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    The rule of law in Trump’s America and what it means for Mel Gibson’s guns – podcast

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    Who are the death row executioners? Disgraced doctors, suspended nurses and drunk drivers

    Being an executioner is not the sort of job that gets posted in a local wanted ad. Kids don’t dream about being an executioner when they grow up, and people don’t go to school for it. So how does one become a death row executioner in the US, and who are the people doing it?This was the question I couldn’t help but ask when I began a book project on lethal injection back in 2018. I’m a death penalty researcher, and I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day. Part of the riddle was who is performing these executions.Seven years later – and with the Trump administration promising more executions to come – I have an answer, sort of.We do not, and for the most part cannot, know precisely who is under the executioner’s hood. State secrecy statutes put the equivalent of a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility over these state-sanctioned killers. But litigation files and investigative journalism have revealed a number of executioners’ identities, allowing us to peek behind the veil of secrecy for a glimpse of who these people are.Consider Missouri’s chief executioner from 1995-2006, Dr Alan Doerhoff, who was responsible for 54 of Missouri’s 65 executions between 1976 and 2006. He didn’t push the syringes – shockingly, non-medical prison guards did that – but he did most everything else. “Nobody will ever do as many [executions] as I have,” he would later boast.Doerhoff’s identity was revealed when a lawyer for a condemned prisoner checked the prison’s chemical dispensary logs and discovered that 2.5 grams of sodium thiopental (the drug used to anesthetize the prisoner) had been used in previous executions. The state’s protocol called for 5 grams, double that amount. The prisoner sued.State officials first told the court that the chemical dispensary logs were wrong. But the next day, they wrote again to “apologize to the court and the parties for providing incorrect information”. The logs were correct. The amount of sodium thiopental being injected was wrong.Troubled by the finding, the court allowed the prisoner’s lawyers to conduct a limited deposition of the state’s chief executioner. The executioner stated under oath that he had problems mixing the drugs, “so right now we’re still improvising”. He also said that he “sometimes transpose[d] numbers”.View image in fullscreen“I am dyslexic,” he explained. “So, it’s not unusual for me to make mistakes.” (Doerhoff later stated that he was not dyslexic, he just sometimes mixed up numbers.)Missouri doubled down on its executioner, telling the court that it was confident in his competence and planned to continue to use him in future executions. But the court rejected the state’s assurances, writing that it was “gravely concerned that a physician who is solely responsible for correctly mixing the drugs which will be responsible for humanely ending the life of condemned inmates has a condition which causes him confusion with regard to numbers”.The state appealed, but soon thereafter, investigative journalism discovered Doerhoff’s identity. Jeremy Kohler with the St Louis Post-Dispatch broke the story in January 2008, and with it came another shocking revelation: Doerhoff had been sued for medical malpractice more than 20 times, and his hospital privileges had been revoked at two hospitals. Doerhoff had also been publicly reprimanded by the state medical board for hiding his malpractice suits from the hospitals where he practiced.All of this was known to the Missouri attorney general’s office when it assured the court of Doerhoff’s professional competence. After oral arguments, the state dropped its appeal of the ruling.The following year, Missouri’s legislature passed a law stating: “A person may not knowingly disclose the identity of a current or former member of an execution team,” authorizing punitive damages for violations.“Their answer to the public finding out they had an incompetent doctor was making it impossible to find out who the doctor is,” an ACLU spokesperson stated.No longer able to serve as Missouri’s executioner, Doerhoff joined the staff of a local hair-removal business and served as an executioner for the federal government and at least one other state – Arizona.Arizona knew about the trial court’s ruling in Missouri, and the facts behind it. But it hired Doerhoff anyway, and he conducted an execution for the state in 2007, just months after being barred from conducting executions in Missouri.When attorneys found out about Doerhoff’s involvement, the prisoners next in line for execution in Arizona sued.Arizona settled that suit in 2009, agreeing to a number of changes in its lethal injection protocol, including formal background and license checks of its executioners. But during the litigation, attorneys for the prisoners discovered that Doerhoff wasn’t the only executioner who had no business conducting executions.One of Arizona’s three IV team executioners was medical team member #3, who was once a nurse but had his nursing license suspended. At the time of the litigation, his occupation was running an appliance business in another state. The identity of medical team member #3 is unknown, but the court noted that he had been arrested multiple times, “including three times in 10 days in Arizona for a DUI in 2007”.Arizona pledged that with its new screening system in place, the court could be confident that the state would use only licensed medical personnel going forward.But in 2011, Arizona was hauled