by Jordan Rubin | Mar 14, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court didn’t act on Steve Bannon’s petition that I flagged in last week’s newsletter. There isn’t much to read into that lack of action thus far. The court is likely to eventually bless the Justice Department’s quest to upend the Donald Trump ally’s contempt conviction. We’ll be tracking the petition when the justices consider it again at one of their upcoming private conferences.
With the court in between hearing sessions — it’s back March 23 for a two-week stint ending with the birthright citizenship case — some of this week’s news came off the bench. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh made a joint appearance at a Washington event on Monday, where they wound up debating the court’s use of the shadow docket in the Trump era. While the Trump appointee defended the court, the Biden appointee reportedly sparked “loud applause” when she said the court’s intervention on the administration’s behalf “is a real unfortunate problem.”
The administration is seeking yet more intervention, specifically on the immigration front. Continuing a theme of Trump’s second term, Solicitor General D. John Sauer complained again that lower courts are unduly interfering with executive policy, as the government seeks to end humanitarian protections for immigrants from dangerous countries around the world.
After previously securing Supreme Court orders against Venezuelan nationals, Sauer now wants the justices to give the green light to end temporary protected status, or TPS, for Syrians and Haitians. In his latest urgent appeal, Sauer said he wants the high court to not only lift lower court orders halting action against Syrians and Haitians, but he also wants the justices to take up full review of the appeals and issue definitive rulings, to,
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 12, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
You don’t have to be a lawyer to see why a plaque honoring officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was installed only after years of delay, at around 4 a.m. over the weekend. The Donald Trump-led Republican Party has no interest in promptly or fully honoring those who fought to repel the Trump-backed mob that day in 2021.
Quite the opposite: A priority of Trump’s second term has been trying to erase that history.
Yet the memorial’s belated, shady installation wasn’t only morally insufficient.
It was legally insufficient, too.
So explains a court filing this week in a lawsuit brought by Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges, who worked that day on behalf of the U.S. Capitol Police and Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, respectively. They sued last year to get Congress to obtain and install a plaque in line with a 2022 law requiring a memorial.
“They bring this suit to compel Congress to follow its own law and install the mandated memorial, to honor the women and men who saved the lives of those inside the building, and to ensure that the history of this attack on the Capitol — and on democracy — is not forgotten,” the June complaint said.
Dunn and Hodges filed the suit against the Architect of the Capitol, which is a legislative branch agency responsible for operating and maintaining the Capitol and surrounding buildings. Represented by the office of Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-picked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, the agency moved to dismiss the complaint in December, arguing, among other things, that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to bring the suit.
Citing a Saturday report by The Washington Post on the plaque’s installation, the federal judge overseeing
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 12, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Trump administration has launched its latest urgent complaint to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to immediately halt a lower court order that stops the administration from quickly ending humanitarian immigration protections — this time for Haitians.
The government’s application Wednesday comes after another recent one regarding Syria that the high court could rule on at any time. And it follows previous Supreme Court orders siding with the administration on lifting protections for Venezuelan nationals.
Continuing a theme throughout President Donald Trump’s second term, the Justice Department’s top Supreme Court lawyer, John Sauer, cast the lower court action he wants lifted as only the latest example of judges encroaching on executive authority.
“This is the government’s fourth application for a stay arising from lower courts’ refusal to allow the Executive Branch to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for various countries on the eve of the terminations taking effect,” Sauer said in Wednesday’s filing, noting that the previous ones “involved Venezuela (twice, resulting in stays from this Court) and Syria (currently pending).”
Sauer said all those cases and others in the lower courts involve “challenges that second-guess the underpinnings” of Kristi Noem’s decisions to terminate protections when she was the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
He said the “main variation” among these cases is that some of the lower courts, including in the Haiti case, “endorse a far-fetched and far-reaching equal-protection claim based on decisionmakers’ purported racial animus.” He warned that such a theory “threatens to invalidate virtually every immigration policy of the current administration.”
