What the World Is Saying About Us

Sometimes it helps to hear what our friends are saying about us to get a better perspective on our faults, as painful as that may be.

So I want use today’s Morning Memo to highlight key excerpts from a devastatingly frank new report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

The tl;dr from the The Global State of Democracy 2026 is that the quality of democracy in the United States is at or near record lows (based on a dataset that covers 1975-2025) — and that decline is having seriously destabilizing effects on democracy around the world.

Here’s a fuller summation of the report, which is most focused on the spillover effects of the U.S. decline but includes a special case study on the United States under Trump II:

In 2025, the global challenges to democracy and the difficulty in stemming its erosion were both exemplified and compounded by political developments in the United States. There, President Donald Trump quickly amassed power in the executive branch and wielded it to further a narrow set of personal goals and pursue retaliation against perceived enemies. In that environment, which is marked by constricted space for both public expression and institutional checks on power, resistance is increasingly unsafe. The results have been far-reaching, undermining the rule of law domestically and internationally and testing long-standing alliances and multilateral cooperation.

The International IDEA is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1995 and headquartered in Stockholm that focuses on developing and supporting democracy globally. Ironically, the United States withdrew as an observer member of the organization shortly after Trump took office last year, when the administration ended U.S. participation in more than 60 international organizations.

While the topics in the new report will be familiar to you, they are presented with the distance and tone of like-minded non-Americans, which makes for a bracing assessment of how far and fast civic life in America has declined.

Trump II Has Turbocharged the U.S. Decline

A significant proportion of the current instability can be traced to US President Donald Trump, whose administration has reshaped political culture in the USA, where power is now personalized and used to further narrow individual goals and pursue vendettas against those critical of the president or his policies. Comparing 2025 to 2020, the change in the quality of US democracy was entirely negative: the country experienced seven statistically significant declines across multiple measures of representative governance, civil liberties, and the rule of law. There were no corresponding advances.

Key Measures In the U.S. Are at or Near Record Lows

The USA experienced four factor-level declines, including in Free Political Parties, Effective Parliament, Access to Justice, and Judicial Independence. It also saw declines in the subfactors of Freedom of Expression, Freedom of the Press, and Economic Equality. Except for Free Political Parties, US scores on these measures are at their lowest levels since 1975.

The USA saw seven statistically significant declines from 2020 to 2025—in Access to Justice, Economic Equality, Effective Parliament, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of the Press, Free Political Parties, and Judicial Independence—and it saw no corresponding advances beyond Basic Welfare, which is not included because the improvements were due solely to recovery from the pandemic. With the exception of Free Political Parties, these factors are now at their lowest-ever levels in the history of the GSoD dataset

The Trump II Decline Has Historical Roots

The USA is experiencing a period of marked democratic decline. While this has manifested most spectacularly during the second Trump administration, the roots of these declines reach far deeper and stem from unresolved conflicts over questions of equality, social hierarchies, and economic distribution.

While many of the USA’s problems long predate the Trump administration, this approach to government has both caused new crises and brought new life to challenges many thought to have been consigned to the ash heap of history.

The GOP Congress Drags Down the U.S. Democracy Score

The failure of Congress, controlled by a Republican Party subservient to the president to a historically anomalous degree, to assert its power and constitutional authority in the face of White House actions has led to the USA’s lowest Effective Parliament score in the history of the GSoD Indices

The U.S. Decline Is Destabilizing Democracy Globally

[T]he USA’s unique geopolitical and economic place in the world means that its ongoing crisis has had, and will continue to have, severe consequences far beyond the country’s borders.

[T]he United States has become the most prominent example and accelerator of the disturbing trend toward a belittled and diminished Rule of Law. Indeed, the negative trajectory of democracy in the United States across the board stands out as a serious concern in the global story covered in our report.

The Trump administration’s actions have not stopped at the borders of the USA. Since 2025, the US Government’s threats and actions against other countries have undermined national sovereignty as well as international law and risked provoking more widespread violent conflict … The ramifications of these actions for the future legitimacy of the democratic model are multifold, far-reaching, and difficult to overstate.

Just as the rule of law is eroding domestically in the USA, its actions abroad undermine the principle of the peaceful settlement of disputes and the multilateral institutions that uphold the international rule of law. This weakens democratic governance globally by diminishing people’s ability to exercise meaningful control over their political futures: national outcomes risk being shaped less by popular will than by external coercive pressure.

The new report reflects the growing sense of alarm in Canada, Europe, and among erstwhile U.S. allies everywhere. In the span of 22 month since the 2024 election, it’s gone from “Are you gonna be okay?” to “Are you okay?” to “You’re not okay.”

SCOTUS Nixes Trump’s Insane USPS Plan

In a crucial decision, the Supreme Court on an emergency basis blocked President Trump’s plan to use the Postal Service to throttle mail-in ballots and unleash chaos in the midterms. Most importantly, a majority of the Roberts Court signaled its view that the administration will likely eventually lose on the merits, meaning that even if it continues to litigate the changes to USPS rules after the midterms, it’s unlikely to prevail.

Ooops …

A whistleblower claims that DHS agent may have broken state laws in their election year hunt for elusive voter fraud by noncitizens.

TPM Exclusive

TPM’s Josh Kovensky: FBI Builds Out National NSPM-7 Center to Track Dissent, FOIA’ed Documents Show

Mass Deportation Watch

• AP: Detainees at the now-closed “Alligator Alcatraz” were held for up to two hours in small metal cages described as “calming areas,” a practice that “does not meet standards for humane treatment,” according to a new report by the DHS inspector general.

• NYT: “Immigrants seeking documents from the government to prove that they are in the country legally are being rebuffed or provided paperwork that is heavily redacted.”

Quote of the Day

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman, on the mother-of-all retributive “investigate the investigator” cases being pursued at President Trump’s behest, in south Florida:

“Grand Conspiracy” is not a concept in federal law. There is no statute, no charge, nothing in the United States Code by that name. It is not a legal theory at all. It is a MAGA wet dream, a holy grail cherished by the most fevered corner of Trumpworld, with no possible purchase in an actual courtroom.

Public Service Journalism …

404 Media: Hundreds of human contractors are reading a massive stream of ChatGPT prompts from actual users — which includes their sensitive, personal information — to improve OpenAI’s models, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.

The New Frontier in Warfare

The United States for the first time confirmed that it has deployed military weaponry in space. The news came in an Air Force press release quoting Secretary Troy Meink: “[T]he United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.”

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Charlottesville Still Reverberates

If you read one thing today, make sure it’s Christopher Mathias’ exclusive for TPM on Marshall Rawson, the Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives who marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to video and a photo we unearthed.

Rawson isn’t publicly touting his presence at the “Unite the Right” rally, but he’s not exactly distancing himself either, telling TPM: “Over the entire span of my adult life, I’ve been very active defending historical monuments from destruction or removal, and I feel that way about almost all monuments, not just those associated with southern history.”

Rawson’s successful GOP primary campaign against the son of the term-limited incumbent received significant financial support from a number of figures in the white supremacy movement. I’m not sure that’s enough on its own to make Rawson some kind of Manchurian candidate of right-wing extremism, nor does it mean they represent him, but it does suggest they think he represents them.

This is the fruit of the permission structure President Trump created for right-wing extremism. After Charlottesville, President Trump rolled out the “very fine people, on both sides” false equivalency. It was a precursor to his “Stand back and stand by” in 2020, which became a catalyst for the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump has been feeding this fire almost uninterrupted for a decade now. We see it in congressional staffers turned Groypers, in campaign staffers toying with Nazi imagery, and in the sheer delight in transgressive behavior as a tribal marker.

Each of these incidents not only sows seeds for future division, hatred, and extremism, but does so without shame or opprobrium. It is open and brazen and unapologetic. Each incident gives birth to new legions of supporters who are steeped in the common experiences of their movement.

Detect a Pattern?

Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) fired his re-election campaign’s political director after the WaPo revealed he had once used a photo of Nazi SS soldiers as his Facebook photo

Today in Overt Racism

Bo French is the GOP nominee for statewide office in Texas:

Election Interference Watch

• The WaPo has good roundup of why the biggest threat to the midterm elections is the Trump administration itself.

• Late Sunday, a second federal judge more fully blocked the Trump administration from ‌proceeding with the new USPS rule on mail-in ballots. The order came from U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in D.C.

• Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is siding with the Trump administration against Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, also a Republican, who is fending off federal demands for private voter data under threat of criminal prosecution.

Great Read: War on Women Edition

A great NYT piece on the extraordinary lengths Republican men in Utah have gone to restructure government to curtail the power of Republican women, especially judges.

Hmmm …

Joe diGenova abruptly resigned from the Trump DOJ the day after he signed a grand jury subpoena for the testimony of former CIA Director John Brennan in the sweeping “grand conspiracy” investigation, according to a new filing this morning by Brennan’s attorney in his preemptive lawsuit against the Trump administration.

If the account offered by Brennan attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein is accurate — and he’s no slouch — then the DOJ confirmed to him what’s been generally reported already: that that there are two investigations involving Brennan, the “grand conspiracy” case in south Florida and a lying to Congress case in DC:

A reminder that Kurt Olsen came straight to DOJ from the Trump White House, where he was the president’s “Director of Election Security and Integrity.”

Another Wrinkle in Slush Fund Case

I just can’t let it go that the Trump DOJ engaged in a new bit of brazen gamesmanship to do the president yet another solid in his lawsuit against the IRS — even though it’s a bit in the weeds.

After failing to even enter an appearance in defense of Trump’s lawsuit, let alone defending against it, and then reaching a collusive settlement that gave Trump IRS immunity and created the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund … after ALL OF THAT … the Trump DOJ notified U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams on Friday that it is now appealing her order that found the settlement to be “non-adversarial, collusive, and jurisdictionally improper” and imposed sanctions on Trump’s lawyers.

While the notice of appeal filed by newly installed acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter was still timely, it comes more than a month after Trump and his lawyers appealed Judge Williams’ order. It’s all part of maintaining the charade that DOJ is not on the same side of the case as the president.

Unlawful Deportations Start to Add Up

Nearly 30 people have been unlawfully deported since Trump returned to office, either in violation of court orders, legally mandated due process protections, or immigration court orders, an analysis by Politico shows.

Criminalizing Dissent Watch

• Prosecutions of protesters flop: The Trump DOJ has failed to secure felony convictions against most of the 102 protesters arrested in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. last year on charges of assaulting federal immigration agents, the AP reports.

• Joint Task Force Vanguard: Under orders from President Trump to target left-leaning ideology, the Trump DOJ is going after randos online.

• Thread of the Day:

Canada Yokes Its Future to the EU

I find it so painful to watch Canada, abandoned by the United States, seek deeper ties with the EU, including a possible “associate member” status envision by Prime Minister Mark Carney.

The Most Important News Today

The Trump administration is expected to announce today that the federal government will no longer regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants — dooming for the foreseeable future efforts to rein in carbon pollution even as the metastasizing effects of global warming are becoming abundantly clear.

As the NYT reports:

The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. … if the U.S. power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.

To remove greenhouse gas emissions from the protections of the Clean Air Act, the Trump administration has to conclude that they do not endanger human health or the environment.

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Say It Ain’t So, Joe!

Joseph diGenova, the Trump loyalist and conspiracy promulgator put in charge of the sweeping DOJ investigation into an imagined grand conspiracy against the president, abruptly resigned yesterday reportedly under pressure for not having secured indictments quickly enough.

For a brief moment last night, diGenova looked like he might effectively turn whistleblower against the Trump DOJ. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.

But a short time later, diGenova backtracked somewhat, telling the AP that his comments were taken out of context: “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”

Victoria Toensing, diGenova’s wife who was also part of the prosecution team, is resigning, too.

What to make of all this?

We don’t have perfect visibility into how it all came down, but the Trump track record on retributive prosecutions is pretty clear and diGenova’s departure fits into the general pattern:

1. Trump just wants indictments. More than anything else, President Trump is eager to stain his foes with indictments. What about actual convictions? That would be icing, but they are almost beside the point. This approach of indict first and try to build a case later is so at odds with how legit prosecutors operate that it remains a cognitive obstacle to analyzing what is going on in the Trump retributive prosecution cases. (You’d also expect a genuine tyrant to want his foes jailed, not merely indicted, so having convictions be an afterthought is confounding on many levels.)

