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A ruling Monday by a federal judge in Wisconsin that would extend the counting of mail-in ballots six days beyond Election Day would also allow those ballots to be counted even if there is no “definitive” sign of a postmark. U.S. District Judge William Conley of the Western District of Wisconsin — an appointee of President Barack Obama — ruled that absentee ballots in the state can be counted until Nov. 9 as long as they are postmarked by Election Day, Nov. 3. That echoes last week’s ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ruled that mailed-in ballots should be...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A federal judge ruled Monday that absentee ballots in battleground Wisconsin can be counted up to six days after the Nov. 3 presidential election as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. The highly anticipated ruling, unless overturned, means that the outcome of the presidential race in Wisconsin likely will not be known for days after polls close. Under current law, the deadline for returning an absentee ballot to have it counted is 8 p.m. on Election Day. Democrats and their allies sued to extend the deadline in the key swing state. U.S. District Judge...

#Flynn Appeals court denies former National Security adviser @GenFlynn ’s effort to force a judge to immediately dismiss charges. 61 page opinion. ORDER attached.

A man who raped and strangled a 10-year-old Kansas girl in 1999 was executed this week, becoming the fifth federal inmate put to death this year. Keith Nelson received a lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after a higher court tossed out a previous ruling that the government was required to obtain a prescription for phentobarbital, the drug used to kill him. Questions about whether the drug caused pain prior to death had been a focus of appeals for Nelson, 45. He was the second inmate to be executed this week after the Trump administration resumed...

...Powell began with a short opening statement and then responded to questions posed by the 10 active judges hearing the appeal. (Judge Gregory Katsas did not participate in the en banc proceedings.) Jeff Wall, the acting solicitor general, argued next on behalf of the government, followed by Beth Wilkinson, the private attorney retained to represent Sullivan. Powell and Wall concluded with short, two-minute rebuttals. The questions posed focused mainly on the propriety of mandamus in the Flynn case given that Sullivan has not yet ruled on the government’s motion to dismiss. Mandamus is an extremely rare remedy, appropriate only when...

LIVE United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit Live Stream

Maybe Judge Luttig was right all along. I had the misgivings you’d expect back in late May, when I disagreed with J. Michael Luttig, the stellar scholar and former federal appeals court judge, regarding how the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should handle the Flynn case. At the time, that court’s three-judge panel had not yet heard oral argument on Michael Flynn’s mandamus petition — i.e., Flynn’s request that the panel find that federal district judge Emmet Sullivan was acting lawlessly. Sullivan had not only failed to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn; he...

The Dakota Access Pipeline is the major means used to transport oil produced in the Bakken region of North Dakota to an existing pipeline in Illinois which can take the oil to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier this month a judge ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to cease operating so that a new environmental review, which could take a year or more, could be conducted. Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appears for the District of Columbia has issued a stay of that ruling, at least while the appeals court reviews it.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton reacted today to a federal court decision , which Judicial Watch may appeal, upholding the secrecy of controversial subpoenas for phone records issued by Adam Schiff, Chairman of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence relating to the impeachment of President Trump. “Adam Schiff secretly subpoenaed, without court authorization, the phone records of Rudy Giuliani and then published the phone records of innocent Americans, including President Trump’s lawyers, a member of Congress, and a journalist. And now a federal court ruled today that Schiff, or any member of Congress can’t be...

A tale of two judges. – Chief Justice John Roberts – the clearly-compromised former conservative jurist who now does the bidding of the progressive left whenever they demand it, apparently – famously stated in 2017 that there are no “Obama judges” or “Bush judges,” there are only federal judges. That, of course, is abject bullshit, but hey, it’s what the Chief does these days. Late this week, we saw the dichotomy between the kinds of decisions we get out of Bush/Reagan/Trump judges and Obama/Clinton judges in two decisions related the ongoing rioting taking place in Portland. It is a classic...

A federal judge on Friday criticized the Trump administration for a confusing and sluggish response to the Supreme Court’s decision last month invalidating the administration’s attempt to rescind the Obama-era program protecting so-called Dreamers. During a telephone hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Grimm said he was troubled that the Department of Homeland Security’s website has yet to be updated to account for the high court’s ruling on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA.

