Justices Suggest Sweeping Rollback on Abortion

precedents now allow. Here's Justice Samuel Alito. The fetus has an interest in having a life, and that doesn't change, does it? From the point before viability to the point after viability? Liberal justice has suggested a decision that gutted the precedence of Roe versus Wade and planned parent who had versus Casey would undermine the courts legitimacy. Here's Justice So so to mayor will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution

and it's reading are just political acts. Joining me is Bloomberg New Supreme Court reporter Greg Store? How would you characterize the questioning by the justices? The tone was it even keeled? Contentious tents. There was a certain amount of contentiousness. Mostly it was very much in favor of Mississippi. The Conservative justices all suggested they were ready to uphold the fift week ban, almost no questions from them suggesting any

skepticism towards it. Justice Clarence Thomas asked right away how the Court could uphold the law without overturning the courts precedents on abortion. Is there any way for the court to do that? There didn't see to be away offered by either side that satisfied the justices. Lawyers on both sides are casting this case is pretty much in all

or nothing case. The abortion rights lawyers Julie Rickleman, the Slicer General Elizabeth pre Lager, we're both essentially saying, if you're going to uphold this law, you are essentially gutting Row. And there's no middle ground standard that will be as workable as the current one that we have. Was the only question for the Conservatives then, whether to overrule Row entirely or whether to stop at fifteen weeks of viability.

That sure seemed to be the case. So you had two Justice John Roberts, who was mostly talking about the fifteen week band aspect of the law. He wasn't talking about overruling Row. And then you had Justices like Amy Coney, Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh who were really pressing on the starry decisis issue, the idea that the Court will respect its presidents. And then you had the most conservative justice says who were pretty clear that overruling Row was what they had

in mind. So you had on one side of the Justice Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch for overruling Row. And then you had the liberals Justices Sonya Sotomayor, Stephen Bryan and Elena Kagan for keeping Row and overruling this Mississippi law. And then you had the other three sort of in the middle, or not really in the middle, because all the conservatives seemed to be ready to allow the Mississippi law. Yeah, not really in the middle. Exactly,

they were ready to allow the Mississippi law. John Roberts was really only talking about the specific law in front of them, not about the broader question about overturning Roki, Wade and Kavanaugh and Barrett almost all their question We're suggesting they were at least thinking very seriously about overturning Row.

They were both suggesting reasons why the Court didn't need to respect the president of rob Wade, while there might be good reasons that the Court could overturn it, and that the reasons that the Court gave in Row and then in Casey for keeping abortion rights intact might not be valid once so, remind me what Barrett and Kavanaugh said about precedent in their confirmation hearings. Well, both of

them said they would respect precedent. Both of them acknowledge Row and Casey as precedents of the Court, but they didn't say that either of them were settled law. They did not treat them the way they treated something like Brown versus Board of Education, which they portrayed as a decision that would never come up to the Court to

be second guest. They said that because there was a chance that they would be asked to overturn Ruby Wade, they didn't want to comment on what they thought about that. Was any conservative justice agreeable to keeping the viability standard. No one seemed to like the viability standard, and John Roberts was certainly among them. He said that the viability standard put the us UH in league a North Korea and China as two other countries that had that standard.

Julie recommend. The lawyer representing the Jackson, Mississippi clinic a shot back that he was incorrect in that assessment, but he said that fifteen weeks seems like enough time for somebody to make a decision. He seemed very ready to jettison that standard. Barrett questioned the contention by the abortion right advocates that women would be forced into bearing the burden of parenthood if they couldn't have an abortion. Did she suggest adoption as a viable alternative. She did, and

she returned to the subject a couple of times. She talked about safe haven laws that she said, we're in place in all fifty states that let a woman who gives birth leave her baby in a in a safe place to be adopted and then she doesn't have to bear those burdens of a parenthood. And what Justice Barrett was suggesting was that language and growing casey that suggested that was a reason why the court needs to let a woman and the pregnancy was not a vou reason.

