins Coie mentioned Hillary Clinton, Fusion GPS, and the Steele “dossier,” before accusing it of working “with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification.” A similar presidential memorandum targeted “all members, partners, and employees of Covington & Burling LLP who assisted former Special Counsel Jack Smith during his time as Special Counsel.”

The orders suspended security clearances for law firm employees, cut them off from government contracts, barred them from federal buildings, and blacklisted them from federal hiring — sanctions designed to cripple the firms by making them toxic to their own clients.

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On Friday, a federal judge ordered MAGA weirdo Patrick Byrne to pay Hunter Biden $1.7 million in punitive damages, ending a deranged carnival of chaotic lawyering that lasted almost three years.

The defamatory statement was relatively tame, at least when compared to some of the crazy shit people have said about the former president’s son. In an exclusive interview in 2023 with Capitol Times Magazine — a publication no one has ever heard of or read but which you can buy for just $10.99 per month — Byrne said he was recruited by the Iranian government for a top secret mission.

Why the Iranians would approach the former CEO of Overstock.com was left unsaid, but apparently this kind of thing happens a lot. Byrne also claims to have been approached by Venezuelan interests and to have been recruited by the FBI to set up a foreign bribe for Hillary Clinton.

In the course of this particularly mission, dubbed “League of Shadows,” Byrne discovered that Hunter Biden was soliciting an $800 million bribe from Iran tied to his father’s negotiations with the regime — or so Byrne told the Capitol Times.

In November of 2023, Biden sued Byrne for defamation in the Central District of California.

Now, in a normal lawsuit, Byrne’s lawyer would have argued that, when the entire world has seen the complainant blasted out of his mind cavorting with sex workers, he’s more or less un-defame-able. But Byrne’s lawyer, Michael Murphy, never got to make that argument, because Byrne fired him an hour before the trial was supposed to start on July 29, 2025.

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This can’t have been an enormous shock to Murphy, who was at least the fourth lawyer on the case. (In court documents, Byrne claimed he feared sabotage when Murphy’s associate showed up with a Free Palestine pin and cat hair on her suit.) But it was a pretty big shock to Judge Stephen Wilson, an 85-year-old Reagan appointee, who gaveled in the case to find three rando lawyers seated at the defense table. None of those lawyers was Peter Ticktin, Donald Trump’s former boarding school roommate, who got famous defending MAGA D-listers and pro hac-ed into this case. In his stead stood Stefanie Lambert, an election-denying lawyer who managed to get herself un-admitted from a case in DC after leaking protected discovery material, but not before getting herself arrested in the courtroom on an outstanding warrant from her home state of Michigan. (Liberty dropped similar suits against Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell, but can’t get out of Byrne’s thanks to Lambert and Ticktin’s antics.)

After sputtering in astonishment at the “three-ring circus” occupying his courtroom, Judge Wilson decided that he wasn’t going to accept Lambert’s pro hac application, and he revoked Ticktin’s for failure to appear. At which point Byrne fired the other two lawyers and essentially refused to participate in the case at all.

Rather than default him immediately, Wilson continued the case to October, reopened discovery into Byrne’s finances, and ordered Byrne to hire another lawyer. Byrne ignored all three instructions, then disregarded multiple orders that he personally appear in the courtroom. Instead, he went on Alex Jones’s show and repeated the lies about Biden and Iran, playing a voicemail recording he had personally designated “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL” under the case’s own protective order. Jones’s account promoted the clip with a caption crowning Byrne a “CIA Whistleblower.”

In January, with a hearing on the default judgment already underway, a lawyer named Robert Tyler, materialized to request a “limited appearance” on Byrne’s behalf — filed that same morning, with no explanation for where Tyler had been for the preceding five months.

“This is another last-minute ploy, and, frankly, at this point in the proceedings, I find Mr. Byrne totally incredible and not believable,” the judge scoffed.

Eventually Tyler managed to enter an un-limited appearance and filed motions to get his client un-defaulted, enlisting the help of (yet another) Florida lawyer. But by then it was far too late.

Judge Wilson awarded Biden $1 in nominal compensatory damages plus $1.7 million in punitive damages — an amount calculated to be high enough to get Byrne to finally shut up about Hunter Biden. (I’ll take the under on that one.)

The court imposed $34,969 in sanctions for Byrne’s bad behavior, to be paid in 14 days, increasing by $1,000 every day after the deadline. (I’ll take the over on that one.)