2. Trump Sends Underlings Into the Buzzsaw. Indicting first and then trying to build a case later puts the onus on Trump DOJ prosecutors on the front end and exposes them to the full wrath of the judiciary on the back end. It is a no-win situation for them. We’ve seen this again and again, with judges excoriating prosecutors for not being ready with discovery, slow-rolling cases after indictment, and generally still working to compile their case as it barrels towards trial.

3. Churning Through Underlings. To get around putting prosecutors in impossible positions with judges, the Trump DOJ frequently churns through junior prosecutors in the same case. It makes it hard for judges to hold prosecutors to account when they’re no longer on the case. Senior Trump DOJ officials have in some cases had to step into the breach themselves. It’s further reduced the capacity of the Justice Department, often leaving political appointees on the front lines in big cases, a nearly unheard of rarity at DOJ.

4. Todd Blanche Knows the Score. Blanche became attorney general because President Trump wasn’t satisfied that Pam Bondi was moving fast enough against his foes. Blanche used his time as acting attorney general to ramp up the second prosecution of James Comey over the seashells arrayed to say “86 47” and to take other aggressive steps on Trump’s behalf — including appointing diGenova to jumpstart the grand conspiracy investigation — and thus lock down the nomination to the permanent position.

5. Blanche Brought in diGenova. Bondi was gone by early April, and by late April Blanche has installed diGenova in a much-touted move to bolster the languishing (and bogus) grand conspiracy investigation, which is being run out of the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office.

6. diGenova Wasn’t the First Prosecutor to Quit this Case. Before diGenova arrived on scene, career DOJ prosecutor Maria Medetis Long had withdrawn from the case, reportedly over concerns that the evidence was insufficient to charge former CIA Director John Brennan in a companion case.

7. diGenova is No Saint in all of This. A staple of GOP politics since he served as D.C. U.S. attorney in the 1980s, diGenova had taken an opportunistic turn toward the Trumpian right over the past decade. He was an attractive option to lead the grand conspiracy investigation because he’d been touting various MAGA conspiracy theories publicly as a Trump surrogate on TV and privately as a legal adviser to the president on matters related to the Russia probes.

8. diGenova Saw the Writing on the Wall. His resignation came after clashes with higher-ups at Main Justice, including reportedly being told that “he had lost the confidence of his superiors,” CNN reported.

9. diGenova Gives Defense Attorneys a Gift. diGenova’s comments to the NY Post will be damaging in any subsequent prosecution that arises from the grand conspiracy investigation. It is more evidence of vindictive prosecutions by the Trump DOJ, and could be used as an example in other unrelated prosecutions as an example of the pattern of DOJ misconduct.

10. diGenova Beats Hasty Retreat. DiGenova’s walkback to the AP of his earlier remarks is still somewhat damaging to DOJ, but it also shows diGenova hastily returning to the fold, where it’s easier to stoke conspiracy theories, gin up Trump, and overpromise results than it is to actually build a viable criminal case that can win a conviction and withstand appeal. That requires real evidence, professional prosecutors, hard work, and adherence to the standards of legal ethics.

Trump wants what he wants: the stain of indictment on his foes, the same as he was stained. He doesn’t care if he breaks the Justice Department, ruins prosecutors careers, churns through appointees, or fails to obtain a conviction. That’s it. It’s not that complicated.

One for the History Books

President Trump’s insane closing flourish at last night’s GOP midterm convention will be the kind of historical artifact that I cringe imagining trying to explain to future generations:

DHS Deletes Super Racist Post

The Department of Homeland Security has taken down a post that featured Optimus Prime of Transformers fame wearing the DHS seal on his armor and telling a Sikh man to “Self Deport or Find Out.” DHS said the post was referring to Harjinder Singh, an Indian trucker who has been demagogued by the Trump administration for his involvement in a fatal highway crash last year in Florida. Hasbro, which owns the Transformers brand, was not happy about the DHS post either.

The Post-9/11 Tools Now Used At Home

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, The Washington Post’s Warren Strobel picks up a theme that has been a key part of TPM’s coverage of Trump II: “[P]owerful agencies and vast legal authorities created to stop another terrorist catastrophe are being turned inward, with the Trump administration using many of those powers to round up immigrants, battle drug traffickers and target political dissent.”

AI-pocalypse Now

The latest developments on the AI front:

• Stephen Witt: The A.I. Threat Is Real. We Need to Act Now

• WaPo: For years, they warned AI could kill all humans. Now people are listening.

• NYT: Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons

Detectorist Finds Hoard of Viking Coins

I am a sucker for these kinds of stories every single time.

An amateur with a metal detector last week found the largest hoard of Viking Age coins ever unearthed in Finland.

The stash of silver coins has not been cleaned or counted yet, but it weighs about 10 pounds. That’s more than twice the weight of Finland’s previous largest Viking Age coin hoard, which was found in 1895 and contained some 1,700 coins.

The newly discovered hoard was really three discoveries in one. Kalle Lappinen, the detectorist, first found one cache, then another about 40 feet away. Each cache was buried about a foot and half below the surface inside of its own birch-bark container, an interesting find in its own right.

The NYT has reaction from professional archaeologists.

See You Back Here Monday

Check out Morning Memo playlists on Spotify and YouTube.

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Election Interference Happening Now

News that the Trump DOJ is escalating its attack on state election officials first emerged, I believe, in Salt Lake City yesterday, where Utah’s top election official revealed yesterday that she’d received a threatening letter from the Civil Rights Division dated Sept. 4 warning that she is “under investigation.”

Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson further revealed that it was her understanding that election officials in multiple states had received similar letters.

By this morning, the New York Times was reporting that the Trump DOJ had confirmed it had sent similar letters to election officials in 30 states.

The letter to Henderson, only a portion of which she posted online, reiterated previous demands that election officials preserve records for the prior 22 months.

“There’s only two reasons to send that letter: Either the lawyers who send it don’t understand litigation obligations, or they’re hoping that states will misinterpret it and retain more than they’re legally required,” David Becker, a former DOJ voting rights lawyer, told the NYT.

What makes the escalation especially remarkable is that they come after the Justice Department has repeatedly struck out in civil lawsuits trying to force states to cough up voter information. Having lost in court while trying to clear the lower bar of a civil lawsuit, the Trump DOJ is now going to meet the even higher standard of a criminal prosecution?

That disconnect is a tell that the real purpose of raising the specter of criminal prosecution is to intimidate election officials into doing the administration’s bidding — if not now, on the voting records dispute, then at some point later as Election Day draws near. It adds to the overall chaos that President Trump has intentionally ginned up for election officials around the running of the election.

“If you cared about the security of the elections … you would not be threatening election officials with prison sentences, you would not be suing all of us, you would not be investigating all of us constantly,” Henderson told the Salt Lake Tribune. “You would not be making it so that we’re not able to do our actual jobs.”

BREAKING: SCOTUS Does the Right Thing in Missouri

In the Missouri redistricting case, the Supreme Court has effectively restored Missouri’s old 2022 congressional map for the 2026 midterm elections. The high court blocked a district judge’s deeply flawed temporary restraining order that had created a standoff between the federal courts and the Missouri Supreme court.

TPM will be covering developments all day today:

• TPM’s Kate Riga: Federal Judge Denies ‘Extraordinary Measure’ of Enjoining Missouri Supreme Court Ahead of Hoskins’ Contempt Hearing

• TPM’s John Light: Missouri’s Republican-Imposed Catch-22, and the Ballad of Denny Hoskins

Stay tuned …

Trump Takes USA Scheme to SCOTUS

The Trump DOJ is asking the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that Sigal Chattah was unlawfully installed as the top federal prosecutor in Nevada.

The Trump scheme to bypass Senate confirmation and federal district judges to install loyalists in blue states has already been shot down by three appeals courts.

In Chattah’s case, when her statutory 120-day term as acting U.S. attorney ended, she was named first assistant U.S. attorney and then automatically elevated into the acting role again — which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected last month as unlawful. It ruled that only a first assistant U.S. attorney already in place when the vacancy happens automatically ascends into the acting role.

Setting aside the complicated statutory and constitutional mechanics, Trump’s goal is clear: He wants compliant loyalists in place as top federal prosecutors in blue states to extend the reach of DOJ as a retributive tool against Democratic elected officials.

Today in Not Normal

The sitting attorney general, Todd Blanche, spoke at President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas last evening — marking another break in the tradition of insulating the Justice Department from partisan politics, especially in the run-up to elections.

Sure Gonna Miss Ed Martin

Trump DOJ official Ed Martin sent many more of his buffoonish “letters of inquiry after request” to scientific journals than previously known, a FOIA request has revealed.

It was already known that Martin had sent his peculiar letters to the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Chest, and Obstetrics & Gynecology baselessly accusing them of being partisan actors. But the FOIA request by FYI: Science Policy News revealed that eight other publications received Martin’s missives:

• American Family Physician

• American Journal of Public Health

• Cancer

• Family Medicine

• Nature Medicine

• Pediatrics

• Science

• Scientific American

Martin left the Justice Department last week and is launching a new gun rights group — Firearm Rights for Americans — focused on restoring access to firearms for people convicted of nonviolent ‌crimes.

JUST IN …

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals today rejected the Trump administration’s unprecedented effort to detain millions of undocumented immigrants without bond, comparing it to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

It was the final appeals court to weigh in on the administration’s novel interpretation of a 30-year-old law. The final score: 11-2 against the administration. The Supreme Court is likely to weigh in next.

Lawless Boat Strike Campaign Kills 3

While the Pentagon has begun non-fatal strikes targeting larger vessels near Ecuador that allegedly refuel drug-smuggling boats, it is continuing its lawless campaign in the Caribbean, where three people were killed in a new strike on Wednesday.

The Summer of Our Discontent

A couple of new data points for the almanac of global warming:

• August 2026 tied July 2023 for warmest month ever recorded planet-wide, according to Copernicus, the EU space program’s climate monitoring arm. Average temperatures worldwide in August were 1.65 degrees Celsius (roughly three degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

• The summer of 2026 was the warmest summer ever recorded in the contiguous United States, according to NOAA. It beat out the Dust Bowl summer of 1936 by 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Preparing for the Unthinkable

President Trump’s concerted assault on free and fair elections is happening on so many fronts that it’s hard for a casual observer to keep track of it all, so I want to pull back briefly and offer a lens through which to assess the threat: election officials on the ground.

Even as the Trump election executive order — in the form of the new USPS rules for mail-in ballots — is winding its way to the Supreme Court for a second time in a week, election officials are up against the clock. Election Day is less than eight weeks out, but in the modern world of early voting and mail-in ballots the election has already started or will soon get underway in many states. So most of the preparation and planning was completed long ago to meet various legal and internal deadlines. That’s a key bit of context as the Trump administration and friendly judges try to change the rules of the game this late in the calendar.

But the current spate of last-minute legal challenges are orderly and tame in comparison to some of the scenarios election officials are preparing for, namely direct federal interference in an ongoing election.

Election officials have elevated federal interference in the midterms to a risk factor on par with a natural disaster, Mary Ellen Klas reports at Bloomberg:

State elections officials are moving forward with plans to mail out ballots as if nothing has changed. But they’re also developing contingency plans — the way they do to prepare for bomb threats, power outages and natural disasters. “There’s a new hazard on the list, and that is the possibility of some sort of federal interference,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told me last week.

Federal interference can take many forms, but after the FBI seized 2020 voting materials this year in Arizona and Georgia, election officials are preparing for direct election interference from law enforcement, NPR reports:

One state election official, who did not have permission to speak publicly, told NPR their office has led three separate statewide trainings this year to prepare for the possibility of law enforcement seeking to take possession of ballots or election materials while the election is ongoing.

Given these manifest risks, The Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law put out this morning a new white paper for judges: “A Judicial Guide to Search Warrants Seeking Election Materials.” It warns of the perils of breaking the chain of custody if law enforcement seizes ballots and other election materials and offers judges alternatives that minimize the risk of irreparable harm to elections.

Election officials face a nearly impossible-to-reconcile duality: preparing for the possibility of an unprecedented federal assault on state-run elections while reassuring voters that their votes will count.