What was the tone of the liberal justices because Justice Sonya Soto Mayor said something that seemed rather shocking. The theme among the liberal justices was that if the Court overturns Row, it will lose its legitimacy and and justice. So to Mayor uses the phrase will this institution survive? The stench that this creates in the public perception that

the Constitution and its reading are just political acts. A couple of the justices of liberal justices mentioned the Court's change in membership and the perception that the country would have that Row was being overturned, not because anything had changed over the course of fifty years, just because the

court's membership had changed. I suppose the justices shouldn't be thinking about public opinion, but it is sort of shocking that they would seemingly take this turn at this point in our history where a majority of the public supports abortion. That's interesting and that may ultimately have an effect on exactly how this case is resolved, depending on how you asked the question. If if you ask folks about do they support a fifteen week limit on abortion? Uh, then

there's more support for that sort of limit. So if the Court could somehow limited decision to just the Mississippi law, perhaps it wouldn't have the public opinion issue that you just described. The problem for the court is that in the absence of using viability as a line, it's not at all clear, and certainly it's not clear that the court has the interest what the other line might be. What line might allow a fifteen week band but not

allow a six week band. And that's why there seemed to be a good deal of momentum on the court for just going ahead ripping off the band aid in the overturning Row. And as you suggest, there could be a backlash there. So remind you when the court took this case, was there talk about overturning row? There was, but not not as much. So what happened was when Mississippi file its appeal, Ruth Vader Ginsburg was still alive, the appeal did not explicitly ask the court to overturn row.

After Justice Ginsburg died, just spared joined the court. The Court took agreed to take up the case, and then when filed it's brief on the merits, that's when it directly said, Hey, you should just go ahead and overturn rowing casey. So that's why the emphasis here has changed. And that's another factor that might matter when I talk about how this decision is perceived by the public. As we've talked about many times, the Chief Justice is in

favor of incrementalism, moving slowly. What would be moving slowly in this case, moving slowly would be if the Court could somehow find a way to uphold this this law. And mind you, that would be a sweeping change, because that is far earlier than the Supreme Court has ever

said is okay to the ban abortion. But the Court could find a way to uphold this law, and just limited to the facts of this case that it's a fifteen week ban in Mississippi right now, the only clinic there performs abortions only up to sixteen weeks, so that the narrow effect of this law in Mississippi is pretty small. The problem, of course, would be that almost immediately they would be badged with other appeals saying well, then you should also allow our twelve week ban or eight week

ban or our six week band. And it's gonna be very hard for the court to find a way to draw a line there. And that was something I think the Solicitor General talked about also in the case of Mississippi, is there a trigger that would completely ban abortions. Mississippi is one of about twelve states that also has a law that would automatically ban virtually all abortions if the Court explicitly over rules Roe v. Wade, and so that

law we kick in. And there would probably be some litigation over some some of those laws whether they actually apply, but there would probably be beyond the twelve states and other maybe another ten or so, according to abortion rights the advocates, maybe even more than that. That would very significantly limit abortion rights and and act pre viability bands. Did any of the liberal justices make an impassioned plea or was their passion on that side? It was mostly

from Justice so to Mayor, as is typical. Justices Kagan and Briar were more focused on issues of the court's legitimacy. Justice brier quoted from the Casey decision, and it's it's concerns about the impact on the perception of the Court if it's overruling its watershed precedents. The absence of Justice Ginsburg was certainly felt today she would have been one of those justices he would have expected to be very

passionate about what seems like is about to happen. Justice Samuel Lilto was pretty stark in what he was saying about getting rid of abortion. Yeah, Justice Lito, it was pretty dark and clear. One thing he pressed Elizabeth pre Lauger on was the idea that plus e versus ferguson the ruling that said that state sponsored racial segregation was was okay. He pressed her to conceive that that decision

was was so bad it should have been overturned immediately. Clearly, in his head he is imagining Roevi Wade as as being that sort of decision that was so bad that, uh, it should be overturned just because of how bad it is. And she said that the court had never revoked a constitutional right it had extended. This would be the first time. Yeah, and that that's an interesting way of casting this case, and that's part of the reason why abortion rights supporters

are are uh so upset by it. But that didn't seem to be a distinction that matter to the justices when they talked about the court ruling precedents, Brett Kavanaugh listed a whole lot of precedents that the Court had overturned, and he talked about things like Brown versus Board of Education and the Berga fell gave marriage decision as big rulings that overturned precedents and uh suggesting that overruling Row

would would just be another case along those lines. After hearing the oral arguments, what's your best guests about how this will come out? For starters, it's very clear they're going to uphold the Mississippi law. The question is whether they will go further and overturn Row on that, it's hard to say for sure. Based on what we heard in the argument, it sounds like there might well be

five votes to do that, including Kavanaugh and Barrett. The question will be when push comes to shove, if John Roberts wants to write a narrower opinion that doesn't go that far, will somebody like Brett Kavanaugh decided he's going to go along with the Chief and save the bigger ruling for later on that it's really too hard to say. Thanks for being in the Bloomberg Lawn Show, Greg, that's Bloomberg News Supreme Court reporter Greg Store. The best protection.

