Supreme Court Shockingly Sides With Jack Smith on a January 6 Case

The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal from Elon Musk’s X Corp. on the company’s claim that special counsel Jack Smith took an unlawful deep dive into Donald Trump’s social media account without notifying the former president.

X Corp. begged the Supreme Court in July to determine under what circumstances a tech company can be compelled to turn over information on its users, while being prevented from alerting those users that they’re being investigated.

The court did not publish a comment Monday, and there were no dissents.

Last year, Smith’s team was able to use a “nondisclosure order” to prevent X Corp. from notifying Trump that prosecutors were using a search warrant to obtain private communications from Trump’s X (formerly Twitter) account, including direct messages, location data, and his drafts from the weeks leading up to the January 6 insurrection.

When X Corp. challenged the order, it was found in contempt and fined $350,000. Prosecutors argued that notifying Trump of the search would endanger the evidence.

Last week, an unsealed filing from Smith’s team showed precisely how the prosecution in Trump’s January 6 trial intended to use tweets from the Republican nominee’s personal X account to demonstrate his alleged election interference.

Trump’s tweets cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election results, spread false claims of voter fraud, attacked those trying to share accurate information about the election, cheered on those traveling to Washington for the rally that would become the riot, and helped the former president conduct a pressure campaign against Vice President Mike Pence.

At 2:24 p.m. on January 6, 2021, as rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

This tweet was then read out to the crowd at the Capitol, who later chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” Moments after Trump tweeted, Pence had to be ushered to a secure location, according to the filing. When Trump heard that Pence had been taken to safety, he reportedly responded, “So what?”

JD Vance’s supporters are seeking revenge against the consulting firm Deloitte after an employee shared personal messages from the Ohio senator in which he criticized Donald Trump’s record.

Donald Trump Jr. and other Republicans are accusing Deloitte consultant Kevin Gallagher of interfering with the election and are asking Speaker Mike Johnson to punish the company for its employee’s action.

“An executive at @Deloitte named Kevin Gallagher decided to interfere in the election & leak private convos with JD Vance to help Kamala Harris,” wrote Trump Jr. “Deloitte also gets $2B in govt contracts. Maybe it’s time for the GOP to end Deloitte’s taxpayer funded gravy train?”

In September, The Washington Post published messages shared by Gallagher where Vance admitted in 2020 that Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver” on his economic plans and that he would most likely lose to Joe Biden. The consultant and Vance communicated for 11 months after Vance contacted Gallagher via Twitter about an essay regarding Catholicism and politics.

Trump Jr. continues to argue that Deloitte’s $3 billion in annual government contracts should be canceled due to Gallagher sharing his own personal communications, accusing the consulting firm of “conspiring with the Washington Post to help Kamala Harris.”

“This individual shared private personal messages on his own volition without the knowledge of Deloitte, which is a non-partisan firm,” said Deloitte in a statement. But that distinction doesn’t matter to MAGA.

“Kevin Gallagher FAFO!” wrote senior Trump adviser Jason Miller. “This is outrageous and @Deloitte should immediately and publicly respond to this scandal,” said Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt.

Vance’s communications director, William Martin, told the Post that Vance “has no opinion on the issue,” but Martin himself retweeted Trump Jr.’s attacks on Gallagher.

“The moment Kevin Gallagher chose to leak his private communications to The Washington Post, he went from a private citizen to a willing participant in the political arena,” Martin said. “When he made that decision, he dragged Deloitte Consulting into the political arena with him.”

Donald Trump’s disastrous speech on Sunday perfectly demonstrated the cognitive decline that attendees at his rallies have been witnessing for months.

The New York Times published a report Sunday analyzing Trump’s recent rally speeches, finding them longer, more rambling, and more extreme than ever before. That same day, during a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, Trump embarked on a nearly two-hour speech filled to the brim with misinformation, random grievances, and incoherent gaffes.

Trump slurred his words as he rambled about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, calling it “probably worse than Katrina.”

“If you want someone who steals your wealth and abandons your family when the floods waters rise, those… flood… waters rise. And they were gone,” Trump ranted. “They haven’t seen anybody from the federal government yet.”

Trump has spent the last week spewing misinformation about the federal response to Hurricane Helene. He falsely claimed that Democrats were preventing aid from reaching Republican areas (something he actually once considered after the California wildfires), and lied that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” efforts at all in North Carolina.

During his speech, Trump also gushed over Elon Musk, who, between running a pro-Trump super PAC and spreading election misinformation, has apparently provided “big doses of” Starlink to some affected by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina per Trump’s request. If “doses” seems like the wrong word to describe internet connection, that’s because it is. Even Trump admitted that he doesn’t “know what the hell” Starlink is.