back into federal court because it had not made good on its promise. The prison director admitted to conducting five executions with full knowledge that medical team member #4 did not hold a medical license of any kind. Nor did officials conduct the required criminal history check on him. If they had, they would have learned that medical team member #4 had been charged with DUI in 2008, public intoxication in 2000, and writing a bad check before that.Medical team member #4 was a prison guard who had previously served as a medical corpsman in the military. He later stated that his only screening was a phone call from the warden “asking whether he knew how to start an IV and whether he would have a problem doing it for an execution”. He was not asked any other questions, and at the time, he had not placed an IV for 15 years. On paper, Arizona was dutifully screening its execution team members. But in reality, the state was doing nothing of the sort.View image in fullscreenMissouri and Arizona are not the only states where discoveries about executioners have raised serious questions about the care and competence with which executioners are chosen. In 2006, a federal court struck down California’s lethal injection protocol based in part on the “inconsistent and unreliable screening of execution team members”.The execution team member responsible for the custody of lethal injection drugs had been disciplined for smuggling drugs into San Quentin before joining the execution team; two team members had been arrested for drunk driving; one suffered from depression and PTSD; and one had been out on a two-month medical leave from getting into a fight with a prisoner.The court in California also noted the “extremely troubling” disappearance of sodium thiopental that was ostensibly taken from the prison pharmacy for training purposes but never used and never returned. “These circumstances may warrant investigation by an appropriate law-enforcement agency,” the court wrote. In California, the state’s executioners were also the chief suspects in a potential criminal investigation.The federal government has proven no better than states on this score. Not only did the federal government hire Doerhoff after he was banned from serving as Missouri’s executioner, but it also hired a nurse for the Timothy McVeigh execution who had been charged with felony aggravated stalking and first-degree tampering with property, ultimately pleading no contest to the misdemeanor version of both charges. The nurse had allegedly smashed the windshield and headlights of a man who was seeing his estranged wife, ran over his mailbox, smashed windows of his home, and left voice messages threatening to burn his house down and blow his “[expletive] head off”!Federal officials knew of the convictions when it hired him – the nurse was on active probation and had to get permission from his probation officer to leave the state.“It seems bizarre to me that we would knowingly allow an offender, on active supervision, to participate in the execution process at any level,” a probation supervisor had written while the department was considering the request. But the permission was granted.In an internal memo, the administrator who confirmed the request for travel wrote: “It would be extremely problematic for [the nurse] and this department if the media got wind of this.”And how did this nurse-executioner get on the federal government’s radar? He was recommended by the Missouri department of corrections. A nurse with his own serious criminal convictions was secretly conducting executions on behalf of the show-me state.Lethal injection litigation has likewise revealed patently unfit executioners in other states as well. In Maryland, litigation revealed that one member of the state’s execution team had been fired by a local police department and charged with poisoning several neighborhood dogs, while another execution team member had been suspended for spitting in prisoners’ food.In Tennessee, litigation revealed that a member of the execution team had pleaded guilty, twice, to possession of a controlled substance, and missed an execution because he was at an in-patient treatment program. That was in 2007. In 2021, Tennessee’s physician-executioner stated that he surrendered his surgery accreditation because of “too many malpractice suits” – at least 10 by his estimation.These are just the executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don’t know. As the former head of Oklahoma’s corrections department told a legislative committee in 2023, the prison staff charged with carrying out executions are “some of the lowest-paid state employees in government”.In executions, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for. Even when a doctor is nominally involved in the execution process, the people injecting the drugs are typically low-level prison employees.Most executioners say they just fell into the job. The opportunity came to them, and they had their reasons for saying yes. For prison guards, it may be a necessary step to moving up the prison ranks. Doctors likewise tend to say they simply slipped into the role. They had agreed to be an observer, but then the medical team needed help. Who were they to watch executioners prick a prisoner a dozen times in a desperate attempt to pierce the vein when they could do it more quickly?One reason doctors aren’t giving, but merits mention anyway, is money. A doctor willing to participate in an execution is a precious commodity, and states will pay dearly for it – up to $20,000 in cash per execution in some places. No doctor yet has said they’re participating in executions for the money. But the fact that they can make a killing from state killing has to be worth something.

