Midway through the evening’s festivities, Max Stier, president of the group sponsoring the event—the Partnership for Public Service, a $24 million nonprofit based in Washington that recruits individuals to work in the civil service—took the stage to thank his high-profile guests. “Great leaders are the heart and soul of effective organizations,” Stier said, “which is why I am so thankful to see so many of our government’s amazing leaders here tonight.”
Stier also acknowledged one federal employee, his wife, Judge Florence Y. Pan, who sits on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Pan would soon need no introduction. Earlier in January she made headlines by asking Donald Trump’s lawyers whether the presidential immunity he sought in connection with alleged Jan. 6 crimes was absolute.
“Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival?” Pan asked Trump lawyer John Sauer. “That’s an official act—an order to SEAL Team Six?” she clarified.
Although the back and forth between Pan and Sauer was inconclusive as to the question about a president’s criminal liability, many mainstream outlets misconstrued the exchange while lionizing Pan for posing a question that they then used to advance their description of President Trump as a lawless menace. The exchange, which Pan prompted when she posed the pre-arranged hypothetical at beginning of the hearing, has raised new questions about the impartiality of judges hearing politically charged cases.
For months progressives have been insisting that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any case that involves President Trump because of his wife Ginni Thomas’ political involvement and participation in the events of Jan. 6. Those same interests have yet to express similar worries about Pan’s objectivity, despite her husband’s longtime political activism and current opposition to another Trump presidency.
Recently, Stier has joined the growing chorus of Beltway voices warning that a second Trump presidency would pose a unique “threat” to the country’s future. Stier and others are particularly concerned with Trump’s promise to convert tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats into political appointees, meaning they could be fired without cause by the president. Such a plan, according to Stier, undermines the Constitution and the law.
“I don’t think we have a deep state today,” he said. But “the proposals that are on the table would create a deep state, rather than the effective state that we all should be pursuing.”
Two Times reporters, in their first-person-plural “analysis” favoring Kavanaugh’s accusers, wrote:
“A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier; the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.”
Stier’s still unproven allegations are included in a new documentary, “Justice,” about the Kavanaugh scandal. The film, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, centers on Ramirez and features a recording of Stier’s never-before-heard 2018 call to the FBI tip line detailing what he claimed to have seen and heard.
“In the previously unheard recording, Stier says classmates told him not just that Kavanaugh stuck his penis in Ramirez’s face, but that afterward, Kavanaugh went to the bathroom to make himself erect before allegedly returning to assault her again, hoping to amuse an audience of mutual friends, In the film, Ramirez says she’d suppressed the memory so deeply she couldn’t recall this second incident. ... Stier’s message to the FBI also cites another incident involving a different woman, which he says he witnessed ‘firsthand’: A severely inebriated Kavanaugh, his dorm mate, pulling his pants down at a different party while a group of soccer players forced a drunk female freshman to hold his penis.”
After President Trump left office in 2021, Pan became one of President Biden’s first judicial nominees, tapped again to serve as a U.S. district judge in Washington. Less than a year later, President Biden promoted her to the D.C. appellate court; in both instances, Pan replaced Ketanji Brown Jackson as she made her way to the Supreme Court. She is the first Asian American to serve on both benches.
“This is a perfect example of how the Deep State defends its interest,” Russell Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America, one of the organizations pushing for the Schedule F reforms told RealClearInvestigations (RCI). “In and out of government, multiple branches of government, relying on personal networks, even marriages, to defeat President Trump and thereby protect a permanent, unaccountable bureaucracy.”
During her brief tenure on the appellate court, Pan has found herself on an unusually high number of politically charged cases.
“To be sure, outside of the January 6 cases brought in this jurisdiction, there is no precedent for using 1512(c)(2) to prosecute the type of conduct at issue in this case.” Nonetheless, Pan applied a “broad reading of the statute” to allow application of the law.
Unusual GOP Dissent on Court
Pan also upheld another controversial lower court ruling that favored the DOJ and worked against President Trump, one that recently resulted in a harsh rebuke from some of her colleagues on the circuit court.U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, another Obama appointee, in 2023 authorized an application from Special Counsel Jack Smith to obtain a search warrant for Trump’s Twitter data in his Jan. 6 case against the former President. Not only did Howell force the company to produce the records, which included direct messages and draft posts, she signed a nondisclosure order to prevent Twitter—now X and owned by liberal bête noire Elon Musk—from notifying its customer, President Trump, about the warrant for 180 days.
X appealed Howell’s nondisclosure order; Judge Pan backed Howell’s decision and ruled against the company’s appeal, citing the need to “safeguard the security and integrity of the investigation” and “avoid tipping off the former President about the warrant’s existence.”
But Pan’s conclusions were wrong, four Republican-appointed judges on the D.C. circuit court wrote last month in what legal observers described as an unusual 12-page statement related to the appeal.
“The Special Counsel’s approach obscured and bypassed any assertion of executive privilege and dodged the careful balance Congress struck in the Presidential Records Act,” Judges Neomi Rao, Justin Walker, Gregory Katsas, and Karen Henderson wrote in an order filed Jan. 16. “The district court and this court permitted this arrangement without any consideration of the consequential executive privilege issues raised by this unprecedented search. We should not have endorsed this gambit. Rather than follow established precedent, for the first time in American history, a court allowed access to presidential communications before any scrutiny of executive privilege.”
But it was Pan’s exchange with Trump’s defense attorney during oral arguments related to Trump’s claims of presidential immunity against criminal prosecution that caught the media’s attention. President Trump is seeking to dismiss Smith’s Jan. 6 indictment on immunity grounds; Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued a landmark ruling in December denying Trump’s motion and concluded that presidents are subject to criminal prosecution.
Roughly one minute into the Jan. 9 discussion, Pan interrupted Trump lawyer Sauer with her hypothetical question. The exchange went as follows:
Despite Sauer’s answer, figures in major media nonetheless reported that Sauer claimed a president could not be prosecuted for ordering the assassination of a political rival. (It was unclear whether Pan suggested the order or the act itself was illegal.) Legal analysts, cable news hosts, and columnists praised Pan regardless of the plausibility of such a scenario.
A reporter asked President Trump about the exchange during an appearance on Jan. 11. “Do you agree with your lawyers, what they said on Tuesday, that you should not be prosecuted if you ordered SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent?” Trump replied that presidents “have to have immunity,” otherwise every president would be prosecuted by that leader’s successor of the opposite political party.
The controversy presumably will continue to swirl until Pan’s panel issues its ruling. It could be weeks until the opinion is filed. Until then, Trump’s March 4 trial date is on hold and looks less likely by the day, which is why Jack Smith asked the court to fast-track the announcement to expedite the process as it inevitably heads toward the Supreme Court. Considering the political composition of the three-judge panel—two judges appointed by Democratic presidents—most observers expect the appellate court to uphold Chutkan’s ruling.
Meanwhile, Pan’s hypothetical scenario of a presidentially ordered hit likely will figure prominently in any opinion.
