The White House Ballroom & Special DC Grand Jury

0:00Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

0:42If you listen to financial news, you know a lot of time to spend thinking about what's next. The next opportunity. The next investment. The next move. But sometimes what matters most is being ready for what you never saw coming. For more than 75 years, Cincinnati Insurance has worked with independent agents to help protect businesses, homes, valuables, and more. Because planning for the future isn't only about knowing what's next. It's about making sure you're ready for what you can't predict. Let Cincinnati Insurance make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at CINFIN.com. From game day crowds to memorable meals, Genius by Global Payments keeps your kitchen and floor perfectly in sync.

1:26Real-time menus, seamless updates, big league reliability for any business. That's Genius.

1:36David Super:This is Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio. The U.S. Supreme Court is allowing President Trump to keep building his new White House ballroom, brushing aside conclusions by two lower courts that he's probably violating the law. The court's majority agreed with the administration that the historic preservation group that sued likely lacked legal standing. The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the three liberals in dissent. Although the high court order is temporary, it all but guarantees that Trump can complete the vast majority of the structure before the legal fight concludes.

2:22Joining me is Bloomberg Legal Reporter Zoe Tillman. The majority here, the five conservative justices, decided this on jurisdictional grounds. Explain that. That's right. So at this stage, what it came down to was whether the historic preservation group that sued had standing to bring this case in the first place. And lower courts had determined that they did. And the justices here determined that they were likely to lose on that question. This involves what is often referred to as an aesthetic injury, which in some cases has been a real injury. There had been some discussion of environmental cases where the view of a national park or the presence of an endangered animal, the loss of that was a concrete injury that would give someone standing to sue.

3:09So in this case, the question was, could a member of this historic preservation group claim an aesthetic injury from viewing the construction of the new ballroom enough to give them standing to sue? The majority said no, that this was basically, you know, mere offense, disagreement, distaste, that wasn't enough. The Trump administration has claimed there are national security and military reasons for the ballroom. Did the majority consider that in the decision? They did. On the other balance of the harm, they cited representations from different agencies, from national intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, others, saying that there were a litany of national security reasons why the above ground portion of the project, which is the ballroom, that's what we all sort of understand visually and structurally this is really about, whether that could be divorced from the below ground components of the project, which everyone understood to be perhaps more tethered to some of these other security concerns.

4:11And the lower courts have said that below ground portion can continue, just not above ground. Today, what the majority said was they gave more weight to the argument that you really couldn't separate those two components of the project. So now the surprise here is that the Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal justices in dissent. Right. Not just in dissent, but writing the dissent, really taking ownership of that decision in a way that we should say the majority opinion was not signed by anyone justice. So we don't put a name on that. It's just the remaining conservative justices.

4:46But no, the chief wrote a strong dissent saying that, you know, this is not a victory for the separation of powers, giving credence to this idea of aesthetic injury as providing legitimate standing to sue over situations like this. And then he concludes by quoting Winston Churchill about the importance of how buildings shape us and the significance of following the rules in deciding, he says, quote, what to tear down and what to build up at the people's house. So the chief justice, not just in the dissent, but really owning the dissent here. Thanks so much, Zoe. That's Bloomberg Legal Reporter Zoe Tillman.

5:24We will arrest you and where we can. We will prosecute you aggressively and we will prosecute your parents. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Now with ChatGPT work. I'm Carol Masser. Social media posts on sleep outnumber those on exercise by 3 to 1 and those on diet by 5 to 1, according to consumer researcher Ryla Global Consulting. And so it may come as no surprise that there are seemingly no limits to what we will do to get a good night's sleep. People are spending on everything from pricey sleep trackers, AI-powered scent therapy machines, to$3 ,000 body temperature-regulating Manosphere-endorsed mattress covers, and couples outfitting totally separate bedrooms.

6:12As Bloomberg's Dina Shanker reports, it all adds up to a sleep support industry that's a$300 million business, with growth coming from functional beverages and sleep powders, even as some experts warn that these products may not be effective and can even be harmful. Despite the spend, 6 out of 10 American adults still don't get the 7 to 9 hours of sleep the credible science says we need. As for experts, they recommend making lifestyle changes, such as getting sunlight and limiting screen time to improve sleep. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

6:49Get started at ChatGPT.com today by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

6:59David Super:Early morning on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video. It was an assassination-style killing, and everybody saw it. Now, as Luigi Mangione prepares to stand trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Audio and 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts. Back in May, D.C. U.S. Attorney Janine Pirro threatened to begin aggressively prosecuting parents for contributing to the delinquency of a minor if their children were involved in so-called teen takeovers.