    Corinna Lain is the author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, out on 22 April More

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    Trump DoJ unable to tell court where man wrongly deported to El Salvador is

    Lawyers for the Trump administration were unable on Friday to tell a federal court exactly where the Maryland resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month is or how he is, as the judge admonished the government at a heated hearing.The US district judge Paula Xinis said it was “extremely troubling” that the Trump administration failed to comply with a court order to provide details on the whereabouts and status of the Salvadorian citizen Kilmar Abrego García and she wanted daily updates on what the government is doing to bring him home.“Where is he and under whose authority?” Xinis asked in a Maryland courtroom.“I’m not asking for state secrets,” she said. “All I know is that he’s not here. The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: where is he?”The government side responded that it had no evidence that he is not still in El Salvador. “That is extremely troubling,” Xinis said.As Newsweek reported, Xinis added: “We’re not going to slow-walk this … We’re not relitigating what the supreme court has already put to bed.”The US supreme court on Thursday upheld the judge’s order to facilitate Abrego García’s return to the US, after a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his summary deportation on 15 March.Abrego García has had a US work permit since 2019 but was stopped and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers on 12 March and questioned about alleged gang affiliation. He was deported on one of three high-profile deportation flights to El Salvador made up chiefly of Venezuelans whom the government accuses of being gang members and assumed special powers to expel without a hearing.Xinis on Friday repeatedly pressed a government attorney for answers but the administration defied her order for details on how or when it would retrieve Abrego García and claimed she had not given them enough time to prepare.“I’m not sure what to take from the fact that the supreme court has spoken quite clearly and yet I can’t get an answer today about what you’ve done, if anything, in the past,” Xinis said.Drew Ensign, an attorney with the Department of Justice, repeated what the administration had said in court filings, that it would provide the requested information by the end of Tuesday, once it evaluated the supreme court ruling.“Have they done anything?” Xinis asked. Ensign said he did not have personal knowledge of what had been done, to which the judge responded: “So that means they’ve done nothing.”The administration said in a court filing earlier on Friday that it was “unreasonable and impracticable” to say what its next steps are before they are properly agreed upon and vetted.“Foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review,” the filing said.Abrego García’s lawyers said in a Friday court filing: “The government continues to delay, obfuscate, and flout court orders, while a man’s life and safety is at risk.”The case highlights the administration’s tensions with federal courts. Several have blocked Trump policies, and judges have expressed frustration with administration efforts – or lack of them – to comply with court orders.Abrego García’s wife, US citizen Jennifer Vásquez Sura, has not been able to speak to him since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She has been rallying outside court and has urged their supporters to keep fighting for him “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard”.The family sued to challenge the legality of his deportation and on 4 April Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” his return. The administration challenged that order at the supreme court, which upheld Xinis’s order but said the term “effectuate” was unclear and might exceed the court’s authority.The justice department in a supreme court filing on 7 April stated that while Abrego García was deported to El Salvador through “administrative error”, his actual removal from the United States “was not error”. The error, department lawyers wrote, was in removing him specifically to El Salvador despite the deportation protection order.Asked at the White House media briefing on Friday if Donald Trump wants the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to bring Abrego García with him when he visits the US on Monday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the supreme court’s ruling “made it very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to ‘facilitate’ the return, not to ‘effectuate’ the return”.Similarly, the administration’s court filing said: “The court has not yet clarified what it means to ‘facilitate’ or ‘effectuate’ the return as it relates to this case, as [the] plaintiff is in the custody of a foreign sovereign. Defendants request – and require – the opportunity to brief that issue prior to being subject to any compliance deadlines.”Maya Yang, Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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    ‘The authoritarian playbook’: Trump targets judges, lawyers … and law itself

