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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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I think you're overstating the choice of venue issue. In practice it's pretty flexible.

Look at when SDNY when after Bannon et al. None of the defendants were in its jurisdiction. They couldn't find a victim. The case was similar -- residents of SDNY heard about "build the wall" so they had jurisdiction.

For things like libel you're supposed to be able to sue in your home state. If the defendant is politically connected (eg NYT) it'll often get transferred, but that's more of an exception.

There have been a few explanations floated for how the lawsuits proceeded...

Fundraising was undoubtably a goal.

Stating all of the allegations in one place for the historical record was probably a motivation. Multiple separate lawsuits wouldn't have been able to convey Trump's side clearly.

The choice of lawyers was questionable. Trump has a thing for hiring ex-prosecutors. They don't have the right experience for this sort of litigation. I suspect that they are grifting Trump... filing half-assed lawsuits so they can bill him and say they did something. Ex-prosecutors aren't the sort of people who actually want to present a strong case against powerful federal insiders.

Another probable goal was just to get to some level of discovery. Getting the various defendants to admit to various facts not in dispute would have been good for Trump's record. It would have been something historians would have needed to acknowledge.

A more out there explanation I've heard is that the goal of the lawsuit was to create a single intelligence silo. It provided a justification to read in all of the lawyers on information that's still classified. Multiple lawsuits would have meant that lawyers could only be read in on specific information relevant to that specific case.

Filing before the statute of limitations had expired was impossible in this case. He wouldn't have been able to sue as president. Legally he could, but it wasn't practical to. Plus high level bureaucrats have too many ways to slow things down... information came out as a trickle, then he had to wait for official investigations to wrap up.

I think it would be helpful if you pointed to links or sources for your claims. For example, I don't know where you're basing the claim that personal jurisdiction is flexible. The wikipedia page on the topic should be enough to showcase how complicated the analysis is and cases get bounced all the time for failure to establish personal jurisdiction (which typically happens because the plaintiff either wants to sue in their home turf for convenience or is maybe judge shopping). Similarly how does filing a frivolous lawsuit help the "historical record" versus just writing a book or issuing a press release? Etc