Trump then made a particularly grim remark when asking if there were any people in the audience planning to vote for “Lyin’ Kamala.”

“Please raise your hand. Please raise your… actually I should say don’t raise your hand. It would be very dangerous,” Trump said, laughing. “We don’t want to see anyone get hurt. Please don’t raise your hand.”

At one point, Trump became increasingly distracted by a fly, calling it a “very aggressive sucker.”

“This one, this one in particular is very aggressive… like, I’m going to be aggressive for our country. You can probably say that,” Trump joked to uproarious applause.

Trump also whined about his canceled interview with 60 Minutes. Trump had decided not to go through with the interview, CBS announced last week. The Trump campaign has since claimed that CBS “begged” for an interview but wouldn’t agree not to fact-check the Republican nominee.

On stage, Trump insisted instead that it was because he had not received an apology for his last appearance on the show in 2020, where he had thrown a fit about how inappropriate it was to be asked “tough questions” before cutting the interview short. Trump said he’d ended the interview after he was incorrectly fact-checked about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“Ah, it’s terrible. So we’re waiting for an apology, they want to do it again,” Trump said.

“I’ll do it again, but they gotta apol—don’t you think I should make them apologize?”

In addition to repeatedly garbling his words, saying “Midworsten” and “Evan juggles” (Evangelicals), the Republican nominee made a number of outlandish lies. He attempted to take credit for the recent record highs in the stock market, claiming that “the market goes up every time I get a good poll number,” while also promising a “1929 depression” if Harris were elected (he said the exact same thing about Biden in 2020). He attempted to walk back his own remarks that voters would only need to vote one more time, and promised again to be a dictator “for one day.”

A new Supreme Court decision effectively means that Texas women will never be able to receive abortion care—even if their lives depend on it.

On Monday, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that emergency abortions violate the Lone Star State’s already draconian abortion laws, upholding a ban on the life-saving procedure even in emergency circumstances.

The Biden administration had asked the justices to throw out the lower court ruling, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in June to punt a challenge to a similarly restrictive medical emergency abortion clause in Idaho. That decision temporarily allowed emergency abortions to continue while a lower appeals court retried the case.

The administration also pointed to federal mandate, reminding the court that hospitals must provide life-saving emergency medical care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The government further noted that legal precedents set by the Texas Supreme Court mean doctors within the state do not have to wait until a woman’s life is in immediate danger to provide the critical care required to save her.

Yet none of that seemed to matter to the ultra-conservative bench, who ruled in favor of heightened restrictions without detailed reasoning, reported the Associated Press.*

Texas had asked the Supreme Court to leave the order in place, arguing that their law left exceptions in place that prioritized the health of pregnant patients. But accessing Texas’s emergency abortion clause loophole isn’t cut and dry. Some women in the state, such as Kate Cox, have been forced to flee for care after failing to legally obtain access to abortions under the state’s emergency clause.

Cox’s case was the first such lawsuit since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Despite her apparent eligibility—and a court decision allowing her to receive the critical care—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in, promising to prosecute doctors with felony charges if they were caught performing the procedure.

Doctors argue that the medical exemptions in the state are unclear, leaving them in legal jeopardy and effectively stalling access to abortions in Texas by proxy.

* This article originally misstated the justices’ vote breakdown.

JD Vance over the weekend admitted that Donald Trump would stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

The Republican vice presidential nominee told a reporter on Saturday that “we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions.

“That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around; it will remain a consistent view,” Vance said to RealClearPolitics.

Vance’s remarks fly in the face of how other Republicans, including Trump, have tried to present more moderate views on abortion. Last week, Trump claimed that he would veto a national abortion ban. Republicans have experienced loss after loss as anti-abortion ballot initiatives fail at the state level in red states like Ohio, Kentucky, and Montana.

Planned Parenthood itself provides many vital services outside of abortion, from preventative screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and cancer to birth control. The organization depends on government reimbursements and grants for 34 percent of its revenue, according to its 2023 annual report. These include Medicaid as well as other federal grants and programs.

Republicans have been trying to end public funding for Planned Parenthood for a long time but have only succeeded in a handful of states, most recently Missouri. It’s something they’ve been trying but failing to do at the federal level.

The former president has been all over the place on abortion rights. In the past, he’s also called for regulation of the procedure to be left to the states, said that a “six-week [ban] is too short,” and struggled to make sense when speaking about the abortion pill mifepristone. Trump’s position on abortion, though he attempts to obfuscate it, is opposing reproductive rights. He’s appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he’s courted the religious right, and he depends on the support of conservatives. Over the weekend, Vance finally said in clear terms what Trump intentionally tries to hide.