7:48Those are social media organized gatherings of teens that have sometimes erupted into violence. Thiero said that parents could be charged even if their child wasn't prosecuted. And she mentioned a host of other possible offenses, including repeated truancy. When teens are repeatedly violating the curfew, when they're repeatedly truant from school, when they possess alcohol or drugs no matter how much, it doesn't mean that they have to be prosecuted. When they are violating a court order or when they're already a PINS, a person in need of supervision or committing criminal offenses like we saw in Chipotle, we're coming for you and we're coming for your parents.

8:42Well now, Pirro has convened a rare special grand jury in D.C. to investigate public schools, zeroing in on truancy, graduation rates, and attendance records. That's according to the Washington Post. Joining me is constitutional law expert David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law. David, so preliminary data for the 2025-2026 school year shows that 50.4 % of D.C. high school students are chronically truant. And the district education officials have said that chronic absenteeism and truancy remain significant concerns. Why is the federal government getting involved here? This seems like a very, very local matter.

9:34David Super:This is a very unusual thing to do. D.C. schools have a history of problems. They also have a history of local efforts to improve them. They're far from fixed, but it seems unlikely to be a situation that a prosecutor could accomplish much dealing with. My suspicion is that the reason we have this special grand jury is because of the other special grand jury looking into the reflecting pool fiasco. I'm sure Prosecutor Pirro irritated the president with that. And this is an effort to modify. She threatened in a press conference back in May to prosecute parents whose teenagers break curfew, city curfew, and participate in whatever this teen takeovers.

10:29I mean, prosecuting parents criminally for their child's failure to attend school. Is there any precedent for that? It seems like the parents would have a lot of defenses.

10:41David Super:No, this is a very theatrical move. This isn't ordinary law enforcement. This isn't a sensible approach. Indeed, in many circles around the country, it's controversial to prosecute parents when their kids shoot up a school. If we don't want to hold parents responsible for their kids taking lives, we're actually going to hold them responsible for kids taking too many absences. And even if there were a prosecution, would it be the U.S. Attorney's Office prosecuting or would it be the Attorney General for D.C.? Well, it's an odd situation because D.C. is different from others from states. Well, this is another example of which we have many of D.C.'s lack of power being used for grandstanding.

11:32David Super:Democrats have done it occasionally in the past, but lately it's mostly been Republicans. President Trump takes over the D.C. Police Department for no apparent reason, accomplishes nothing. President Trump deploys National Guard troops to the streets of D.C. I walk past them every day. They're standing around looking really bored, really unhappy. And as far as I can tell, accomplishing nothing other than running up a big tab. He has threatened D.C. with all sorts of things. They've said that they'll take away D.C.'s ability to govern itself if D.C. doesn't follow their agenda. So the mayor of D.C.

12:14David Super:is really almost a full-time federal relations officer. She has to be. She probably would do a better job in the city if she didn't have to deal with all of this grandstanding. So this is still going on from, you know, the highly publicized calling in of troops to help D.C., help in quotes, to help D.C. with crime. I mean, National Guard troops have been withdrawn from from other cities, from Minneapolis and L.A. Those cities have governors who could say, get them out of here. And indeed, in California, they litigated. I'm not sure if they did in Minnesota or not. But here, they don't really have any legal standing to do it because we are a colony.

12:58also i mean with her calling a special grand jury that means that that grand jury can issue a report even if they decide not to bring any criminal charges so they could bring out a report that's critical of certain people that names people without having to bring charges isn't that dangerous.

13:21David Super:It is because a grand jury is completely controlled by the prosecutor. If a grand jury, as the saying goes, would indict a ham sandwich at the prosecutor's behest, the grand jury would certainly denounce the ham sandwich. And the expectation is that the grand jury will do what she wants. For political reasons, she wants D.C. condemned. Neither the mayor nor nor the superintendent of schools, nor anyone else has any right to present arguments or testimony before the grand jury. So they will see only one side of the argument. And if Prosecutor Pirro is any good at all, if you get to completely dominate the information people receive, they will come to conclusions you want them to come to.

