President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural committee is no longer selling tickets for major donors to attend his swearing-in and accompanying private events in Washington, according to five people briefed on the conversations.
The committee has raised over $170 million, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to share internal financial information. The haul is so big that some seven-figure donors have been placed on wait lists or have been told they probably will not receive V.I.P. tickets at all because the events are at capacity.
Mr. Trump often talks privately about who has supported him, and the frenzy to donate to his inauguration — even if it comes without the usual exclusive access — underscores the degree to which deep-pocketed donors and corporations are seeking to curry favor with him. Far more than in early 2017 at the start of his first term, corporate America has largely embraced Mr. Trump during his transition, partly out of a desire to get on his good side.
Prospective donors began to be told early this week that no more seats were available for certain events around Washington, according to the people briefed on the conversations. The personalized donation link that fund-raisers had circulated to their networks of major contributors no longer worked on Tuesday and Wednesday. The packages offered to corporate and individual donors had originally been marketed as available through Friday, but they ended early given the extraordinary demand….
The circumstances were extraordinary for another reason: Justice Alito was being drawn into a highly personalized effort by some Trump aides to blackball Republicans deemed insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump from entering the administration, according to six people with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
The phone call centered on William Levi, a former law clerk of Justice Alito’s who seemingly has impeccable conservative legal credentials. But in the eyes of the Trump team, Mr. Levi has a black mark against his name. In the first Trump administration, he served as the chief of staff to Attorney General William P. Barr, who is now viewed as a “traitor” by Mr. Trump for refusing to go along with his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
Mr. Levi has been under consideration for several jobs in the new administration, including Pentagon general counsel. He has also been working for the Trump transition on issues related to the Justice Department. But his bid for a permanent position has been stymied by Mr. Trump’s advisers who are vetting personnel for loyalty, according to three of the people with knowledge of the situation.
As Mr. Trump puts together his second administration, Mr. Barr is among a handful of prominent Republicans who are viewed with such suspicion that others associated with them are presumptively not to be given jobs in the administration, according to people familiar with the dynamic. Republicans in that category include Mr. Trump’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and his former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. To be called a “Pompeo guy” or a “Haley person” is considered a kiss of death in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. Resistance to such people can usually be overcome only if Mr. Trump himself signs off on their hiring.
Tuesday’s phone call took place against that backdrop. Several people close to the Trump transition team on Thursday said their understanding was that Justice Alito had requested the call. But a statement from Justice Alito framed the matter as the justice passively agreeing to take a call at the behest of his former clerk.
Mr. Levi did not respond to a request for comment. The Supreme Court press office said it had nothing to add to the statement it put out from Justice Alito on Wednesday. In that statement, Justice Alito said that Mr. Levi “asked me to take a call from President-elect Trump regarding his qualifications to serve in a government position. I agreed to discuss this matter with President-elect Trump, and he called me yesterday afternoon.”…
No president has ever attempted to do what Donald Trump now proposes to do—assemble a small team of former personal attorneys and install it at the highest levels of the Department of Justice. The president-elect first named lawyers who have represented him in recent years to the key positions of deputy attorney general, principal deputy attorney general, and solicitor general. Then, with the quick death of the Matt Gaetz nomination, he announced a new attorney-general nominee, Pam Bondi, who was a member of his legal defense team in the first impeachment. The Justice Department’s responsibilities have always been subject to competing expectations: that it would keep politics out of law enforcement but, like other departments, would loyally serve the president in the implementation of his governing program. The results have been uneven, and at times disastrous, as with Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. But when problems arose, they were relatively localized: the product of poor appointments, or the failure of particular presidents in particular situations to respect institutional values and norms. What the DOJ faces now is different in kind: a vision of White House control achieved through the appointments of individuals the president has chosen because they have worked for him and demonstrated their loyalty. The pressing question now is whether these lawyers may be, as the president-elect likely hopes, the “president’s lawyers” in more than one sense.
Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose two additional trips from a billionaire patron than have previously come to light, Senate Democrats revealed on Saturday after conducting a 20-month investigation into ethics practices at the Supreme Court.
The findings were part of a 93-page report released by Democratic staff members of the Judiciary Committee along with about 800 pages of documents. It said the two trips, both of which had been previously unknown to the public, took place in 2021 and were provided by Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate in Texas and a frequent patron of Justice Thomas’s.
