by Jordan Rubin | Feb 10, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Back in November, I noted that Steve Bannon got a boost in his appeal when the Supreme Court asked the Justice Department to respond to the Donald Trump ally’s petition. Bannon was seeking high court review of his contempt of Congress conviction, which he got in 2022 for not complying with the House Jan. 6 committee.
The Trump DOJ had initially waived its right to respond to Bannon’s petition, which would’ve likely led to its outright denial if the high court didn’t request a response. The appeals court had ruled against Bannon, so a Supreme Court denial would’ve effectively upheld his conviction.
But the high court did request a response, and what followed was quite the boost for the Trump ally, who’s been in the news lately less for his contempt appeal than for his midterm polling place threats and Jeffrey Epstein ties.
On Monday, the day that the DOJ’s high court response was due, it didn’t file a brief opposing Bannon’s petition, as the government routinely does when criminal defendants petition the court. Rather, the DOJ told the justices that it was making a motion in the trial court to dismiss Bannon’s case, and it asked them to vacate the appeals court ruling against him and to send the case back so it can be dismissed in the lower court.
“The government has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” the Trump DOJ’s Supreme Court filing said. It didn’t explain why it thought that justice required dismissal.
It takes at least one justice to request a response to a petition, but it’s not public which justices make such requests.
As noted
by Jordan Rubin | Feb 6, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. When we left off last week, the Supreme Court faced a simple but important test: After the court’s Republican-appointed majority approved Texas’ congressional map, would it likewise approve California’s?
The court passed the test this week, when it rejected a Republican appeal that sought to halt California’s Democratic-friendly map, which voters passed in response to the Donald Trump-spurred Texas map.
Of course, it was a test of the court’s own making, prompted by its weak gerrymandering jurisprudence in recent years and its December decision to green-light the Texas map while strongly hinting that it would also back California’s. When the court sided with Texas, the most conservative justices defended the move on the grounds that “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
So, the court kept its implicit promise. That’s good.
Noting the potential windfall for Democrats in the midterms, The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board said that angry Republicans “can blame Mr. Trump for starting the race to the gerrymander bottom.”
The court has many tests ahead this term, including another election-related case, from Louisiana, with implications for the future of voting rights. It’s also due to rule on tariffs, birthright citizenship and much more in the months ahead. With the justices set to return to the bench later this month — that’s the soonest we’d get the tariffs ruling — any action before then would come on the shadow docket, like this week’s California order. There’s another, unrelated emergency appeal from that state that the justices could decide at any time, regarding teachers telling parents if their kids express “gender incongruence.”
And there’s always new litigation from people trying to get the justices to take their cases. One of those hopeful litigants is Steve Bannon, who
by Jordan Rubin | Feb 4, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon sentenced Ryan Routh on Wednesday to life in prison for trying to assassinate Donald Trump when he was running for president in 2024, The Associated Press reported.
Federal prosecutors had urged the Trump-appointed judge to impose a life sentence on Routh to “send a message that seeking to assassinate a Presidential candidate will result in the most severe punishment.” Arguing that his crimes “undeniably warrant a life sentence,” they said in a memo ahead of sentencing that he planned the attempted assassination for months, showed his willingness to kill anyone who got in the way and expressed no remorse.
They said that he “plotted painstakingly to kill President Trump, and took significant steps toward making that happen, culminating on September 15, 2024 at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, when he sat in a sniper hide that he had carefully constructed, chambered a round in the military-grade SKS rifle that he possessed illegally, and pointed it toward President Trump and his protective detail.”
He was only thwarted, they said, “by a Secret Service agent who noticed and disrupted Routh before Routh could fire a shot.”
Cannon, who dismissed Trump’s classified documents case in July of 2024, rejected Routh’s motion for her recusal when he was charged that fall.
