A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Does The Roberts Court Have Any Dignity Left To Surrender?

President-elect Donald Trump raced to the Supreme Court this morning to try to get the high court to block his sentencing Friday in the hush money case in New York.

Trump’s latest move to avert sentencing came after he was rebuffed by an state appeals court judge Tuesday. In a 30-minute emergency hearing scheduled on a hour’s notice, Trump argued that his entire conviction was defective, that presidential immunity precluded his prosecution, and that sentencing him during the presidential transition was disruptive. TPM’s Josh Kovensky was in the courtroom for the hearing.

The prospect of the uber-conservative Supreme Court coming to Trump’s rescue from criminal accountability yet again raises the specter of an even more unbound Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20. Furthermore, it may not be the only Trump-related case the Supreme Court has to consider before inauguration. Also potentially on tap is whether Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report to Attorney General Merrick Garland can be made public.

Oh, Look, It’s Aileen Cannon Again

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon continued her series of extraordinary interventions in the Mar-a-Lago case, purporting to block the public release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report. In an unprecedented order issued at the urging of Trump’s co-defendants, Cannon barred the Justice Department from releasing the report until three days after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals disposed of the matter.

Trump’s co-defendants had urged both Cannon and the 11th Circuit to intervene. The 11th Circuit gave Smith a deadline of this morning to respond. It’s timetable beyond that is unclear. Trump has since moved to intervene in the case himself. In an almost comic move, after the won relief from Cannon, Trump’s co-defendants reiterated to the 11th Circuit to that they prefer the appeals court let Cannon handle the matter herself. Of course.

Cannon arguably has no jurisdiction over the Mar-a-Lago case while it’s on appeal, yet she acted anyway. Still, the most alarming aspect of her ruling was that she seems to be blocking the release of Smith’s report not just as to the Mar-a-Lago, but also as to his Jan. 6 case in Washington, D.C., over which she never had any jurisdiction.

For The Record

Jay Bratt, 65, a counterintelligence prosecutor and a key member of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team on the Mar-a-Lago case, retired on Friday, after 34 years with the Justice Department, the NYT reported.

Timely …

Reuters: ‘Three senior U.S. Justice Department officials committed misconduct in the final months of Donald Trump’s first presidency by leaking details about a non-public investigation, a move that may have been intended to sway the 2020 election, the department’s internal watchdog concluded in a new report.”

Crazy Making

Trump held one of his rambling, untethered, make-of-it-what-you-will press conferences at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. If you’re inclined to freak out, there was plenty to freak out about. If you’re taking more of a wait-and-see-what-he-actually-does approach, there was still plenty to freak out about:

• “This news conference, which was the first since Trump’s re-election was certified by Congress, was a wild one — even by Trumpian standards. In a little over an hour behind a podium at his Mar-a-Lago beach club, the president-elect, along with promising to rename an ocean basin, threatened potential military force against Panama and Denmark. He also suggested he might use “economic force” to make Canada the 51st State.”–TPM’s Hunter Walker
• “There was a lot of déjà vu in Tuesday’s news conference, recalling scenes from his first presidency. The conspiracy theories, the made-up facts, the burning grievances — all despite the fact that he has pulled off one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. The vague references to “people” whom he never names. The flat declaration that American national security was threatened now, without defining how the strategic environment has changed in a way that could prompt him to violate the sovereignty of independent nations.”–NYT’s David Sanger
• “[Trump] just left open using a military threat against a NATO ally, Greenland. And NATO rules require an attack on any member to be treated as an attack on them all. That’s certainly no small thing, even if it’s just Trump being Trump.”–WaPo’s Aaron Blake

Zuckerberg’s Big Capitulation To Trump

In the face of threats from the Trump and the right, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is abandoning content moderation on Facebook:

• TPM’s Josh Marshall: Zuckerberg Achieves Trump Lap Monkey Badge And Other Platform News
• The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last: Mark Zuckerberg Is a Surrender Monkey
• The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel: Mark Zuckerberg is at war with himself.
• Trump himself, giving Zuckerberg zero cover:

Reporter: Meta announced they will stop doing fact checks..Trump: I think they’ve come a long way Reporter: Do you think he’s responding to the threats you’ve made in the pastTrump: Probably

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-01-07T17:38:48.738Z

Super Smart Read

Henry Farrell, on the social media crisis:

We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation – that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.

Worth your time.

Scoop

The Forward: “The Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic, according to documents obtained by the Forward.”

RED ALERT IN NORTH CAROLINA

Mother Jones: “The Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the state election board from certifying the victory of one of the court’s own members—Democratic Justice Allison Riggs. In doing so, the state’s highest court laid the groundwork for potentially overturning the election and handing the seat to Riggs’ GOP challenger.”

Voting Right Watch: Face Palm Edition

TPM’s Kate Riga: Louisiana: Racism Doesn’t Exist Anymore, So Let Us Racially Gerrymander

Quote Of The Day

“I think being president of a public university in a red state right now is one of the hardest jobs in higher education.”–Michael Harris, professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University

LA Under Siege From Extreme Wind-Driven Wildfires

Dire warnings of an extreme wind event in Los Angeles proved prescient Tuesday with entire neighborhoods overrun by flames; cars hastily abandoned in a panicked retreat being shoved aside by a bulldozer so emergency workers could reach the fire zone; a school, a synagogue, and a landmark restaurant burned to the ground.

Three major fires were burning in Los Angeles overnight, with winds expected to ebb some later in the day but none of the fire were close to being contained yet. Casualty figures were remarkably low but it was still early and with the extent of the damage had yet been surveyed.

