Supreme Court Slaps Down Trump Ally’s Desperate Ploy to Evade Justice

Mark Meadows tried to appeal to the Supreme Court over his election interference charges in Georgia, and was swiftly shut down.

Hoping to have his case moved to federal court, Meadows appealed to the Supreme Court, but on Tuesday the court denied his request. A former White House chief of staff under Donald Trump, Meadows faces two charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the Peach State.

Meadows’s legal team argued that since he was a “federal officer” at the time, the case should be moved to federal court, where he likely hoped to claim immunity from prosecution. Meadows was rebuffed in the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against the former Trump staffer because he doesn’t work for the federal government anymore. The lower court also ruled that even if he was still a federal officer, “the events giving rise to this criminal action were not related to Meadows’ official duties.”

In total, 19 people, including Meadows and Trump, face criminal charges in the effort to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. They have all pleaded not guilty. But Trump’s reelection last week makes any prosecution of him in the next four years unlikely. It’s not yet clear what effect his victory has on his co-defendants.

The Georgia Court of Appeals is expected to hear oral arguments on December 5 on Trump’s appeal to have Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis thrown off the case, but that may change now that Trump is the president-elect. The Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity affirmed that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted for any crimes, meaning that the Georgia case against Trump will at best be in limbo for several years and at worst disappear altogether.

That will be of little comfort to Meadows and the other defendants in the case, especially since Willis was reelected last week. He and his fellow 2020 election conspirators will be hoping that the Fulton County prosecutor is eventually kicked off the case, or that it gets dismissed altogether.

Justice Samuel Alito has slammed the door on overeager Republicans’ hopes for a Trump-packed Supreme Court. 

With Republicans inching toward trifecta control of the House, Senate, and White House after their sweeping victory last week, the party has now turned its attention to the nation’s highest court. Republicans will have at least two years of uninhibited ability to mold the Supreme Court in their image, especially if conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Alito—76 and 74, respectively—get the message and step down. 

But Alito quickly shut down rumors of his retirement. 

“Despite what some people may think, this is a man who has never thought about this job from a political perspective,” a friend of Alito told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “The idea that he’s going to retire for political considerations is not consistent with who he is.”

Alito was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006 and has been a bastion of conservative originalism ever since. He penned the opinion on the devastating overturning of Roe v. Wade, something that was made possible in part thanks to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing away in 2020, after stubbornly refusing calls to step down during President Barack Obama’s term—giving President Donald Trump the conservative majority needed to overturn the crucial reproductive rights law.  

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 70, has also faced calls for her to step down, but she has no plans to retire either.

Donald Trump’s pick for his administration’s “border czar” suggested that immigrants should “self-deport” ahead of the president-elect’s massive deportation scheme.

During an interview Monday with Tom Homan, Trump’s former director of Immigration Customs and Enforcement, Fox News’s Sean Hannity pitched the idea of a two- or three-month “grace period” for undocumented immigrants to self-deport.

“If you don’t self-report-deport, then you will never be given an opportunity at citizenship and when you leave, you will never be invited back, you will never be able to apply to come into the country,” said Hannity. “Sound like a good idea or no?”

“Criminals and gang members get no grace period,” Homan, the incoming border chief, said. “But, while we’re out prioritizing the public safety threats, and national security threats, if you want to self-deport, you should self-deport. Because, again, we know who you are, and we’re gonna come and find you.”

“So, if you want to self-deport, that’s fine. But criminals and gang members, they get no favors from this administration. You came to this country illegally which is a crime. You committed crimes against United States citizens, some heinous crimes, you get no grace period, so we’re coming for you.”

“But for those others, the non-criminals, you wanna self deport I’m all for it,” Homan said. “Because when they self-report they can put everything in order, their family business that they got, homes, or whatever. They can put all that in order and leave with their family all together. It makes perfect sense for the ones that are not criminals.”

Homan’s rambling response leaves room for interpretation, resting on the administration’s definition of “non-criminal,” which would likely include both undocumented and legal immigrants.

JD Vance has previously suggested that Trump would deport immigrants who are in the country under legal programs such as temporary protected status, or TPS. There were 863,880 foreign nationals in the United States under TPS as of August. Vance has also refused to rule out deporting immigrants with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, status.

The details of Trump’s plan to execute the largest mass deportations in history are still unclear. Homan said Tuesday he expected support from the U.S. military and special operations.

Donald Trump may have secured a second term in the White House, but his Russia problems are far from over—at least according to suspiciously phrased comments by some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies.

Speaking with Russian state media on Monday, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev noted that while the U.S. election may be over, Trump is still beholden to “certain forces.”

“To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations,” Patrushev told the business daily Kommersant in response to a question about whether the outcome of the presidential election would bode well for Russia. “As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

That statement was elevated by Tass, the Russian news agency.

In a curious follow-up about Trump’s susceptibility to being pressured and influenced, Patrushev made another eyebrow-raising comment: Rather than answer the question directly, the Putin aide made a point to bring up assassination attempts against the president-elect.

“We know of two cases of attempts on his life during the election campaign,” Patrushev told Kommersant. “In general, throughout the history of the United States, attempts have been made on the lives of presidents and candidates regularly—more than 20 times. Four U.S. presidents have died at the hands of assassins while in office. Therefore, it is extremely important for U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent a repetition of such cases.”

Trump’s history with Russia goes way back to the early days of his first campaign. In 2019, former FBI director and Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Russia had blackmail material on Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

And that relationship appears to be ongoing. On Wednesday, veteran journalist Bob Woodward revealed that he had spoken about the unusual relationship between Trump and Putin several months ago with Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.

“It’s so close, it seems like it might be blackmail,” Coats said, according to Woodward.

Woodward also recounted a separate conversation he had with CIA Director Bill Burns, who reportedly emphasized that “Putin manipulates” and is “professionally trained” to do so. According to Woodward, Burns believed that Putin has “got a plan” to repeat what he did during the forty-fifth presidential administration by “playing Trump.”

Senator Tom Cotton will be gaining a lot more power in the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments.

On Monday night, The New York Times reported that Trump will appoint Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, allowing Cotton to move up and become chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee as Republicans take control of the Senate.

Cotton was initially reportedly in the running to be Trump’s vice president, but ultimately was passed over in favor of his Senate colleague JD Vance. If he does take over the Senate Intelligence Committee, he will bring his record of foreign policy hawkishness and support for violent solutions with him.

Before his political career began, Cotton called for American journalists to be jailed for reporting on classified information, and in the Senate, he made a name for himself by constantly calling on the United States to attack Iran.

In 2020, the Arkansas senator called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to crush Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Later that year, he claimed that America’s Founding Fathers saw slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Recently, Cotton has made headlines for again calling for the military to be used against protesters, this time against opponents of Israel’s brutal massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, which he staunchly supports.

As the Intelligence Committee chair, we can expect more sound bites like his racist badgering of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in January, where he repeatedly asked the Singaporean social media executive if he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and ignored Chew’s protests about his actual place of birth.

Cotton’s support of military force against Americans probably endears him to Trump, who has also called for military force against his domestic enemies. The Arkansas senator will also be pushing to use the full force of America’s intelligence apparatus against Americans he disagrees with. Cotton and Trump will very likely be working together to stamp out any dissent, especially if Congress grants the presidency unprecedented new powers.