The Missouri Map Mess

If you’re trying to make sense of the latest developments in the Missouri redistricting saga, I’d recommend:

• TPM’s John Light: Dueling Missouri Court Decisions Give Us a Preview of the Kind of Midterm We’re in For

• Law Dork’s Chris Geidner: Dueling rulings cause chaos over Missouri maps

Overnight, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) to show cause for why he could not be held in contempt of court for announcing that he would use the congressional district map the court deemed invalid. It set oral arguments for Thursday morning.

Census Chicanery Continues

• The Trump administration issued its proposed changes to the Census Wednesday, including an unprecedented exclusion of non-U.S. citizens from the count despite the 14th Amendment’s instruction that the “whole number of persons in each state” must be counted, NPR reports. The change, if allowed, would profoundly shift the balance of political power in America.

• More from TPM: Trump Admin Officially Moves to Reshape National Political Power With New Changes to 2030 Census

• Wired has identified the authors of last month’s bogus Census Bureau report on noncitizen voting in the 2020 election:

  • Dan Sweeney, a deputy general counsel at the Department of Commerce who previously worked as the “DOGE legal liaison and deregulatory attorney” at EPA;

  • Michael Lachanski, a new Census Bureau hire who was until recently a fellow at the MAGA-fied Claremont Institute;

  • Matthew Jensen and Jeff McCrea, staffers at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute

Judge Deplores Trump DOJ Conduct

The Trump DOJ’s litigation strategy in a key wrongful deportation case was “not reasonable,” U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Maryland ruled Tuesday as she ordered the government to pay more than $160,000 in attorney fees:

Looking at the totality of the circumstances, even if portions of the government’s positions might have been reasonable, its overall litigation position has not been substantially justified. A reasonable person could not find that the government’s overall litigation position had reasonable basis in law and in fact.

The attorney fees award was tied to litigation over the wrongful deportation of a Venezuelan national named “Cristian” to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act last year in violation of a court-approved settlement agreement.

The wrongful deportation of Cristian was just one of numerous other violations of the settlement agreement by the Trump administration that have emerged in the J.O.P. case. Judge Gallagher had already found the administration in contempt of court even before yet another wrongful deportation came to light last week.

It’s one of the perverse ironies of the Trump II presidency that taxpayers must foot the bill for the lawlessness of the Trump DOJ.

CBP Is Using ‘Predictive Policing’

“Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching,” 404 Media reports.

DHS to Flip Eagle to Show It’s at War

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin wants to change the department’s seal so that the eagle is facing the arrows in its left talons instead of the olive branch in its right talons. “We’re actually changing our seal to make it look towards the arrows because … when it looks towards the arrows is when it means we’re at war,” Mullin told Fox News.

A Shift in Lawless Boat Strike Campaign?

A Labor Day weekend operation by the U.S. Southern Command near Ecuador may have signaled a shift in approach. U.S. forces destroyed several commercial vessels believed to be used to refuel drug-smuggling boats but only after the boats were intercepted and their crews safely removed without any deaths or injuries. It was the fourth such interdiction of floating refueling platforms.

Illegal and Unproductive

Three retired Coast Guard officers, deploring the Trump administration’s lawless campaign against alleged drug smuggling boats on the high seas:

This policy is legally unsound, strategically counterproductive, and morally corrosive. It weakens the international partnerships that have underpinned successful maritime drug interdiction for decades while placing American servicemembers in the impossible position of carrying out actions that may conflict with the law and their own personal and professional ethics. Drug smugglers are criminals—not enemy combatants—and treating them as military targets undermines both the rule of law and America’s credibility abroad.

Jeffrey Epstein Watch

The Trump DOJ is refusing to cooperate with European law enforcement agencies investigating Jeffrey Epstein, the WaPo reports: “Several European law enforcement officials said in interviews that DOJ has not responded to their requests for mutual legal assistance, which could permit foreign investigators to obtain evidence, information and testimony from the U.S.”

EU Catches Canada On the Rebound

With U.S.-Canadian relations in tatters, the European Union and Canada are “working toward a new, all-encompassing relationship that will range from trade to security” in a new alliance that will stop just short of EU membership, Bloomberg reports.

Anthropic Researcher Quits Over AI Fears

WSJ: “Jacob Coxon, a researcher who specializes in training new AI models by having them consume vast amounts of data, said Tuesday that he is leaving the company because he doesn’t want to participate in an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.”

I don’t recall the phrase “destroy humanity” being used in a straight news story since the end of the Cold War.

Quote of the Day

“Fortunately Americans had the wisdom to elect a corrupt dullard who’s susceptible to sycophancy and surrounds himself with sycophants to resolve the Sycophantic, Amoral Robot conundrum that poses existential risk to humanity.”—Brian Beutler

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A Critical Week Ahead for Democracy

As I sat down this morning to try to catch you up on the state of play of the various Trump administration threats to the sanctity of the midterms elections, I realized anew how hard it is to keep track of it all — and how much that is the point.

The scale of the many different percolating threats, the complexity of the legal battles to beat back the federal government from an unlawful role in state elections, and the relentless disinformation campaign intended to delegitimate elections all combine intentionally to overwhelm the senses.

Even though we’ve seen this coming from virtually the moment the last election was over, Trump’s full-court press still swamps the political and media environments. It also threatens to exceed our imaginations. For as foreseeable as this was, I still would have shuddered if you had told me a year ago where things would stand in the second week of September 2026, with voting already getting underway.

President Trump’s uber-aggressive executive order in March calling for what is essentially a federal takeover of election administration remains in play with Election Day under two months out. We’re once again in the unenviable position of hoping that the Roberts Court will “do the right thing” and close the Pandora’s box of ills that Trump’s elections EO unleashes.

The lateness of the hour, as election law expert Rick Hasen points out, should on its own be sufficient for the Supreme Court to rule against Trump on the new postal rules on mail-in ballots that his executive order spawned. Chaos and uncertainty doesn’t begin to capture the sheer impossibility of the task the USPS and state election administrators would face if the Supreme Court rules for Trump:

I have never in over thirty years of teaching and studying election cases ever seen an attempt like this one to roll out a major change in election administration against the will of state and local election officials on a time frame that is certain to impede on states’ ability to run elections and that will certainly disenfranchise thousands if not millions of voters who will not get ballots if the USPS rule is put into effect for this election. Those voters include those who are elderly, in rural communities, with certain disabilities, traveling in the military (within the U.S) or for other reasons. This is not a rollout that hurts Democrats and helps Republicans; it’s a rule that threatens mass disenfranchisement of voters across the political spectrum and in red and blue states.

It’s a game of chicken between the president and the Supreme Court. It makes you want to avert your eyes.

After a flurry of weekend legal moves, things are likely to begin moving more quickly this week at the First Circuit Court of Appeals and ultimately at the Supreme Court in the complicated litigation over the Postal Service’s role in mailing ballots even as the USPS inspector general is opening his own probe of a whistleblower’s complaint.

While that is going on, other Trump attacks on the midterms continue on multiple fronts:

• The Trump DOJ has issued seven “voter-related” subpoenas over the past three months to the secretary of state in Nevada, where top federal prosecutor Sigal Chatta has repeatedly sought to cast doubt on the integrity of federal elections, the NYT reports. The subpoenas come after the Trump DOJ failed to obtain private voter information in civil lawsuits against Nevada and two dozen other states.

• The Trump DOJ leadership — which already cancelled mandatory election law training — is now pressing U.S. attorneys around the country to prioritize prosecuting the phantom of illegal noncitizen voting under a rarely tested statute, Bloomberg reports.

• DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche last week that sought to cast doubt on digital voting systems and lay the groundwork for claiming that some electronically cast or counted votes are invalid, the NYT reports.

You can plainly see Trump’s old 2020 playbook at work again, but this time using a whole-of-government approach to tamper with the midterm elections on the front end and then discredit the election results on the back end.

Trump DOJ Watch

• The Retribution: Even before Hill Republicans last month sought a criminal investigation of Dr. Tony Fauci for taking the Fifth at a congressional hearing, the Trump DOJ had been conducting since last year a “sprawling and aggressive” probe of Fauci that has scrutinized at least eight scientists, the NYT reports: “Investigators have demanded phone, email, grant and payment records, as well as grand jury testimony by scientists.”

• The Corruption: Federal prosecutors in Miami closed a criminal probe into Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt on orders from the office of then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as part of an effort by the Trump administration to enlist Betancourt to engineer a massive new oil deal with Venezuela’s government, CNN reports.

• The “Anti-Weaponization” Slush Fund: The Trump administration must cough up the names of the people who devised the structure of the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund that was of the bogus settlement of President Trump lawsuit against the IRS, a federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in a case challenging the slush fund.

First Look at Fed Indictment of ICE Agent

The unsealed federal indictment of ICE agent Christian Castro charges him with six counts of making false statements in the aftermath of the Jan. 14 shooting in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge. He is accused of lying about:

• being struck with a broom;

• being struck with a snow shovel;

• firing his gun while seated or lying on his back;

• the duration of the altercation prior to the shooting.

Grand Juries Stood Up to Midway Blitz

Federal grand juries in Chicago held the line during last year’s flurry of prosecutions of protesters during Operation Midway Blitz by demanding more evidence from prosecutors, including the testimony of CBP commander Greg Bovino, according to court records newly unsealed at the request of the Chicago Sun-Times.

In one case, an assistant U.S. attorney conceded that “the government does not possess and cannot realistically obtain all of the evidence the grand jury has requested.”

In the end, grand juries indicted a subset of protesters, but prosecutors won convictions against only two of the 33 Midway Blitz defendants.

Map of the Day

In the tens of thousands of habeas cases filed since the Trump administration unilaterally changed a three-decade-old interpretation of federal law last year, a significant disparity exists in how quickly federal courts are issuing rulings freeing detainees, a ProPublica analysis has found (click the map for a larger version):

While the vast majority of federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration, the speed with which they have done so has varied widely, with detention-center-heavy Louisiana and Mississippi moving the slowest, at an average of nearly three months.

Hegseth’s Unprecedented Leak Probe

“U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions, according to officials briefed on the move,” the NYT reports.

Quote of the Day

“I think it is fair to say the wheels are coming off. It’s sort of like if you had a car and you took out 10 percent of the parts of the car. It’s not that the car is going to be 10 percent slower. The car is not going to work.”—Don Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, on the Trump II hollowing out of the federal government

Far-Right AfD Wins Big In Germany

In the state election in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, the far-right Alternative for Germany won 44 percent of the vote, more than doubling its 2021 haul.

Historian Adam Tooze offers this context:

Despite their remarkable showing, it is not obvious that the AfD will form the next government in Sachsen-Anhalt. The other parties may arrange themselves to keep the AfD out of power. At the national level, the AfD are even further from government. Nevertheless, this result shakes Germany’s political system. It shows how far the familiar political norms of the Federal Republic have disintegrated. Mecklenburg Vorpommern, another small East German state, will vote on September 20th and the outcome may well be similar. The crisis of German democracy has long been forecast. It now seems to be upon us.

If you’re still catching up on what AfD represents, here’s a sampling: the forced “remigration” of non-ethnic-German citizens to their countries of origin; banning the Pride flag; exalting German history before the two world wars and downplaying its Nazi past; cracking down on “anti-German” art, including the Bauhaus, in an echo of the Nazi assault on modern art.

Calling AfD a “far-right” party hardly does it justice.

Before the AI Hack of Hugging Face …

A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website in May and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, but OpenAI kept it under wraps as it grappled with the fallout from the separate ‌Hugging Face hack in July, Reuters reports.

Absurdity of the Day

President Trump spent the Labor Day weekend as an online troll obsessed with changing the name of New Mexico to New America, with numerous posts like this one:

Ex-AUSA Now Under Criminal Investigation

The Trump DOJ has fired the federal prosecutor who sought to bring civil rights charges against an ICE agent for the January shooting of a man through the closed door of his home during Operation Metro Surge.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans of Minneapolis was fired — and is now himself reportedly under criminal investigation — after ProPublica published emails he sent to lawyers for the victims apologizing that his efforts to bring more serious civil rights charges against ICE agent Christian Castro were being blocked by Main Justice.