One trip took place that July by private jet from Nebraska to Saranac, N.Y., where Justice Thomas stayed at Mr. Crow’s upstate retreat for five days. The other came in October, when Mr. Crow hosted Justice Thomas overnight in New York on his yacht after flying him from the District of Columbia to New Jersey for the dedication of a statue.
The disclosures were one of the few new revelations in a report that otherwise largely summarized information about largess accepted by justices — and failures to disclose it — that had already become public. Justice Thomas had not disclosed the trips, even after refiling some of his past financial forms, and the committee learned about them through a subpoena to Mr. Crow, the report said.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has not yet submitted a legally required ethics pledge stating that he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while in office, raising concerns that his refusal to do so will hamper the smooth transition to power.
Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act.
While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.
It has missed multiple deadlines for signing required agreements governing the process. That has prevented Mr. Trump’s transition team from participating in national security briefings or gaining access to federal agencies to begin the complicated work of preparing to take control of the government on Jan. 20, 2025….
I’m pleased to welcome Bob Bauer to the ELB Book Corner, writing about his new book, The Unraveling. Here is the third of three guest posts:
In a chapter about impeachment in The Unraveling, I single out the late Kenneth Starr for criticism of his performance as independent counsel in the Clinton case. He took on a constitutional controversy laden with unusual elements of run-away partisanship—an impeachment directed at a president’s conduct of his personal life— and made it, on that score, far worse. The chapter detailed the ways in which Starr failed to exercise the particular ethical responsibilities of a lawyers in an exquisitely sensitive public role.
But my larger concern is the well noted increase in partisan appetite for impeachments when a loss at the polls is unthinkable.Those concerned about this trend may have all the more cause for worry now that the Supreme Court has established significant levels of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. Even before that decision, immunity figured into the pressures for impeachment: Because presidents could claim immunity from prosecution while office, impeachment was the only source of formal accountability in that period. With the zone of immunity now expanded, advocates for an impeachment can dismiss the suggestion that Congress should stay its hand, respecting the voters’ choice and leaving the president to answer to the legal system after his or her term ends. The President may now get a pass for a wide range of alleged misconduct, and, of course, Congress must impeach and convict before considering a vote on disqualification from holding future office.
For this reason, I make the case that the House and Senate should formally revise the rules governing impeachment processes. While there are some standing rules and often-cited standards, these are largely made up on the fly in each individual case of impeachment. This is a mistake, as it only encourages the engineering of different processes with the actual or perceived purpose of enhancing the prospect of one result or the other. A bipartisan institutional reform exercise while there is no particular impeachment pending could focus attention on what an impeachment process most appropriately should be– with no president at imminent risk of risk benefitting or suffering from the particular choices made.
Among the issues that could be addressed: Is the Senate obligated to hold the trial if the House impeaches? Must it at least consider a Motion to Dismiss—or can it just ignore the House action? On what schedule must the House transmit articles of impeachment? What are precisely the “due process“rights of a president defending against an impeachment in a House or a Senate trial? None of these questions need to be answered so definitively that every conceivable procedural issue is settled before a particular impeachment. There is, however, a major advantage, in substance and credibility, to a “veil of ignorance” establishment of clear rules.
In the book, I note the motion to dismiss filed by the late Senator Robert Byrd to end Senate consideration of the Clinton impeachment. The constitutional remedy of impeachment had deteriorated into spectacle, including “hallway press conferences and [a] battle of press releases that are contributing to the division of our parties and our nation.” As a well-respected institutionalist, Byrd rightly warned that the impeachment process was inflicting more damage on the democracy than the conduct for which President Clinton was impeached.
The House and Senate could collaborate on bipartisan internal reforms to address these dangers of an impeachment process unconstrained by settled standards and processes, overly vulnerable to the worst partisan opportunism. Action may be unlikely, but the cost of inaction is no less predictable.
North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. will not be recused from two high-profile cases involving his father, the Republican Senate leader. The court’s Republican justices denied Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s motion requesting Berger Jr.’s recusal on Friday, writing that the Senate leader was involved in the case in an official capacity only — not a personal one.
“We believe that Justice Berger can and will execute his responsibilities in this case fairly and impartially,” the majority wrote. Rather than deciding on recusal himself, Berger Jr. referred the motion to the full court to consider. In a dissenting opinion, the court’s two Democrats noted that the Code of Judicial Conduct makes no distinction between family members acting in their official capacity and personal capacity in its rules around recusal. Justice Allison Riggs, who authored the dissent, noted that Justice Berger previously refused to recuse himself in another case involving his father that challenged the state’s voter ID law.
