Administrative State

A convicted Cuban plane hijacker who terrorized a flight crew and forced a plane to divert to Florida in 2003 is back on the streets after a Bill Clinton-appointed federal judge ordered his release from ICE custody last week.

Miakel Guerra Morales, who served roughly 20 years in federal prison for aircraft piracy, had been detained by immigration authorities since December. He was awaiting deportation.

That is, until U.S. District Judge John E. Steele ruled on July 8th that he could no longer be held, despite the ongoing removal process.

A report from the magistrate judge in 2009 highlights some aspects of the brutality involved in the hijacking. The hijackers— Morales and a handful of co-defendants—wielded the plane’s emergency axes and several knives in an attempt to control the pilot and crew. Knives were, on multiple occasions, pressed against the throats of some individuals.

A new Wall Street Journal analysis found that Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most partisan justice on the Supreme Court, voting against the Trump administration 98 percent of the time in 100 major cases. In those same cases, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas aligned with the administration 89 and 88 percent of the time, respectively.

The Wall Street Journal suggested in its article that Alito’s record was the real story behind this data: “In a term dominated by Trump-related disputes, [Alito] voted to uphold every significant Trump initiative that came before the court, and he wrote frequent, full-throated endorsements of some of Trump’s most brazen efforts to expand presidential power.”

Alito is certainly a consistent conservative justice, but Jackson sides against the Trump administration in almost every major case, according to the WSJ’s analysis. The real story this data tells is about Jackson’s radicalism, which sometimes even causes her to split with her left-wing counterparts on the court.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams has handed President Donald Trump a ruling with the kind of symmetry Washington usually saves for satire. President Barack Hussein Obama nominated Williams in 2011, and 15 years later, she’s effectively stripped Trump’s IRS settlement of legal use and pushed several lawyers toward professional discipline.

The political circle closed with almost comic precision.

Trump had a legit grievance; Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor, stole and leaked Trump’s tax records with confidential data from thousands of wealthy taxpayers.

Littlejohn pleaded guilty and received five years in prison.