Byrne's team says he intends to appeal. League of Shadows could not be reached for comment.

Donald Trump had a rough week in three courts — although he was apparently too ignorant to fully understand it.

First, Judge Thomas Barber, a Trump appointee in Tampa, tossed a defamation suit against the Washington Post over a 2023 article entitled “Trust linked to porn-friendly bank could gain a stake in Trump's Truth Social” by Drew Harwell, Matt Bernardini and Matei Rosca. It involved a claim that Trump Media and Technology Company (TMTG), the parent company of of Truth Social, failed to disclose a $240,000 finder's fee paid to arrange an $8 million loan. TMTG sued for defamation, hiring “Kraken” alum Jesse Binnall, who makes his living filing bumptious defamation suits for MAGA dorks like Mike Flynn and former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark “minisoldr” Robinson. (Both sued CNN. Both lost.)

The first two versions of TMTG’s complaint got dismissed, but then the plaintiff suddenly remembered in January that no such finders fee had been paid. That new “fact” was enough for Judge Barber to allow discovery, which unearthed both an invoice for the “referral fee” plus an unsigned referral fee agreement. This appears to have resolved the matter for the court, which dismissed the case in a minute order, holding that the “Plaintiff has failed to present evidence that would allow a jury to find by clear and convincing evidence that Defendant published the allegedly defamatory statements with actual malice.” The judge did not elaborate on his reasoning, but promised that “a written order memorializing and explaining these rulings will follow in due course.”

Binnall can’t take all the credit here, though, since he passed the baton in March to Alejandro Brito, Trump’s current trollsuit lawyer. That means that Brito is the one who’ll have to fend off the Post’s motion for monetary sanctions associated with his client’s failure to produce discovery. And Brito is already pretty busy!

Down the hall in Tampa, he just won a round in Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times … sort of. In that case, the president defeated a motion to dismiss for lack of venue and/or transfer the case to the Southern District of New York. Judge Steven Merryday held that Trump transacts enough business in the Middle District of Florida that he’s entitled to file suit there. (His residence at Mar-a-Lago is in the Southern District of Florida, FWIW.)

Trump immediately took to Truth Social to praise this “very fair and highly respected Judge.”

This is probably not an opinion shared by his trusty sidekick, since Judge Merryday dropkicked Brito’s first complaint for being wholly defective in every way. Here is just one of the 85 pages Brito vomited onto the docket back in September.

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Donald Trump and his lawyers are still trying to drag E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit into overtime — and drag her lawyer Roberta Kaplan down with it.

Last week, Judge Lewis Kaplan (no relation) granted Carroll’s motion to expedite briefing on her request to disburse the nearly $5.8 million the court has been holding for her since May of 2023, when the first jury found that he sexually assaulted and defamed her. At the time, the parties signed a stipulation agreeing that the $5 million verdict and statutory interest would be held in court escrow until the final disposition of the case. On June 29, the Supreme Court bounced Trump’s petition for certiorari with no known dissents. Now it’s time to pay up!

And yet …

On July 3, Trump’s lawyers filed what they styled as a “motion to amend/correct” Judge Kaplan’s order to expedite. And by amend, they mean “reconsider” — or, more precisely “reverse” — and “reinstate the normal briefing schedule to which President Trump is entitled under the Court’s Local Rules.” Their only justification appears to be that Trump has a new lawyer, Josh Halpern, since his former counsel, Justin Smith, was just confirmed to the Eighth Circuit. But Trump says he’s going to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its denial of cert, so perhaps he needs more than a week to come up with a non-sanctionable argument that he’s entitled to stay his own stipulation because he wants to ask his six besties to do him a solid.

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Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan was ready for that one.

Later that day, she noted that Trump himself nominated Smith to the judiciary back in February and so was clearly aware that he’d be down one attorney. But no matter, since Alina Habba’s hapless former partner Michael Madaio has been on the case since the beginning, so he’ll need no time to get up to speed.

But that’s just table stakes. Kaplan also flagged media reports that Trump’s own Justice Department has been trying to prosecute Carroll for her conduct in this very case.

“While we did not want to raise what might be unnecessary details to Your Honor, in light of Defendant’s continued gamesmanship, we believe it is only appropriate to bring certain developments to Your Honor’s attention, as they prove the wisdom of the Court’s decision to require expedited briefing and allow this case to finally come to an end,” she wrote.