I know you're tired of me saying this the best protection against this new variant or any of the of the various out there. But once we've been dealing with already is getting fully vaccinated and getting a booster shot. President Biden has been consistent in his message about vaccines, but his vaccine mandates are facing problems in the courts.

About seventeen million healthcare workers are fighting the pandemic from the front lines, and the Biden administration has mandated that they must be vaccinated by January four, But more than half the states are involved in legal challenges to that mandate, and in the first victory for opponents of the mandate, a federal court and Missouri blocked the administration from enforcing it intense states. My guest is Robert Field, a professor

of law and public health at Drexel University. It's the first victory for opponents of the vaccine mandate for health workers. So why did a federal court in Missouri block the Biden administration from enforcing the mandate. That mandate is issued through the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Medicare and Medicaid, and the court felt that it overstepped its authority in requiring that hospitals that accept those programs

imposed a vaccine mandate on their workers. It felt that this was federal overreach that it goes beyond what Congress authorized the agency to do. The court also went into some of the policy aspects, which is not really appropriate for a legal review, and said it will cause people to avoid healthcare jobs and it will cost a large

amount of money to administer. So now a federal judge in Florida declined to block the rule in a separate sy So we're in a funny legal world in terms of the mandates of whack a mole, where different courts are whacking different legal moles as the cases come up. Only the Supreme Court is really in a position to speak definitively to this issue. Until they do, it's going to be different district courts which have limited geographic scope,

and appeals courts that have limited geographic scope. None of them has the final say until the Supreme Court speaks. So it's not unusual in a case like this with national litigation to see different opinions from different courts. So that means that, for example, healthcare workers intense states, according to this decision, don't have to abide by the mandate, but healthcare workers in other states do For the time being, they don't do abide by the mandate until there's been

a final rule in the case. It's a temporary injunction, so it's not as though it will never apply to them, But in terms of the Missouri ruling, it could be reversed after the court he fully hears all the arguments

and makes a definitive decision. This is a temporary injunction, and given the fast moving and emergency nature of a lot of these laws, we're seeing a lot of courts issuing temporary injunctions, not waiting the weeks or months that it might take to have the case fully argued, to have the briefs written and the oral arguments made in a full decision written, which is one of the reasons we're seeing so many different decisions because courts are acting

quickly to either strike down mandates or temporarily uphold them. In neither of those cases are we seeing fully fleshed out, reasoned decisions, which should be the basis of president So, in your opinion, which judge is correct? Is it the judge in Florida who didn't block it or the judge in Missouri who did block it. Well, I can give you my opinion, Um, But whether Um Supreme court would agree with it. I guess we'll find out at some point.

I think the mandate for healthcare workers rest on pretty solid legal ground. It's tied to Medicare and Medicaid, primarily to Medicare, and what it does is it adds a condition of participation. If a hospital or another care care facility wants to be eligible to receive Medicare reimbursement, it has to meet various requirements, and there are hundreds of

pages of regulations setting forth those requirements. So, for instance, it has to have properly licensed staff, it has to be properly accredited UH, it has to meet various quality control standards under the Affordable Care Act. It has to meet standards for reporting safety lapses, readmissions after surgery, mortality, morbidity rates for certain procedures. Um. There are, as I said,

pages and pages of requirements. This is adding to those requirements, but there's never been a question up to now about

CMSs authority to issue them. What is a bit different is this is issued on an emergency basis, and while the courts are acting quickly to either issue or deny injunctions, CMS as well as OSHA for the larger mandate have acted very quickly without the usual rulemaking process, which can take months or years to publish a proposed rule, solicit comments from interested parties, revisit the rule, publish it again, publish a preamble that explains all of its thinking and

analysis UH and then making a final rule. So one of the distinctions here that a court could make is the speed with which um CMS acted and the lack of the full fleshed out procedure. The judge in Missouri said that this is not really an emergency and it didn't call for their emergency powers and said, well, when will we stop treating COVID as emergency? I would say when thousands of people stopped dying every day of the disease, it will no longer be an emergency. The court didn't

find that very convincing. Um So, if you accept that this is an emergency, and I certainly believe COVID, especially with the new variance, as an emergency, then that would justify CMSs use of its emergency powers just looking down the road. If after trial, this injunction is still in place and it's appealed, it would go to the Eighth Circuit, which has one active or senior status judge appointed by

