A federal judge refused to halt the UFC Freedom 250 cage fights set for this weekend at the White House, despite a lawsuit that called the event a “volcano of corruption” that will mark “the first private, for-profit sporting event ever held on White House grounds.”

In a ruling on Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, said he rejected the plaintiffs’ emergency application because they failed “to establish both a substantial likelihood of standing and irreparable harm, and because the equities and public interest weigh against emergency relief.”

The case was brought by activist Susan Douglas and Vietnam War veteran Paul Romano, who challenged the use of the Lincoln Memorial chamber and the South Lawn of the White House. Represented by the Public Integrity Project, they alleged that the event runs afoul of federal regulations and isn’t the purely patriotic display that President Donald Trump and UFC head Dana White have portrayed.

The plaintiffs said it will “feature million-dollar VIP packages, brand placement opportunities adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial, and an exclusive broadcast on the President’s favored streaming service.” The streaming service they referred to is Paramount Plus, noting in their complaint that the UFC’s broadcast partner, Paramount Skydance, is run by Trump allies Larry and David Ellison and “has decided that no American will be able to take in this ‘celebration of America’ without first paying $8.99 plus tax for a Paramount Plus streaming subscription.”

Calling the event a “volcano of corruption,” the plaintiffs said that it “will mark an inflection point in American history.” They added, “The images it generates will one day appear in the history books — and not in the chapters about times remembered fondly.”

White said the goal is to “celebrate the 250th birthday of America” in putting on the fights among professional mixed martial artists on the South Lawn of the White House in a massive structure called “the Claw.”

The plaintiffs noted that the event coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday and that White is a close friend and ally of the president. They said Trump 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.”

Douglas and Romano added that Trump stands to benefit directly, citing reporting that earlier this spring he bought 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.”

The Trump administration said the plan is to hold a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday; a ceremonial weigh-in at the Ellipse on Saturday, followed by a concert headlined by the Zac Brown Band; and seven UFC matches to be held on the White House South Lawn on Sunday.

Defending the event, the administration called it a “collaboration” with the UFC and called the suit meritless, arguing, among other things, that the plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case in the first place. Rather than being truly harmed, officials said, the plaintiffs sought to “seek out that which offends their sensibilities, just so they can complain about it.”

The administration said the suit’s last-minute nature alone should defeat it, calling the timing “inexcusable” because “these events were publicly announced almost a year ago; the dates were confirmed by the White House three months ago; and site preparations have been publicly visible for weeks.” The plaintiffs insisted they “acted promptly as soon as their injuries accrued and the full scope of the event’s lawlessness became clear.”

The plaintiffs alleged that they suffered “aesthetic injuries” from the Claw’s construction and that Douglas in particular “will suffer aesthetic injury if the UFC Freedom 250 weigh-ins are permitted to occur at the Lincoln Memorial.” Douglas said she “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.”

Romano said he “has no choice but to see the offending aesthetics, as he must frequently travel through the area for work [as a part-time ride-share driver]. He therefore has no choice but to observe the desecration of these sites.” As a Vietnam War veteran, he said he suffers “the dignitary and emotional harms that come from national memorials being used for corrupt purposes.”

But in his ruling on Friday, Mehta said the plaintiffs couldn’t show they were “directly affected” by the government’s actions.

“Even if Plaintiffs had established standing, the court still would deny emergency relief because Plaintiffs have not proven irreparable harm,” the judge went on, adding that their “unreasonable delay in filing suit” further hurt their claim. He said they waited more than two weeks after visible preparations commenced at the White House to seek emergency relief.

Mehta also said that the “for-profit elements of UFC Freedom 250 have long been known” and that the “absence of congressional approval and a NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] review is not new information.”

On the environmental front, the judge said that the plaintiffs failed to show any harm that would come from the press conference and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, and that the UFC estimates it will spend $700,000 to remediate grass damaged by the Claw on the South Lawn.

The judge concluded that the risk of any significant environmental damage “therefore appears remote,” whereas the harms on the government side include the time, effort and money that have gone into planning the event, as well as the interests of spectators, remote viewers and the millions of dollars the UFC and related organizations have spent.

“The potential loss of those dollars resulting from a last-minute, court-ordered stoppage cannot be ignored,” the judge wrote.

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“In a recent column, you wrote that one of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers had written to the Supreme Court justices ‘to suggest that they “may wish to consider the petitions together” once the upcoming one is filed’ in the E. Jean Carroll appeal. How is that legal? Does the Supreme Court entertain these sorts of communications?” — LG

Hi LG,

It is common practice for lawyers to alert courts to relevant developments in their cases. Supreme Court practice is no exception.

