A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
SCOTUS May Have Another Emergency Trump Case Soon
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has made a mess of the tendentious dispute over the public release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago prosecutions. But it may not matter for long if the case ends up before the Supreme Court.
Last evening, the appeals court mostly sided with the Justice Department in refusing to block Attorney General Merrick Garland from releasing the volume of the two-volume report pertaining to the Jan. 6 case. Garland has already said he won’t release the Mar-a-Lago volume until the case is complete (which puts it in the hands of the incoming Trump DOJ).
Still, the 11th Circuit didn’t go as far as the Justice Department had wanted. It failed to dislodge immediately the temporary injunction that renegade U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon imposed, preventing Garland from releasing the report until three days after the appeals court decision. On a practical level, I suspect the appeals court’s own rationale was leaving Cannon’s injunction in place would give the defendants in the Mar-a-Lago case a chance to take the matter to the Supreme Court without either Cannon or the 11th Circuit having to intervene again.
Instead, the appeals court invited the Justice Department to appeal Cannon’s decision if it wanted the matter resolved more quickly. The Justice Department immediately filed that invited appeal overnight. So now the case is back at the 11th Circuit and likely headed to the Supreme Court.
The race against the clock is on, with 10 days until inauguration and Trump’s takeover of DOJ, when the prosecutions and the reports are likely to be buried.
Trump Sentencing Is ON
In a surprise decision that showed the corruption of the six-justice conservative majority has some ill-defined limits, the Supreme Court declined in a 5-4 split to block the sentencing of President-elect Trump for his conviction in the hush money case involving porn star Stormy Daniels.
Chief Justice John Roberts joined with Amy Coney Barrett and the three liberal justices in refusing to allow Trump’s depredations to erode the rule of law even more dramatically than they already have. But it was a hollow victory in many key respects:
- Alarmingly, four justices – Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh – would have blocked Trump’s sentencing altogether.
- The Supreme Court’s scant order declining to intervene wasn’t scant enough. Rather than staying silent on its reasoning and doing the least damage possible, it invented new and vague constitutional standards for president-elects, tied the trial judge’s hands on sentencing, and once again carved out special treatment for Trump even as it handed him an ostensible defeat.
- The liberal justices seem like hostages of late, forced to go along with bad reasoning and setting troubling new precedents even when getting their preferred outcomes.
Still, the sentencing of Donald Trump for 34 felony convictions 10 days before he is sworn in to a second, non-consecutive term is better than nothing. A low bar. Judge Juan Merchan’s sentencing of Trump will proceed this morning at 9:30 a.m. ET in state court in Manhattan. TPM’s Josh Kovensky is in the courtroom and will be covering it for us live.
Trump and Alito Call: A Loyalty Test
The NYT goes deep on the circumstances of the call between President-elect Trump and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and what it says about prioritizing loyalty above all else, old grudges against Bill Barr of all people, and the contours of a Trump II administration.
Rudy G Faces Another Contempt Hearing Today
Rudy Giuliani got owned by a federal judge in DC yesterday and will be forced to appear in person today at his second contempt of court hearing in as many weeks. Like the first one, this arises from the $148 million defamation judgment against him by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Embrace The Complexity
The death toll in the Los Angeles wildfires rose to 10. Early estimates are that some 9,000 buildings have damaged or destroyed, roughly split in half between the Palisades fire, which remains uncontained, and the Eaton fire, which is 6% contained as of Friday morning. It is expected to be the costliest conflagration in economic terms in U.S. history.
Natural disaster coverage is notoriously difficult, often over-simplistic, and occasionally downright bad. Immediate public reaction and political responses can be emotionally charged, misguided, misdirected, and ultimately ephemeral.
One example in particular that Morning Memo has returned to from time to time over the past year is the mistaken framing of the insurance industry’s growing recognition of climate change risk as an “insurance crisis.” Insurers pulling back is a symptom of the climate crisis, another early warning sign, an arguably rational response amidst a sea of denial.
You’ve probably read by now that State Farm last year decided to dramatically reduce its property insurance exposure in Pacific Palisades by not renewing nearly 70% of its existing book of business there. Susan Crawford, who is as thoughtful and astute as anyone writing the broad issue of controlled retreat from high risk zones in a new climate, looks at the impact of the Los Angeles fires on California’s insurer of last resort.
In further service of embracing complexity versus reductive thinking in these matters, let me refer you to this insightful thread by Jake Bittle:
1/ When I was reporting my book chapter about the 2017 Santa Rosa fires, I spent a lot of time in two neighborhoods that had both burned. One was dense and middle class, in flat land, the other was very wealthy and up on a hill. I want to talk a bit about this.
— Jake Bittle (@jake_bittle) January 10, 2025
For a broader overview of the rapidly spreading effects of climate change on politics, Garrett Graff is another steady if urgent voice.
Global Temps Passed 1.5C In 2024 For First Time
Average global temperatures were 1.6 degrees Celsius in 2024, making it the hottest year in human record-keeping and the first year that surpassed the 1.5-degree mark over the pre-industrial average.
IMPORTANT
Trump advisers have spent months looking for a disease they can blame on immigrants as justification for closing down the southern border, the NYT reports.
Pizzagate Gunman Killed In Police Shooting
NYT: “A man in North Carolina who fired a rifle inside a Washington restaurant in 2016 because he wrongly believed an internet conspiracy known as Pizzagate was fatally shot by the police in North Carolina over the weekend when he pulled out a gun during a traffic stop, the authorities said.”
Quite A Presidential Tableau
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The report would be a nice dessert after the sentencing.
I think someone needs to release the report anyway, even if SCOTUS decides to stick their nose in it to protect their golden calf.
Looking at the assemblage as the casket passes, there’s no hand over Trump’s left chest because he has no heart . . . .
Someone’s gonna have to unroll that thread about poor and rich neighborhoods, because I cut my Twitter sub and all I can see is that initial tweet.
I’m sure whatever it says won’t surprise me.
It can be done. Alito would know how to do it.
Or, rather, one of his clerks would.