a Democratic president. Out of fourteen, the one in Florida would go to the leventh Circuit, which is also very conservative, So you could end up with two conservative courts hearing this and possibly agreeing. Would the Supreme Court still you think take a case. My guess, and it's a guess, is that they would because it's such an important issue

that they would want to resolve it with finality. Typically they would take a case when there's a split between the circuits, But when there's something this important, where president is needed for this pandemic and possibly the next one, I would think that the Supreme Court would want to

step in. With regard to Biden's mandate for large employers, we've already resolved that it's going to be the sixth Circuit that's going to make the decision for all the circuits through the Ping pong ball lottery, So in that case, the Supreme Court would not use a split between the circuits to step in, but I think there as well, it would use its authority to define what the law is, so the officials going forward have some sense of what they can and can't do, and there will probably be

splits in the circuits at some point so that the Supreme Court will review the issue. Yeah, it's likely there will be. I guess the one issue that would be concerning in terms of the legal terrain is if the Supreme Court uses what's become known as the shadow docket. Rather than issuing a full decision, they issue a temporary order either striking down or upholding an injunction, and then wait months or years before actually considering the merits of

the case. But I do think this is important enough and guidance is so desperately needed that the Court would step in. It seemed as if we were looking at, you know, light at the end of the tunnel. And so maybe these vaccine mandates weren't as important as they were six months a year ago. But now that there's a new variant, does that add another dimension of urgency

to this? Yeah, well, in theory it does. But it's too new to really know how effective the vaccines are um so it will take some time, at least a few weeks to have a sense of whether more vaccination will help. But clearly the more people who are vaccinated, the less chance the virus has to mutate and develop new strains. Uh we first noticed this variant in South Africa. Africa has a very low vaccination rates, so it's not surprising that that would be a wonderful incubator for new

vaccine strains. Um. I think that the idea that new variants can pop up at any time without warning should give a greater sense of urgency to getting our vaccine rates up as high as possible, possibly high enough to achieve her immunity where the virus can't get a toe hold in the population. Turning to the Sixth Circuit, which, as you said, has all the consolidated cases on the

mandate for large employers. Several states with Republican attorneys general, the Republican National Committee, various companies, and other groups have asked that court to have an on bank review before a three judge panel. Why would they want that? Is that ever done? It's done when you have a decision by one judge or by a panel, to have every judge on that circuit court decide. I don't know what

the reasoning is. My guess is that if the entire court were to hear the case and rule against the mandate, they'd be in a stronger position when it comes to the Supreme Court, because the Biden administration has file papers saying that they should not. What they would be doing is bypassing the three judge panel and going right to the full circuit. And that's out of the normal procedure. So the Biden administration is arguing against that. Is the

Biden administration also just looking for time. Well, they may be um Also, it's a court this is heavily dominated by Republican appointees, so there's a greater chance of getting some Democrats on the free judge panel than there is of getting a democratic majority on the full em Bank panel. They've received petitions to transfer the case to other circuits. Is there any reason why a circuit would say, no, let this other circuit take this over. We can't handle it.

Asking a sixth circuit to send it to another circuit it seems to me like a fool's Errand there's uh strategy often used in litigation of throwing as many arguments as you can against the wall and seeing what would stick. So there's a fairly minimal cost to throwing those arguments out. My guess is that they don't really expect to succeed in that. I think the Sixth Circuit of My guess as the judges are very happy to have the case and to leave their imprint in this area of the law.

So let's turn to yet another lawsuit over vaccine mandates, and there are certainly plenty of them to discuss. So New York City's COVID vaccine mandate there's a religious challenge by fifteen public school teachers and administrators. So what did

the arbitrator rule here? So the ruling was that if you're gonna claim a religious exemption, it has to be through a recognized religion, and if the leader or top clergy in that religion have come up in favor of vaccines, that your objection could not be sincere and therefore not legitimate. That seems like a very radical approach. Well, the sincerity of a religious objection is important because we don't want allow sham contrived religious beliefs to counteract public policy. But

it's very difficult to draw that line. Some when is someone genuinely expressing a sincerely, deeply held religious belief and when are they just trying to do an end run around a vaccine mandate. That would be one way of doing it, saying you can't just make up your religion on the spot. The Supreme Court, the conservative majority there, seems more sympathetic to the argument that you can make

it up on the spot. The Second Circuit in the New York City case seemed more sympathetic to that argument that you can't challenge someone's belief because another member of their religion doesn't accept it, even a leader their religion doesn't accept it. You have to take each person on their own. But there was one employee who was identified as Roman Catholic that was granted an exemption despite the