Ruling against the administration last month, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes wrote that Noem “has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 11, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Vindictive and selective prosecution claims are rarely made — and even more rarely succeed — but they’ve become a feature of the revenge-based second Trump administration.
Following similar claims made by Kilmar Abrego Garcia, James Comey, Letitia James and others in response to their indictments over the past year, voting technology company Smartmatic has entered the fray.
The company became a right-wing fixation in connection with the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, as Trump supporters falsely claimed Smartmatic had rigged that election and others. Those claims led the company to file defamation lawsuits against Fox News, Newsmax, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Michael Lindell and current U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro.
In 2024, while Biden was president, the DOJ charged current and former Smartmatic executives in a bribery case with allegations related to the 2016 elections in the Philippines. The company itself wasn’t charged — that is, until a superseding indictment in October 2025.
In a motion to dismiss those charges, filed Tuesday in Florida, Smartmatic argues the timing is not coincidental.
“Instead, the only consequential changes in this case since 2024 were the President, his DOJ, and their well-documented crusade to unconstitutionally target their perceived political enemies, like Smartmatic,” the company said in the dismissal motion.
While making the big ask of dismissing the charges outright, the company said it should at least get to probe what it called Trump and his allies’ “improper involvement in the DOJ’s decision to vindictively and selectively target SGO for prosecution.” SGO Corporation Limited is the U.K.-based parent company of Smartmatic.
Smartmatic drew a parallel to the case of Abrego, whom the administration illegally deported and, after resisting court orders for his return, eventually brought
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 10, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Trump administration’s retribution campaign has landed in court again, this time with a lawsuit from Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the AI tool Claude.
The company said the government unlawfully retaliated by deeming Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk. The company said that happened because it maintained Claude can’t, as it said in its legal complaint, “safely or reliably be used for autonomous lethal warfare and mass surveillance of Americans.”
The complaint was filed Monday in the federal Northern District of California, where the San Francisco-based company is headquartered.
It recounted that President Donald Trump, on Feb. 27, directed all federal agencies to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.” That same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that the company be designated a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” adding that “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” Other agencies followed suit.
Calling the actions “unprecedented and unlawful,” Anthropic accused the administration of “pure retaliation” and said the Constitution doesn’t allow the government to “wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech.” The company said it’s turning to the courts “as a last resort to vindicate its rights and halt the Executive’s unlawful campaign of retaliation.”
Alleging violations of the Administrative Procedure Act and constitutional provisions, including the First Amendment, Anthropic is seeking urgent relief against the administration. The company said the actions of Trump, Hegseth and other agencies “will continue to impair Anthropic’s First Amendment and due process rights, injure its reputation, harm its business relationships, and cause economic injury for which it cannot obtain compensation from the government.”
The
by Jordan Rubin | Mar 6, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court wrapped up its latest two-week hearing session, featuring a trippy oral argument on gun rights for drug users. The GOP-appointed supermajority also helped New York Republicans hold on to a congressional seat, backed California parents over the state’s school transgender policies and shut the courthouse door on prisoners trying to file lawsuits claiming unconstitutional treatment.
Looking ahead, Steve Bannon is poised for good news from the justices as soon as Monday morning. That’s when the court is next slated to publish an order list with action on pending appeals. Among the many petitions at the high court is Bannon’s, which he filed last fall, seeking review of an appellate ruling that upheld his contempt conviction for blowing off the House Jan. 6 committee.
The Trump ally’s appeal took an unusual path, because the Justice Department initially waived its right to respond to his petition. That would have normally led the court to deny it outright, leaving his conviction intact. But then the court requested a response — a move that’s not unheard of but is especially noteworthy here because of what happened next.
In a typical criminal case, the DOJ’s response would’ve been a brief opposing high court review and seeking to uphold the conviction. But here, the department asked the court to vacate the appellate ruling so that the government can move to dismiss the case completely in the trial court.
The administration didn’t specify why it wanted to abandon Bannon’s case at this point, only that it “has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice.”
