Opinion | It takes a lot to get a federal judge to write a piece this bold

By Drew Goins
October 7, 2024 at 4:52 p.m. EDT

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Objection, Your Honors


(Anthony Gerace for The Washington Post)

This newsletter typically omits writers’ middle initials, but when you come across an impassioned op-ed written by a senior federal appellate judge, he gets to keep the S.

In other words, it’s a big deal that Stephen S. Trott of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit — who was appointed by Ronald Reagan — has decided to write anything, let alone that the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in the case of Donald Trump is untenable in a democracy.

Under that ruling, he opens his piece, “could President Richard M. Nixon have legally ordered his Plumbers to burgle the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist? Might they all have gotten away with it? It certainly looks that way to me.”

Trott is in a position to know; before he assumed judgeship and all its expectations of impartiality, he was the young lawyer overseeing that very burglary indictment.
Trott walks through how differently all the Nixon scandals might have unfolded if that presidency had possessed today’s imperial powers. His analysis includes a chilling sentence: “The president’s and the Plumbers’ corrupt intent and criminal purpose would have been considered immaterial.”

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Opinion by Drew Goins
Drew Goins is a newsletter writer and editor in the Opinions section.follow on X drewlgoins