    As Donald Trump aggressively seeks revenge against multiple foes in the US, he’s waging a vendetta using executive orders and social media against judges, law firms, prosecutors, the press and other vital American institutions to stifle dissent and exact retribution.Legal scholars say the president’s menacing attacks, some of which Trump’s biggest campaign backer, the billionaire Elon Musk, has echoed, are aimed at silencing critics of his radical agenda and undercut the rule of law in authoritarian ways that expand his own powers.“Trump’s moves are from the authoritarian playbook,” said the Harvard law school lecturer and retired Massachusetts judge Nancy Gertner. “You need to delegitimize institutions that could be critics. Trump is seeking to use the power of the presidency to delegitimize institutions including universities, law firms, judges and others. It’s the opposite of American democracy.”In a stunning move on Tuesday, Trump railed that a top Washington DC judge ought to be impeached for ruling to halt the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans allegedly including gang members, sparking the chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts, hours later to issue a strong statement against calls to impeach judges for their rulings.Legal scholars sharply criticize other attacks by Trump and the Maga world on judges who have issued rulings against executive orders or Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), with the goal of weakening the judicial branch to boost Trump’s powers.Fears about Trump’s war on his critics rose this month as the president issued executive orders penalizing three big law firms including Covington & Burling and Perkins Coie. Critics say Trump’s sanctions against the firms were sparked by their clients, respectively ex-special counsel Jack Smith, who brought charges against Trump for trying to subvert his 2020 election loss, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which hired the firm that helped pay for a dossier alleging collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign.Those executive orders, which included barring some firms from entering federal buildings, interacting with agencies and taking away security clearances from some lawyers, were widely seen as punitive measures to hurt them financially.District Judge Beryl Howell on 12 March blocked the Trump administration from enforcing key parts of its order against Perkins Coie, which she stated “runs head-on into the wall of first amendment protections”.The third law firm Trump targeted with an executive order was Paul Weiss Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, whose former partner Mark Pomerantz later tried to build a criminal case against Trump when he worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. But Trump’s executive order was reversed on 19 March after the firm agreed to provide $40m in pro bono services to support administration priorities.Legal scholars have also denounced justice department firings or demotions of some two dozen lawyers who worked on cases against Trump allies convicted for attacking the Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory.In a stark show of vindictiveness and historical revisionism about his role inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol and baseless claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was rigged, Trump addressed a justice department gathering on 14 March and proclaimed he intended to end the “weaponization” of the law against him.In an angry and rambling talk, Trump singled out among others Jack Smith, to whom Covington provided pro bono help, and the former Perkins lawyer Marc Elias, a key figure in fighting Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.Trump blasted them and others who had investigated him as “bad people, really bad people … They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country, but in the end, the thugs failed and the truth won.”Shortly after Trump spoke, the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who taught constitutional law for two decades, gave a sharp rebuttal at a rally outside the justice department. “No other president in American history has stood in the Department of Justice to proclaim an agenda of criminal prosecution and retaliation against his political foes,” Raskin said.Legal experts say Trump’s attacks on lawyers and judges are dangerous.“The sheer vindictiveness with which Trump and his allies have targeted lawyers – both in government service and in private practice – and judges has disrupted lives, inflicted costs and even raised security concerns,” said Daniel Richman, a Columbia law professor and former federal prosecutor.