14:10And I'm also wondering, since there was a city investigation in 2018, And also, since there's data about how many kids are skipping, what exactly are they investigating? It seems like the information's out there already.

14:28David Super:When I investigate, it's usually things I don't know. Here, I don't know what they don't know. There are so many reasons why high school kids may skip school. It seems like you need a social scientist or a psychologist more than a grand jury to discover the causes and cures for truancy. And you say that quite correctly, that there are many different reasons why kids don't come to school. Kids may have behavioral problems. Kids may have nutritional problems. And yet we're cutting kids off of food assistance and Medicaid under Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So before we start pointing fingers, we should stop making things worse ourselves.

15:14Also interesting is that the Legal Accountability Center, a legal watchdog group, filed bar complaints last week, accusing Pirro and two of her lieutenants of violating their ethical duties by seeking to charge six Democratic lawmakers with federal crimes for appearing in a video that called on troops to resist unlawful orders. Of course, a D.C. grand jury refused to indict those lawmakers. How long does it take for a bar committee to act? And, you know, what would it take for a bar committee to say, oh, the U.S. attorney has violated legal ethics?

15:57David Super:Bar committees vary enormously in how fast they are, how efficient they are, how fair they are. And I don't know either of these bar committees at all well. If I was on a bar committee or staffing a bar committee and I got a complaint about a sitting U.S. attorney, I would want to make sure that we had all of our ducks in order before we did anything with it. So I would not expect it to move rapidly. And one of Piro's subordinates accused of violating his ethical duties is Stephen Vander Veldin. He's the one who's in charge of this special grand jury. He was also in charge of the investigation into former Fed Chair Jerome Powell, into the six Democratic lawmakers, into allegations that the D.C.

16:47police force purposely skewed its crime statistics. So you have to expect something.

16:53David Super:The list you mentioned are not the biggest crime threats in D.C. They're the biggest political threats in D.C. And so apparently he's the person who she trusts to carry out political uses of her office. Let's turn now to the Supreme Court. Today, the full court decided on the ballroom, which we had been waiting for. Things are very much in flux due to another decision of the Supreme Court recently, where the court lifted a block on Trump's executive order to restrict mail-in voting over the dissents of the liberal justices. And as surprised as I've been over the past few years with the decisions of the Supreme Court allowing Trump to expand executive power, That decision really shocked me because the president and federal agencies like the post office have no role to play in elections.

17:55And that seems crystal clear.

17:57David Super:The Supreme Court is taking the position that anyone challenging the administration will be held very, very strictly to the letter of all procedural rules. and at the time the plaintiffs in this case filed suit, no one outside the federal government had been harmed. Now, under the Supreme Court's precedent, you can sue over an imminent harm and when the President of the United States, who this very Supreme Court is empowered to completely control the federal executive branch, says we will interfere with mail voting, that strikes me as an imminent threat, but the Supreme Court said there were enough details that had yet to be filled in, and there was time for a challenge if the administration ever did move forward.

18:52David Super:But it was striking to me that the opinion of the court said absolutely nothing about the merits. Some of these cases, they say, we're not deciding the merits, and then they tell you what they think about the merits. This one didn't do that. This one, the only thing they said about the merits Time will tell. Of course it will. So I was actually fairly encouraged by the action that they had no consensus to reach out and give the president a boost on that. And they had to know that this case was coming right back to them within a matter of weeks because the president has now put out a rule to interfere with mail voting.

19:34David Super:And by the standards they set out, their opinion, plaintiffs are certainly free to challenge that. So, I mean, we have seen this court, you know, given to Trump, especially on the emergency docket. twice last term, two notable examples where they didn't, which is the tariffs and birthright citizenship. Do you have any confidence that when this comes back to them, as it will, I guess, within the next couple of weeks, maybe, do you have any confidence that they'll reject Trump's attempt here? Yes, I have a lot of confidence, actually. And the two cases you mentioned are good examples of that. Trump won preliminary procedural rulings in both of those cases.