“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in the email. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”

Evans concluded his email: “It has been an honor and a privilege to try to get justice for your clients.”

News of Evans’ firing came the same day that Castro was indicted on lesser charges of making false statements for allegedly lying to investigators about the shooting. Castro is facing separate state charges in Minnesota, but state prosecutors failed in their efforts to have Castro extradited from Texas after he was arrested there.

In addition to being fired, Evans is now under federal criminal investigation, according to various reports. CBS News says it’s for alleged leaks; the AP says it’s for alleged obstruction of a grand jury probe; the WaPo says it’s for alleged obstruction of justice.

Even the lesser charges are a big reversal for the Trump DOJ, which originally charged Castro’s victims over the incident. But the case came apart as new evidence, including video, emerged that undercut Castro’s account. Within a month, the case was dropped.

Castro, the first federal agent to face federal charges over Operation Metro Surge, turned himself in to federal authorities in Texas on Thursday. Oddly, the Trump DOJ says a decision on the civil rights charges against Castro has still not been made.

Trump DOJ Promotes Aakash Singh

Aasash Singh, who has been the main point of contact between Main Justice and U.S. attorneys around the country and a key figure in some of the Trump II retributive prosecutions, has been promoted to principal associate deputy attorney general, Bloomberg reports:

Attorney General Todd Blanche, in one of his first major personnel changes since being sworn in last month, is now handing Singh a more sprawling portfolio. Past PADAGs, including Trump’s initial pick in this administration, Emil Bove, have wielded significant law enforcement power behind the scenes by applying tough tactics — at times making unpopular decisions affecting the career workforce.

Living in the Worst Timeline

TPM’s Layla A. Jones: How a Baseless, Right-Wing Social Media Panic Led to Dramatic Changes at the Census Bureau

Trump USPS Ballot Scheme Back at SCOTUS

With North Carolina starting to mail out ballots today, the Trump administration raced back to the Supreme Court on Thursday asking it to stay a lower court ruling which blocked its latest effort to use the Postal Service to spearhead a massive federal intervention in the running of the midterm elections.

Two Big Redistricting Wins for Democrats

• Missouri: The state Supreme Court has thrown out the new GOP-drawn map used in last month’s primary that eliminated one of the state’s two Democratic congressional districts and restored the old map — setting up the strange prospect of the general election being contested by candidates who were nominated by districts that no longer exist. The court ruled that the new map must be approved by voters before it can go into effect, so the new map will also be a referendum item on the November ballot.

• Maryland: The state Supreme Court cleared the way for a proposed amendment to the state constitution to appear on the November ballot that would make it easier for Democrats to gerrymander congressional districts in their favor in time for the 2028 election.

Nigel Farage Targeted in Sting Operation

In the United Kingdom, two of Nigel Farage’s top aides have stepped down after Channel 4 aired a video of an undercover sting operation targeting Farage. In the videos, in which Farage and the two aides appears, journalists posing as a rich American donor and his UK-based son schemed on how to get around UK election law on foreign donations to contribute £500,000 to Farage’s Reform UK party.

Germany Election Watch

A last bit of analysis of German domestic politics ahead of Sunday’s election in which the far-right AfD party is poised to win a historic victory in one state:

• Politico: How Germany’s Firewall Against the Far Right Collapsed

• NYT: Something Alarming Is About to Happen in Germany

Thread of the Day

How Bad Was the Open AI Breakout?

A clearer, though still imperfect, picture is slowly emerging of the seriousness of the hack of Hugging Face by Open AI agents who broke out of their sandbox. For your long weekend reads, let me suggest:

• At the NYT, Kevin Roose has the tl;dr: Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.

• Ajeya Cotra, one of the outside investigators allowed in by Open AI to assess some (but not all) of what happened, recounts her takeaways from the investigation: “[T]his incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover …”

• In the The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations, Dwarkesh Patel draws particular attention to what happened after the Hugging Face hack: The Open AI agents seem to have hacked Open AI itself, but that later incident hasn’t been subject to outside investigation.

Sad to See the Summer Go

Enjoy the long weekend. See you back here Tuesday.

Check out Morning Memo playlists on Spotify and YouTube.

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Judge Demands Answers by Noon

A 19-year-old asylum seeker — who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March in violation of a court-ordered settlement agreement, then returned Aug. 7 by the Trump administration — was wrongfully deported again Monday to El Salvador, where he fears persecution.

The revelation comes in J.O.P. v. DHS, a long-running class action lawsuit in Maryland over the treatment of unaccompanied minor asylum seekers nationwide. The latest wrongful removal comes after repeated violations by the Trump administration of the settlement agreement and of multiple subsequent court orders by U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher seeking to enforce it, including a July order that found the administration in contempt of court.

Counsel for the class of plaintiffs notified Judge Gallagher of the latest (repeat) wrongful deportation yesterday, describing a mad scramble Monday to determine what had happened to their client, identified in court records only as E.L.A.

They asked the judge to order DHS to answer a series of seven questions to get to the bottom of what happened to the teen. Gallagher obliged, giving the administration a noon deadline today to provide answers, while adding an eighth question in her order: “What is the plan for promptly rectifying this error?”

Trump DOJ Blocked Charging ICE Agent

ProPublica has gone a long way towards confirming what Morning Memo suggested Monday: Main Justice scotched the effort by the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office to bring charges against ICE agent Christian Castro for the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in January during Operation Metro Surge.

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota had been preparing to bring civil rights charges against Castro and had gone as far as alerting attorneys for the victims of the impending charges. But then nothing happened.

ProPublica has since obtained a Tuesday evening email from assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans updating the victims’ lawyers that Castro will likely now only face a lesser false statements charge for lying about the circumstances of the shooting.

“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in the email, ProPublica reports. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”

The Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is led by Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon, who was in a prime position to block the civil rights charges.

Castro also faces state charges over the shooting, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refused to extradite him to Minnesota after he was arrested in Texas. Castro was released from jail in Brownsville last week after the Trump DOJ sided with Abbott in a federal court battle over the extradition request.

Sosa-Celis and another man were originally charged by the Trump DOJ for the incident, which culminated with Castro shooting through the front door of their home, but the case quickly unraveled and the charges were dropped.

In his email alerting the victims’ attorneys that the civil rights case against Castro had been stymied, the federal prosecutor ended by saying: “It has been an honor and a privilege to try to get justice for your clients.”

IMPORTANT

The Trump DOJ has adopted a sweeping new legal interpretation designed to compel state governments to report undocumented immigrants or risk losing federal funding, Politico reports.

A new memo from the Office of Legal Counsel reinterprets longstanding law and formally withdraws a prior 1998 OLC memo that administrations had relied on for almost 30 years.

The move is reminiscent of the Trump administration’s reinterpretation last year of a 1996 law — which suddenly allowed millions of undocumented immigrants to be detained without a right to bond hearings. That shift flooded federal courts with habeas cases in which judges have overwhelmingly rejected the administration’s interpretation, but produced a circuit court split that the Supreme Court is expected to resolve as soon as its next term.

Trump Loses Again on Birthright Citizenship

U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman of Maryland has blocked President Trump’s second executive order on birthright citizenship, leaning heavily on the Supreme Court’s rejection of the first one in June. “The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,’” Boardman wrote in her ruling.

DHS and the Threat to Voting

• ICE is “preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will create a massive national database of voters,” Wired reports.

• The NYT has obtained internal documents and training materials showing new details about the new DHS effort to target the bogeyman of illegal noncitizen voting, which the administration is privately calling the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.”

The Left-Wing Terrorism Canard

DHS is using an anti-terrorism provision in the PATRIOT Act that allows warrantless access to financial information to target opposition groups, TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports.

Quote of the Day

“Things have gotten so much more dangerous. I think we are headed in the wrong direction. And if I could ever be more concerned than I was after my only child was murdered, I am.”—U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was murdered at her New Jersey home in 2020 by a disgruntled lawyer, on the increase in threats to judges

‘More Bismarck, Less Hitler’

With the far-right Alternative for Germany party poised to win big in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt in the Sept. 6 election, Politico profiles AFD lawmaker Hans-Thomas Tillschneider and explores the right-wing resurgence in the former East Germany:

It’s perhaps no coincidence that such a revolution in German identity would take root in the former East Germany, where the AfD is ascendant. While West Germany was attempting to undertake a confrontation with the past, imperfect as it was, the state narrative in the former East Germany was that its people had vanquished fascism, which in any case was a product of the West. Many of the AfD’s supporters in the East believe a West German narrative about the Nazi past was imposed on them after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Art Is Dangerous

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill pulls together Trump’s multi-front attack on public art — from last week’s removal by the State Department of a painting by Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley to the sustained assault on the Kennedy Center — into a coherent whole that whitewashes the American story:

The point of taking down Kehinde Wiley’s painting was not to replace it with some more “aesthetically calming” work of art. The idea is to make art devoid of meaning and imagination so that it cannot inspire thinking that challenges the hegemony this Administration is bent on imposing on 350 million Americans. Doing that requires the brutal reduction of art to works that are “woke” and those that are “patriotic.”

Gloria Steinem, 1934-2026

The feminist leader and cultural icon Gloria Steinem has died at 92.

Black and Female Officers Targeted

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has blocked the elevation of seven Army officers to the rank of two-star general, the New York Times reports, as part of his ongoing mission to destroy the military’s merit-based promotion system and replace it with a politicized system based on personal loyalty and fealty to MAGA ideology:

More than half of the officers affected by Mr. Hegseth’s dismissals are Black or female in a force whose senior ranks are dominated by white male officers. Of the seven officers Mr. Hegseth removed from the Army two-star promotion list, two are Black and two are female.

The Pentagon purges have hit more than 80 generals and admirals so far, which represents about 10% of the military’s top officers, according to the NYT.

The destruction of a professional military has to rank among the most egregious and long-lasting of Trump II initiatives targeting government itself, along with his attacks on the merit-based civil service system, his abusive misuse of the Justice Department, his elimination of USAID, and his running roughshod over Congress’ power of the purse.

It is one of the bitter ironies of the Trump II presidency that he is destroying not just what he views as liberal shibboleths but core elements of what Republicans used to say mattered most to them — which creates a perverse future dynamic where Democrats will be expected to expend their political capital to repair everything.

Quote of the Day

“It’s been a year of murders. The Trump administration has normalized murder. It’s absolutely criminal.”—an unidentified defense official, on the one-year anniversary of the start of the lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats that has killed 227 civilians in 65 attacks

Warming of 1.5°C Is Now Unavoidable

A first-of-its-kind UN report titled “Limiting Overshoot” assumes that the world will exceed its 1.5°C target for warming and recommends what it calls the “best remaining option”: limiting peak warming to 1.8°C and then begin the Herculean task of bringing temperatures back down.

Even this revised plan — with the ungainly name “overshoot, peak and decline” — requires an enormous global undertaking without precedent that must be commenced immediately. It starts with reducing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide to net zero by the 2050s and then relies on the future development of carbon removal technologies at scale to bring temperatures back down to the 1.5°C threshold.

The report emphasizes the importance of minimizing the time spent above 1.5°C and limiting the overshoot as much as possible to have any real chance of (i) mitigating the most extreme consequences of climate change; and (ii) bringing temperatures back down to more survivable levels.

Even under its best-case scenario, the report still envisions the world spending decades above 1.5°C and warns that in the event “overshoot, peak and decline” works, civilization will still face lasting and irreversible consequences: “Legacy impacts that do not reverse with temperature—continued sea-level rise, species extinctions, ecosystem regime shifts, permafrost carbon feedbacks and the displacement of communities—mean the post-peak stage inherits the full burden of what preceded it.”

Tina Peters Declines New Elections Job

Tina Peters, the convicted former Colorado county clerk who has been on high-profile victory tour since Gov. Jared Polis commuted her prison sentence, has declined to accept a job offer as an elections official in Shasta County, California, a hotbed of Big Lie enthusiasm.

“She declined the offer because she’s running around the country right now trying to secure the elections,” Clint Curtis, the Shasta County registrar of voters who is himself a longtime election denier, told the LA Times. “Shasta County lost out.”

