1/ Major legal development in the Travel Ban/Muslim Ban case: a former consular officer in a sworn affidavit says the waiver process is "window dressing." A current officer calls it a "fraud." SCOTUS must take notice. Great reporting by @JeremyStahl slate.com/news-and-polit…
2/ The Trump administration added a waiver process to save the Travel Ban from being struck down, then emphasized that a waiver process makes the Ban fair. In oral argument, Breyer and Sotomayor asked the govt whether the waiver process was mere “window dressing.”
3/ Solicitor Gen. Noel Francisco answered that "the State Department’s consular officers have been tasked with ensuring the legitimacy of that process. The “waiver process actually is applied automatically by consular officers.” But an officer tells Slate the process "a fraud."
4/ Read @JeremyStahl's piece for the statistics on waiver and the actual cases that corroborate that the waiver process is a fraud and a facade, "window dressing" for show so that courts won't strike it down. But let's talk about SG Noel Francisco. This is Strike 3 for him.
5/ As I told @jacobwe on @realTrumpcast last week, SG Francisco is next in line after Dep AG Rod Rosenstein to run the Mueller investigation, in case he recuses or is fired. I said Francisco is "unacceptable" to run the Russia investigation. slate.com/articles/podca…
6/ Rachel Brand had been next in line after Rosenstein. When Rachel Brand resigned in Feb, I wrote about how Noel Francisco's legal/political background makes him problematic if he were to take over the investigation. shugerblog.com/2018/02/09/ass…
7/ In the Travel Ban/Muslim Ban case alone, Francisco confirmed these suspicions three separate times. First, he erred in describing the key facts of Trump's statements showing animus: slate.com/news-and-polit…
8/After a significant factual error, SG Francisco sent the shortest possible correction on that fact, but did not correct the many other misleading aspects of his argument. STRIKE 2. slate.com/news-and-polit…
9/ Now @JeremyStahl has reported on this "window-dressing" "fraud" of a waiver process. For SG Francisco, that's STRIKE 3.
10/ Historical context: During the Japanese Internment in WWII, the Solicitor General Fahy and the DOJ also misled the Supreme Court, as historian Peter Irons has documented. This a permanent scar on the SG's office. Read here: sfchronicle.com/opinion/openfo…
11/ Now Noel Francisco is risking the same fate as former SG Fahy: a permanently destroyed reputation as a lawyer by misleading the Supreme Court, exaggerating national security claims to defend a flagrantly discriminatory policy. @neal_katyal
