Because this hypothetical memo was paid for by our tax dollars, not your own private money! That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain. Using it for your own gain would be theft from the American public.

In this hypothetical case, of course. There is no evidence that such a memo exists. But if it did...

Yes, because it was produced by the same people that are going to argue the case in court. You can hire the best lawyers in the world but they will still have to speculate on what arguments the government is going to make, and whether there are confidential communications showing evidence that there was some consistent rational justification for the tariffs and not just the president's public posts that leader X was mean to him on the phone so he imposed a tariff.

What a week argument - your still making excuses for this nonsense. Ridiculous.

Not just a Whitehouse insider, the guy actively doing the policy he was probably being advised was illegal and would be overturned.

And also probably one of the guys most pushing for this policy which was probably advised would likely be overturned.

Tariff policy is ultimately implemented by the Secretary of Commerce. This isn't some random other staffer in the Whitehouse that heard these policies wouldn't go, it was the guy actively doing it likely stands to make significant financial gains for his actions being found to be illegal.

The level of corruption on that is just absolutely mindblowing.

> yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject

That isn’t true and you should really question whatever news source told you that. Putting aside that it was 6-3 in the Supreme Court. It was a 7-4 decision in the en banc Federal Circuit, with two Obama appointees voting in favor of upholding the tariffs. The lower appellate court opinions amounted to 127 pages: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO....

You don’t get cross-party splits like that on issues where “everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject” agrees. If anyone with legal expertise was telling you that this issue was simple, they’re probably not very good at their job.

Who cares? The Treasury Secretary shouldn't have family profiting off fixing illegal policy the Treasury Secretary enacted. That should never happen. It is wrong, it doesn't explicitly spelled out.

The two answers I'm hearing to my question so far are that either this decision was so obvious that anyone could have predicted it without insider information, or that this was a split decision that the administration could not have predicted ahead of time.

You're right that maybe there never was any internal memo, just thought this was funny.

Wait...how do we know there was no such memo?

We have no reason to believe that if such a memo exists it was used improperly, but I don't see how we could know there is no such memo.

BTW you've got an extra Justice on the Supreme Court. Should be 6-3, not 7-3.

I understand your position but I disagree. If I were trying to predict whether the government is going to win in court, I think reading what the government's own lawyers think about the case would be valuable. If it were possible to pay for this I think people would, that's why I think it is material. Some random person's opinion is not relevant information, but the opinion of people directly involved in a case is.

The non-publicly known strategy they intend to use in court is “information”

Is a lawyer working on a case allowed to short the stock of his client?

Why not?

(Hint: it creates a perverse incentive to see your side lose the legal argument for your own personal gain.)

And in this case, it's the actual secretary doing it. Who has significant influence on the outcome of the case (largely in the negative - nothing he can do can make the government more likely to win it, but stuff he did has the capacity to make the government more likely to lose it.)

The Lebowski conjecture.