Bovino Was Under Internal Investigation When He Resigned

Greg Bovino, the flamboyant former Customs and Border Protection commander who became the face of President Trump mass deportation operations in blue cities, was under internal investigation when he resigned in March, according to newly released government emails.

Thanks, Apple

Another tech giant has fallen in line with President Trump’s executive order purporting to rename Lake Ontario:

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It’s Too Easy to Blame Only SCOTUS

The Roberts Court rightly gets heaped with opprobrium for its role in enabling Donald Trump and setting the rule of law ablaze. Its latest bouquet to Trump — which Chief Justice John Roberts could not bring himself to participate in — covers the high court in no glory, clearing the way for the completion of his unlawful ballroom project that began with the demolition of the East Wing.

But I’m not sure this particular case is best put in the bucket of another Roberts Court disaster or that viewing it only from that perspective is especially revealing.

What the ballroom case shows is how badly broken things are — well beyond the Supreme Court, whose 5-4 ruling found that the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacked standing to challenge the legality of the vanity ballroom project, which is to say it had no right to sue under these circumstances.

Set aside the merits of that decision for the moment and consider all of the breakdowns that had to happen to get to the point where the National Trust unexpectedly and out of the blue had to stake its reputation, financial resources, time, and energy on trying to prevent the president from desecrating one of the country’s most historic public buildings.

You wouldn’t design a system where it’s up to historic preservationists to drop everything to race to court to protect the White House from being torn down by a renegade president without approval or appropriation from Congress. By the time the National Trust filed suit in December, the East Wing had already been demolished in October.

Even if the National Trust had prevailed in court, I’m not sure how much comfort we should have taken in that result. Better than losing, for sure. But as a reliable and durable mechanism for ensuring lawful government conduct and maintaining the constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances, it leaves a whole lot to be desired.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly in Trump II: No clear mechanism to arrest Trump’s onslaught and so into the breach step people and organizations committed to stopping a rogue president, but often poorly situated factually and legally to fend him off. Often, these willing warriors have been the option of last resort after structural guardrails have failed, institutions have abdicated their responsibilities, and those who know better have eschewed their professional obligations.

Chief among the abdicators is, of course, the Republican Congress, whose abdication has been so complete that it has eroded the foundation of the three-branch system. While elections remain vital, the essence of the rule of law is that the law will be abided regardless of who wins the election. A Democratic win in November will be better than losing, but how much comfort can we take in knowing that we’re only one election away from another lawless regime.

So while the Roberts Court deserves every bit of your scorn and Supreme Court reform is essential, it will not be sufficient. The Supreme Court can’t replace Congress, even though the Roberts Court would happily do so. And Congress can’t simply return to how it functioned before given that Trump tried to demolish it on Jan. 6 and sideline it since returning to office.

The Retribution: Jim Comey Edition

A new grand jury subpoena has been issued to Jim Comey confidante Daniel Richman in a continuation of President Trump’s campaign of retribution against the former FBI director. Some key points:

• The subpoena came from a grand jury in South Florida and “appears to be connected to the so-called grand conspiracy case that has sought to implicate Mr. Comey and other federal officials who have investigated Mr. Trump in an overarching plot to deprive him of his rights,” according to the NYT.

• Richman, a Columbia University law professor, was already entangled in politicized investigations of Comey under Trump I (for allegedly leaking classified information) and earlier in Trump II (for allegedly lying to Congress). The second investigation resulted in Comey’s indictment, which he successfully had dismissed because Trump aide Lindsey Halligan wasn’t lawfully appointed as acting U.S. attorney when she obtained the indictment.

• The NYT says it’s not clear what prosecutors are aiming to get from Richman this time. Fox News, which first reported the subpoena, says it’s “part of a new investigation into Comey allegedly leaking classified information to … the New York Times” — which connects it back to the Trump I probe.

California Pushes Back on ICE

The California legislature passed bills for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature that would:

• ban the use of electric shock gloves by law enforcement through 2030; and

• bar former federal immigration enforcement officers from a wide range of public sector jobs.

Today in Not Normal

TPM’s Hunter Walker reports that in a 2020 podcast, the GOP nominee for governor in Colorado described encountering a young girl who had been possessed by Satan: “She’s a little girl, a pretty girl, just adorable, just like a little girl you want to bring home and just make her your daughter, except she had a demon in her.”

Driscoll Warns Trump About Hegseth

In one of his last acts before tendering his resignation as secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll had a White House meeting with President Trump in which he warned that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s purge of top generals was compromising Army readiness and transformation, The Atlantic reports.

Quote of the Day

“Those who have contributed the least are suffering the most.”—Nepali official Maheshwar Dhakal, on carbon emissions in the developed world, in the aftermath of the glacial collapse and catastrophic flash flood that killed hundreds and left thousands missing in the Himalayas

Wendell Berry, 1934-2026

No writer or thinker has had as much influence on the course of my life as Wendell Berry, who has died at 92. I was an especially earnest 20-year-old when I threw a couple of his books in my pack and set out solo, like a damn fool, for my first mountain climb even though I had no climbing experience and no familiarity with mountains. After laboring mightily through waist-deep snow on the Pacific Crest Trail just to get to timberline, I was pinned down in my tent overnight by thunderstorms on Oregon’s Mt. Thielsen, the spired mountain known as the lightning rod of the Cascades. By the time the skies cleared enough to summit, I had become mesmerized by Berry’s writing.

As a young man, I took Berry very literally. I would farm, of course, but two generations removed from the kinds of farms Berry wrote about, I had no more business farming than I did climbing mountains solo. So instead I tried to roll back the clock by moving to Missouri, where my mother’s family had farmed for generations, and went to law school there, with a loose notion of being a lawyer-farmer like Berry’s fictional Wheeler Catlett, based on his own father.

Those plans got shelved when journalism called me back, but the themes of Berry’s writing remained an abiding touchstone for my life, even if I was a little less literal about them as I got older. He made me wary of my own ambition and of doing inadvertent damage in the world. He nudged me toward a particular kind of proportionality in work (small publishers and a small law firm) and in living that left room to cut across the grain of modern life.

As much as I wanted to engage with him directly, my aversion to fanboying kept me from ever seeking him out. When I picked up stories over the years about young idealists making pilgrimages to Kentucky to meet the man himself, I vowed to leave him well enough alone. The closest I came to overt fandom was attending his Jefferson Lecture in 2012 at the Kennedy Center. Still, I felt a smidge of envy when Nick Offerman emerged over the past decade as my generation’s bridge to Berry. But it took Offerman, by his own admission, 20 years of hounding — and turning himself into a more-than-passable woodworker — to earn an audience with Berry and his wife Tanya on their porch. That’s more than I could have mustered.

I didn’t always agree with Berry. I wanted to challenge some of his convictions. I wanted to press him on the tradeoffs often implied by but sometimes not directly addressed in his writing. But mostly I wanted him to tickle my brain. Even in disagreement, he had a self-effacing charm and a wit in his public persona that I admired.

For all of his eloquence on the quiet virtues of husbandry and stewardship, his “boomers” versus “stickers” framing of American history, and his paeans to a mostly vanished agrarian life that I had gotten glimpses of from my own family as a young boy, one of the things that has stuck with me the longest is a self-deprecating exchange Berry had with a reader almost 40 years ago.

In the late 1980s, Berry wrote an essay for Harper’s titled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” extolling the virtues of his Royal Standard typewriter. The coup de grâce of the essay was the line: “When somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.”

The letters to the editor that followed became the basis of the introduction to another of his essays — “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” — and this portion has stayed with me as the standard for gracious good-humored concession:

Only one of the negative letters seemed to me to have much intelligence in it. That one was from R. N. Neff of Arlington, Virginia, who scored a direct hit: “Not to be obtuse, but being willing to bare my illiterate soul for all to see, is there indeed a work demonstrably better than Dante’s … which was written on a Royal standard typewriter?” I like this retort so well that I am tempted to count it a favorable response, raising the total to four.

If you’re unfamiliar with Berry’s work, I’d suggest starting with The Unsettling of America (1977) and Home Economics (1987).

Deep-Sixed

One of the weirder side plots last week in the extradition fight between Minnesota and Texas over ICE agent Christian Castro was news that the Trump DOJ was considering bringing federal charges against him for the same shooting for which Minnesota had already indicted him.

It was weird for a lot of reasons:

• The Trump administration hasn’t pursued criminal charges against federal agents for the high-profile shootings during Operation Metro Surge (or for misconduct during similar blue-city invasions in Los Angeles and Chicago).

• The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office had already charged Castro’s victims within two days of the shooting before later dropping the case when evidence emerged that Castro had lied about the incident and was suspended by ICE.

• At the same time the Justice Department was reportedly considering charging Castro, it was coming to his defense in the extradition fight, albeit indirectly. In a move that showed the Trump DOJ was clearly colluding with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, it inserted itself into the extradition case by providing factual confirmation for one of Abbott’s legal arguments for why he was slow-rolling Minnesota’s request for Castro.

Against this backdrop it was hard to take seriously the reports — from CNN and CBS News — that federal charges against Castro were imminent. CNN went so far as to suggest charges could come down that day, before the federal judge ruled on the extradition request, as a way of making sure Castro stayed in custody even if Minnesota lost in court. “The tight timeline puts pressure on both federal and state prosecutors to keep Castro in custody,” CNN reported.

But no charges came that day or the next day or in the nearly full week since. Castro was released from jail in Brownsville on Thursday amid fears by law enforcement that he would flee to Mexico.

Subsequent reporting by the New York Times and Minnesota Public Radio is a bit opaque on what happened to the supposed federal case. As the NYT put it over the weekend, “those plans unraveled” and “fell apart in the final hours for reasons that remain unclear.”

Piecing together the reporting and what we know after 18 months of watching the Trump DOJ do President Trump’s bidding, what seems most likely to have happened is that Main Justice scotched the effort by the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office to bring charges against Castro.

I want to be clear that’s not confirmed, but it’s what the available evidence points to.

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota were preparing charges against Castro of deprivation of rights under color of law, MPR and the NYT report. That’s the go-to civil rights charge for excessive force by law enforcement officers.

The federal case was far enough along that prosecutors early last week told the lawyer for Castro’s shooting victim that charges were coming. “Mr. Sosa-Celis put his trust in federal prosecutors in Minnesota who promised him, as a victim and a witness, that they would finally pursue justice by indicting Christian Castro,” attorney Robin Wolpert told the NYT.

Frederick J. Goetz, a lawyer for another victim, apparently received similar assurances. The NYT also had an anonymous third source.

As I warned last week when flagging the CNN report on federal charges, a key figure stood between Castro and any federal charges: Harmeet Dhillon. She is the assistant attorney general who oversee the DOJ Civil Rights Division, which is usually involved in these kinds of use of force cases. Civil rights cases are not typically run solely out of U.S. attorney’s offices because the Civil Rights Division, at least before it was purged under Trump II, had experienced lawyers and resources to assist with these specialized cases and to ensure uniformity and consistency in how these case were handled nationwide.

It put Dhillon in a prime position to meddle, interfere, block, stonewall, etc., the charges against Castro. What exactly happened? Was Dhillon involved? Directly or indirectly? We don’t know. But it’s hard to imagine that prosecutors in Minneapolis went as far as alerting victims’ lawyers of impending charges without U.S. Attorney Daniel N. Rosen being aware of it and at least tentatively signing off on it. So that shifts suspicion to Main Justice and the White House — which in mid-2026 are virtually indistinguishable.

We should allow for the possibility, though remote, that federal charges may still come. A DOJ official told the NYT in a statement that the agency had “not yet reached a conclusion on this matter and will never rush an investigative process and the thorough review of all evidence.”

Trump DOJ Watch

• FBI: Under Director Kash Patel, the FBI will no longer automatically disqualify job applicants who hired sex workers, stole from an employer, or engaged in bestiality, CBS News reports.

• IRS “Settlement”: In federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, the Trump DOJ is balking at demands that it cough up details on the bogus settlement of President Trump’s collusive lawsuit against the IRS which yielded the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund and IRS immunity for Trump, some of his family members, and his business.

• Kennedy Center: The Trump DOJ is running out of ways to humiliate itself in public, Jay Willis writes at Balls & Strikes.