Specifically, the DOJ is investigating whether Carroll lied in an October 2020 deposition during this colloquy:

HABBA: Are you presently paying your counsel’s fees?

CARROLL: This is a contingency case.

HABBA: So you’re not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date; is that correct?

CARROLL: I’m not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.

HABBA: Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?

CARROLL: No.

On the eve of trial, Kaplan wrote to Habba explaining that, while Carroll had told the truth to the best of her memory in 2020, “she now recalls that at some point her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.”

Habba tried her best to make this a thing back in 2023, but all she managed to do was wring an additional deposition out of Carroll on the subject of litigation funding. But now the DOJ is (or was) trying to use that three-year-old deposition to take out not only Carroll but LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a prolific Democratic funder whose nonprofit, American Future Republic, paid some of Carroll’s legal expenses.

That investigation appears to have foundered after massive public backlash, with US Attorney Andrew Boutros insisting that his office “has not opened—and has never opened—a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll.”

Notably he didn’t say that he’d never investigated Hoffman or his non-profit, which is the entity located in the Northern District of Illinois. But it’s just as well anyway, since Boutros currently has his hands full dismissing indictments and fending off the Broadview 6 after it was revealed that his staff regularly engaged in misconduct before the grand jury.

That should have been the end of the matter. But instead a conservative watchdog group, the National Legal and Policy Center, filed a bar complaint against Kaplan with the New York Attorney Grievance Committee.

From Carroll’s confusion about who was paying for her case, NLPC’s counsel Paul Kamenar infers that Kaplan must have lied to her own client. But then Kamenar, who has been practicing law since the 70s, affects to be confused about the difference between attorneys fees and expenses.

“Would those legal fees paid by Reid Hoffman be considered as a gift to Ms. Carroll and subsequently be accounted for as a payment by Ms. Carroll to Ms. Kaplan, in which case they would constitute taxable income to Ms. Kaplan?” he wonders. “While any contingency fee is taxable income to a lawyer, how were the legal fees paid by Reid Hoffman accounted for?”

He then demands “at a minimum” that the AGC, which is a part of the Supreme Court of New York, unseal the additional deposition testimony ordered by Judge Kaplan, of the Southern District of New York.

It’s a bit much from a guy who calls himself an “Overcriminalization Expert.” And it seems to have failed to impress Judge Kaplan.

On July 4, he denied Trump’s motion to “amend/correct.” The president will have to explain on Tuesday why he should be entitled to yet more delay in a case which has now dragged on for four years.

Lotsa luck.

On its way out the door on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s six conservatives made time to deliver a performative kick to the handful of trans kids participating in K-12 athletics. In West Virginia v. B.P.J., the right-wing majority held that broadly prohibiting children from participating in youth sports does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The majority opinion, penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is a gift to right-wing culture warriors trying desperately to cling to power by showing how cruel they can be to trans kids, blithely regurgitating disproven talking points about protecting girls from the imagined scourge of “biological males.” And Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence is so needlessly vile that we can’t eve bring ourselves to quote from it.

Culture warriors in robes

In 2021, West Virginia passed the “Save Women’s Sports Act,” codified at West Virginia Code § 18–2–25d. It defines male and female with respect to the “biological sex determined at birth,” notwithstanding the fact that for a significant number of children, it’s impossible to determine their sex at birth.

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America’s gun lobby is going to war with itself. Again. Or maybe this current skirmish is just a continuation of the previous conflict? Honestly, with so many self-dealing dickheads involved, it’s hard to keep track.

The National Rifle Association and its former charitable arm, the 1791 Foundation (f/k/a the NRA Foundation), are currently suing each other in two different federal courts, with a third lawsuit filed Wednesday in DC Superior Court. The NRA claims the Foundation was hijacked by a dissident faction loyal to disgraced former CEO Wayne LaPierre. The Foundation says the NRA used it as a “piggy bank” for decades and is now fudging its numbers with the charity’s cash to hide a looming insolvency crisis. ¿Por qué no los dos?

The NRA’s operatic implosion in 2019 revealed a truly comical level of corruption, as LaPierre and his cronies passed donor money to themselves through the non-profit’s advertising firm Ackerman McQueen. The firm produced NRATV, a streaming channel of culture war content, such as photoshopping Klan hoods onto Thomas the Tank Engine characters to protest the addition of a Black, female train from Kenya. On-air talent included various NRA officers, including Oliver North, who quit his job as a Fox commentator when he was named president of the NRA board, only to be awarded a $1 million contract to produce NRATV content by Ackerman McQueen. The advertising firm, which pocketed $40 million a year from the Foundation, also paid various personal expenses for LaPierre and his family.