The Supreme Court on Friday denied an appeal by a Nevada church to allow additional worshipers to join in-person services based on capacity amid the coronavirus pandemic. Nevada has placed a 50-person cap on all places of worship, no matter the capacity of the building, as a part of the state's coronavirus restrictions. But casinos, along with other businesses such as restaurants and movie theaters, may permit up to 50 percent capacity, allowing casinos to grant access to hundreds of patrons at a time. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh all issued dissenting opinions rejecting the constitutionality of...

Conservative lawmakers blasted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after he sided with the court's liberal justices in a 5-4 decision Friday that rejected a Nevada church’s request to block the state government from enforcing a cap on attendance at religious services. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted early Saturday morning that Roberts had "abandoned his oath." "What happened to that judge?" tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). "Freedom of religion is our first freedom. Yet SCOTUS has ruled that casinos can host hundreds of gamblers, while churches cannot welcome their full congregations. Justice Roberts once again got it wrong, shamefully closing...

In Nevada, it seems being in the entertainment business has more leeway than those exercising their constitutionally protected right to worship. Amid the COVID outbreak, the state has limits on the capacity of certain locations. For churches, it’s no more than 50. For everything else, from movie theaters to casinos, it’s much more than that. It seems a bit unfair. The standard makes no sense, but it seems to be perfectly logical for Chief Justice John Roberts who sided with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court in the case of a church who challenged this unfair standard (via NYT):...

Portland, Oregon - A federal judge specifically blocked U.S. agents from arresting or using physical force against journalists and legal observers at the ongoing Portland, Oregon, protests that have sparked confrontations between local officials and President Trump over the limits of federal power. U.S. Judge Michael Simon made his ruling late Thursday, a day after Portland's mayor was tear-gassed by federal agents as he made an appearance outside a federal courthouse during raucous demonstrations. Protesters have gathered in Oregon's largest city for nearly two months straight since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. **SNIP** Judge Simon had previously ruled that...

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered Michael Cohen, former attorney to President Trump, released from prison, agreeing with Cohen's lawyers that he was wrongly taken back into custody for criticizing the president. Cohen, who was serving a federal fraud sentence, was released on home confinement as prisons were emptied to the COVID-19 pandemic. A week after tweeting that he was finishing a tell-all book about Trump, a probation officer told him he would have to agree to a complete ban on speaking in public, including by publishing a book, as a condition of continued home confinement, according to court documents....

The Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted another injunction on the Trump administration's rapid push to resume federal death sentences this week. A divided court lifted one of a handful of injunctions temporarily blocking the execution of a man whose lawyers say suffers from severe dementia. The vote was 5-4 with the liberal justices — Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — dissenting. DEVELOPING...

A federal judge in Washington has blocked federal executions scheduled for this week, citing concerns that the lethal injection protocol involved is "very likely to cause extreme pain and needless suffering." Judge Tanya Chutkan said the last-minute ruling only hours before executions were set to resume for the first time in 17 years was "unfortunate," but she blamed the Justice Department for racing ahead before legal challenges had been fully aired. The judge said the prison's plan to use a single drug, pentobarbital, could cause pulmonary edema, producing a sense that the condemned men were drowning. That would violate the...

he U.S. on Tuesday carried out its first federal execution in almost two decades, killing by lethal injection a man convicted of murdering an Arkansas family in a 1990s plot to build a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest. The execution of Daniel Lewis Lee, over the objection of the victims’ relatives and following days of legal wrangling and delays, revived the debate over capital punishment during a time of widespread social unrest. *** Lee, 47, of Yukon, Oklahoma, professed his innocence just before he was executed at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. “I didn’t do it," Lee...

A federal judge on Monday ordered the government to explain the “scope” of President Trump’s commutation of longtime GOP operative Roger Stone, including whether the move only involved the sentence of incarceration, or also the period of supervised release. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the government to provide the court by Tuesday, July 14, “a copy of the Executive Order commuting the defendant’s sentence and to address the question of the scope of the commutation, in particular, whether it involves the sentence of incarceration alone or also the period of supervised release.” In February, Jackson sentenced Stone to...