Jimmy Carter’s Final Return To Washington

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Last Gasps

Over the next few days we will witness the final death spasms of the efforts to hold Donald Trump accountable to the rule of law. A convicted felon, who was also under other indictment, has never risen to the presidency before. We are deep into uncharted waters, and it’s unclear whether the final skirmishes over how the cases against Trump are disposed of matter much in the overall scheme of things. Most at stake seems to be whether the rule of law will retain some shred of dignity.

What we do know is that Trump is fighting fiercely to cow the last judges and the remaining prosecutors standing between him and being sworn in as president unencumbered by any legal restraint or stain.

A new battlefront opened yesterday in the special counsel cases while Trump’s effort to avoid sentencing later this week in the hush money case took on new urgency. We’ll take them in order.

Trump Tries To Block Special Counsel Report

Under the regulations for special counsel, they are to submit a final report to the attorney general, who may make the report public. It has been the practice of Attorney General Merrick Garland to make special counsel reports public.

We learned yesterday that Trump’s lawyers – themselves poised to take top DOJ positions in the new Trump administration – have been privately lobbying Garland to bury Special Counsel Jack Smith’s reports on the Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago investigations.

We learned of this development when two of Trump’s co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago case filed an emergency motion asking U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to block the public release of any report pertaining to them. Let me pause and note that as to the Trump co-defendants there is a legitimate concern that the public release of further information about them could be prejudicial since their cases, still on appeal, were not extinguished by the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity. I am sure that is a consideration Garland will be weighing anyway.

Attached to the motion was a strident 12-page letter dated Jan. 6, 2025, from Trump’s attorneys to Garland demanding that he halt all efforts to prepare and release Smith’s report, and throwing all manner of arguments, legal and political, into the mix.

In response to the motion, Jack Smith confirmed in a new filing that he is “working to finalize a two-volume confidential report to the Attorney General explaining the Special Counsel’s prosecution decisions.” One volume pertains to the Mar-a-Lago, Smith told Cannon. The other volume, presumably, applies to the Jan. 6 case. Smith said he would not turn the Mar-a-Lago volume over to Garland before 1 p.m. today. Smith also said Garland has not decided how to handle the volume of the report related to Mar-a-Lago but regardless will not release it to the public before Friday, Jan. 10, 2025 at 10 a.m. ET.

Notably the letter to Garland from Trump’s counsel indicates they have been allowed to review drafts of the special counsel report, though they complained about the compressed time frame and onerous conditions of their review.

Again, this is uncharted territory. The Jan. 6 case against Trump has been dismissed. Cannon dismissed the Mar-a-Lago case against him and DOJ has dropped its appeal of that dismissal as to Trump. So, for example, it’s not clear whether Cannon has any jurisdiction to weigh in here. But it would not take much in the way of judicial delays to push all of this back a few days and leave it to the new Trump DOJ – helmed in part by his now-personal attorneys – to make it all go away.

Trump Tries To Stop Hush Money Sentencing

Judge Juan Merchan denied Monday Donald Trump’s last-ditch request to delay his sentencing set for Friday in the hush money case. Trump has already taken steps to get a state appeals court to intervene to overturn his convictions. Expect more emergency appeals today and later this week, including all the way to the Supreme Court, as Trump tries to head off sentencing.

Rudy G Held In Contempt Of Court

The only small measure of schadenfreude available on the Jan. 6 anniversary was Rudy Giuliani being held in contempt for flouting courts orders in the successful defamation case against him by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, an outgrowth of the 2020 election subversion effort. TPM’s Josh Kovensky was in court for two days of Giuliani absurdism. Give it a read.

Marking The Jan. 6 Anniversary

• Don Moynihan: “There was nothing inevitable about where we are today. In key moments key Republicans said, essentially, that Jan. 6 was not a big deal, or even a positive event. It is hard not to conclude that the people who occupy key institutions in newer democracies were simply less willing to take those democracies for granted. By contrast, American democracy seems to be of such little value to many of its leaders that they did nothing to defend it.”
• CNN: How Merrick Garland’s Justice Department ran out of time prosecuting Trump for January 6
• Roger Parloff: “Because of the unusual—almost unimaginable—posture of the investigation at this juncture, I will interweave into this recap of the Justice Department’s latest [Jan. 6 prosecution] figures some discussion about potential pardons.”

Great Read

ProPublica’s Joshua Kaplan: “Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.”

TPM On TV

TPM’s Hunter Walker was on last night with MSNBC’s Joy Reid discussing the still unsolved Capitol Hill pipe bomb case:

Anticipatory Obedience

The Federal Reserve’s top regulatory official, Michael Barr, resigned rather than waiting around to see if President Trump would try to remove him unlawfully: “I was worried that the risk of a dispute over the position would end up being a political distraction for the Federal Reserve and for me, and that that would end up detracting from our ability to serve our mission.”

Bannon Unfurls New Threats Against DOJ Officials

A sample of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s screed on his program yesterday targeting outgoing DC U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves:

Matthew Graves has to understand something. Matthew Graves, write this down. Or if Matthew Graves’ family or anybody that knows Matthew Graves, make sure his family knows this. 

You’re going to prison for a very long time. You’re a totally evil person that has broken the law and destroyed lives, and the people whose lives you destroyed may not have the power to do anything about it, but we certainly do, and we are. You are a truly evil individual and you’re deranged.

Quote Of The Day

“Ten years ago if someone had told us the owner of one of the world’s biggest social-media companies would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany, who would have imagined that?”–French President Emmanuel Macron, addressing French ambassadors on Monday

Jimmy Carter To Lie In State At The Capitol

The remains of the late president arrive today in Washington for three days of public memorials.

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