North was ousted by LaPierre’s allies after threatening to blow the whistle. But a lawsuit by New York Attorney General Letitia James upended the entire organization. A jury found LaPierre liable for breach of fiduciary duty in February 2024, after which he was banned from serving as an NRA officer or director for ten years and ordered to pay $4.35 million in damages. It’s the position of the current NRA leadership that all the prior unpleasantness was LaPierre’s doing, and ended with his departure.

Meanwhile, DC Attorney General Karl Racine filed his own lawsuit in 2020 targeting the Foundation. As a 501(c)(4) that engages in political lobbying, the NRA can’t accept tax-deductible contributions. But the Foundation is a 501(c)(3), so donors can take a tax deduction on gifts. Racine alleged that members of the Foundation’s board of trustees, many of whom were NRA directors and officers, had breached their fiduciary duty by letting the NRA use the Foundation’s $200 million in assets as a virtual piggy bank.

“The Board approved multi-million-dollar loans to the NRA with the knowledge that the NRA had financial problems, and the Foundation might not be repaid,” he said. “The Board also agreed to pay millions more in fees to the NRA without any apparent benefit to the Foundation.”

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In April 2024, on the eve of trial, the Foundation entered a consent judgment requiring it to implement a raft of governance reforms aimed at ensuring that the charity acted in the best interest of its donors, rather than the NRA. In accordance with the settlement, the board members voted in August to strip the NRA president and EVP of their ex officio board seats and eliminate the NRA’s right to appoint Foundation trustees.

NRA VP Doug Hamlin reviewed the proposed amendments in advance and confirmed his assent as long as he could still make recommendations about funding priorities. Nine of eleven trustees who voted in favor of the amendment were sitting NRA board members. Nevertheless, NRA’s leadership purported to be shocked, shocked that the Foundation would be so uncooperative after the overhaul. According to the Foundation, it rebuffed requests to buy the NRA’s headquarters building or to pay $800,000 for a firearms collection of “no particular historical significance.” Eventually, the NRA demanded that the Foundation start handing over 20 percent of its revenues as a “royalty” on the name “NRA Foundation” — the legal name of the entity, which it had been using without paying a licensing fee for decades.

In January, the NRA sued the Foundation in federal court in DC, alleging trademark infringement, breach of charitable trust, and a grab bag of other claims under DC law. Per the complaint, the August 2024 board meeting was a secret coup by LaPierre loyalists to undermine the reformers righting the mothership.

On June 24, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan dismissed everything but the trademark dispute, declining to exercise jurisdiction over the charitable trust, breach of contract, and governance claims, which involve novel questions of DC charitable law. The NRA immediately refiled the dismissed claims in DC Superior Court.

The following day, the Foundation filed its own complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia. It alleges that, when the Foundation refused to pay the “royalty,” the NRA cut off access to donor lists, locked the Foundation out of its own social media accounts, and launched a competing charity to poach the Foundation’s donors.

The complaint also alleges that the NRA is fraudulently representing to the IRS and its own auditors that it retains “control” over approximately $176 million of Foundation assets, allowing it to claim net assets of $257 million, rather than $81 million:

But beyond retaliating against the Foundation, the NRA took action to deceive its auditors and the public. Recognizing that deconsolidation of the Foundation from the NRA for accounting purposes would strip approximately $176 million in net assets from the NRA’s financial statements—likely triggering a going-concern qualification that would reveal the NRA’s true financial condition to its creditors and the public (including its members and donors)—the NRA filed its lawsuit as a pretext to tell its auditor that the Foundation’s lawful governance reforms were invalid and that the NRA still “controls” the Foundation. The NRA then directed two of its own employees—who held dual NRA/Foundation finance titles—to sign a Management Representation Letter to the NRA’s auditor on the Foundation’s behalf, from the NRA’s headquarters, using NRA email addresses, without the knowledge, authorization, or consent of the Foundation’s actual management or Board. That letter falsely represented to the auditor, on behalf of the Foundation, that the NRA had “maintained control over the Foundation” and that the Foundation’s governance amendments “did not follow regulatory and legal requirements.” The Foundation’s Board and management never saw, reviewed, or approved this letter.

It’ll be hard to blame that one on Wayne LaPierre! But you know they’re gonna try.