20:17David Super:The first case involving birthright citizenship got all the way to the court and they said no nationwide injunctions and sent it back. After the procedural T's were crossed and I's were dotted, the case came back up to them and five justices said this is screamingly unconstitutional. You can't do this. Similarly with the tariffs, Trump was allowed to keep his tariffs in place, even though they certainly looked very illegal for the better part of a year. But when they got around to the merits, the court said, this is ridiculous. You can't do this. So I would expect that this is going to be a similar pattern.

20:56David Super:Trump clearly has no argument that he's entitled to do this. his order and rule are dramatic overreaches. And I would expect that when forced to deal with the merits, the Supreme Court will get rid of it. I can think of several different ways they might get rid of it. And I'm obviously hoping for the more sweeping one, but we'll see. Tell us about the different ways they could get rid of it. One thing they could simply do is allow an injunction against it to stand on the principle that it's too close to the election. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said it's improper to change rules right before an election.

21:33David Super:And there's even some mention of that in the court's opinion last week. A better result that I'm hoping for is to say, wait a minute, what makes you think you get to run an election? And to get to the merits of this and to kill this idea once and for all. Let me ask you this, not for the midterms that are coming up, but is there any way that it's possible for the post office to say, we will only accept this kind of ballot to go through the mail system. We'll only accept an envelope with these characteristics. I don't think so. The post service comes from a very, very long, centuries-old tradition of having to take anything that is offered to it unless there's a very specific, compelling reason not to.

22:21David Super:They don't have to let you ship biologically hazardous materials or explosives. They don't have to allow you to ship illegal drugs, but ballots are not going to wreck a post office or a mailbox, and at least at the moment they're not illegal. So I don't think there's anything in the tradition of post offices or common carriers that allows them to reject things simply on the basis of disliking them or having policy disagreements with states. There's enough chaos around the elections. This just adds unnecessary litigation up and down the chain. Well, it only does that because we've never had an administration before that was so uninterested in the law before it acted.

23:10David Super:If anyone proposed this in the Biden, Bush, Obama, Bush, whatever administrations, lawyers would shoot it down before it got to first base and would say, we have no authority to do this. We live in a federal system. This is up to the states. And the lawyer for the post office would say no. If they were pressed, they'd threaten to resign. And the whole idea would die without anyone ever hearing of it. It's this administration where if they want to do something, they just do it. Legality is notwithstanding. Thanks so much for joining me today, David. That's Professor David Super of Georgetown Law.

23:51This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Now with ChatGPT Work, I'm Carol Masser. Social media posts on sleep outnumber those on exercise by 3 to 1 and those on diet by 5 to 1, according to consumer researcher Ryla Global Consulting. And so it may come as no surprise that there are seemingly no limits to what we will do to get a good night's sleep. People are spending on everything from pricey sleep trackers, AI-powered scent therapy machines, to$3 ,000 body temperature-regulating Manosphere-endorsed mattress covers, and couples outfitting totally separate bedrooms. As Bloomberg's Dina Shanker reports, it all adds up to a sleep support industry that's a$300 million business, with growth coming from functional beverages and sleep powders, even as some experts warn that these products may not be effective and can even be harmful.

24:44Despite the spend, 6 out of 10 American adults still don't get the 7 to 9 hours of sleep the credible science says we need. As for experts, they recommend making lifestyle changes, such as getting sunlight and limiting screen time to improve sleep. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com today by selecting Work Mode. Available on Plus and Pro Plans.

25:16David Super:Early morning on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video. It was an assassination-style killing, and everybody saw it. Now, as Luigi Mangione prepares to stand trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Audio and 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts.

25:51President Trump dismissed concerns that the conflict in Iran was draining American firepower, saying this is a relatively little war for us. The comments came as the U.S. and Iran exchanged strikes for the first time in about a month. Joining me is Notre Dame Law School professor Mary Ellen O 'Connell, an expert on international law and the use of force. Mary Ellen, you've said that this is on a long list of wars the U.S. has lost. Has the U.S. definitely lost the war? The standard wisdom is that the U.S. has lost this war already. Certainly the initial war aims that the president announced, Within a few weeks, there would be nothing left of any nuclear facilities, that the regime would change, that there would be no more support for forces in the region that are sponsored by Iran.