by Jordan Rubin | Mar 27, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell not only lost his latest motion to overturn a defamation verdict related to the 2020 election — the judge also said lawyers for the media company he founded must explain why they shouldn’t be fined and referred to their state bars for disciplinary proceedings.
The double defeat came Wednesday from U.S. District Judge Nina Wang, a Joe Biden appointee in Colorado. She presided over the civil case in which a jury found the Minnesota gubernatorial hopeful and his media company, Frankspeech, liable for defaming Eric Coomer. The plaintiff had worked for Dominion Voting Systems, a voting technology company targeted by Donald Trump supporters in connection with the election he lost to Biden.
Wang rejected the post-trial motion challenging the verdict, which totaled over $2 million against Lindell and Frankspeech. Through that company, Lindell broadcast his show, which included statements about Coomer that led to this lawsuit. In her ruling, the judge recounted Coomer testifying that Lindell’s statements accusing him of election-rigging made the plaintiff unlikely to ever work in anything election-related again.
To be sure, the decision wasn’t a total loss for the Lindell crew, as the judge also rejected the plaintiff’s motion to increase the damages.
Yet the actions of Frankspeech’s lawyers in defending against that motion led the judge to raise ethical concerns. Wang noted that, in their response to the plaintiff’s motion to increase the damages, defense lawyers Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster cited a case as having been decided by a federal appeals court. But the judge observed that it was actually a trial-level ruling that the lawyers misleadingly described, to boot.
“A reasonable review by counsel should have alerted them of the error,” Wang wrote.
Incredibly, this sort of thing
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 26, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
President Donald Trump keeps struggling with the Supreme Court’s tariffs ruling against him — and his statements on the matter still misunderstand what the ruling said and why.
That was evident when he spoke on Wednesday at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual fundraising dinner in Washington.
On top of continuing his tirade against Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, two of his appointees who ruled against him — “They sicken me,” the president said — Trump remains confounded by the fact that the government must refund the tariff money it illegally collected.
He complained that the 6-3 ruling from February, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, “didn’t want to put one little sentence that all money taken in up ’til this day doesn’t have to be paid back.”
It’s true that the majority didn’t address refunds. That led Trump’s other high court appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, to observe in dissent that the court “says nothing today about whether, and if so how, the Government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers.”
But the president should keep in mind, or be informed by his staff, that government lawyers had acknowledged that refunds would issue if the Supreme Court were to deem the tariffs illegal. For example, in convincing the lower courts not to halt the tariffs while litigation proceeded toward the justices, government lawyers wrote that there’d be no harm to plaintiffs because, if the administration were to lose in the end, then plaintiffs “will assuredly receive payment on their refund with interest.”
Having now lost the case, no one in the government can be surprised that it must go through a refund process — certainly not the leader of the government.
The post Why
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 25, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
A California state jury found Meta and YouTube liable in a landmark social media case on Wednesday, awarding $3 million in compensatory damages to a plaintiff who brought the case and putting the Instagram maker’s liability at 70% and the Google company’s at 30%.
The jury has not yet decided how much to award in punitive damages.
A 2023 complaint accused social media companies of fueling an unprecedented mental health crisis for American children through “addictive and dangerous” products. Plaintiffs accused the companies of deliberately tweaking their products to exploit kids’ undeveloped brains to “create compulsive use of their apps.”
The civil case was brought by several plaintiffs against several companies, but this state court trial, which featured testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, involved a plaintiff described by her initials as “K.G.M.” in court papers against Instagram and YouTube.
In the 2023 complaint, K.G.M. said she was a 17-year-old in California who started using social media at a much younger age, though her mother told her not to and used third-party software to try to prevent the daughter’s social media use. The complaint alleged that the corporate defendants designed their products in ways that let kids evade parental controls and that the companies knew, or should’ve known, that K.G.M. was a minor.
The plaintiff alleged that Instagram’s and other companies’ addictive designs led her to develop “a compulsion to engage with those products nonstop” and to see “harmful and depressive content, urging K.G.M. to commit acts of self-harm, as well as harmful social comparison and body image.”
