by Jordan Rubin | Dec 18, 2025 | Deadline: Legal Blog
“In America, we do not jail people for political speech.”
That’s the first line of a lawsuit filed Wednesday against Tennessee law enforcement officials who arrested a man for a social media post following Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September.
Larry Bushart’s 37 days behind bars before his baseless charge was dropped, however, show that we do, in fact, do this in America.
But his civil action raises the question of what consequences, if any, there will be for that violation of American laws and values, which are being tested after the popular conservative commentator’s death with reprisals against people for speaking about the tragedy in ways that some powerful people don’t like.
Bushart is a retired law enforcement officer in Lexington, Tennessee. He posted a series of political memes on Facebook under a post about a vigil for Kirk in nearby Perry County, Tennessee. One of them quoted a statement that President Donald Trump made after an Iowa school shooting the year before in which Trump said, “We have to get over it.” Bushart wrote over that statement: “This seems relevant today…”
Trump’s statement was about a shooting at Perry High School in Iowa (not Tennessee). Bushart’s suit said that Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems knew the meme was about an Iowa school but still “publicly claimed it might have caused ‘mass hysteria’ if interpreted as a prediction of what President Trump might say after a hypothetical shooting at Perry County High School.” Weems directed Bushart’s arrest, and the former lawman was jailed on a $2 million bond he couldn’t afford, based on the false claims by Weems and his investigator, Jason Morrow, that Bushart had threatened mass violence at a school.
“It
by Jordan Rubin | Dec 15, 2025 | Deadline: Legal Blog
This week was supposed to kick off with testimony from a whistleblower in a Washington judge’s contempt inquiry into Trump administration officials. But a federal appellate panel with Donald Trump appointees in the majority prevented that from happening.
“The administrative stay should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that petition or motion,” Friday’s appellate order said, referring to the government’s emergency appeal to halt U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s proceedings. The order said the purpose of the pause was to give the court time to consider the matter. It noted that Judge J. Michelle Childs, a Biden appointee, voted to deny the stay, which Trump-appointed Judges Neomi Rao and Justin Walker granted.
Whatever the order’s reasoning, it has the effect of at least further prolonging Boasberg’s long-running bid to get to the bottom of Trump officials’ violation of his March order to halt flights to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act – and what to do about it.
This isn’t the first time that Trump-appointed judges in D.C. have intervened in the matter, having previously cast doubt on the validity of Boasberg’s efforts and prolonged his ability to conduct his inquiry earlier this year. A fuller slate of D.C. Circuit judges in November permitted the trial judge to move forward, which he quickly sought to do.
Play
‘Not even close to legitimate’: Retired judge slams DOJ filing misconduct complaint
August 6, 2025 / 04:08
It was back in April that Boasberg found probable cause that the conduct of government defendants constituted contempt. He wrote that the Constitution “does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it.”
Yet,
by Jordan Rubin | Dec 12, 2025 | Deadline: Legal Blog
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court wrapped up its December hearing session this week. It kicked off with a case that could “destroy the structure of government” if the Trump administration has its way. And that was just Monday.
The destruction concern came from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent,” she told U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer during the hearing in Trump v. Slaughter.
Sauer pressed the high court to overturn its 1935 precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which has protected independent federal agencies from presidential control. The hearing suggested that the only question is how the administration will win the case, not whether it will.
On Tuesday, one of Sauer’s top deputies pressed the court to lift yet another limit on campaign financing. Sarah Harris represented the administration in backing JD Vance and other Republicans’ bid to let political parties coordinate campaign spending with candidates. A 2001 precedent upheld those restrictions, but Harris argued that “intervening developments have demolished” its reasoning.
What changed since 2001? The court’s membership. Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Harris clerked, is the only justice still on the high court bench. He authored the dissent in that 5-4 decision, writing that he remained “baffled that this Court has extended the most generous First Amendment safeguards to filing lawsuits, wearing profane jackets, and exhibiting drive-in movies with nudity, but has offered only tepid protection to the core speech and associational rights that our Founders sought to defend.” He’s now part of a GOP-appointed supermajority that is enthusiastically projecting its vision of the founding fathers’ vision.
But a
by Jordan Rubin | Dec 12, 2025 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Trump Justice Department has again failed to get a new indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James, with a grand jury declining Thursday to return charges, according to two sources familiar with the presentation.
The failure follows another grand jury rejection last Thursday and a dismissal the week before that of James’ charges on the grounds that the prosecutor behind them, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed. The dismissal left open the opportunity to bring new charges with a lawful prosecutor.
In a statement, James’ lawyer Abbe Lowell said, “For the second time in seven days, the Department of Justice has failed in its clear attempt to fulfill President Trump’s political vendetta against Attorney General James.”
He said the “unprecedented rejection makes even clearer that this case should never have seen the light of day. Career prosecutors who knew better refused to bring it, and now two different grand juries in two different cities have refused to allow these baseless charges to be brought. In addition, a federal judge threw out the first indictment, pointing to the illegal appointment of a prosecutor put in place to carry out the President’s revenge. This case already has been a stain on this Department’s reputation and raises troubling questions about its integrity. Any further attempt to revive these discredited charges would be a mockery of our system of justice.”
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.
Historically, getting indictments from grand juries has not been a difficult task, given the relatively low bar that prosecutors must clear at that early stage of a criminal case. But this year has revealed a stunning pattern of grand jurors refusing to approve cases brought by the DOJ in
by Jordan Rubin | Dec 10, 2025 | Deadline: Legal Blog
When the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed Emil Bove to a lifetime seat on the federal bench this summer, it did so in spite of ethical concerns that set him apart from some of Donald Trump’s other judicial nominees.
Given those concerns, which stemmed from his unscrupulous handling of multiple cases as a Justice Department lawyer, Bove could have chosen to go above and beyond to reassure the American people that he views the job of a judge as different from the job of a partisan lawyer (which a DOJ lawyer shouldn’t be, anyway).
He chose differently Tuesday, when he attended a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard reported that Bove said he was there as a citizen to watch the president speak.
Of course, there’s a difference between the rights of a private citizen and the role of a judge who’s tasked with avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. Bove prioritized the former over the latter by attending the political speech of the president who just appointed him and whose policies he might evaluate as a federal appellate judge. He sits on the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit.
The public display came as Bove, who previously represented Trump as a criminal defense lawyer, features in a Washington, D.C., judge’s contempt inquiry into DOJ lawyers’ actions in response to his order to halt Alien Enemies Act flights to El Salvador in March.
A DOJ whistleblower alleged that Bove said “that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.” The whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, is slated to testify next week in Washington. Bove said in a sworn declaration to the judge this week that he had “contributed to privileged legal advice” on the matter but that he