fact that the pope has been in support of vaccinations. Well, I think that gets to the argument that you can't base the sincerity of your belief on what other members of the religion belief. Um Now, the divine authority of the pope, the belief in the divine authority of the Pope is stronger than in the respect given to the

leaders of many other religions. But it would come under that reasoning that your interpretation of your religion is what controls, not what a member of the clergy, leader of the clergy, or fellow members of the religion belief. So the Second Circuit's concerns were with First Amendment issues. Yeah, so that would be a matter of freedom of religion. That's been

authority issue UM all along. The Supreme Court held that case was held that religious exemptions to compelling public policy need not be granted, and so religious exemptions to vaccine mandates are not constitutionally required. So I don't really understand what the President is here. It's possible the Spring Court will get this case and then decide to overrule that precedent.

But with regard to school mandates, religious exemptions are not required, and there are now five states that don't permit them. School children have to be vaccinated to attend school UM. West, Virginia, Mississippi, California, Maine,

New York, and Connecticut have repealed them. And in another case involving a religious exemption, Justice Stephen Bryan turned away a request from eight mass General Brigham workers for a religious exemption from the Massachusetts Hospital Systems requirement that they be vaccinated. Ria rejected that without requesting a response from the hospital or referring the matter to the full court. It's not unusual, UM, there are cases where a justice

would um request a fuller examination. But this is an emergency order they're asking for. And you know, the way the Supreme Court works is each justice is assigned geographic territory to handle emergency requests, and they have a fair amount of latitude. The plaintiffs could appeal to the full Court to review what he has done, but it's not unusual for for the justice in charge of a region to either accept or deny a request for an emergency

order on their own. And so so far, the justices haven't second guest vaccine requirements, but there were two There are two cases before the court Maine in New York, right, So in the main case, they have not issued a final decision. Uh, it stays in effect pending the the full litigation, and it is possible that the conservative justices will decide that a religious exemption is required. Um. But they did not. Um. I'm trying to remember. I think

the vote was six to three. They did not require that it be put on hold pending the full consideration of the lawsuit. I guess you can't blame people for being confused about these vaccine mandates because there seemed to be different interpretations of the different mandates. I think part of the confusion is that we're seeing a skyder shot of cases across the country, and we're seeing different decisions, some based on the law and some based on politics.

And so there's um and we're seeing new terrain with with these mandates. We've spent well over a hundred years UM hashing out school mandates, and that law seemed to be pretty settled. But broader mandates for broader swaths of the population, that's new. Uh And it does raise greater sensitivities, and so it's not surprising we have inconsistent decisions. I should add, though, that the school mandates as a political and ideological matter, are not resolved. There's still a very

strong anti vax movement. There are still a lot of parents who try to get whatever exemptions they can UM, who try to delay the vaccines, who homeschool their children so they won't have to comply with the public school attendance rules. UH. So that is still a controversial issue. And of course we have the anti vax um misinformation, for instance, that autism is caused by various vaccines or other kinds of neurological injury, for which they really is evidence.

So if there's no religious exemption from vaccine mandates. What exemption from vaccine mandates is there. There will always be an exemption for medical reasons. And the basic Supreme Court case that upheld mandates dates from nine five uh smallpox vaccine mandate in Massachusetts in response to an epidemic. The court said that you cannot impose a mandate if it's likely to cause medical harm to the person. So that's been incorporated into every mandate law sinse. But it did

not say any other kind of exemption was required. Um for the COVID vaccines, there's a very narrow um range of conditions that could make you vulnerable. People who have had one shot and reacted anaphylactically, or had another kind of allergic reaction, um and kinds of autoimmune conditions. So if you have one of those, then you can it's constitutionally required that you're granted an exemption. But that's not going to cover a lot of people. Thanks so much

for being on the show. That's Robert Field, a professor of law and public health at Drexel University. Jacob chans Lee, known as the Q and on Shaman, he's appealing his sentence of more than three years for his role in the January six Capital riot. Joining me is Bloomberg Legal reporter David Yaffe Beleny tell us about the charges against him and what happened. So, the charges against Jacob Chansley are similar to the charges that have been filed against

many of the rioters. He entered the building in an unauthorized way, He obstructed an official of proceeding. He pleaded guilty to that. The big difference between him and some of the other rioters. It's just been the sort of notoriety that he managed to establish in the hours after the riot, partly because he showed up shirtless two with this horned headdress as he walked into the Senate chamber.

