Category: Blogs

New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested outside an immigration courtroom Tuesday. Lander has been volunteering as an observer and escort for people with immigration hearings in recent weeks. In this case, while accompanying a man named Edgardo, a group of ICE agents approached the two men, who were walking arm in arm. Lander asked repeatedly to see a judicial warrant before being handcuffed and detained. Lander was later released after New York Governor Kathy Hochul condemned the arrest and visited New York City to lobby for his release. Five other mayoral candidates also condemned Lander’s arrest, although current Mayor Eric Adams has stayed silent. Adams “has sold this city out to Donald Trump to try to get his own pardon,” says Lander. “Let’s be clear: It’s only himself he cares about, and he is putting New York’s immigrants in harm’s way.”

The Supreme Court has upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts over dissent from the court’s Democratic appointees.

The Republican-appointed majority said Wednesday that the state law isn’t subject to heightened scrutiny under the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Reasoning that the law doesn’t discriminate based on sex, Roberts wrote that it “prohibits healthcare providers from administering puberty blockers and hormones to minors for certain medical uses, regardless of a minor’s sex.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent for the three Democratic appointees that the law plainly discriminated on the basis of sex, and so it deserved greater scrutiny from the court. “By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims,” she wrote.

The appeal presented national implications for other states with similar laws and for transgender rights more broadly. According to KFF, which tracks health policy, 27 states have laws or policies limiting youth access to gender-affirming care.

The justices took the case at the urging of the federal government during the Biden administration. Its petition noted that states across the country have laws that bar transgender adolescents from receiving certain treatments but don’t restrict those same treatments for any other purpose. Those laws “classify based on sex and transgender status,” the petition argued.

Defending the law, the state said it’s “not unconstitutional discrimination to say that drugs can be prescribed for one reason but not another.” The state further argued that its law doesn’t classify people based on sex but rather creates two groups: “minors seeking drugs for gender transition and minors seeking drugs for other medical purposes.”

After Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, the federal government told the court in February that its Biden-era stance “no longer represent the United States’ position.” Still, the government didn’t ask the justices to dismiss the appeal, citing several factors including that the court’s resolution of the case would affect many pending cases in the lower courts.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

In recent months we’ve seen the Trump administration punishing speech critical of Israel in its widening effort to combat what it sees as antisemitism. As protestors have been detained for pro-Palestinian activism, we’ve seen attacks on Jews and people expressing concern for Israeli hostages in Gaza — and in the wake of all this, a lot Jews don’t agree on which actions constitutive antisemitism. On this episode, we’re looking at the landscape of this disagreement, and talking to the legal scholar who came up with the definition of antisemitism that the White House is using, and who says he’s worried that definition is being used in a way that could hurt Jews instead of protect them.

This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Ko Takasugi-Czernowin.

Friday, June 13, was a truly unlucky day for John Eastman, a key architect of President Trump’s plot to disrupt the results of the 2020 presidential election. A California appellate court, charged with reviewing recommendations to discipline lawyers in that state, affirmed the findings of a trial judge and recommended that Eastman “be disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Eastman’s name be stricken from the roll of attorneys.”

The judges found that his work on the 2020 election case was shoddy and deceptive. “Disbarment,” they said, “is necessary to protect the public, the courts, and the legal profession.”  

For any lawyer, this is a professional death sentence. But the court’s decision is not only a devastating blow to Eastman but also to the Trumpist myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. 

That lie drove MAGA’s 2024 election efforts and still animates Trump’s speeches, including the one he recently gave to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C. It is also embraced by the heads of the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

And, as the court noted, Eastman himself continues, to this day, to claim that there were “nefarious forces behind former President Biden’s 2020 electoral win.”

But like the House Jan. 6 Committee and 60 other courts, the judges serving on the Review Department of the California State Bar Court would have none of it. They made clear that “in a democracy nothing can be more fundamental than the orderly transfer of power that occurs after a fair and unimpeded electoral process,” and that Trump and Eastman violated the law by conspiring and lying to disrupt the 2020 election. 

So why is Friday’s Eastman ruling significant? 

The case is unique and momentous because this is the only proceeding where Eastman, along with supporting denialist enthusiasts, testified under oath, cross-examined their critics and presented their full denialism defense. Eastman — assisted by his denialist apostles, who took 19 days to testify, present 7 witnesses and introduce over 180 document exhibits — had more than his day in court. He also presented his stolen election narrative to the public-at-large, with thousands watching by Zoom.