“I’m sure some are intimidated, and that certainly seems the intent. Others will cozy up to him. But the more this occurs – and I don’t imagine it will stop – the more it will look like Trump’s problem is less with those who practice law and more with law itself. Even allies who cheer his tactics may soon wonder how they would fare in a lawless world.”Other legal scholars express grave concerns with Trump’s widening attacks on law firms, judges and other institutions that have criticized his policies and power grabs.View image in fullscreen“Trump’s sanctions against Covington and Perkins serve two purposes. In the immediate term, he gets revenge against two firms that have offended him,” said NYU law professor Stephen Gillers.Gillers stressed that these orders also “warn other law firms that they face the same punishment if they cross Trump by representing plaintiffs challenging his executive orders. In fact, the executive orders should be called by their rightful name: vendettas.”Gillers added that the “only remaining institutional threat to Trump’s quest for total power is the judiciary … Lawyers are the gatekeepers for access to judicial power. We see a double-barreled strategy: attack the judges who criticize or rule against Trump as a warning to other judges, and attack law firms as a warning to other law firms that might take Trump to court.”The surge in Trump administration attacks on judges has been fueled by multiple court rulings that have delayed or scuttled Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s Doge operation to shrink the federal government with scant regard for congressional and judicial powers.For instance, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, last week wrote on X: “Under the precedents now being established by radical rogue judges, a district court in Hawaii could enjoin troop movements in Iraq. Judges have no authority to administer the executive branch. Or to nullify the results of a national election.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJudges who have ruled against Trump have witnessed an uptick in threats. A bomb threat was even made in March against a sister of the conservative supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett after she joined three liberal justices and Chief Justice Roberts in a ruling that went against Trump.Trump’s rightwing allies in Congress have jumped into the legal fray with calls to impeach certain judges who have ruled against the administration and some of Doge’s radical cost-cutting moves.After the New York district judge Paul Engelmayer blocked Doge on 8 February from gaining access to millions of sensitive and personal treasury records, Musk baselessly accused him of being a “corrupt judge protecting corruption” on X, the social media site he owns where he has about 200 million followers.“He needs to be impeached NOW!” Musk said on 9 February.With Musk nearby in the Oval Office last month, Trump echoed these attacks by the world’s richest man, who donated close to $300m to his campaign:“It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so maybe we have to look at the judges because I think that’s a very serious violation,” Trump said.To bolster those charges, Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican congressman, filed an impeachment resolution against the judge, whose ruling came after more than a dozen Democratic state attorneys general filed a lawsuit arguing Doge could not legally access treasury records with personal details of millions of Americans.Former federal judges and scholars say that Trump and Musk have pushed the legal envelope in ways that are unprecedented in the US.“When you flood the zone with scores of executive orders, many of which were clearly based on questionable legal grounds, no one should be surprised that they’re not withstanding judicial scrutiny,” said John Jones, an ex-federal judge who is now president of Dickinson College.“An additional problem the administration has is that it’s losing credibility with the courts by continually making disingenuous arguments in support of these orders.”Other critics voice similar concerns.“Trump’s actions aimed at the role of lawyers and the courts appear to be part of a battle to reduce the judicial branch to being subordinate to the president,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University. “If Trump is able to punish lawyers who oppose him and ignore the courts, he will be only steps away from becoming the king he seems to want to be.”On another front where Trump is eager to snuff out criticism and dissent, the president escalated his attacks on the media in his recent justice department speech by asserting without evidence that some major reporting outlets are “illegal” and “corrupt”.“These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative,” Trump said, lashing out at CNN and MSNBC as corrupt.Trump added in conspiratorial fashion: “It has to stop, it has to be illegal, it’s influencing judges and it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal.”Trump’s widening attacks on the press, the courts, law firms and other American institutions damage the rule of law in Raskin’s eyes.“Trump is attacking any source of potential institutional opposition,” Raskin said. “Anyone who offers any kind of resistance is a target of Trump’s. We’re seeing an explosion of Trump’s incorrigible lawlessness.” More