Autopsy: National Guard Shot Man in Back

Tyrin Johnson, 20, was shot in the back last month by National Guard troops assigned to a federal anti-crime task force in Memphis, according to an autopsy report obtained by the AP that contradicts police accounts.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Another Wrongful Deportation: U.S. District Judge Daniel D. Domenico, the chief federal judge in Colorado, has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a Mexican national who was deported to his home country earlier this month in violation of the court order barring his removal.

• And Yet Another: U.S. District Judge Michelle Williams Court of Los Angeles took the first steps towards ordering the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a Nigerian man who remains in hiding in Togo without legal status. The Trump administration was barred from deporting the man to Nigeria under the Convention Against Torture because he was a former member of Boko Haram who was likely to be tortured by the Nigerian government and Boko Haram. So instead the administration deported him in May to Ghana, which quickly put him on bus to Nigeria and then abandoned him when he refused to continue after crossing the border into Togo. The man is reportedly now seriously ill with malaria.

• Third-Country Deportations: Deportees recount harrowing, abusive ICE flights to African countries.

Clyburn Comes Out for SCOTUS Expansion

In the wake of the Roberts Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais decimating the Voting Rights Act and setting back Black political power at least two generations, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) said over the weekend that he favors expanding the court by four justices to match the 13 appellate courts:

Pete Hegseth Watch

• Iran: Senior U.S. military leaders have warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegeth that it is not sustainable to continue large-scale operations against Iran without jeopardizing U.S. security interests elsewhere in the world, the WaPo reports: “Leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with what is characterized in the SDOB as a “non-concur,” those familiar with the assessment said — meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless.”

• More Pentagon Purges: In a highly unusual move, Hegseth is blocking the promotions of four Army officers to one-star rank apparently because they worked for generals he does not like, current and former defense officials told the NYT.

• Influencers on Pentagon Payroll: The Pentagon has secretly installed military-veterans-turned-social-media-influencers in civilian roles to defend Hegseth and attack administration critics, according to the WaPo.

Trump’s Scheme to Take Venezuela’s Oil

The devil will be in the details of whatever yet-to-be-released written agreement memorializes this scheme, but for now the WSJ has the most detailed account of the Trump administration’s plan to give the Pentagon a direct 35% stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, a private company led by controversial Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt: “It would give Washington a direct financial stake in a private company that would be granted centurylong rights to some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves—and tie the U.S. more closely to the unelected government that is granting those rights.”

Teddy Roosevelt Is Rolling in His Grave

The Trump administration is pushing the National Park Service to trade away a 1/4-mile strip of land in a corner of Yosemite National Park so that a developer can develop adjoining property it owns outside the park, NOTUS reports.

Thanks, Google

Google Maps now shows Lake Ontario as “Lake America” to U.S. users:

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DOJ Election Monitors Cross the Line

At least two DOJ election monitors allegedly tried to interview voters and access voting machines in Cheyenne during last week’s primary election in violation of Wyoming law, Republican Gov. Mark Gordon said.

“I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns — I don’t like that,” the governor said at a meeting with state elections officials. “And I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes, either.”

The DOJ monitors’ requests were denied by local election officials. The Trump DOJ has not denied the allegations that the monitors tried to interview voters and access voting machines.

While DOJ election monitors have had an important role historically in protecting the right to vote, especially for Black Americans, the Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon has threatened to expand the use of monitors to make sure only eligible people vote — in what would be a serious federal incursion into state-run elections.

The governor’s account of what happened last week in Wyoming suggests monitors potentially violated the rules in multiple ways, based on a summary of guidelines for election monitoring Campaign Legal Center:

No Notice: The DOJ put out a statement the day of the primary that it was dispatching monitors to Wyoming, and claims it gave notice to the Wyoming U.S. attorney — but state and local election officials do not appear to have been notified directly.

Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said that she had no advance notice that DOJ monitors would be present. “Shortly after learning of their presence, I spoke with a DOJ official in Washington who informed me that the decision to deploy monitors to Wyoming was made on short notice, and an email had been sent to me, but it may have gone to the wrong address,” she told NBC News (emphasis added).

Accessing machines: Monitors are tasked with observing and reporting on compliance with federal law. They are not there to enforce federal law. Lee said the requests went well beyond the scope of federal civil rights and voting law: “They included questions about the nature, length and timing of poll worker training,” Lee said. “Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired and wanted to examine our tabulators.”

Examining tabulators on Election Day is particularly egregious and well outside the bounds of election monitoring.

Interviewing voters: Generally, federal monitors may interview voters leaving a polling place but only after they have voted. They may not intimidate voters or seek to determine their identity or eligibility to vote. The exact circumstances of the request to interview voters was not clear from the accounts provided by the governor or Laramie County clerk.

However, monitors must also abide by state laws that govern election monitoring. “But as ‘monitors,’ as per Wyoming state law, they weren’t allowed to go interview voters; they weren’t allowed to check the tabulators,” the governor told Cowboy State Daily.

No credentials: Election monitors are supposed to identify themselves as such when at a polling place, but Lee said two monitors didn’t show their credentials at first.

The governor has asked the state attorney general to investigate the episode. “Sounds like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” Gordon said. “It was just irregular, and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into the nature of all this.”

It’s not clear if this was a Keystone Cops affair, a dry run for highly aggressive and invasive election “monitoring” in key states during the general election — or, in classic Trumpian fashion, both.

Just In …

The 11 Circuit Court of Appeals is questioning whether it has jurisdiction to hear President Trump’s appeal of the sanctions imposed for his collusive lawsuit against the IRS.

In a letter to counsel today, the appeals court on its own asked for additional briefing from the parties within 14 days on the jurisdictional question. The appeals court appears particularly focused on whether the sanctions order by U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams is final for purposes of appeal since she has not yet determined the amount of of attorney fees to be awarded to amici who challenged the bogus settlement between Trump personally and the Trump administration.

Second-Class Citizenship

The rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has prompted Republican lawmakers across the country and in Congress to push legislation limiting the right of naturalized U.S. citizens to serve in public office, The Atlantic reports.

Quote of the Day

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”—U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco, in ruling that the Trump administration illegally imposed sanctions on AI giant Anthropic as retaliation for publicly criticizing the Pentagon

Course Correction

Big tech companies who contributed lavishly to Trump are bracing for subpoenas from Democrats if the House flips, the WSJ reports.

Sign of the Times

The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation declined to allow the use of an iconic 1981 Mapplethorpe photograph of Roy Cohn on the cover of the upcoming Kai Bird biography of the Joe McCarthy mentee turned Donald Trump mentor because it feared retaliation from Trump, the NYT reports.

Trump Attack on Higher Ed: Loser Edition

Twenty-one Canadian universities announced that they have poached 48 top-flight American academic researchers using funding from a new Canadian government initiative.

Landmark Day for the Word ‘Hydronym’

With President Trump absurdly purporting to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rolls out his rhetorical canon and fires “hydronym” across the border: “We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.”

See Ya Back Here Monday

Check out Morning Memo playlists on Spotify and YouTube.

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The Cold Civil War

The ICE agent indicted for a shooting during Operation Metro Surge has reportedly been released from jail in Texas after Gov. Greg Abbott successfully stonewalled Minnesota’s extradition request.

Christian Castro’s release this morning came the day after a federal judge in Brownsville ruled against Minnesota in its legal bid to force Abbott to extradite the ICE agent accused of shooting an undocumented immigrant through the front door of a home then lying about it.

While accepting that Abbott “has considered this particular extradition request for an atypically long duration,” U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. ruled that he lacked subject matter jurisdiction to intervene because Abbott had not officially rejected it yet and the law provides no explicit deadline for a governor to respond to an extradition request.

Minnesota’s argument effectively asks the Court to impose into the Extradition Clause, the Extradition Act, and the UCEA a deadline for a state governor to sign a rendition warrant or decline to do so. The Court is unaware of any authority supporting the creation of a court-imposed deadline under these circumstances.

Texas law does, however, only allow the state to keep a fugitive in custody for 90 days while extradition is pending. Castro’s 90 days ended today; hence, his release. Judge Rodriguez also rejected Minnesota’s alternate request to keep Castro in jail while the legal fight plays out to prevent him from fleeing across the border to Mexico.

Abbott managed to pull off his successful political gambit of protecting a fugitive ICE agent wanted on criminal charges in a blue state without ever having to deny outright Minnesota’s extradition request. He slow-rolled the request for two months even as he routinely processed other extraditions to Minnesota. Then when the state prosecutor in Minnesota pressed the issue, Abbott at the last minute ordered a Texas investigation into whether Castro was really a fugitive under extradition law.

In a nod to Minnesota’s legal position, Judge Rodriguez used a lengthy footnote to express skepticism about the legal validity of Abbott’s claim that Castro might not really be a fugitive because he didn’t flee Minnesota but was ordered by ICE to return to his home base in Texas. The Trump DOJ had leaped into the case at the last minute to buttress Abbott’s argument, offering proof that Castro had in fact been ordered by ICE to return to Texas.

“The Court has doubts that caselaw supports the construction of ‘fugitive’ that Texas is considering,” Judge Rodriguez opined in a signal of how he might rule if a riper version of the case comes back to him.

In his ruling, Judge Rodriguez allowed for the possibility that a governor could stonewall an extradition request for so long that it effectively became a refusal to extradite, but that the circumstances of this case didn’t amount to that yet. Regardless, Abbott violated no law but considering Minnesota’s request for three months, Rodriguez ruled.

Minnesota is left with the bleak options of appealing to the 5th Circuit, the most MAGA-ified of the federal appeals courts — or of biding its time until Abbott either officially refuses to extradite Castro or, more likely, enough time has passed without Abbott taking any action to argue that he’s constructively refused the extradition request. Rodriguez offered no signals in his ruling on how long would be long enough to be deemed a constructive denial.

By that time, Castro may be ensconced in Mexico, where Minnesota prosecutors say he owns property and has a romantic partner he plans to marry.

Rep. McIver Not Immune in Delaney Hall Case

The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) is not immune from prosecution for the Delaney Hall incident last year even though she was conducting congressional oversight.

“The charged conduct … is unambiguously non-legislative,” the three-judge panel concluded in a 2-1 split decision.

Criminalizing Dissent as Terrorism

The State Department has designated three groups based in Europe as transnational terrorist organizations as part of its effort to breathe life into the myth of far-left political terrorism at home that is tied to an imagined international conspiracy of leftist extremism, the NYT reports:

In a statement, the department said that it would impose sanctions on Palestine Action, which is based in Britain and organizes acts of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies; Masar Badil, another pro-Palestinian group with branches in Western Europe and Canada; and Autistici/Inventati, known as A/I Collective, which is based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world.

Scenes From a Personalist Presidency

The legal fight over adding Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center may be the most direct confrontation over the gaudy trappings of his personalist regime — and it is doing an amazing job of revealing the absurdity of the current moment.

In their latest filing, lawyers from Washington Litigation Group and Democracy Defenders Action who are representing Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center Board, let it rip. Here’s a small sampling:

• “The Department of Justice has offered up a cocktail of fabulous pronouncements and stunning inaccuracies untethered to law or reality.”

• “In their words, astonishingly, if the Court prevents them from returning President Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, they will ‘be required to’ demolish the Center and build ‘a large outdoor amphitheater’ as a ‘replacement.’

• “In plain English, Defendants have not-so-subtly said: ‘What a nice Kennedy Center you have here. What a shame should something happen to it.’ This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop.”

• “Defendants consciously chose to play a dangerous game of chicken with the law. They voted to defy the Court’s decision and restore Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center. They refused to wait for the Court to rule, manufacturing an unnecessary fire drill. And now they have threatened the destruction of the Kennedy Center, a sacred memorial to a fallen President, all in the name of one man’s vanity. Enough is enough. This has to stop.”

You can read the full filing here.

An Ominous Sign

CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, the WSJ reports. Ratcliffe’s warning was particularly focused on potential Russian aggression toward the Baltic states, according to Politico.

A Manmade Disaster Decades in the Making

Some of the stunning videos and eyewitness accounts of the catastrophic flash flood in the Himalayas after a glacier collapsed are almost to much to bear. This particular video manages to capture the breathtaking spectacle without having to confront directly the extensive loss of life:

The energy released from the glacial collapse and debris flow initially registered as an earthquake before the U.S. Geological Survey figured out the likely cause. Subsequent satellite imagery seems to have pinpointed the site of the collapse, though the exact mechanism of the disaster remains unclear pending further analysis.

