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.
Sure, President Donald Trump started literally tearing down the White House this week, but don’t sleep on all of the other terrible things happening. Gotta be well-rounded, right?
This week, we’ve got one of Justice Neal Gorsuch’s former clerks showing off along with one of Trump’s former personal lawyers having a really bad time at the Third Circuit. Also, the Department of Homeland Security thinks it is really unfair to tell them they can’t attack journalists and the University of Virginia makes a dumb deal with the devil.
Mike Davis says the quiet part out loud
Mike Davis, who was ostensibly in the running to be attorney general for Trump’s second term but somehow didn’t land any job in the administration, couldn’t help himself from bragging that he still knows things, man.
However, in his zeal to go on “The Charlie Kirk Show” and show off, Davis likely revealed a little too much. Davis was asked about an investigation into a “grand conspiracy” against Trump and popped off about how “my buddy,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones, is empaneling a grand jury that “should be fully up and running by January.”
There are indeed two new grand juries set to be empaneled on Jan. 12, 2026, but there’s no information whatsoever about what those are for, which means that either a sitting U.S. attorney is illegally feeding confidential information to someone with no role in the government or Davis is lying.
In a normal world, it would most likely be the latter. These days, it’s probably the former. Sigh.
Another rough week for Alina Habba
If the Department of Justice thought things would go any better at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals than they did at the lower court regarding their frantic attempts to keep Alina Habba in a job she has no business being in as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey, they were disabused of that notion at oral argument.
A lower court had ruled back in August that Habba, one of Trump’s innumerable former personal attorneys, was not legally in her position as U.S. attorney for New Jersey despite the administration’s attempt to keep her there via a string of temporary appointments.
Alina Habba, a former defense lawyer for President Donald Trump who has been named interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey.
The lower court’s decision was stayed pending this appeal, which means at the moment, federal judges in New Jersey have to deal with figuring out whether Habba can prosecute cases during the stay.
At oral argument in front of the Third Circuit, the DOJ attorney, Henry Whitaker, insisted that the government “colored inside the lines here.”
Sure, yes, it is very normal to (1) name your former personal attorney with no prosecutorial experience as an interim U.S. attorney; (2) pull her nomination from the Senate after the district court judges in New Jersey refused to keep her in the job; and (3) have Habba quit her job as interim U.S. attorney. And then (4) have the attorney general appoint Habba as both a special attorney and a first assistant U.S. attorney and (5) say that when Habba resigned as interim, that meant the U.S. attorney position was vacant. So Habba has now ascended to the top job from the first assistant role.
When asked if he could provide any other examples of U.S. attorney appointments like this, Whitaker went with “Well, I guess, I cannot.”
Aww, cheer up, pal! The lower court in Nevada disqualified another of Trump’s terrible picks, Sigal Chattah, over a similar type of temporary appointment nonsense, and Lindsey Halligan may soon face the same thing in the Eastern District of Virginia. So you do have a few examples! Too bad they are all equally illegal.
“C’mon, bro. Just let us attack journalists a little bit, as a treat!”
That was pretty much the argument the Department of Homeland Security tried in front of U.S. District Judge Hernán Vera, asking him to stay his preliminary injunction barring federal agents from using indiscriminate force against journalists and observers in Los Angeles.
DHS tried to tell the court that the plaintiff journalists weren’t at risk of any immediate harm, so they didn’t have standing to sue.
Yeah, about that. The court noted that these journalists continue to attend and cover protests where DHS uses indiscriminate force on, well, everyone, and have “fired on Plaintiffs even when they were far from the center of protest activity.” Seems like a pretty immediate danger!
And in case you’re confused, this is a different case from the one in Chicago, where DHS was also ordered not to do this, and did it anyway.
Biden appointee will force the military to do a DEI
After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered libraries at military-run K-12 schools to purge books about any “divisive concepts” such as race and gender and demanded curriculum changes to make sure there was no forbidden diversity, a group of 12 students and their families sued.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction and ordered the Department of Defense Education Activity, which oversees the schools, to immediately restore the 596 books to the five schools attended by the plaintiffs. Turns out there are cases that say pesky things like “school boards can’t remove books just because they don’t like them.”
How dare she. How are we going to build the next generation of warfighters now?
Oh, Virginia. Why would you do it?
The University of Virginia has decided to bend the knee to stop the Trump administration’s sham investigations into whatever it comes up with.
Well, not so much “stop” as “pause until the government feels like starting again.”
Sure, UVA doesn’t have to give the administration money and sure, they don’t have to submit to external monitoring, so in that regard it is a better deal than what Columbia agreed to, but it is still exceedingly not great.
The agreement requires UVA to certify its compliance quarterly, and then the government
“may make such inquiries as it deems necessary to verify the accuracy of such certification.” So, basically, the administration can put UVA through the wringer quarterly.
Oh, and also, if at any time, the government decides UVA isn’t in compliance, they get 15 days to show appropriate progress and if the government doesn’t agree, “the United States may terminate this Agreement and may pursue enforcement actions, monetary fines, or grant or funding terminations as appropriate, and may resume all Investigations held in abeyance during the pendency of this Agreement.”
See? Pause, not stop. The investigations remain hanging over the school and the government can restart them whenever.
There’s no certainty for UVA in this agreement, but at least they did agree to follow so-called “federal guidance” by eliminating any diversity initiatives and throwing trans students under the bus. All of that bigotry for literally no actual protection from the administration. Good job.