While it’s perfectly legal to write such letters, the degree to which the justices “entertain” them can be hard to pinpoint. They aren’t formal motions that the court either grants or denies. Rather, they aim to bolster the positions that the lawyers were already pressing. Therefore, it can be tough to isolate a letter’s effect, if any, in the context of the broader case in which it appears. The recent letter in Trump v. Carroll is a good example of that, for reasons I’ll explain below.

First, some background to help understand the letter’s significance (and potential insignificance) in the context of this complex litigation.

There are two separate but related civil cases that Carroll brought against Trump. They both stem from her claim that he assaulted her in a department store dressing room decades ago and defamed her about it in 2019 and 2022.

In one of the cases, a jury in 2023 awarded her $5 million in damages after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and for defamation over his 2022 statements. In the other, a jury in 2024 awarded her $83.3 million in defamation damages over his 2019 statements.

The $5 million case is further along in the appellate process, with the president’s Supreme Court petition pending for months, but the court keeps putting off its decision on whether to grant review.

The court doesn’t explain why it reschedules petitions.

But even before Trump filed the letter in question, I speculated that some justices may want to put off deciding whether to review the first petition until the second one is before them. The second case involves statements Trump made while he was in his first term as president, and his appeal in that one raises issues, including presidential immunity, that the justices may be more interested in than the issues raised in the already pending petition, which centers on more legally mundane complaints about the evidence used against him at trial.

At any rate, even if there isn’t direct legal overlap between the two cases, the court may want to deal with them together.  

It’s against that backdrop that we saw the June 2 letter from Trump lawyer Justin Smith, whom the president has nominated to be a judge on the St. Louis-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. Smith works for the law firm (also based in St. Louis) founded by John Sauer, which has represented Trump in several matters, including the Carroll litigation and the criminal immunity appeal that Sauer argued to the justices in 2024. Sauer is one of several of Trump’s personal lawyers now serving in top Justice Department posts; he is the solicitor general, the DOJ’s top lawyer representing the United States at the Supreme Court.

Smith’s letter is only a paragraph, so I’ll quote it while adding context in brackets and skipping over case citations. It says:

I write to advise the Court that President Donald J. Trump intends to file a petition for a writ of certiorari [asking the justices to grant review] in [the $83.3 million case] within the next month. Because [the $83.3 million case] involves the same parties and overlaps with the President’s pending petition for a writ of certiorari in [the $5 million case], the Court may wish to consider the petitions together. Like the pending petition in [the $83.3 million case], [the $5 million case] arises from decisions by the Second Circuit [New York-based federal appeals court], which recently denied rehearing en banc [by the appeals court’s full slate of judges after a three-judge panel ruled against Trump] in [the $83.3 million case,] over the dissent of three judges[, two of whom were appointed by Trump and one of whom was appointed by George W. Bush].

In a nutshell, the letter tells the justices: Heads up, the second petition is coming soon. As you note, it also says the court “may wish to consider the petitions together.”

But the letter doesn’t directly ask the court to do anything. To the extent that it’s asking for something, it’s essentially urging the court to not deny review of the $5 million petition before the justices have a chance to consider it alongside the $83.3 million petition. But Trump was already seeking review in the $5 million case, so the letter isn’t really asking for anything new in that regard.

Plus, when Trump filed the $5 million petition back in November, it was apparent that the $83.3 million case would eventually come to the justices too, but the appeals court hadn’t ruled against Trump in that one yet. The justices were already formally aware of the $83.3 million case before Smith’s letter because it’s discussed in the $5 million case petition.

Because the court doesn’t explain its scheduling moves, we can’t say for sure why it has been delaying consideration of the $5 million petition. For now, all we can definitively say is that the justices were not unanimous about immediately wanting to deny review, as they do for most petitions. That’s a better signal for Trump than it is for Carroll, though it doesn’t dictate whether the court will ultimately grant review, which requires the votes of at least four justices. Nor does it dictate how a majority would rule if the court does grant review.  

As I noted above, the effect of Smith’s letter, if any, is difficult to isolate. The court had already been putting off considering the $5 million petition for months before he effectively asked the justices to keep doing so until the next petition comes. So, if the court keeps putting it off, then it will be hard to know whether it’s doing so because of Smith’s letter or because the court is doing what it was going to do anyway.

On that note, the court rescheduled the petition yet again this week, further suggesting that it is waiting for the second petition. Whether Smith’s letter had any role in the latest rescheduling is hard to say because the court has continued the delay it had already been conducting.  

After the second petition is filed (Smith said in the June 2 letter it would come “within the next month”), Carroll will have an opportunity to respond, and the court is about to break for the summer after it finishes issuing the term’s remaining opinions over the next few weeks.

Therefore, we may not know whether the court is going to grant review in either petition until the fall. And even if the already pending petition were to be granted soon, the case wouldn’t be argued and decided until the next court term, which starts in October. At this point, it would be surprising if the court acts on the pending petition before receiving the second one.