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    Trump administration briefing: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention, ‘Trumpcession’ fears and gutting USAid

    The Trump administration’s decision to have immigration authorities arrest pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for alleged support of Hamas is an attack on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union warned on Monday.“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.“The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the US and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes. To be clear: the first amendment protects everyone in the US. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate.”Outrage after Palestinian student activist detainedFree speech organizations and advocates are expressing outrage after a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, was arrested and detained over the weekend. Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities, who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.Read the full storyArrest of Palestinian activist first of ‘many to come’, Trump saysDonald Trump said on Monday that the arrest of a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, is the “first arrest of many to come”.Read the full storyUS stocks register heavy falls as White House tries to talk up Trump tariffsThe US stock market continued to drop on Monday as the White House denied that Donald Trump’s trade policies were causing lasting chaos within the economy.The S&P 500 fell 2.7%, the Dow Jones dropped 2%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 4% as investors sold shares in the so-called “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. Tesla’s shares had their worst day since September 2020, falling 15%.Read the full storyRisk of ‘Trumpcession’ rising, economists say, as global markets fallThe risk that the US economy will enter recession this year is rising, according to economists, as Donald Trump’s chaotic approach to tariffs continued to hit markets.Read the full storyTrump tariffs policy ‘misguided’ and US economy ‘very wobbly’, ex-adviser saysDonald Trump’s focus on tariffs as an economic weapon is “misguided”, and the US economy is “very wobbly”, a former adviser and longtime supporter of the president said.Read the full storyOntario sets 25% surcharge on US energy exportsThe Canadian province of Ontario is imposing a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to the states of New York, Michigan and Minnesota in protest against Donald Trump’s tariffs, Premier Doug Ford said on Monday.Read the full storyCanada’s designated PM Mark Carney meets Trudeau as Trump threat loomsCanada’s incoming prime minister, Mark Carney, has met with Justin Trudeau as the pair discuss a transfer of power after the former central banker’s landslide victory at the Liberal party’s leadership race.The meeting on Monday sets the stage for an imminent federal election and gives Canada a fresh leader to square off against the US president, with the two countries locked in a bitter trade war provoked by Donald Trump.Read the full storyUS rebrands immigration app to CBP Home with ‘self-deport’ functionOn day one of his presidency, Donald Trump, issued a directive abruptly ending the government’s use of CBP One – an online application that had served as the primary means for people at the southern border to apply for asylum in the US. On Monday, the administration announced it has reimagined the app as a platform for “self-deportation”.Read the full story83% of USAid programs terminated after purgeThe Trump administration has finished a six-week purge of programs of the US Agency for International Development, cutting 83% of its programs, according to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.Read the full storyTop Washington Post columnist quits after piece critical of Bezos is scrappedWashington Post associate editor and top political columnist Ruth Marcus is reportedly resigning after the decision by the CEO, Will Lewis, to kill her opinion column critical of the billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’s latest changes to the paper.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    There is “no military solution” to the conflict in Ukraine, US secretary of state Marco Rubio has said ahead of high-stakes meetings on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia aimed at repairing a severely damaged relationship that has left embattled Kyiv without Washington’s support.

    JD Vance’s first cousin has called the vice-president and Donald Trump “useful idiots” to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

    A man pardoned by Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection who also was convicted of plotting to kill federal agents investigating him is still legally liable for the plot, a judge ruled on Monday.

    The US secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has directed the Food and Drug Administration to revise safety rules to help eliminate a provision that allows companies to self-affirm that food ingredients are safe. The move would increase transparency for consumers as well as the FDA’s oversight of food ingredients considered to be safe, Kennedy said on Monday.

    Poland’s prime minister called on “friends” to respect their allies in a post on X that mentioned nobody by name but came a day after an extraordinary social media spat between top officials in the US and Poland over Starlink satellites.

    A Virginia man who was detained by Ice agents despite being an American citizen says he is reconsidering his support for Trump.

    Wall Street fell significantly as traders grew concerned over the possibility that Trump’s trade war will send the US economy into a recession.

    A top state department official has a history of insulting his boss, Marco Rubio, in social media posts, among many other questionable statements. More

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    Top US prosecutor quits over pressure to investigate Biden climate spending

    A top federal prosecutor has quit after refusing to launch what she called a politically driven investigation into Biden-era climate spending, exposing deepening rifts in the US’s premier law enforcement agency.Denise Cheung, head of criminal prosecutions in Washington, resigned on Tuesday after Trump appointees demanded she open a grand jury investigation into Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants based largely on an undercover video, multiple people familiar with the matter told CNN.The directive came from the acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove through Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for Washington DC US attorney. Officials wanted Cheung to investigate EPA contracts awarded during Biden’s tenure and freeze related funding, CNN reported.In her resignation letter, Cheung wrote to Martin that she and other prosecutors had determined there was insufficient evidence to warrant grand jury subpoenas, even if senior officials cited the Project Veritas video as justification.“When I explained that the quantum of evidence did not support that action, you stated that you believed that there was sufficient evidence,” Cheung wrote to Martin. “You also accused me about wasting five hours of the day ‘doing nothing’ except trying to get what the FBI and I wanted, but not what you wanted.”The dispute stems from the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin’s claim last week about $20bn in climate law funding being held in a Citibank account.The resignation adds to broader upheaval within the justice department, where prosecutors considered unaligned with current leadership have faced termination, particularly those involved in January 6 investigations. More

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    The courts separate democracy from autocracy. Will Trump defy them?

