A patient prepares to take the first of two combination pills—mifepristone—for a medication abortion during a visit to a clinic.
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.
It’s another bleak week in the courts, which is a distressingly common thing right now. How do you feel about religious fanatics getting to lie about abortion because Jesus says it’s cool? Are you down with giving the manifestly incompetent Jeanine Pirro multiple ways to indict people, which is necessary since she sucks at it?
We do have one bright spot here: Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl—remember those conspiracy theorists?—are actually facing some consequences for their actions. Weird, right?
If you love Jesus, you can lie about the abortion pill
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that New York cannot enforce a law barring the dissemination of misinformation about the abortion pill, because freeze peach.
Anti-abortion types have touted that the abortion pill can be “reversed,” which is both wrong and dangerous. In 2019, researchers from the University of California, Davis, looked into whether progesterone could stop a medication abortion after someone has taken the first pill in the two-pill process. Out of 12 women in the study, three suffered vaginal bleeding so severe that they needed to be rushed by ambulance to a hospital. And the study authors then determined it was too dangerous to proceed, so they ended it.
An abortion-rights activist holds a box of mifepristone pills outside the Supreme Court in 2024.
But these plaintiffs in the case really want to be able to tell people this is a safe and real thing women can do.
Let’s face it: If this case were about anything other than abortion and conservative Christians hating it, this would be a slam dunk for New York. For example, there’s no way a court would sign off on there being a free speech right to tell everyone that knee surgery will kill you, or that, hey, why not remove your own bladder stent because the doctor should never have put it there anyway, because kidney stones aren’t real?
But these plaintiffs are compelled to share lies about a supposed abortion-pill reversal process because their religion says so, and that means it’s free speech, and they get to keep doing it.
Maybe Pam Bondi will like this judge now
Remember how poor U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro kept getting no-billed by federal grand juries when she tried to bring inflated criminal charges against people scooped up in President Donald Trump’s so-called crime crackdown?
Well, she came up with a neat little trick to solve this: Go to a local grand jury instead, get an indictment, then walk that back over to federal court.
Jeanine Pirro, shown in 2024.
It’s unhinged, but Judge James Boasberg just signed off on it, saying that the interplay of federal and D.C. laws is complex and therefore Pirro gets to have even more bites at the apple with her wildly overcharged cases.
Funny thing is, Boasberg has been the subject of relentless attacks from Attorney General Pam Bondi. She filed an absurd ethics complaint merely because he dared to tell the administration to turn around the planes filled with detainees heading for Venezuela, and then had the gall to tell the Justice Department it can’t defy court orders. The nerve. But since Boasberg has given Pirro this little treat, perhaps the DOJ will lay off for a bit.
Okay, it won’t, but we can dream.
Law school tuition is too damn high and it’s … the ABA’s fault?
Yes, that’s the logic of the Federal Trade Commission, but this isn’t really about tuition. It’s about the administration’s desire to replicate the recent Texas plan to cut the American Bar Association out of the law-school approval and accreditation process and instead let the state Supreme Court decide which Texas law school graduates will get admitted to the bar.
While this might sound benign, it’s scuzzy as hell. ABA accreditation provides both standardization and standards, meaning that it addresses both what law schools need to cover and at what level of quality and service. Texas’s proposal would result in nothing but fly-by-night, unaccredited law schools lobbying Texas justices to sign off on their sketchy schools.
The other problem here is that if Texas decides that students from unaccredited schools can sit for the Texas bar, those students likely could not sit for the bar in other states, which would require graduation from an ABA-accredited school.
This is all part of the administration’s attack on accreditors generally, because god forbid you impose any rigor or quality on higher education. How is Trump going to have Trump University 2.0 if these stupid accreditors hang about?
The FTC’s logic here is that since the ABA has a “monopoly” on accreditation, it has led to a shortage of lawyers, to which: lol.
The nation has over 1.3 million practicing lawyers, and the lawyer bubble has persisted for years, with law school graduates sometimes having double the unemployment rate of non-lawyers. This push likely results in nothing but Trump University Law School, which is a thing no one needs.
Blast from the past: Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl
Conspiracy theorists Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl were everywhere in the first Trump administration, pulling the absolute weirdest stunts.
Conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl, shown in 2018.
Remember when they held a press conference to falsely announce that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had hired a 24-year-old boy toy for sex, only for said boy toy to be unable to stop laughing behind the podium? Or when Wohl went to Minneapolis to “investigate” Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar and declared the city a hellhole where he received death threats, except the threats he reported to police appeared to have been made … by him from an alt account?
Burkman and Wohl also committed crimes, such as using robocalls designed to suppress Black voters during the 2020 election. The robocalls had misinformation about voting by mail, particularly that it put people in a public database that would allow police to track them down and allow credit card companies to find them and collect debts.
In a rarity for conservative activists, however, these two fucked around and found out and were prosecuted or sued in multiple jurisdictions. And they just agreed to a no-contest plea in Michigan, which netted them a year of probation, which is a lot better than New York, where they are on the hook for over $1 million in fines.
Ed Martin seemingly can’t stop deleting government records
Oh, Ed Martin. We just can’t quit you because you just can’t quit being an unethical jackass. It seems that the pardon attorney/director of the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group/special attorney for mortgage fraud may have a problem with concealing and destroying records.
However, since the DOJ won’t voluntarily provide records or information via Freedom of Information Act requests, watchdog organization American Oversight sued the DOJ to try to unlock these records or to confirm that Ed’s a little heavy with the delete button.
Martin has been here before. When he worked for Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt, his alleged deletion habits ultimately forced the state to pay $500,000 to a lawyer who was allegedly fired after raising an issue about the office.
Martin is one of the key people helping Trump exact retribution from people he perceived as having wronged him. Of course, he’s not going to keep a paper trail—come on.