She alleged that she suffered bullying and sextortion through Instagram and that Meta did nothing in response to a report about it.
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 21, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court added to the term’s already heavy docket, agreeing on Monday to consider the Trump administration’s quest to quickly end humanitarian protections for Haitians and Syrians.
Yet the week’s court news arguably started Sunday night, when President Donald Trump lashed out on social media. He complained in lengthy posts about the tariffs ruling (which he mischaracterized) and other gripes, including the 2020 election loss that still haunts him and his disappointment in the court’s Republican appointees.
He referred to the “Democrats” and “Republicans” on the court, forgoing the more precise, if euphemistic, label of Democratic and Republican appointees. The president groused on Truth Social that GOP justices “openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land.”
By “openly disrespect,” he apparently meant some of the Republican appointees occasionally rule against him. At the risk of stating the obvious, the court has been helpful to Trump, both personally and presidentially.
But it’s not the Trump Court. It’s the Roberts Court. And though there’s overlap between the two, Chief Justice John Roberts is playing a longer game. That means the court occasionally checks the Republican president, even while largely approving his policies and keeping him out of prison.
Roberts didn’t directly respond to Trump’s latest meltdown. But he happened to have a public appearance on Tuesday, at which he put yet more distance between himself and the president. While in conversation with a federal judge at Rice University in Houston, the chief justice called personal attacks on judges “dangerous,” and he deemed “absurd” the notion that justices carry forward the agenda of the presidents who appointed them.
Again, he didn’t call out Trump by name. But one needn’t squint
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 20, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
“When Donald Trump is out of office, and although the Supreme Court ruling gave him presidential immunity for his official acts, will he be held accountable for his 34 felony counts?” – T.
Hi T.,
Trump was already sentenced in the New York hush money case, right before he returned to office.
The judge gave him an “unconditional discharge,” which is basically a non-penalty. The judge said he gave that sentence because Trump was about to be president again, concluding that “the only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge.”
Reasonable people can disagree about what accountability means in this situation.
It’s true that, in his sentencing, Trump received favorable treatment because he won the 2024 election (though he didn’t face mandatory imprisonment in any event).
But the fact he was sentenced at all represented something unique about this case, because it was the only one of his four prosecutions that went to trial before the election. After he won that election, his two federal cases went away, due to the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, and the Georgia election case went away due to the Fani Willis disqualification saga.
The hush money case isn’t over yet.
Trump is actively appealing his jury trial conviction on those 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money scheme in connection with the 2016 presidential race. He’s trying to move his appeal from state court to federal court.
Whichever route it takes, the Supreme Court can have the last word on how its immunity ruling applies to the state case.
Among Trump’s arguments on appeal is that the prosecution improperly used evidence of his official presidential acts to
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 19, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
On Thursday afternoon, the Supreme Court is set to honor the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired in 2006 and died in 2023. Though the memorial will likely feature heartfelt reflections on the justice’s accomplishments and character, the occasion more broadly serves as a reminder of how far right the court has moved since she left.
O’Connor was appointed by Ronald Reagan, fulfilling the Republican president’s campaign pledge to put the first woman on the court. She was confirmed 99-0 in 1981, a margin that’s difficult to imagine for a justice these days.
Another thing that has changed is that outcomes of big cases were less predetermined in her time, with O’Connor having been a swing vote at the center of pivotal disputes. While, for example, she was in the majority for 2000’s Bush v. Gore that led another Republican to the White House, she also cast crucial votes to maintain affirmative action and abortion rights, both of which the court has since gutted.
Dissenting from the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned those latter rights, the court’s Democratic appointees called O’Connor a judge “of wisdom.” They paid tribute in that passage not only to O’Connor but also to Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter —who, like O’Connor, were GOP appointees who sometimes bucked the party line.
“They would not have won any contests for the kind of ideological purity some court watchers want Justices to deliver,” the Dobbs dissenters wrote of the trio. “But if there were awards for Justices who left this Court better than they found it? And who for that reason left this country better? And the rule of law stronger? Sign those Justices up.”
Dobbs was authored by Justice Samuel Alito, who replaced O’Connor and has contributed to the