    Will the Trump administration defy the courts?JD Vance’s tweet last weekend that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” has sparked widespread concern that the Trump administration might become the first in US history to do so. At least at this stage, it is not clear that it will come to that, notwithstanding the president’s proclivity for asserting limitless executive power. But as other countries’ experiences show, if he were to adopt the position of the US vice-president, Trump would be crossing perhaps the most fundamental line demarcating constitutional democracy from autocracy.Consider just a few examples. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez spent years undermining the country’s supreme court, declaring that it lacked “legitimate and moral authority”. The former president later refused to comply with a 2003 order to demilitarize the Caracas police force, instead tightening military control over law enforcement to entrench his power. In Hungary, after failing to enforce rulings of the constitutional court, Viktor Orbán’s government openly defied the European Union’s highest court’s ruling finding Hungary’s restrictive asylum scheme in violation of EU law. Likewise, in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan systematically ignored domestic and European court of human rights rulings that ordered the government to release journalists and other political activists critical of his government.Nothing is more challenging to an authoritarian than an independent judiciary ready to hold the leader accountable. When would-be authoritarians perceive judicial oversight as a threat, they respond by dismissing and defying court rulings or otherwise undermining judicial independence. By the time the authoritarian takeover is complete, the judiciary is rendered toothless. Courts are especially vulnerable to such moves because they do not have their own enforcement arms.To be sure, we are not there yet. But Vance seems to see these examples not as object lessons in what not to do, but as models for the US president to follow. In 2021, Vance said his “one piece of advice” to Trump for a second term would be to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people … And when the courts – because you will get taken to court – and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” (It is disputed whether Jackson even said this, but in any event he never defied the court.)In Trump’s last term, he had a worse won-lost record in the supreme court than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt – yet he abided by all court orders. And in the wake of concern about Vance’ s comments, Trump said he always obeys courts, but will pursue appeals. Thus far, that seems to be the case. But no responsible government official – much less the No 2 official in the executive branch – should even suggest that defying the courts is appropriate.View image in fullscreenTrump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, is also fanning the flames. On 8 February, hours after a federal judge in New York temporarily blocked Musk’s team from accessing sensitive personal information held by the Department of the Treasury on millions of Americans, Musk shared a tweet from another user saying: “I don’t like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I’m just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us.” The next day, Musk posted: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!”On 12 February, Musk tweeted: “Bravo!” in response to a claim by El Salvador’s autocratic president, Nayib Bukele, that he had impeached judges in 2021 “and then proceeded to fix the country”. Musk added: “We must impeach judges who are grossly undermining the will of the people and destroying America. It is the only way.” Bukele’s removal of five constitutional court judges in 2021 is widely regarded as a “technical coup” that paved the way for him to seek re-election in violation of constitutional term limits. Musk is no lawyer, but he should know that in the US, impeachment is reserved for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, not decisions Musk does not like.Government officials are of course free to criticize court decisions. But Vance’s and Musk’s comments echo those of authoritarian regimes around the world, which often seek to undermine the legitimacy of any institution that might constrain their actions – the courts, the press, the non-profit sector. The criticism is often the first step in a campaign to sweep away all constraints.The federal courts in the US system are given independence and final say on legal disputes so that they can act as a check on the political branches. In 1975, the supreme court explained that “all orders and judgments of courts must be complied with promptly.” Indeed, the chief justice, John Roberts, in his annual end-of-year report on the federal judiciary in 2024, identified “threats to defy lawfully entered judgments” as one of the core issues that “threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends”.The moment of truth may come soon. More than 60 lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s initial measures – from seeking to revoke birthright citizenship to freezing federal funding. Nearly every court to rule thus far has ruled against the administration.Were the Trump administration to follow Vance’s and Musk’s advice and defy the supreme court, the fallout would be swift, widespread – and justified. The supreme court has limited formal resources to compel the president to follow its dictates, because the president, not the courts, oversees federal law enforcement. Despite that formal reality, defiance would be an impeachable offense – and if the Republican party stood behind the president at that point, it would pay greatly at the polls. That’s because few principles are as fundamental to the American system as the notion that the supreme court has final say on constitutional and statutory issues and its orders must be obeyed. Trump would cross that line at his own, his party’s, and the country’s peril.

    Amrit Singh is a law professor and executive director of the Rule of Law Impact Lab at Stanford Law School. David Cole is a professor at Georgetown Law and former legal director of the ACLU More