There’s more than one reason that Todd Blanche should not be attorney general of the United States. You’ll be hearing plenty about them in the days and weeks ahead, following President Donald Trump’s nomination of his former criminal defense lawyer to lead the Department of Justice.

One way to view the nominee is through a single word: “tainted.”

That’s how a judge described Blanche’s investigation into Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who became a prime target of the administration’s crudely incompetent deportation regime last year. The Trump-controlled government illegally sent Abrego to El Salvador in violation of a court order, then resisted additional court orders for his return, and then finally secured his return but only to greet him with an indictment that a judge recently dismissed as unconstitutionally vindictive.

It’s rare for judges to grant vindictive prosecution motions, but the actions of Blanche and his colleagues made it possible. Indeed, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw emphasized that he didn’t reach the conclusion “lightly” in his ruling last month.

But in dismissing the charges of illegally transporting undocumented immigrants, to which Abrego had pleaded not guilty, Crenshaw wrote that “absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution.” The Obama-appointed judge recalled that the government had closed its investigation into the Tennessee traffic stop at the center of the case in 2022. It was only reopened after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his right to remedy his illegal removal.

Crenshaw singled out the blundering of Blanche, who is currently the acting attorney general after Pam Bondi’s departure. He was deputy attorney general at the time of the Abrego probe. “Absent Blanche’s tainted investigation,” Crenshaw wrote in his May 22 ruling, Abrego’s illegal indictment would not have happened.

The judge noted that Blanche said in a Fox News interview that the executive branch only started investigating Abrego after a judge in Maryland “questioned” the decision to deport him illegally.

In fact, Crenshaw’s dismissal ruling was only made possible by his previous finding that Abrego could proceed with discovery into potential vindictiveness. Blanche played a starring role in that incremental ruling last year, where Crenshaw wrote, “Deputy Attorney General Blanche’s remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights to bring suit against the Executive Official Defendants, rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”

Therefore, Blanche has not only acted as an instrument for Trump’s revenge but has done so in a manner that has thwarted that revenge’s success. To be sure, Blanche is a competent attorney, but he has chosen what might be termed a “tainted” path. If the GOP-controlled Senate confirms him to the top job full time, then a microscopically dim silver lining could be that his continued service to Trump will result in further fumbles.

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President Donald Trump will have another case coming to the Supreme Court from his personal docket. This one relates to the defamation lawsuit he filed against CNN over the network’s use of the phrase “big lie” regarding his claims about the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

In March, the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declined to consider his case, after a three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld a district judge’s ruling against him. Two of the three judges from the unanimous panel ruling were Trump appointees, as was the district judge who dismissed Trump’s suit in 2023. The judge did so on the grounds that the statements at issue were opinion, not factually false statements, and that Trump hadn’t shown that CNN acted with “actual malice.”

Trump argued that CNN’s use of the “big lie” phrase was intended to associate him with Adolf Hitler and Nazi propaganda. But the appellate panel deemed his claim “unpersuasive,” calling his assumption that the term is clear enough to be a factual statement “untenable.” It called his other claims “meritless.”

The March denial from the full appeals court put the president on the clock to petition the justices if he wanted a chance at saving the case. A filing this month to the high court confirms that he will be petitioning the justices, but not quite yet. The filing said his petition is due June 15 but he wants an extension to Aug. 14. Such extensions are routinely requested and granted. The request was made specifically to Justice Clarence Thomas, which is also routine because Thomas is the justice assigned to field administrative requests like this from the 11th Circuit.

In his extension request, Trump’s personal lawyers appeared to re-up his rigged-election claims that he has continued to press. Previewing the petition they intend to file, they said the network’s “allegations were false, but were perceived as historical fact by large segments of CNN’s audience. In reality, President Trump was lawfully pursuing then-unresolved, and now proven, claims about election irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.” The filing does not appear to detail the “irregularities” or how they have been “proven.”

On top of the many high court cases related to his administration, the promised petition will only be the latest one from the president’s personal docket. He is already pursuing an appeal in the E. Jean Carroll litigation, in which he is vying to upend the millions of dollars in damages she won after a jury found him civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming her. The justices have not yet decided whether they are going to review his Carroll appeal, which involves two separate petitions, one of which has been pending for months and another that his lawyer said should be filed soon.

Separately, a petition is pending against CNN in another Trump-related defamation case. The petition was brought by Alan Dershowitz over the network’s coverage of his representation of Trump during his first impeachment trial in his first term. Like Trump in his CNN case, Dershowitz has lost in the lower courts. The justices have not yet decided whether they will review Dershowitz’s petition.