All in all, it may be a while before we know the fate of these cases and whether Carroll can collect on the damages she won or whether the court will help the president again.

Please submit “Ask Jordan” questions through this form for a chance to have your question featured in a future edition of the Deadline: Legal Newsletter.

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The Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s attempt to execute Jeffery Lee with nitrogen gas after lower courts stopped the state from executing him with that method.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch voted to side with the state, according to the court’s unexplained order on Thursday night denying the state’s emergency application.

On Tuesday, a Trump-appointed judge in Alabama blocked the state from executing Lee under its nitrogen-hypoxia protocol. U.S. District Judge Emily Marks found that Lee proved the state’s method violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

She emphasized that although she was issuing a permanent injunction against the nitrogen method, she wasn’t banning the state from executing Lee. She said the record showed his alternative proposal of the firing squad “significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain as compared to nitrogen-hypoxia.”

Under precedent adopted by the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority, an inmate who challenges an execution method as unconstitutional must propose an alternative method that is feasible, readily implemented and significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain.

Having scheduled Lee’s execution for Thursday, Alabama officials moved to lift Marks’ injunction in an effort to proceed as planned. Procedurally, they first had to ask Marks herself for relief. In their motion to the judge, they said she downplayed the risks of the firing squad, as well as the state’s concern about finding willing and able executioners for the shooting method.

State officials further said the fact that they scheduled Lee’s execution for Thursday “should have sunk his claim.” They said that “however easy or hard it would be to implement a firing squad in the abstract, there’s no support for the view that it could be done two days from the Court’s decision that it satisfies the Eighth Amendment test.”

Marks rejected the motion to lift her injunction, noting that the state’s urgent motion did “little more than repeat the arguments it made previously,” which she also had rejected. She added that the state had no right to complain about the timing because it was the state that set Lee’s execution while litigation was pending.

A divided three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declined to disturb Marks’ ruling. The panel’s majority recounted that a judge’s permanent injunction like the one Marks issued is entitled to deference and can be overturned only if the judge abused her discretion. With that in mind, the majority said her findings were “amply supported by the evidence presented.”

And noting that courts reviewing motions for urgent relief consider the “irreparable harm” at stake, the majority observed: “It goes without saying that Mr. Lee would suffer irreparable harm if he were executed pursuant to a method that the district court has found unconstitutional.”

On the other hand, the majority said the state’s preferred Thursday execution timing “is not a magical date” and that “the injury to the State caused by a delay would not be irreparable because the district court’s injunction allows it to execute Mr. Lee by any other authorized method (including lethal injection or the electric chair).”

Trump-appointed Judge Robert Luck was the panel dissenter. He began by recalling that Lee was sentenced to die for robbing and murdering Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson 26 years ago. “Unlike his victims, Lee was allowed to choose his method of execution,” he added, referring to Lee’s initial choice of nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative to lethal injection during a previous round of litigation.

“For as long as we’ve had an Eighth Amendment, the Supreme Court has never held that a state’s method of execution qualifies as cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment,” Luck wrote. “Because we shouldn’t do so here, I would grant the state’s motion to stay the injunction.”

Lee’s jury had recommended a life sentence, but the judge sentenced him to death under Alabama’s “judicial override” option, which has since been abolished.

The state cited Luck’s dissent in seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court on Thursday. Officials told the high court that if the lower court ruling in Lee’s favor stands, it would be “unprecedented in American history.” The state said it would not only “portend the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method” but would also “expand the concept of cruelty well beyond the bounds of the Eighth Amendment.”

Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck, an expert on the Supreme Court’s so-called shadow docket, submitted an amicus brief opposing the state. He said Alabama was trying to do something procedurally that it shouldn’t be allowed to do. He explained that unlike in other emergency challenges that states have brought to the justices, Alabama wasn’t challenging a temporary execution stay issued by a lower court, but rather a permanent injunction.

“After all,” Vladeck said in the brief, “allowing Alabama to execute Mr. Lee through a grant of emergency relief would necessarily frustrate this Court’s ability to conduct plenary review of the district court’s final, permanent injunction.”

Highlighting that point, Lee’s lawyers told the justices that the case was “in a procedural posture unlike every previous method of execution challenge that this Court has considered.” They noted that unlike other emergency litigation in capital cases, “this case comes to the Court following a full three-day bench trial on the merits — the first such trial anywhere on the constitutionality of nitrogen asphyxiation.”

They said Lee wasn’t challenging his death sentence or the state’s ability to execute him but rather “only the method that Alabama intends to employ.” They said the state wanted to make the case moot by executing Lee “using an unconstitutional and permanently enjoined method,” but that the state hadn’t “cited a single case in which this Court has intervened in a capital case in such an extraordinary way.”

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