At the risk of sounding smug or pompously dreary, this is a disaster triggered by a warming world, where glaciers around the globe are in retreat — sometimes in sudden and dramatic convulsions. The upper elevations of the Himalayas have been frozen in place for eons and as they become unfrozen, they’re unleashing not just ice and meltwater but millennia of rockfall and till embedded within the glacial ice plus loose boulders and rock fragments on high slopes and ridges only recently freed from the grip of non-glacial ice.

It’s not just happening in the Himalayas, as the WaPo reports: “In the past five years alone, glacier collapses have buried a Swiss village, killed 11 mountaineers in Italy and triggered floods that destroyed two hydropower plants and swept away at least 200 people in India.”

Five years is a long time for us to compute multiple disasters across Eurasia. It seems like a slow-motion disaster happening just beneath our capacity to clock it. But in geological time, this is an incredibly fast-moving epochal change, the seeds of which were sown by human carbon emissions decades ago. The genie is already out of the bottle.

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It Just Keeps Happening

I’m keenly aware that at a certain point the numerous wrongful deportations by the Trump administration begin to blur together into an indistinguishable mass of human suffering, lawlessness, and indifference.

Unable to chronicle each one, I keep raising the bar for what’s worthy to bring to your attention. Regrettably, the Trump administration keeps finding new and unlawful ways to clear that bar.

A new case that emerged Friday out of Baltimore sets several new standards for egregiousness. It involves a Mexican national illegally in the United States whose testimony for the Justice Department against the drug cartels prompted an immigration judge in 2024 to bar his deportation to Mexico “after finding that he was more likely than not to be tortured by the government or by individuals acting with the acquiescence of the government if he were returned to Mexico.”

The details of the unusual case emerged entirely in an opinion issued by U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Maryland accompanied by an order that the Trump administration try to bring him back. The Trump administration deported him to Mexico any way — multiple times.

Most of the case file remains sealed, so it’s difficult to get full visibility into the case. That’s by Gallagher’s design because of her concerns that the Mexican man’s life is in danger. Gallagher took the rare step of sealing entirely an earlier iteration of the case because “the sensitive and urgent nature of this case requires a higher degree of confidentiality and security than it was originally filed under.” She had the case refiled as a John Doe case with additional protections.

What follows is drawn from Judge Gallagher’s opinion.

Released by ICE in 2024, the man lived in Maryland and complied with ICE requirements until he was re-detained in January during a routine ICE check-in. He was shipped to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, and then without notice he was deported to Guatemala last month.

This is where things go from bad to surreal, even though the man had a pending habeas corpus case in Louisiana.

Guatemala, refusing to take non-Guatemalans, turned him over to the Mexican consulate. After learning about his protections from deportation to Mexico, a Mexican consular official properly declined to accept him and he was returned to the United States the same day.

After bouncing him around various of its facilities, ICE deported him again a few days later, this time directly to Mexico in violation of the immigration judge’s order. To its credit, Mexico for a second time properly refused to take him, and he was returned to the U.S.

Again he was bounced around various ICE facilities before he was allegedly given notice (only in English and he only speaks Spanish) of a highly unusual move that requires intervention at the highest levels of government: The Trump administration had terminated the immigration judge’s order barring his removal to Mexico. More on that in a moment.

On Aug. 1, the Trump administration deported him for a third time — again to Mexico. “He has been in hiding since that date,” Judge Gallagher wrote in her order, “fearing that the cartels that he provided information against will find him and torture or kill him before he can return to the United States.”

This is not Gallagher’s first rodeo. Last year, she oversaw a case where a 20-year-old Venezuelan man referred to in the case filings only as “Cristian” was unlawfully deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison under the Alien Enemies Act in violation of an existing court-approved settlement agreement. For months, the Trump administration stonewalled Gallagher’s order to facilitate the man’s return to the United States, then abruptly repatriated him to Venezuela — the very country from which he was seeking asylum in the United States. At that point, his lawyers lost contact with him.

While Gallagher declined to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court for its conduct, she thrashed it for its role in putting Cristian’s life at risk:

It is possible, at this point, that Cristian has decided to forego a return to the United States and has voluntarily absented himself from contact with his counsel. It is equally possible that Cristian has been the victim of the anticipated violence that caused him to seek asylum in the United States in the first instance.

Gallagher has closely patterned her rulings in wrongful deportation cases on those of her Maryland colleague U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who has overseen the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the poster child of wrongful deportations. In the beginning, Abrego Garcia was perhaps an incidental casualty of the administration’s mass deportation operation but he became a target when he fought back. It’s not clear why this John Doe was targeted, especially given his cooperation in testifying against the Mexican drug cartels.

The answer to why — to the extent it’s ever answerable — seems like it may be found in the decision to terminate the immigration judge’s order barring his removal under the Convention on Torture. When I say that that termination only happens at the highest level of the government, I mean Cabinet level:

“The Notice stated that the Department of State had received diplomatic assurances from the Mexican Government that Doe would not be tortured if returned to Mexico, and that Acting ICE Director David Venturella and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had consulted and determined that these assurances were reliable,” Judge Gallagher wrote.

In an eye-raising footnote in her opinion, Judge Gallagher signaled that she, too, was perplexed by this extraordinary intervention by the secretary of state and the acting ICE director:

It was agreed upon by the parties at a hearing that this form of termination, which requires the participation of a Cabinet member and another high-ranking U.S. government official, is extremely rare. No information was provided to explain why these top-level officials personally involved themselves in this case or why they terminated Doe’s CAT Deferral within a week of his removal to Mexico on July 15 or 16, allegedly in violation of the CAT.

The upshot of all of this for now is that Judge Gallagher issued a temporary restraining order requiring the Trump administration to take “active steps” within 14 days to “facilitate” the John Doe’s return to the United States. She also ordered daily status reports from the administration on the “specific efforts to facilitate” his return. If he returns, it must be within 200 miles of Baltimore, she ordered.

Subsequent status reports filed since her order are under seal, so it’s not clear what the precise state of play in the case is right now. Among the new filings is a sealed motion from the Justice Department asking Judge Gallagher to reconsider her TRO, so it looks the administration is still fighting to deport the man.

As it happens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Mexican Foreign Secretary Roberto Velasco this morning at the State Department:

For Your Radar …

A federal judge in Brownsville said he would rule as soon as today after a hearing yesterday on Minnesota’s lawsuit to compel Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to extradite a fugitive ICE agent to charges related to a shooting during Operation Metro Surge.

Initial reports from the hearing suggest the judge is not inclined to grant Minnesota’s request to keep ICE agent Christian Castro in state custody in Texas, but it’s less clear whether the judge was favorably disposed to the broader extradition argument Minnesota was making:

At an hourlong hearing Tuesday in Brownsville, the judge said he was “not inclined” to order the Cameron County sheriff to continue holding Castro beyond Thursday, adding that a written order could come Wednesday.

The 90-day window that Texas has by law to hold Castro in custody on a nationwide arrest warrants ends this week. The Trump DOJ has sided with Abbott, who is making spurious legal arguments about why he doesn’t have to extradite Castro … at least not yet.

In related news that is rather puzzling, CNN reports that the Trump DOJ is considering bringing federal charges against Castro. DOJ originally charged the two immigrants involved in the incident with Castro, before the case fell apart amidst evidence that Castro and another agent had lied about the shooting.

No decision on charges has been made yet, DOJ told CNN, but officials in the DOJ Civil Rights Division have “held conversations” with federal prosecutors in Minnesota about the case.

A reminder that the Civil Rights Division is led by the boundary-less Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon.

Chicago Police Investigate CBP Shooting

A special unit within the Chicago Police Department is now investigating the shooting of Marimar Martinez by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum during Operation Midway Blitz. Martinez was shot five times in the Oct. 4 incident but survived and recently participate in a mass filing of complaints with police over the conduct of federal agents during the Chicago operation.

The Criminalizing of Protest

Two new pieces from TPM’s Josh Kovensky

• Civil Liberties Groups From Across Political Spectrum Denounce Trump’s NSPM-7

• Undercover DHS Agent Monitored Alex Pretti Memorial, New Docs Suggest

Immigration Officers Focus on Voter Fraud

Hundreds of immigration officers have been diverted from their normal duties to hunt down non-citizens who registered to vote as part of President Trump’s disinformation campaign to denigrate immigrants and delegitimize U.S. elections, the WaPo reports:

Fraud detection officers with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been tasked with screening voter data to look for noncitizens who registered to vote, said the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal security operations. The officers’ work screening immigration applications for false information and possible security threats has effectively ground to a halt, they said.

Elon Musk Off the Hook in Wisconsin

A local prosecutor has declined to bring charges against Elon Musk for his stunt during the state 2025 Supreme Court election of offering two $1 million checks to voters.

Trump DOJ Watch: Nevada Edition

A county Republican chair in Nevada is alleging that he is the victim of vindictive and selective prosecution by Sigal Chattah, the top federal prosecutor in the state and a GOP rival. Leo Blundo, a former county commissioner, also alleges that Chattah involved herself in his case despite an order from Main Justice for her to recuse herself:

Chattah’s role in Blundo’s case leading up to his March indictment for alleged pandemic loan fraud was one of multiple instances in which the first-time prosecutor and staunch Trump ally sought status updates from prosecutors despite warnings that she was disregarding her pledge to be walled off, Bloomberg Law reported earlier.

Bloomberg Law previously reported that Chattah “pushed to launch investigations at the behest of former clients and friends while repeatedly bypassing Justice Department orders recusing her from cases.

Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that Chattah was unlawfully installed as the top prosecutor in Las Vegas in a workaround designed to bypass Senate confirmation and federal judges.

Trump Destroyed USAID and Then …

The fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, which is raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo, threatens to become the worst such outbreak in history, the WaPo reports.

Dolly Parton, 1946-2026

My favorite Dolly Parton story is actually three stories in one that she tells, all involving “I Will Always Love You“: Why she wrote it, why she refused to let Elvis record it, and her first time hearing the Whitney Houston version. It’s a window she offers beyond the vamp and the camp into herself as a songwriter at core with astute business sense. Self-serving? Perhaps. But I want to believe.

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First at TPM …

In important development overnight, the Trump administration is now openly colluding with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to keep an indicted ICE agent from facing justice in Minnesota.

In a new court filing, the Trump DOJ leaped in on Abbott’s side only a few hours after Abbott in his own filing outlined for the first time his legal argument for not yet having complied with Minnesota’s extradition request for ICE agent Christian Castro. Castro, who is jailed in Brownsville, is charged with allegedly shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis through the front door of a home in Minneapolis in January during Operation Metro Surge then lying about it.

While the Constitution, federal law, and legal precedent don’t give a governor discretion to deny a valid extradition request from another state, Abbott claims he is “investigating” whether Castro is truly a fugitive under extradition law. His argument — which legal experts dismiss as insubstantial — is that Castro may not be a fugitive because he didn’t flee Minnesota after the incident but was ordered by ICE to return to his home base in Texas. As a legal matter, that’s irrelevant to the analysis.

“While the Governor has serious doubts that Mr. Castro qualifies as a fugitive, the Governor has not yet received a report from the Secretary and so has not made a decision concerning Minnesota’s request,” Abbott’s filing said.

Last night, the Trump DOJ jumped into the case to which it is not a party. It filed a statement of interest that attempts to buttress Abbott’s legal position by supplying a declaration from an ICE official that Castro was indeed directed to return home to Texas after the incident, which the official says was common practice after such incidents for public safety or the safety of federal agents. “Castro had no discretion in the matter,” according to Patrick Divver, an ICE official above Castro in the chain of command during Operation Metro Surge.

In his declaration, Divver describes getting Castro and his partner — a witness to the shooting — out of Minnesota two days after the shooting. He claims it was to protect them from protesters “using aggressive and sometimes violent tactics, including doxxing” against federal agents. Immediately removing them from Minnesota also had the effect of putting the agent involved in the shooting and an agent who witnessed the shooting out of reach of Minnesota law enforcement.

