One of the most formidable obstacles to overcoming the emergency is the lack of a clear legal strategy to stop Trump’s excessive use of emergency powers. “I’m not aware of any legal challenges to the excessive use of emergency powers,” Goitein told me, and if she isn’t aware of any, I doubt anyone else is. Impeachment might offer greater freedom, but we’re still a long way off. Lawyers are therefore forced to challenge individual abuses in court as soon as they arise.
Goitein actually had an idea: she was suggesting that judges start granting less deference to the executive branch. She pointed out that in Sterling v. Constantine (1932) and Baker v. Carr (1962), the Supreme Court had suggested circumstances in which presidents should be accorded less deference than usual. In Sterling, the Supreme Court referred to a “permissible scope of honest judgment,” meaning that bad faith falls outside that scope. One difficulty, however, is that Sterling implied that executive power is exercised at the state rather than the federal level.
Representative Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement Tuesday that the new disclosure “contains fewer than 1,000 pages of CBP records relating to Epstein’s flight locations between 2000 and 2014, as well as forms consistent with reentry into the United States.”
“The 33,000 pages of Epstein documents that James Comer decided to ‘release’ were mostly public information,” Representative Garcia, a California Democrat, said in a statement. “To the American people, do not be fooled.”
A review of the materials released by the commission indicates that they include public court filings and transcripts from Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, previously released flight logs from Epstein’s plane, public communications from the Bureau of Prisons on the night of Epstein’s death, and various other public court documents related to Epstein’s criminal case in Florida.
The 33,000 documents the Justice Department has provided to Congress represent only a fraction of the records it possesses.
The Trump administration risks facing repercussions for its decision not to release documents related to the investigation into Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who committed suicide in prison in 2019. This decision follows a strong backlash from supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement after the administration announced last month that it would not release additional records.