After considering this evidence, the Review Department court held that Eastman’s “false narrative” of “nefarious forces behind” President Biden’s 2020 win “resulted in the undermining of our country’s electoral process, reduced faith in election professionals, and lessened respect for the courts of this land.”  

And even if neither of the meticulous decisions of these two California courts changes the minds of the MAGA faithful nor shames Republican leadership into rejecting the Big Lie, the decisions and the evidence that support them will withstand the tests of time and help foil historical revisionism. They set the record straight and ensure that Trump and his accomplices will have difficulty escaping history’s judgment. 

As former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes observed, court judgments like the one handed down last week are addressed not just to our present moment but “to the intelligence of a future day.”

The Eastman case demonstrates again that misinformation and lies collapse in a courtroom where facts and evidence rule. Among the courts’ key findings are: 

• Eastman admitted that he knew of no significant ballot fraud that would justify challenging the election results. 
   
• Eastman failed to “support the Constitution or laws of the United States” as all lawyers must do. 
   
• Eastman was grossly negligent in failing to investigate the bizarre results of statistical studies on which he relied to disrupt the presidential election — for example, that there was a one quadrillion to the fourth power chance of Biden winning four states after Clinton lost them in 2016. 
   
• Eastman knew that his Jan. 6, 2020, Ellipse speech was built on lies and willful blindness. “We know there was…traditional fraud that occurred,” he said. “We know that dead people voted.” At the time, he understood neither claim was true. And the Review Department rejected Eastman’s “merely ‘rhetorical hyperbole’” defense. 

  The courts also did not find his explanation a credible defense for his fraudulent actions and mischaracterizations. Both courts rejected Eastman’s claims that such statements and rhetorical hyperbole are constitutionally protected.

  While recognizing that all lawyers have a First Amendment right to make public statements, the Review Department court said that “this right does not extend to making knowing or reckless false statements of fact or law.” Nor does the First Amendment protect speech “that is employed as a tool in the commission of a crime.”

• Eastman falsely told the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” crowd and the nation that state election law irregularities and fraudulent voting had changed the result of the presidential election. Part of the proof? As the trial judge noted, on Nov. 29, 2020, Eastman wrote to fellow MAGA lawyer Cleta Mitchell that he knew of no actual evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in any states: “It would be nice to have actually hard documented evidence of the fraud.”  
   
• Eastman’s biggest lie was that Vice President Pence had the authority to interfere in the electoral vote. Both Eastman and Trump knew Pence had no such authority, but, on the president’s behalf, Eastman continued to press Pence and his lawyer to disrupt the Electoral College count.  

  Even Eastman’s own testifying constitutional expert and family friend, conservative Professor John Yoo, flipped on Eastman. Yoo breathtakingly admitted that the Trump-Eastman alternative elector notion was “a made-up dispute rather than a real one” and that Pence’s rejection of the pair’s arguments was “unassailable.” 

• The Review Department also emphasized that Eastman’s testimony during the bar disciplinary proceedings demonstrated that his beliefs were not sincere, honest or credible. From start to finish, the court found, he “used his skills to push a false narrative in the courtroom, the White House, and the media.” 

Despite such plentiful and well-documented findings, which California law insists must meet the heavy burden of “clear and convincing evidence” before an attorney can be disbarred, Trump’s top election lawyer has remained defiant, disingenuous and not credible. Eastman characterized the bar proceeding as “political persecution.” 

He insisted that those who brought charges against him “should themselves be disbarred,” and that the Office of Chief Trial Counsel of the State Bar and the trial judge were “partisan” actors who had made campaign contributions to Democrats.  

This rhetoric, of course, sounds eerily familiar.  

Eastman will likely appeal to the California Supreme Court and, if he loses there, eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.

It is also possible that when the next Supreme Court vacancy occurs, Trump may nominate Eastman. After all, if we can have a convicted felon in the White House, why not a disbarred, but loyal, lawyer on the nation’s highest court? 

Whatever unfolds for Eastman, and despite the profound damage that Trump’s election denialism has done to American democracy, the Eastman case compellingly illustrates Alexander Hamilton’s confidence that this nation is well served by an independent judiciary. 

As if anticipating the election denialism of Trump and Eastman, Hamilton argued that courts would “guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of…the acts of designing men or the influence of particular [circumstances which] sometimes disseminate among the people themselves…” 

Nearly 250 years later, Hamilton sounds positively clairvoyant. 

 

Neil Goteiner was a pro-bono trial attorney consultant to the California State Bar during the Eastman proceedings.