“To achieve the desired outcome in this case, members of this Court who typically ascribe to a strict textualist philosophy are eager to add words to the Code of Judicial Conduct,” Riggs wrote. “… I suspect the reason we have not changed these rules is simple — the optics of overhauling existing ethics standards to accommodate Justice Berger and Senator Berger are problematic, to put it mildly.” In both cases, Cooper is challenging laws passed by the General Assembly that strip him of his appointments to various boards and commissions. One of those laws, which is currently blocked by a lower court’s order, would drastically restructure state and local election boards and give all appointments to legislative leaders — including Berger Jr.’s father, Senate leader Phil Berger, who is named as a defendant in both cases.
I’m pleased to welcome Bob Bauer to the ELB Book Corner, writing about his new book, The Unraveling. Here is the first of three guest posts:
Since the publication of my book, The Unraveling, I have been asked why, during this norm crushing experience with Donald Trump, I chose to ground my reflection in a fair degree of professional self-criticism. The objection goes something like this: whatever second thoughts you have had on positions taken or advice given, your sins and those associated with Trump’s brand of politics must be weighed on different scales.
I note, first, that my self-examination only goes so far. There are controversial positions I’ve taken, say, on money and politics, which have not changed radically over the years. I continue to believe that continued reliance on the post-Watergate model of campaign finance regulation is mistaken (and futile).
However, on other topics, it seems to me that if we are going to have a productive debate about reviving the norms of democratic politics the conversation should open with some show of humility. When will-to- win becomes overpowering, because the issues are deemed existential, ends are soon supposed to justify the means. Both parties can fall into this trap, though one of them—Trump’s—sees this not as a trap but as the portal through which to march to political dominance.
I suggest in the book that norms are upheld or weakened as a result of individual choices that all those in political or government positions make. A norm is an abstraction, made meaningful by what an actor chooses to do in particular circumstances. How actors make these choices defines an ethical politics, and a politics devoid of ethics is not really “democratic politics.” I share the view expressed by the political theorist Bernard Crick in his “defense of politics: that “to act morally in politics is to consider the results of one’s actions,” and that “however convinced [men and women are] of the rightness of their party, they must compromise its claims to the needs of some electoral and legal framework.”
I offer the example from early in my career of the Democrats making a run at bringing the Internal Revenue Service into the business of containing “negative” campaign speech for which then-available tax credits would be denied. They did not care for negative campaigning, in large part because they did not care for the success of these attacks in the Republican resurgence culminating in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Putting the IRS in the middle of judging the ‘negative” quality of campaign speech was a dreadful idea. The proposal went nowhere but my advocacy of this proposal reflected ethical tone deafness. And— with qualifications—the same goes for the use of the RICO statute to undermine then majority whip Tom DeLay’s plans to spend massive “soft” money to retain Republican control of the body.
To address these issues forthrightly is not by any means to engage in “moral equivalency.” I am second to none in my disgust with Trumpist political attacks on democratic norms and institutions. But the book looks to the common ground that Democrats and Republicans can find to resist the worst of what this kind of politics, and an unethical politics more generally, portends for the health of the democracy. In The Unraveling, I address urgently needed short-term and longer-term responses to the currently troubled state of democratic self-governance, including presidential abuse of power, the controversies over the Supreme Court, the rise in the resort to the impeachment process, and the challenge to professional, nonpartisan election administration. I describe my involvement in those projects, working with any and all who share these concerns, while remaining a very committed Democrat.
President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans….
The announcement would mark a major shift for Biden, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has long resisted calls to make substantive changes to the high court. The potential changes come in response to growing outrage among his supporters about recent ethics scandals surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas and decisions by the new court majority that have changed legal precedent on issues including abortion and federal regulatory powers.
A ProPublica analysis found a lack of transparency regarding conflicts plagues federal and state courts where loose rules, inconsistent enforcement and creative interpretations of guidelines routinely allow judges to withhold potential conflicts from the parties before them.
In an examination of more than 1,200 federal judges and state supreme court justices, ProPublica, in partnership with student journalists at Boston University, found dozens of judges, including both Republican and Democratic appointees, who chose not to recuse when facing potential appearances of impropriety involving familial financial connections. Ethics experts say that the judges’ interpretation of the rules may often lie within the letter of the law, but at the expense of its spirit.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., rejecting calls for their disqualification, participated in the case, siding with a member of the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Experts in legal ethics have said that the activities of the justices’ wives raised serious questions about their impartiality.
