Raskin asks Alito to recuse himself from Trump case after phone call between the two
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(WASHINGTON) — The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, on Thursday urged Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself from any consideration of President-elect Donald Trump’s efforts to block his sentencing for his conviction in his hush money case in New York following ABC News’ reporting of a Tuesday phone call between Trump and Alito.
“Yesterday, we learned that President-elect Trump spoke to Justice Alito just hours before Trump asked the Supreme Court to halt his criminal sentencing in New York. Justice Alito brushed off this startling ex parte private phone call and breach of judicial ethics by asserting that this perfectly timed conversation actually regarded his recommendation of a former clerk for an administration job,” Raskin said in a statement.
“Especially when paired with his troubling past partisan ideological activity in favor of Trump, Justice Alito’s decision to have a personal phone call with President Trump—who obviously has an active and deeply personal matter before the court—makes clear that he fundamentally misunderstands the basic requirements of judicial ethics or, more likely, believes himself to be above judicial ethics altogether.”
ABC News reported that the call came just hours before before Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday morning filed an emergency request with the justices asking them to block a New York judge from moving forward with sentencing Trump in his criminal hush money case on Friday.
In his statement, Raskin said, “Justice Alito has made his political leanings and support for the president-elect clear, whether it be his display of flags in apparent support of the January 6th insurrectionists and the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, or his self-proclaimed ideological battle with ‘the Left.'”
“In our democracy, Americans expect their cases to be heard by impartial judges,” he said.
Alito told ABC News the call concerned a job recommendation for one of his former clerks in the new administration.
“William Levi, one of my former law clerks, asked me to take a call from President-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position,” the justice said Wednesday. “I agreed to discuss this matter with President-elect Trump, and he called me yesterday afternoon.”
Alito said that he and Trump did not discuss his hush money case.
“We did not discuss the emergency application he filed today, and indeed, I was not even aware at the time of our conversation that such an application would be filed,” Alito said. “We also did not discuss any other matter that is pending or might in the future come before the Supreme Court or any past Supreme Court decisions involving the President-elect.”
It is not unusual for a sitting justice to offer a job recommendation for a former clerk, but it is rare, court analysts said, for a justice to have such a conversation directly with a sitting president or president-elect, especially one with an active stake in business pending before the court.
The court is expected to weigh in on Trump’s request by Friday morning.
The hush money case is not the only one before the Supreme Court that Trump has an interest in. On Friday, the court will hear a last-ditch challenge to a law that would ban the video-sharing app TikTok on Jan. 19 unless its Chinese-based parent company sells its stake.
Trump asked the court in a filing late last month to pause the divestiture deadline in order to give him a chance to reach a “negotiated resolution” to save the app once he takes office on Jan. 20.
(WASHINGTON) — As early as Friday, President Donald Trump is expected to invoke the Alien Enemies Act — a wartime law that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation — as part of the efforts to carry out mass deportations, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The Department of Defense is not expected to have a role in the invoking of the authority, which could be used to deport some migrants without a hearing
There have been discussions inside the administration about invoking the act, multiple sources said.
Trump had previously said on the campaign trail that he planned to invoke the act.
The act hasn’t been used since World War II, when it was used to detain Japanese Americans.
During World War II, the Alien Enemies Act was partially used to justify the internment of Japanese immigrants who had not become U.S. citizens. The broader internment of Japanese-Americans was carried out under executive orders signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and not the Alien Enemies Act since the law does not apply to U.S. citizens.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons and commutations for nearly all of the rioters charged with joining the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was “disturbing” and an affront to the law enforcement officers who were assaulted at the hands of the pro-Trump mob, a former top prosecutor from the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office told ABC News in an exclusive interview Tuesday.
“It’s disturbing because what it says to the victims, to the officers who put their lives on the line that day to defend the country, and also to the officers who then went and told their stories and testified in court — reliving the trauma of that day over and over and subjected themselves to cross-examination,” Alexis Loeb, who oversaw multiple high profile Jan. 6 cases during her time as deputy chief of the office’s Capitol Breach section, told ABC news.
“It’s disturbing because of what it says about the rule of law and the message it sends about political violence being acceptable and attacks on the peaceful transfer of power, something that has distinguished our nation, being acceptable,” Loeb said.
Trump has defended his decision to hand down pardons and halt the ongoing prosecutions for nearly all of the more than 1,500 people charged in the four years since the attack on the Capitol, even in the face of criticism from some Republican Senators.
Many of those pardoned were convicted in engaging in brutal attacks against the roughly 140 law enforcement officers injured in the attack — documented through thousands of hours of videos and police body camera footage — using weapons from bats, hockey sticks, bear spray and stun guns.
“I’m the friend of — I am the friend of police, more than any president that’s ever been in this office,” Trump said. Sixteen other Jan. 6 rioters had their sentences commuted.
“As you know, we commuted about 16 of them because it looks like they could have done things that were not acceptable for a full pardon, but these people have served years of jail. Their lives have been ruined …, ” Trump said at an event Tuesday night. “They served years in jail. And if you look at the American public, the American public is tired of it. Take a look at the election. Just look at the numbers on the election.”