It takes at least four justices to agree to grant review.

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No Supreme Court justices dissented Monday from the court’s refusal to hear an appeal from Mississippi death row prisoner Tony Terrell Clark, who argued that he was forced to meet an “impossible” standard.

Clark had claimed that his right to an impartial jury was violated when Black people were kept off the jury because of their race. But to vindicate his rights on appeal in Mississippi state court, he said, he had to prove that the outcome of his trial would have been different without the jury violation.

Yet even though Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with her colleagues that Clark’s appeal didn’t merit high court review, she penned a separate statement to call out what she deemed the “problematic” standard that the state’s top court applied against him, in the context of his claim that his trial counsel ineffectively challenged the prosecution’s strikes of prospective jurors.

Clark’s case involved an interplay between two types of legal claims: a “Batson” claim and a “Strickland” claim, both of which are named for the 1980s-era Supreme Court cases from which they came. Batson claims (from the case of Batson v. Kentucky) are when a defendant argues that a potential juror was illegally kept off the jury because of their race. Strickland claims (from the case of Strickland v. Washington) are when a defendant argues that their lawyer was ineffective. Defendants bringing Strickland claims must show two things: 1) that their lawyer was deficient and 2) that the defendant was prejudiced by the deficiency.

The “impossible” Mississippi standard, as Clark put it, was that to prove on appeal that he was prejudiced by his counsel’s mishandling of a Batson challenge, the state high court said he needed to show that the outcome of his trial would have been different had the lawyer performed effectively.

Sotomayor took issue with that. “The Mississippi Supreme Court’s approach, to the extent it requires a criminal defendant to show that a competently presented Batson challenge would have produced a different trial outcome, is almost certainly wrong,” the Obama-appointed justice wrote.

She noted that other courts have taken a different approach: They make the narrower inquiry of whether the Batson challenge itself would have been successful if the lawyer had handled it properly, rather than looking at whether the resulting trial would have turned out differently, as Mississippi does.

In his Supreme Court petition, Clark explained that his post-conviction counsel tried to meet the “impossible” standard by talking to a potential Black juror who was kept off the jury. “As common-sense dictates,” his petition said, the struck juror “could not offer an opinion on whether she would have voted guilty or for a death sentence if she was on the jury.”  

In her statement Monday, Sotomayor said her colleagues “should one day resolve” the issue and decide “that Strickland does not require the kind of prejudice analysis that the Mississippi Supreme Court has adopted for Batson-related ineffectiveness claims.”

But the justice conceded that Clark’s appeal didn’t present the proper case for doing so. She recalled that the state high court found that Clark failed to satisfy not only the prejudice prong but also the deficiency prong, and that he didn’t argue the deficiency issue to the justices. “Given the independent basis on which Clark’s Strickland claim failed below, I concur in the denial of Clark’s petition for a writ of certiorari,” she wrote.

Seeking to uphold Clark’s conviction and death sentence for the 2014 murder of 13-year-old Muhammed Saeed during a robbery, Mississippi’s lawyers likewise emphasized that the state court ruled against Clark on both the deficiency and prejudice prongs of the Strickland test.

When Clark’s case was previously before the high court in 2023, Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that said the court’s rejection of what was then his latest appeal meant that “a Black man will be put to death in the State of Mississippi based on the decision of a jury that was plausibly selected based on race.”

Monday’s denial also follows a recent 5-4 ruling from the justices in favor of another Mississippi prisoner, Terry Pitchford, who also raised a Batson claim and argued that the state high court wrongly ruled against him, too. The Supreme Court decision in Pitchford’s favor was authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has long taken an interest in Batson claims, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson. Pitchford’s case didn’t raise the complication that Clark’s case did of the Strickland issue being layered on top of the Batson issue (though the Pitchford case raised other procedural issues that, as the 5-4 vote indicates, made it a close one).  

Sotomayor’s statement Monday appeared on the court’s order list, a routine document on which the justices announce the latest action in pending appeals. In line with the court’s typical practice, the justices didn’t explain why they denied Clark’s petition. There usually isn’t any comment from any of the justices accompanying denials. Therefore, Sotomayor’s statement made the case stand out and included a rare explanation for why at least one of the justices agreed to pass on the petition.

It takes four justices to grant review, giving the court’s six-justice GOP-appointed majority significant power not only over how cases are decided but over which cases are decided.

