"Mr. Trump ended the first day of public trading $4.6 billion richer on paper...."

I'm reading "Trump’s Social Media Company Opens New Avenue for Conflicts of Interest/Ethics experts say Trump Media, now a publicly traded company, would present a new way for foreign actors or others to influence Donald J. Trump, if he is elected president" (NYT).

Isn't it funny how his haters got him kicked off Twitter and — only because of that — he made his own website and 3 years later, it makes him $4.6 billion?

Anyway, this new Times article, by Sharon LaFraniere — "an investigative reporter currently focusing on Republican candidates in the 2024 presidential campaign" (I love the plural) — casts shade on Trump's insanely good fortune. 

"The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor."

"Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. Going forward, these practices will likely be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries.... Watergate deluded us into thinking that independent counsels of various stripes could vindicate the rule of law and bring national closure in response to abuses by senior officials in office. Every relevant experience since then — from the discredited independent counsel era (1978-99) through the controversial and unsatisfactory Mueller investigation — proves otherwise. And national dissensus is more corrosive today than in the 1990s, and worse even than when Mr. Mueller was at work...."

Writes Harvard lawprof Jack Goldsmith, in "The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences" (NYT).

"To indict Mr. Trump for these and other acts, Mr. Garland must make three decisions, each more difficult than the previous, and none of which has an obvious answer...."

Writes lawprof Jack Goldsmith (in the NYT):  

"Leaks can serve a really important role in helping to correct government malfeasance, to encourage government to be careful about what it does in secret and to preserve democratic processes."

Said Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, author of "Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11," quoted in The Washington Post on December 6, 2012, in a column titled "Why we don’t need another law against intelligence leaks" (by Leonard Downie Jr.).

And here's a CNN piece by Princeton history professor Julian Zelizer, "Why Washington is leaking like a sieve," published May 31, 2017:

Does Trump want to lose the case about the immigration order?

Harvard lawprof Jack Goldsmith speculates that he does (because the other explanation is that his White House Counsel Donald McGahn is "incompetent or ineffectual"):

The Immigration EO has a surprisingly strong basis in law but was issued in haste, without proper interagency coordination, without proper notice, without adequate consideration of its implications, and with a media strategy, if it was that, that suggested that the EO was motivated by discrimination against Muslims....

The clearly foreseeable consequence of the roll-out combined with Trump’s tweets is to weaken the case for the legality of the EO in court. Why might Trump want to do that? Assuming that he is acting with knowledge and purpose... the only reason I can think of is that Trump is setting the scene to blame judges after an attack that has any conceivable connection to immigration.... If Trump assumes that there will be a bad terrorist attack on his watch, blaming judges now will deflect blame and enhance his power more than usual after the next attack....

It's easy for Trump's antagonists to get distracted running with the theory that he's a brutish lout who doesn't know what he is doing. It's important to pursue the alternative interpretation — that Trump does know what he is doing — and that is what Goldsmith is doing.

Goldsmith seems like the Scott Adams of Trump antagonists. This is something we need — analysis that assumes Trump is savvy and brilliant, coming from people who don't like what he is doing.

It makes sense to me to theorize that Trump is hoping to lose in court. It would relieve Trump of the burden of following through on a key campaign promise. He won't have any responsibility for the consequences and failures of a policy he was prevented from carrying out, and he can blithely insist that it would have worked. But the judges stopped him. People will be stirred up and angry at the judges — those terrible activist judges.

OR: Maybe Trump's trick is to get the judges to think he wants to lose so he can win. Devious!!

What to ask Mukasey.

4 law professors say what questions they'd like the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Michael Mukasey. (The Attorney General nominee testifies today.)

A sampling:

Jack Goldsmith: "In 2002 the Department of Justice opined, 'Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogations of battlefield combatants would violate the Constitution’s sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the president.' Do you agree with this statement? How do you define the scope of the president’s exclusive military powers?"

Charles Fried: "Priorities in law enforcement and particular conceptions of controversial legal issues — affirmative action, severity and leniency in criminal prosecution and sentencing, antitrust policies, civil rights enforcement — have always been part of a president’s project for the nation. And yet the public expects and the rule of law demands impartiality in law enforcement. So the attorney general cannot be independent of the president who appointed him, as are judges or the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, but neither must he be a political operative pushing the president’s advantage at every turn. How would you balance these conflicting demands?"

Jack Balkin: "When, if ever, should the government prosecute journalists or other citizens for publishing classified information leaked to them about government activities of questionable legality?"

UPDATE: Mukasey on the "torture memo": "The Bybee memo, to paraphrase a French diplomat, was worse than a sin, it was a mistake. It was unnecessary."