It wasn’t a great week for speaking truth to power. ABC’s decision to settle Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit to the tune of $16 million at the behest of parent company Disney sent shockwaves through newsrooms around the country. Coupled with Trump’s lawsuits pending against publishers, journalism prize organizations, CBS, and this week’s news that the President-elect is suing an Iowa pollster and the newspaper that published her poll for “election interference”, rising fears about the freedom of the press are pretty understandable. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by storied media columnist Margaret Sullivan and First Amendment scholar Sonja R West to understand the protections in place and the pinch points for a free press under Trump. 

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Our lives, and our communication in particular, are increasingly conducted over the internet. This means we are increasingly able to be hacked and monitored, by governments, by the police, and more and more by anyone who can get their hands on the available software.

Guest: Ronan Farrow, investigative reporter and producer of the Max documentary “Surveilled.”

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Cheyna Roth, and Ethan Oberman.

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Last week, we examined the deeply worrying prospect of Kash Patel, FBI director. This week, that possibility became even more worrisome with respect to the future of the FBI, all sparked by current director Christopher Wray’s announcement of his intention to step down. To kick off this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern, who explains why Wray’s decision is very bad news for the law and the rule of law. 

Next, the planet: Last summer, we tried to absorb the sheer scale of the shift in the constitutional landscape following a run of cases at the end of the last term that gave the courts the power to reshape the administrative state from the bench, and to impede the tools of the environmental protection trade at a time when the climate is in crisis. But the news cycle moved on and the global climate alarm got snoozed again. That alarm was surely ringing again at One, First Street this week, when a case that could reshape the nation’s biggest environmental law was argued at the Supreme Court. 

Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado comes to the court as a dispute over how much review is due to a railroad plan that will carry waxy, crude oil through environmentally sensitive areas, and send said waxy crude on its way to already polluted and health blighted gulf communities. Sam Sankar of Earth Justice was on hand to explain how this weedy case paints a very clear picture of the Supreme Court conservative majority’s fondness for grabbing cases that are vehicles for achieving their preferred policy outcomes, but then finding themselves in a bit of a pickle when its time to craft a new test for an old problem.  

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Daniel Penny’s trial over the death of Jordan Neely hinged on the question of how and when a “reasonable person” would feel threatened. Does the jury’s non-guilty verdict deliver a clear answer? 

Guest: Katie Way, writer-editor at Hell Gate.

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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.

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Last week’s killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO prompted an outpouring of glee online. A look into UnitedHealthcare’s business practices—and the American healthcare system as a whole—can help explain why.

Guest: Dan Diamond, national health reporter for The Washington Post.

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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther. 

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What do people inside the Department of Justice think about their once-colleague and possible-future-overlord, Kash Patel? On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by former US Attorney Joyce White Vance to discuss the frightening implications of Patel's potential nomination as FBI Director under the incoming Trump administration. They explore Patel's contentious history, including his time in the DOJ, his authorship of the Nunes memo, and his bottomless loyalty to Trump. They also discuss the broader consequences of Patel’s stated desire to use the Justice Department as a tool for political retribution, including threats to journalists and DOJ officials, and what his targeted individuals can do in the face of this new, chilling reality. 

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How problematic is it for Joe Biden to pardon his son Hunter after promising, again and again, that he wouldn’t?

Guest: Ankush Khardori, senior writer for POLITICO and a former federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice.

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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.

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When it comes to gender affirming care for teenagers, parents’ rights no longer matter. Doctors’ opinions no longer matter. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in United States. v Skrmetti, challenging Tennessee’s ban on healthcare for trans kids, and upending half a century of gender protection doctrine. 

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, who will also be the first openly trans lawyer to argue at SCOTUS when he argues, alongside the Biden administration, representing the parents and physician of trans adolescents seeking care, in what will be the biggest trans rights case the court has ever heard. Chase and Dahlia dig through the doctrine to reveal the conservative legal movement’s deep hypocrisy when it comes to trans rights as compared to the rights of parents and doctors when it comes to abortion.

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The Supreme Court threw out the last attempt to ban mifepristone, the “abortion pill,” because they couldn’t figure out who in the case was being injured. Now three states are claiming they are being harmed, because abortion access is preventing population growth for them 

Guest: Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times from 1978 to 2008, author and winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. 

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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.

Disclosure in Podcast Description: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more.

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If you had forgotten the chaos of Trump 1.0, the frenzied first two weeks of transition to Trump 2.0 has surely been a stark reminder. A pair of random billionaires are claiming in advance that SCOTUS will back their extra-governmental plans for a slash and burn policy for federal agencies; accusations of sexual misconduct swirl around cabinet picks; nominations are being retracted and replaced, and while all of this happens we are waiting to see whether Republicans in the Senate will step into a role of moderation, or just roll over. This matters a lot with respect to what the federal judiciary is going to look like, how much scrutiny is applied to the most outlandish cabinet nominees, and the independence of the Justice Department. 

On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has spent years investigating the dark money plot to control the courts, and who knows from firsthand experience why the justice department is different from other agencies. 

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The Department of Justice has released its recommendations for how Google’s monopoly on web search should be broken up. Top of their wishlist? Spinning off their web browser Chrome. 

But with a new administration coming to the White House, will Google have to comply?

Guest: Leah Nylen, antitrust reporter for Bloomberg News

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Disclosure in Podcast Description: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more.

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