So in some ways he's not a particularly notable January six defendant, but he has this kind of symbolic importance that was established very early on. So he was sentenced to forty one months. The sentencing earlier months. He got forty one months, which is the joint longest sentence that a writer has gotten so far. I mean, not many of them have been sentenced, but that's currently the sort of top tier of sentence that we've seen so far.

He gave a very long, rambling and unusual address to the judge in that case, in which he expressed remorse and talked about his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi and other historical figures. It was very much in keeping with the sort of strange public persona that he's cultivated over the past year, and that seems like it was going to be the end of it. The judge said, what you did here was horrific, and also the prosecutor characterized that note that he left for Vice President pens as a threat. So,

I mean, isn't just him running through the capital. Yes, I mean he hasn't been accused of violence, which is a major difference between the charges that he's facing him what some of the more serious riot cases involved. But yes, he left a note on the daist that Mike Pence had just deserted that read it's only a matter of time. Justice is coming. His lawyer argued that that wasn't actually a threat. The prosecutors argued that it was a violent threat to tense that was clear because of the context

of what was going on. So there's been a lot of arguments back and forth about that. But yeah, that was one of the kind of key accusations against him, So is he now trying to take back the guilty play. So it's not entirely clear what's happening right now. He's been represented since the early days post riot by a guy named Albert Watkin, the defense attorney. He's been very kind of outspoken in his sort of endorsement of Jacob Chansley and arguing that he's not actually a bad person,

that he's a peace lover, that sort of thing. But Watkins essentially fired his chancelly lawyer and replaced by a guy named John Pierce, who representing a lot of other capital rioters in this kind of sprawling investigation, and earlier today Pierce filed a notice of appeal saying that Chadley is going to challenge the sentence at the appeals court level in Washington. We haven't seen the kind of full text yet of what Chandley is saying, what his argument

is going to be. One potential option would be to argue that he was inadequately counseled by Watkins as original lawyer. So that's something that we're anticipating, kind of looking out for his more filings hit the docut in this case that forty one months that was less than the fifty one months that the prosecutors had requested, even though it was one of the stiffest handed out so far. That's right, and that's partly because I think Chandley gave a very

kind of authentic address to the court. You know, he showed that he was remorseful, and I think that resonated with the judge as he handed down the sentence. It seems like it's a long stretch to think that he's going to be able to challenge his sentence when the sentence was in the guidelines, was in the framework, was less than what the prosecutors wanted, and he was fully represented by a lawyer. So it just seems like an uphill battle and kind of strange. It is kind of

strange to enormous long shot. I think that every expert who's following this pretty much agrees that it's very unlikely that he'll he'll end up with a sentence less than the one he's already received. How many other capital riders have been charged, how many have been sentenced? About six hundred have been have been charged so far, huge investigation. We're still seeing, you know, more arrest every few days.

The man hunt is very much continuing. In terms of sentences, moves had maybe a couple dozen so far, Roughly the vast majority haven't involved jail time. Writers have been mostly sentenced time served and released or given probationary sentences that sort of thing. So we've only had a time of small number that have carried serious jail times. But that's also partly because many of the defendants facing the most

serious sizations just haven't been sentenced yet. I mean, some of them aren't pleading guilty, like in the big kind of conspiracy cases that are set to go to trial next year. And in some instances, you know, it's just, you know, a defendant who was accused of something relatively minor who has been sentenced, and it sort of makes sense that the jail term hasn't been that long. So I'm not sure if you know this or if anyone knows this. So the FBI, they're they're looking for the

people who participated in the riot itself. We're hearing a lot from the January six committee about organizers on what might have happened behind the scenes. Is the FBI investigating that as well? The truth is, we don't really know, since obviously those sorts of investigations are totally cloaked in secrecy. There were kind of early rumbling in this sort of direct aftermath of the riot about the FBI looking at people who'd organized it. I mean, obviously there was talk

even of Trump being indicted for inciting the riot. That hasn't happened. There hasn't really been any public indication that that's going to happen, and so it certainly seems as if the agency's priority at the moment is simply arresting the people who were there on the grounds who breached the building, some of whom were also involved in planning.

In these big conspiracy cases involved people who are who are helping to plan the riot, But we haven't yet seen the Justice Department go after those sort of big name associates of Trump, the types of people who are being subpoenaed by the Congressional Committee. Thanks David. That's Bloomberg Legal reporter David Yaffe Bellini, and that's it for this edition of the Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast.

You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot Bloomberg dot com slash podcast Slash Law, and remember to tune in to The Bloomberg Law Show every week night at ten pm Wall Street Time. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg