I’m not a huge basketball fan. A casual one, mostly. But it’s become more central to my sports interests over the years. When I was a kid, baseball and football were the only sports and baseball was … well, baseball. What else was there to say? At least in our home that’s how it was. But I’ve been pulled in the same way as the whole society has by the rise of American basketball over the course of my lifetime. And I’ve been pulled hard into Knicks’ destiny run. You’ll see other commentary about last night’s game, literally the biggest comeback in NBA playoff history. But I wanted to share one moment with you, one that came after the game when Knicks captain Jalen Brunson went on ESPN’s Inside the NBA post-game show.
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I attended an afternoon hearing Wednesday in D.C. federal court, where Judge Richard Leon declined to block President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — but in a way that might actually have some teeth. I joined Executive Editor John Light on Substack Live after leaving the courtroom to talk about what went down and why it might be a pyrrhic victory for the administration.
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I want to share a few more thoughts about yesterday’s news out of the defunct Broadview Six case, specifically the all-but-unprecedented release of the transcript of the grand jury sessions from which the indictments came. This was always a case of wild over-charging at a minimum. And that raised the question of just how prosecutors managed to get the case through a grand jury, even with how low a bar that usually is. Well, now we know. They cheated. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.
As David Kurtz notes here, this case seemed fuzzier than most of the other Trump retribution prosecutions. While the indictments singled out a Democratic candidate and lawmaker and those closely associated with them, none of those were high-profile Trump “enemies” like Tish James or James Comey. The prosecutor who initially led the case showed no signs of being especially Trumpy. Defense attorneys tried from the beginning to pry free evidence of White House and/or DOJ interference or direction in bringing the case. But prosecutors said they looked and there was no communication about it. The judge accepted that statement at face value.
It was almost certainly false.
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