Loeb told ABC News Trump’s pardons may have wiped away the cases and guilty verdicts against the rioters, but they could not erase the historical record of their many crimes.
“These were prosecutions staffed by career prosecutors and FBI agents of all sorts of political persuasions who came together and prosecuted these cases because they all recognized that attacking police officers was wrong, breaking into the Capitol was wrong,” Loeb said. “And what the pardons did do, was that they wiped away the verdicts and the sentences, not the historical record of what happened, but the verdicts and the sentences and the verdicts and the sentences were handed down by juries made up of ordinary citizens and judges appointed by both political parties, including several judges who were appointed by President Trump.”
After the attack on the U.S. Capitol by rioters seeking to overturn the 2020 election, more than 1,580 people were charged criminally in federal court, according to the Department of Justice. More than 1,000 have pleaded guilty. That figure includes 608 individuals who have faced charges for assaulting, resisting or interfering with law enforcement trying to protect the complex that day, the office said. Approximately 140 law enforcement officers were injured during the riot, the DOJ has said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office previously said it is evaluating whether to bring charges in roughly 200 cases that have been referred to them by the FBI, about 60 of which involve potential felony charges involving allegations of assault or impeding law enforcement. Trump’s executive order, however, appears to have completely shuttered the probe and the FBI removed from its website previous ‘wanted’ posters it had for violent rioters who had yet to be identified.
At least 221 individuals have been found guilty at contested trials in U.S. District Court, the DOJ said. Another 40 individuals have been convicted following an agreed-upon set of facts presented to and accepted by the court.
Some current and former DOJ officials have expressed alarm at the potential that the pardons could lead some now-freed defendants to target some of the former prosecutors who oversaw their cases, the judges who sentenced them, or witnesses who may have testified against them at trial.
Loeb declined to say whether she was personally concerned about the threat of retribution from those she prosecuted, and instead expressed confidence in the integrity of the legal system that resulted in the rioters’ convictions.
“The juries overwhelmingly found that the government had proved its case by a beyond a reasonable doubt, and the juries paid close attention throughout the trial and were just riveted by the video that came from all angles,” Loeb said. “These were some of the most documented crimes, I think, that we’ve ever seen.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday he supports “redemption” and “second chances” for Jan. 6 Capitol rioters after Trump’s sweeping pardons.
At his weekly press conference, Johnson was asked how Republicans can tout “backing the blue” if they support pardons for those convicted of assaulting police officers during the attack.
“The president has the pardon and commutation authority. It’s his decision,” Johnson said. “And I think what was made clear all along is that peaceful protests and people who engage in that should never be punished. There was a weaponization of the Justice Department.”
Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters received condemnation from some unions that represent law enforcement.
“The vast majority of Americans do not support letting those who assault or attack law enforcement off the hook ‘scot-free,'” the Capitol Police Officers’ Union said in a statement. “This use of presidential power is not what Americans want to see and it’s not what law enforcement officers deserve.”
“The FBI Agents Association (FBIAA) strongly condemns acts of violence targeting law enforcement officers who serve and protect our communities. Accordingly, the FBIAA does not believe granting pardons or clemency for individuals convicted of such acts is appropriate,” a statement from the union said Wednesday.
The Fraternal Order of Police, who endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, and The International Association of Chiefs of Police also criticized the pardons.
“Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety — they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law,” the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Fraternal Order of Police said in a joint statement Tuesday. “Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families. When perpetrators of crimes, especially serious crimes, are not held fully accountable, it sends a dangerous message that the consequences for attacking law enforcement are not severe, potentially emboldening others to commit similar acts of violence.”
(NEW YORK) — In what appears to be part of the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against sanctuary cities, the Justice Department is investigating a sheriff in upstate New York who released an undocumented man later taken into custody by federal agents.
The US Attorney’s office for the Northern District of New York “is looking into the circumstances” surrounding the release by Tompkins County Sheriff Derek Osborne of Jesus Romero-Hernandez, a 27-year-old Mexican citizen.
Romero-Hernandez pleaded guilty to a state assault charge and was sentenced to time served, necessitating his release. He left local custody in Ithaca before Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived to pick him up on a federal complaint charging him with illegally re-entering the United States after a prior removal.
Ithaca adopted a sanctuary law in 2017.
ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service and Homeland Security Investigations later apprehended Romero-Hernandez.
“The Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office in Ithaca, NY, a self-described sanctuary city, appears to have failed to honor a valid federal arrest warrant for a criminal alien with an assault conviction,” Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said. “I applaud the U.S. Attorney’s commitment to investigate these circumstances for potential prosecution.”
Tompkins County and the Tompkins County Sheriff’s office issued a joint statement refuting the DOJ’s claims.
The officials said ICE was “notified of when the individual in question was going to be released and had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident.”
“There was no interference with federal immigration enforcement efforts. DOJ’s assertion that the Tompkins County Sheriff did anything to put federal law enforcement officers in danger is false and offensive,” the offices said.
Bove convened all 93 US attorney’s offices on a phone call on Thursday to convey that they should focus on surging resources toward immigration enforcement. He likened the threat posed by undocumented immigrants to the threat posed by terrorists.
It represents a significant shift for the Justice Department redirecting law enforcement resources away from previous national security priorities and toward immigration enforcement.
