Musk’s big mouth, and the DOJ’s unlawful meme obsession
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.
Last week was … a lot, legally speaking. While much of the Trump administration’s efforts have shifted to trying to get courts to agree that President Donald Trump can deploy troops from red states to bring blue cities to heel, there are still many other terrible developments.
We’ve got a throwback to Elon Musk’s idiotic actions, the Fifth Circuit is likely going to decide it’s totally groovy to force religion into the classroom, James Comey’s attorney is taking a page from Trump’s playbook, and the Supreme Court looks primed to strike down conversion therapy bans—because why not hurt trans kids more. Oh and last—but never least—is the Department of Justice’s meme antics undermining its own case against Luigi Mangione.
Musk and the Trump administration FAFO
Well, well, well. If it isn’t the consequences of Musk’s own actions.
The New York Times recently prevailed in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over the Trump administration’s refusal to provide a list of Musk’s security clearances when he was a government contractor prior to 2025. Now the administration will have to cough it up.
They tried to say that it would violate Musk’s privacy, but the court noted that Musk bragged publicly of his “top secret clearance” in 2024, making it not really all that private to begin with.
The Times did not request additional information—like Musk’s application for clearances or any investigative materials—but the government still claimed that it couldn’t provide the form because it would show whether clearances were subject to any conditions, even if the conditions themselves were redacted.
This is where Musk’s boasts about his ketamine use, his cringe-worthy blunt rotation with Joe Rogan, and his chats with Vladimir Putin came back to bite him.
To grant a security clearance, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency must review foreign influences and drug use. The court said that, while Musk has not publicly discussed any conditions, he has publicly addressed his drug use and contacts with foreign leaders. And since the DCSA is supposed to consider those things, the public has an interest in the DCSA’s performance of its duties.
You can expect the Trump administration to continue fighting this because it would likely crack open the door for FOIA requests about Musk’s clearances at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—and they desperately don’t want that.
The Fifth Circuit will keep hearing Ten Commandment cases until they get the desired result
In another horrible development, the Fifth Circuit has ordered a full court review of the three-judge panel decision in Roake v. Brumley—and it’s not an exaggeration to say that we should all be worried.
Both the Louisiana lower court and the three-judge panel ruled that the law requiring public schools to permanently display the Ten Commandments was unconstitutional, because it so obviously is.
The fact that they agreed to a review and requested new briefs and oral arguments is a sign that there’s an appetite to reverse it. This would mean getting a decision on the books holding that the government can force the display of the Ten Commandments—but only the Protestant version chosen by the state.
Next stop will be the Supreme Court because, much like they did with abortion, states are going to keep passing objectively unconstitutional laws, shoving them up to the Supreme Court to bless them. Terrific system we have here.
Unlawful appointments giveth, but they may also taketh away
One of the challenges James Comey’s attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, has said he will raise—and file a motion to dismiss the case—is an unlawful appointment claim.
Basically, that would be that Lindsey Halligan, installed as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia for the sole purpose of indicting Trump’s enemies, is not legally allowed to be in her role. Her predecessor, Erik Siebert, served the limit of 120 days in the interim position, allowing the federal judges to appoint him.
The issue is whether that created a new vacancy or not. If it did not, then that 120-day interim use is gone forever, which is why the court ruled that Alina Habba isn’t legally in her role in New Jersey. In that case, the Trump administration argued that the 120-day clock starts over with each interim appointment, but that would make the 120-day interim limit entirely useless.
There would be a sort of grimly hilarious symmetry if the Comey prosecution falls apart because a judge decides that Halligan was not properly in her role. Trump hit a stroke of luck when his all-time favorite lower-court judge Aileen Cannon ruled, wildly incorrectly, that Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed and threw out the entire classified documents case.
What’s good for the goose, etc.
SCOTUS tips its hand, and it’s not great
Tuesday’s oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar made it clear that the Supreme Court is going to strike down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. Doing so would also knock out similar laws throughout almost half of the country.
There’s no credible argument for conversion therapy, which tries to force minors to be heterosexual and cisgender. Major health care organizations have denounced it, and people forced to undergo it report high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
The right-wing argument in Chiles is that it violates the free speech of therapists if they can’t compel children to listen to how their identity is bad and wrong.
It’s an absolute sham of a lawsuit, with no evidence that the plaintiff ever intended to offer conversion therapy or received any complaints. Her lawyer, with the rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ group Alliance Defending Freedom, told the court that Chiles was the subject of “anonymous complaints” that they declined to provide.
This is just another case where the plaintiff is nothing but a straw man standing in to get the desired conservative result—which is to protect the free speech of bigots at the expense of the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ kids.
Trump and the DOJ are going to tweet Luigi Mangione right out of jail
The DOJ is in trouble over how hyped it is to talk about Mangione’s guilt while in the midst of prosecuting him, with the public affairs deputy director posting on X interviews of Trump saying that Mangione “shot someone in the back as clear as you’re looking at me.”
This is pretty much a textbook example of prejudicial pretrial statements, which are not allowed, as pretty much every DOJ prosecutor knows. But the DOJ is being steered by people whose main interests are creating cool meme content and hurting people, so they might not be so familiar.
When the court ordered the Trump administration to explain what happened here, they said that, since the person who made the post wasn’t part of the prosecution team, they weren’t violating the rule.
This is nonsense, of course, as it would basically mean that the DOJ could pop off with these statements any time as long as the actual prosecutor on the case isn’t the one to say it.
But this isn’t the first time that the attention-hungry, meme-driven administration ran into trouble with Mangione, who’s now moving to block the DOJ from seeking the death penalty because of the highly televised perp walk they made him do.