“Mr. Trump is the current Republican candidate for President in next month’s election,” Routh’s lawyers at the time wrote to Cannon in October of 2024. “On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly praised Your Honor for her rulings in his case. As the alleged victim here, he has a significant stake in the outcome of this case too. Were he to become President in the future, he would have authority to nominate Your
by Jordan Rubin | Feb 2, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Being a federal prosecutor has long been a prized job in the legal profession. That’s been true no matter who the president was at the time of the prosecutor’s hiring. Assistant U.S. attorneys serve across Republican and Democratic administrations, focusing on the cases they’re prosecuting, not the president’s politics at any given moment.
So it was only the latest debasement of the Justice Department in the Donald Trump era when former Trump DOJ official Chad Mizelle, who left the administration but is apparently still connected to it, posted this message on X over the weekend: “If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me. We need good prosecutors. And DOJ is hiring across the country. Now is your chance to join the mission and do good for our country.”
If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me. We need good prosecutors. And DOJ is hiring across the country. Now is your chance to join the mission and do good for our country.— Chad Mizelle (@chad_mizelle) January 31, 2026
Putting the administration’s stamp on the matter, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller boosted Mizelle’s post while adding his own pitch: “If you want to combat fraud, crime and illegal immigration, reach out. Patriots needed.”
If you want to combat fraud, crime and illegal immigration, reach out. Patriots needed. https://t.co/SyVJxAMKWQ— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 31, 2026
The informality of Mizelle’s social media post aside, its most disturbing aspect is the implication that supporting the current president’s politics is a requirement for being a federal prosecutor.
That’s unethical, because prosecutors swear an oath to the Constitution, not
by Jordan Rubin | Jan 31, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. It was always about the elections. Donald Trump’s federal agents just seized 2020 voting records from Georgia, one of the sites of his failed bid to subvert the contest he hasn’t gotten over losing to Joe Biden. And he’s still tilting at Minnesota over electoral losses there, stating falsely this month that he “won Minnesota three times.” In fact, Trump never won that Democratic-led state, which, perhaps not coincidentally, has been one of the latest targets of federal occupation.
Nor did the Republican win California, which, like Minnesota, he called “crooked” in those same remarks. The Golden State is the focus of this week’s newsletter, as the Supreme Court weighs the fate of its congressional map ahead of the November midterm elections.
The high court already approved Texas’ Trump-backed move to make its map more Republican-friendly. When it did so last month, the court seemed to approvingly cite California’s countereffort in the process. The court’s unsigned order observed that the Lone Star State “adopted the first new map, then California responded with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done.” In a concurring opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
So, how could the high court not approve the Democratic-friendly move out west? After all, a lower court panel this month quoted Alito’s concurrence in rejecting the GOP’s claim that California’s map was an unlawful racial gerrymander. The panel found that the state’s Proposition 50 “was exactly what it was billed as: a political gerrymander designed to flip five Republican-held seats to the Democrats. In other words, the ‘impetus
by Jordan Rubin | Jan 30, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
While the Minnesota courts expose immigration officials’ unprecedented violation of court orders, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s “unlawful actions” have been called out by a federal appellate panel on a San Francisco-based court.
The panel scrutinized Noem’s move to terminate the temporary protected status, or TPS, designation for Venezuelan immigrants and her partial removal of Haiti’s protections. The federal program at issue provides relief from deportation for no more than 18 months at a time. The panel ruled that Noem exceeded her authority when she moved to vacate existing TPS designations.
“The Secretary’s unlawful actions have had real and significant consequences for the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians in the United States who rely on TPS,” the panel said in an opinion by Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw. The Clinton appointee was joined by Biden appointees Salvador Mendoza Jr. and Anthony D. Johnstone.
“The Secretary’s actions fundamentally contradict Congress’s statutory design, and her assertion of a raw, unchecked power to vacate a country’s TPS is irreconcilable with the plain language of the statute,” Wardlaw wrote. She added that Noem’s actions have “left hundreds of thousands of people in a constant state of fear that they will be deported, detained, separated from their families, and returned to a country in which they were subjected to violence or any other number of harms.”
The Trump administration had cited previous Supreme Court orders provisionally backing the administration on the subject. But the panel reasoned that those high court commands “did not expressly decide the issue of whether the Government was likely to succeed on the merits of this case, so we reject the Government’s argument that