Virginia Thomas, known as Ginny, helped shape the effort to overturn the 2020 election. “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” Ms. Thomas wrote in a text message to Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, during the fraught weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack.
Justice Thomas has not given a public explanation for remaining on the case, and he has taken part in other cases arising from the election and the 2021 attack. But he recused himself in October from a case concerning John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who had advised Mr. Trump. Justice Thomas, for whom Mr. Eastman had served as a law clerk, gave no reasons for his decision to disqualify himself from that case.
Justice Alito has been more forthcoming. He explained why he would not recuse from the case in a letter to Democratic lawmakers in May after The New York Times reported that flags that have been used to support the “Stop the Steal” movement had been displayed at his homes in Virginia and New Jersey.
The justice said his wife, Martha-Ann, was responsible. “My wife is fond of flying flags,” he wrote. “I am not. She was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our residence and our vacation home and has flown a wide variety of flags over the years.”…
Members of Congress hear a lot of secrets: classified briefings, confidential previews of pending legislation and the private opinions of constituents, regulators, corporate executives and world leaders.
Watchdog groups have long believed that somelawmakers use that information to make money in the stock market. Now a loose alliance of traders, analysts and advocates is trying to let Americans mimic the trades elected officials make, offering tongue-in-cheek financial products — including one named for former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and another that refers to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — that track purchases and sales after lawmakers disclose them.
Collectively, these investment vehicles haveattracted hundreds of millions of dollars.At times, congressional investigatorshave used them to keep tabs on suspicious trading activity, according to people familiar with these investigations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
Supreme Court justices seldom give reasons for their decisions to recuse themselves. Even rarer are explanations for deciding to participate in a case when they have been accused of conflicts of interest.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. is an exception. He seems positively eager to explain himself. But whether his explanation has helped or hurt his cause is open to question.
On Wednesday, Justice Alito wrote letters to Democratic lawmakers saying he was not only permitted but also obligated to sit on two cases arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol despite controversies over flags displayed outside his houses associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement.
Experts in legal ethics said they welcomed Justice Alito’s decision to explain himself. But they were not persuaded by the reasoning in his letters, which said the flags had been flown by his wife and so did not require him to step aside in the pending cases, on whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution and on whether a federal obstruction law covers participants in the Jan. 6 assault….
Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said the quality of the reasoning in Justice Alito’s letters had shortcomings.
“I agree that Justice Alito’s wife has a First Amendment right to express her views,” Professor Frost said. “But if she does so on their shared property, in a way that would lead a reasonable person to question his impartiality, then he should respond by recusing himself.”
Professor Frost added that her conclusion would be no different had the controversy involved a liberal member of the court like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020. “I would say the same,” she said, “if Justice Ginsburg’s husband had placed a ‘Gore won’ sign on the lawn of their shared home while the Bush-Gore election was being contested in the courts.”
Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.
This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.
Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google street view image from late August also shows the flag.
The photographs, each taken independently, are from four different dates. It is not clear whether the flag was displayed continuously during those months or how long it was flown overall.
A Google street view photo taken in August 2023 shows the flag flying at the Alitos’ house.
Justice Alito declined to respond to questions about the beach house flag, including what it was intended to convey and how it comported with his obligations as a justice. The court also declined to respond….
In coming weeks, the justices will rule on that case, which could scuttle some of the charges against Mr. Trump, as well as on whether he is immune from prosecution for actions he took while president. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances at regaining the White House in the next one.
The disclosure about the new flag is troubling, several ethics experts said in interviews, because it ties Justice Alito more closely to symbols associated with the attempted election subversion on Jan. 6, and because it was displayed as the obstruction case was first coming for consideration by the court.
Judges are not supposed to give any impression of bias, yet the flag could be seen as telegraphing the Alitos’ views — and at a time when the justices were on the cusp of adopting a new ethics code. “We all have our biases, but the good judge fights against them,” said Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University Bloomington. “When a judge celebrates his predispositions by hoisting them on a flag,” he added, “that’s deeply disturbing.”
I was uncertain if the initial revelation of the first flag merited Justice Alito’s recusal in the first case, but I now believe he must recuse in the Trump immunity and related cases. His impartiality could be reasonably questioned here. There’s no blaming it on his spouse this time in any credible way.
