Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
This week, a Supreme Court justice says what we’re all thinking, Donald Trump gets told to sit down and start talking, and Jeanine Pirro’s crappy attorneys escape consequences.
Elena Kagan knows what’s up
Justice Elena Kagan is not a person who goes around trashing the Supreme Court or her colleagues. Indeed, she was still weirdly defending her conservative colleagues as late as July of this year, even as they unmoored themselves from all law and logic. But even the even-keeled Kagan has her limits.
Ahead of the midterms, which the Trump administration has made increasingly chaotic, she’s calling out recent decisions the court has made that contribute to that chaos.
“The court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system work.” Kagan said during a discussion at Catholic University. She went on to say that the Supreme Court has “created a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”
These words might seem sedate, but from a Supreme Court justice, they are a five-alarm fire. Oh, and the conservative eagerness to let infinite amounts of dark money slosh around? She’s not a fan.
“The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare. And they’re right,” she said.
Indeed they are, Justice Kagan. Indeed they are.
Trump continues to try to stall his own lawsuit against the BBC
As we well know by now, Trump loves bringing lawsuits, but actually litigating them? Not so much.
Thus far, he’s been very successful at slow-walking his own $10 billion defamation case against the BBC, even attempting to refuse to sit for his own deposition until not only after the midterms, but until after the discovery period in his case has closed. On Thursday, that gambit fell apart, with the magistrate judge in the case ordering him to appear no later than Dec. 11 for a deposition by the BBC’s attorneys, unless the parties agree to extend the discovery period past the current Dec. 18 deadline.
Regrettably, this is only a magistrate’s order, however. The actual judge in the case is one of Trump’s own nominees who has been exceedingly friendly, so that order may very well get changed, even though it’s ridiculous to allow Trump to refuse to participate in his own lawsuit while making the BBC follow all the rules.
Related | Trump had no idea suing the BBC would be so much work
Trump is also trying to block the BBC from subpoenaing former special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection. It makes perfect sense for the BBC to try to talk to Smith, as the BBC explained in a court filing: “It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith, who spent years gathering evidence on those topics with the force of the Justice Department and the power of the grand jury behind him.”
Smith isn’t opposing the subpoena, but Trump is very very mad and sad about the possibility Smith could appear, and is begging the very friendly judge to stop it, telling the court, “Smith lacks any personal knowledge regarding the issues in this matter.” Hmm. Since Trump refuses to let the BBC talk to his inner circle and seems to be dodging his own deposition, it’s hard to argue that the BBC wouldn’t benefit from hearing from Smith.
Another day, another Trump demand at the Supreme Court
It seems like nary a week goes by these days that Trump doesn’t run to the Supreme Court to demand to get his way. And why wouldn’t he? They reliably deliver results for him.
Big Bend National Park, Texas, is seen on Sept. 19, 2026.AP
In the latest, the administration is demanding that the Supreme Court erase a lower-court injunction stopping it from fast-tracking a border security project that cuts through Big Bend National Park.
As with so many things Trump wants to do, this isn’t even a situation where the plaintiffs are contending he’s not allowed to do it, period. The lawsuit is over whether Trump is required to follow the laws that are supposed to be followed before the federal government carves through hundreds of miles of environmentally sensitive areas, archeological sites, sacred locations, and so on. The administration skipped all of that and just started building, as per usual, and now wants the Supreme Court to greenlight its right to keep skipping.
Sadly, this will probably work, because the conservatives on the Supreme Court are pathologically inclined to buy Trump’s perennial argument that if he can’t do exactly what he wants to right away, it’s somehow unconstitutional.
A big “womp womp” for the OPM
This case has dragged on for over 18 months, but federal employees, past, present, and potentially future, finally won their lawsuit against the Office of Personnel Management.
Remember way back in the heyday of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, when Elon Musk’s little band of racist cretins was hoovering up every last bit of government data it could get its hands on? OPM happily handed over data on literally tens of millions of former, current, and prospective federal employees. Sure, we have a Privacy Act that prohibits the willy-nilly sharing of personnel records between agencies, but what’s a major law compared to what Musk and company wanted, right?
The laughable excuse that OPM has relied on all along was that somehow this was required to modernize … well, no one is really sure what, exactly, was supposed to be modernized. It doesn’t really sound like the government was able to tell U.S. Judge Denise Cote what was supposed to be modernized either, or why it would have required access to the private data of tens of millions of people.
“The record also provides no support for a finding that it was the pursuit of a modernization agenda that prompted OPM to grant sweeping and expedited access to a score of DOGE Agents to its systems of records containing PII [personally identifiable information],” the ruling states
Big loss for OPM, and a big win for data privacy.
No consequences for the DOJ’s attorneys run amok, as per usual
The ridiculous, meritless case that U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. Jeanine Pirro’s office brought against former Olympian David Hearn for allegedly damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool fell apart in a spectacular fashion, one which highlighted just how bad things are at the DOJ these days.
Related | Trump rages over losing his Reflecting Pool scapegoat
There were really only two possibilities here. Either Pirro’s prosecutors were so bad at their jobs that they didn’t even bother to check whether the allegations against Hearn had any support, or they knew the allegations had no support and brought a vindictive prosecution at the behest of the president. Both of these possibilities are bad!
However, the DOJ Inspector General apparently doesn’t even see this as worth investigating. Hearn’s attorneys are asking the IG to reconsider, and if there were any actual, well, justice, the IG would say yes.