On that note, Monday’s order list also included a case in which Sotomayor and Jackson noted their dissent from the court’s decision to vacate a lower court ruling that sided with a defendant. The high court majority sent the case back to the lower court, ordering further review in light of the justices’ latest sentencing-related rulings that made it harder for prisoners to win compassionate release.

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.

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A new lawsuit seeks to halt the “UFC Freedom 250” event that is scheduled for this coming weekend, calling it “deeply corrupt” and arguing that it runs afoul of federal regulations.

The plaintiffs are activist Susan Douglas and Vietnam War veteran Paul Romano. Represented by lawyers with the Public Integrity Project, they said in their complaint that they brought the case “to seek judicial relief for their injuries, uphold the rule of law, and protect our nation’s most cherished monuments from corrupt exploitation.”

Their complaint focuses on the relationship between UFC head Dana White and President Donald Trump. The plaintiffs argue that the event is poised to benefit the two men personally rather than benefit the country, a distinction the plaintiffs maintain has legal significance in their favor.

White said the goal is to “celebrate the 250th birthday of America” when he puts on the cage fights among professional mixed martial artists on the South Lawn of the White House in a massive structure known as “the Claw.”

The plaintiffs cast the card in a less patriotic light.  

While observing that the event coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday, they noted that White is a close friend and ally of the president, who is giving White and his company “what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.”

The plaintiffs added that Trump stands to benefit directly too, citing reporting that earlier this spring he bought up to $50,000 stock in the company that owns the UFC.

They said White “has good reason to stick to his story” about the event being a celebration of America because, they observed, federal law “tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces, which are national parklands.”

They said the plan for the event “is for fighters to conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”

Under the usual permitting regime, no special events can be held on the South Lawn or at the Lincoln Memorial, and structures can’t be built on the South Lawn without express authorization from Congress and a thorough environmental review. The plaintiffs conceded that there is a temporary regulation authorizing events that celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. But they said the UFC Freedom 250 event fails to satisfy even that relaxed rule because it would still require the event to be “for the celebration of the 250th anniversary of American Independence” and “planned, organized, and executed” by the federal government. The plaintiffs contend the UFC event is neither of those things.  

Their specific legal claims include alleged violations of National Park Service regulations, erecting structures on federal parkland without congressional authorization and failure to conduct environmental review.

When the government responds in court, one of its arguments may be that the plaintiffs don’t have legal standing to bring the case — that is, that they aren’t uniquely harmed by the spectacle such that a successful suit would heal them. The government has raised the standing issue in other recent pending challenges against high-profile executive actions like the White House ballroom and the “anti-weaponization” fund.

According to the plaintiffs’ complaint in the UFC case, Douglas is a retired government employee who frequently organizes and attends protests and other events on the National Mall, at the Lincoln Memorial and near the White House. Romano, they said, is a retired Air Force sergeant and former police officer with the Department of Defense who frequently travels along the National Mall and past the White House and Lincoln Memorial as part of his part-time work as a ride-share driver. They have both “protested and testified against alterations to DC’s monumental landscape,” per their complaint.

In an accompanying filing seeking a temporary restraining order against the government, Douglas and Romano argue that they “are suffering aesthetic injuries from the erection of ‘the Claw’ on the South Lawn” and that Douglas in particular “will suffer aesthetic injury if the UFC Freedom 250 weigh-ins are permitted to occur at the Lincoln Memorial.”

They said Douglas “regularly travels to the affected areas for protests and has specific plans to visit on four occasions between now and the conclusion of UFC Freedom 250, including on the nights of both the weigh-ins, June 13, and the June 14 fights.”

They said Romano “has no choice but to see the offending aesthetics, as he must frequently travel through the area for work. He therefore has no choice but to observe the desecration of these sites.”

They added that Romano in particular, being a Vietnam War veteran, suffers “the dignitary and emotional harms that come from national memorials being used for corrupt purposes.” And they said they would have submitted public comments if the “massive construction project” were submitted for environmental review as required.

In response to the suit, the White House released a statement:

This is an obstructionist, baseless, and dilatory lawsuit brought simply to prevent President Trump from hosting what will undoubtedly go down as one of the most historic sporting events in our Nation’s history during our semiquincentennial celebration. This iconic event is no different than the various other White House-hosted events on the South Lawn and properly permitted events on the Ellipse and National Mall throughout the year.

This article has been updated to include the White House’s statement.

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