candidate quality are rearing their head in georgia. our good air decided to float over to china s bad air. so when china gets our good air, their bad air gotta move. all in starts right now. good evening from new york. i m chris hayes. two weeks after the fbi executed that search warrant on his florida property, donald trump has finally issued a legal response if you want to call it that. not surprisingly, the attempt here is to stall the investigation into the allegedly classified information the fbi seized from mar-a-lago by asking the court to appoint what s called a special master. that s one who goes through and looks at the documents and sees if any are covered by executive privilege. that in itself does make a ton of sense. nevertheless, lots of legal observers say this all may be too little, too late. the case will be heard by judge aileen cannon who was appointed by trump, supported by far-right florida senator rick scott, before being confirmed in the lame du
welker and michael crowley and barry mccaffrey. thanks for joining us. molly, let me start with you. we see russians make key advances, especially as they are being more concentrated in the eastern part of ukraine. they are hammering the area of severodonetsk. talk me through what you are hearing when it comes to the battlefield in ukraine. reporter: that s exactly right. they are hammering severodonetsk and all of the villages surrounding it. there s been a pocket, a horseshoe-like area, a-in-law fighting area, but that s where all of the russian aggression for the last week has been concentrated in the donbas. severodonetsk has the biggest city, the most strategic in lieu luhansk. this morning. we heard the front line cut the city in half. as of an hour ago, we heard from the head of the city military that told reuters, 60% of the city is under russian control, the eastern part. 20% under ukrainian control and there s a portion of that city which is no man s land. evacuat
former law clerk of justice sotomayor, law professor at nyu and msnbc legal analyst. i know you have looked at the decision. chief justice john roberts and justice amy coney barrett joined the three liberals in the majority. what do you make of that and this decision? well, i don t know that we should be calling it a decision, chris, it s an order from a shadow docket proceeding. this is the court s emergency docket where it takes up applications for emergency relief, and what prompted this emergency order was a trial court in texas that imposed a vacator of the banning ghost guns. the court stepped in and said while the litigation on the propriety of the legislation is pending in the current court of appeals and indeed if it goes on to the supreme court, for the time being it will reinevacuate the rule, vacating the vacator.
and basically, they did endorsed an advisory code code of ethics for the court, something that we have talked about, advising changes in the management of the court s emergency docket, recommending public audio of the court arguments and opinion and ounce months to be simultaneously released. that last part is at least happening. but when it comes to these decisions that are of consequential changes to peoples lives, i just have to think that the legal community at least right now is saying that something may need to be done, right? the question is what. if you read justice sotomayor s dissent in the lgbt case, it s brilliant. she knows that whenever a group that s been shut out finally gets constitutional protections, there is always a conservative backlash. it happened in a civil rights movement. it happened in the women s rights movement.
is responding to these cases as they find them. and so it s often the lower courts or outside parties that are bringing these cases to the court s emergency docket. one, i mean, obviously, unique circumstance of the trump administration was the pandemic. and so that caused a lot of state orders that were not necessarily happening as rapidly in years previous to that. and so that increased the use of the orders docket. but i think the court has been attentive to people wanting to understand its reasoning. and so some of these cases actually have resulted in written decisions, perhaps not as lengthy as the merits ones. in fact, there have even been oral arguments issued more rapidly, sometimes in cases when the court s wanted to rule on issues of big importance. so i think the court is trying to issue its reasoning for the american public and quite frankly, in some ways is one of the most transparent institutions in the sense that at least with the merits cases, we re getting dozens and