While the DOJ filing doesn’t explicitly take Abbott’s side, it provides the factual underpinning for Abbott’s legal argument. The dove-tailed filings by Abbott and the Trump DOJ on the same day are just the latest effort by the Trump administration to foil Minnesota’s effort to criminally charge federal agents for abuses during Operation Metro Surge:

• The Trump DOJ blocked Minnesota from participating in the ultimately aborted federal investigations into the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and for months withheld from state investigators and prosecutors the evidence it had initially collected after those shootings.

• More recently, the Trump DOJ has threatened criminal prosecution of the victims of a road-rage-style incident in which ICE agent Gregory Morgan, Jr. allegedly brandished his service weapon at a random driver while passing him on the right shoulder. As a result, the victims have taken the Fifth rather that testify, forcing Minnesota prosecutors to seek immunity for their testimony — immunity that the Trump DOJ has refused to give.

Notably, even as Abbott has stonewalled for months Minnesota’s extradition request for Castro, he has routinely processed other extradition requests from Minnesota.

After the new filings, Minnesota late yesterday asked the court to allow it to file a reply to Abbott’s new arguments, which it says he had not previously raised during the month’s long stonewalling of its request.

It also sought to supplement the record with declarations from Minnesota investigators to reinforce its argument that Castro is a flight risk because he is in a “close, personal relationship” with a woman in Mexico. A state investigator reviewed 16 of the 394 jailhouse phone calls between Castro and the woman in which he expressed his intention to marry her after his release and “buy a big house in Mexico so he can retire there.” Another investigator talked to Castro’s wife, who said he had left their home and marriage in November to pursue the relationship with the Mexican woman and claimed he bought the property in Mexico where the woman lives, along with a Jeep for her use.

The tone of Abbott’s filing is telling. If he loses the extradition fight, he can blame the courts for making him do it. If he wins, it’s icing. In the meantime, he can use it as a performative tip of the hat to President Trump and to make political hay, like this gratuitous swipe at Minnesota Gov. Tom Walz (D) in his latest filing: “Given this odd rush to judgment, it is difficult to ignore the possibility that Governor Tim Walz is content to look the other way when the context is sexual violence against children by illegal aliens, but not when the context is immigration enforcement by federal officers.”

It’s all of a piece with the larger Cold Civil War that Trump is fighting by sending armed federal agents into blue states, targeting elected Democrats with spurious accusations of fraud and pursuing them with a new DOJ fraud section run out of the White House, refusing to provide blue states with disaster funds, and targeting specific states like Colorado for retribution for alleged misdeeds like prosecuting a Trump ally and having mail-in voting.

Aiding and abetting a red state in refusing to abide by the Constitution and honor a blue state’s extradition request is in the same bucket of sledge-hammering the federal system as deploying red state national guards to blue states over the objections of their governors.

While accountability for the abuses of federal agents in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge is a historically important endeavor in preserving the rule of law, the larger issue is the assault on the federal structure by, of all things, a president absurdly butt-hurt by the fact that not every state voted for him.

Unpacking What SCOTUS Just Did

Over the dissents of the three liberal justices, the Roberts Court lifted an injunction on a Trump executive order to create citizenship lists and gives the Postal Service control over who receives a mail-in ballot — although, importantly, another injunction blocking the same executive order remains in place:

• Chris Geidner: What Monday’s Supreme Court election order ruling is and is not

• Rick Hasen: KBJ Warns of “Kafkaesque Nightmare” After Pro-Trump Supreme Court Ruling on Mail Voting. We’ll Know Soon Enough.

• Steve Vladeck: Making Sense of the Mail-in Ballots Ruling

• TPM’s Kate Riga: Trump Gets Significant Early Win in Mail-In Ballot Case from Supreme Court

Trump Can’t Say He Wasn’t Warned

The WSJ reports on a February meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office :

Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard outlined assessments from America’s intelligence apparatus. According to people familiar with the meeting, she told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons. Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market. And it would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, prompting questions about American resolve and reliability with allies.

Today’s Absurdity: 🙃🙃🙃

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What Your Friends Say About You

Saturday’s extraordinary speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was ostensibly about the collapse of U.S. trade talks, but it was really about the collapse of the United States as a beacon of economic freedom, a worthy partner, a trusted ally, and a reliable neighbor.

As you would expect, the speech was written for a domestic political audience, with laundry lists of things already done and still to be done to protect Canada from the sudden emergence of an erratic aggressor on its southern border. But sprinkled among the reassurances to Canadians were blistering indictments of the United States under President Trump as a untrustworthy, deceitful, and calculating former (and hopefully future) friend.

This speech was more direct and explicit than Carney’s January address in Davos that received so much attention. “You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” Carney said after pulling Canadian negotiators from the trade talks late Friday.

I grew up in Cajun south Louisiana, so I was particularly struck by Carney’s account of the Trump administration’s attack on Canadian cultural policies that protect French language and culture, via the NYT:

On Saturday, he said that American negotiators “asked too much and offered too little.” Among other things, Mr. Carney said that American negotiators pushed to roll back Canada’s efforts to promote Canadian and French language content in online streaming services, subsidies for industries like publishing and film production and even mandatory labeling in French, an official language in Canada, as well as English on packaging.

“We were close to reaching a comprehensive agreement with the U.S., but they made changes, including threats on French language and culture and Canadian culture that would never be acceptable for that reason,” Mr. Carney said in French. “That marked the end of that stage of negotiations.”

When Carney talks about U.S. threats to Canadian sovereignty, as he did Saturday, he doesn’t seem to be referring as much to Trump’s preposterous chest-thumping about making Canada the 51st state — though that looms heavily over U.S.-Canada relations — but rather to a steady stream of demands and expected concessions that chip away at Canadian autonomy in ways that would over time subordinate it to the United States. But it’s all of the same piece: a relentless Trump administration effort to demean, denigrate, and demote Canada to American sidekick status.

Lawless Boat Strike Campaign Resumes

After a two-month pause, the Trump administration’s lawless campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats resumed Sunday with a strike in the eastern Pacific that killed two people.

Sayanora, Ed!

Ed Martin — who variously served as acting D.C. U.S. attorney, U.S. pardon attorney, special attorney, and head of the Weaponization Working Group — is leaving the Justice Department “to go outside to fight Legal Battles for the upcoming Midterm Election, and the Presidential Election of 2028,” President Trump said.

Trump US Attorney Scheme Blocked Again

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Friday that John A. Sarcone III was unlawfully appointed as acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York.

The 2-1 decision aligned with a key decision earlier in the week by the 9th Circuit that a vacant U.S. attorney position can only be filed by a first assistant U.S. attorney who was already in place at the time of the vacancy. In a workaround designed to bypass Senate confirmation, Sarcone was installed as first assistant attorney after the vacancy created when federal judges declined to extend his term as acting U.S. attorney.

Trump’s interpretation “would turn the FVRA’s common-sense framework on its head,” the 2nd Circuit ruled. “Under that reading, the President could install virtually anyone as the acting officer simply by naming that person First Assistant, regardless of whether they possessed any of the qualifications Congress required for the Executive to depart from the default.”

The Corruption: Live Nation Edition

Many DOJ officials regard President Trump’s direct and personal political interference in the Live Nation antitrust case “extreme” even for him, the WSJ reports. The settlement in March while the trial was underway came after Live Nation hired new lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell, the NYC firm that represents Trump personally.

Roberts Allows Ballroom Project For Now

Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary administrative stay of lower court orders that would have halted construction of Trump’s White House ballroom on Saturday. Instead, construction will continue for now as the Supreme Court considers how to proceed on Trump’s emergency appeal.

In related news: The White House already has a nuclear-proof facility buried deep underground that was completed in secret during the Obama presidency which undercuts Trump’s claims in his ballroom lawsuit, the Washington Post reports.

The Purges: Stars and Stripes

The publisher of Stars and Stripes (who had already announced his retirement), along with the military newspaper’s editor in chief and a reporter, were all fired by Pentagon, which has tried to assert control over the venerable publication that has long had editorial independence.

Trump Threatens to Sue Think Tank

President Trump is absurdly threatening the Center for American Progress with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit unless it retracts a report it published last month titled: “The Trump Administration’s $1.7 Billion National Guard Deployments Fail To Reduce Urban Crime.” CAP called the threatened lawsuit “baseless” and “a transparent attempt to silence us.”

Completely Normal

TPM’s Hunter Walker: Colorado GOP Gov Nominee Claims to Have Battled ‘Demons’ With ‘Reptilian’ Eyes

History Repeats Itself With a Vengeance

With Alternative for Germany poised to become next month the first far-right party to come to power in a German state since World War II, it has been targeting the Bauhaus in strikingly similar ways to the Nazis nearly 100 years ago, the WSJ reports.

Quote of the Day

“Whether and how things intensify, or whether it turns out like in 1932, no one knows.”—Barbara Steiner, the Austrian-born director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

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No One Is Safe

One of the most pernicious effects of corrupting federal law enforcement is that it undermines public confidence — as it should — in everything the Justice Department does.

You can’t have a Justice Department or FBI doing corrupt work with one hand and normal aboveboard work with the other and expect anyone — from citizens to lawyers to judges — to decipher which is which in any given case.

At it’s core, that is what losing the “presumption of regularity” is all about. It casts doubt on everything.

For defenders of the old DOJ, reformers, watchdogs, and journalists, one of the pitfalls of the descent into endemic DOJ corruption is that they themselves take on the onus of figuring which cases are legit and which aren’t. It’s an impossible task. Given the limited access and visibility that outsiders have into federal cases — criminal and civil — there’s no real way to assess on a case-by-case basis where impure motives, retribution, and bad acts are involved.

It’s only because Trump is such a uncontained raving moron that many of the early vindictive prosecutions are so obviously driven by his desire for retribution. He could have picked less sympathetic characters, people who had less obvious reasons for being in his crosshairs than Letitia James or James Comey.

Even then, if I had a penny for every time I’ve been told that Comey deserves what he’s getting because of his heavy-handed role in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, I’d have retired by now. The notion that Comey had it coming so totally misses the heart of the matter that I’ve given up trying to correct people on this point.

If Trump were less impulsive and more calculating, he would have begun by targeting unpopular, unsavory, dubious characters where the corruption could be more easily camouflaged.

The news yesterday that former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) is now under federal criminal investigation related to the sexual misconduct allegations against him is case in point. We could fall into the trap of trying to figure out whether this is a legit prosecution given Swalwell’s contemptible conduct. We could try to parse which parts of the investigation are legit and which aren’t. But it’s a crazy-making undertaking. You can’t possibly separate out Trump’s repeated threats against Swalwell and the prior investigation of him and Trump’s eagerness to target political foes like Swalwell from the possibility that there’s a valid legal and factual predicate to justify the feds looking into him.

The onus must remain firmly on the Trump DOJ to be aboveboard at all times, and the presumption that it is corruptly proceeding should remain firmly against it as long as it has a corrupt leadership. I don’t mean Bondi or Blanche or Patel or whoever else becomes titular head of federal law enforcement. I mean Trump.

While Morning Memo is mostly focused on the politically oriented vindictive prosecutions, there’s a vast range of other DOJ cases, investigations, and regulatory actions that have come under suspicion for obvious reasons. These are far-flung examples because the problem itself is so all-encompassing:

• Corporate fraudsters are being let off the hook right and left. Who gets let off and who doesn’t prompts endless but justified speculation about what it takes to receive such dispensation.

• In one particularly concerning case, a career federal prosecutor in Miami fired for years-old anti-Trump blog posts he wrote before joining the department has sued the Trump DOJ, claiming that he was terminated immediately before he was scheduled to try a major fraud case — and not-so-subtly suggesting that the only way MAGA influencer Natalie Winters could have been tipped off to the old blog posts was by “one of the parties,” the implication being that it was all a bid to delay the upcoming fraud trial. Defense counsel have “vigorously denied” having anything to do with unearthing the fired prosecutor’s writings.

• Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s brother Joshua’s fire-sale purchase (along with Bob Iger) of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers while the previous owner Mark Walter is fighting off a federal investigation has prompted insidious but understandable speculation that law enforcement scrutiny was a tool to force the sale.

The suspicion, rumor, and conjecture — some of it more grounded in fact, some of it less so — arising from the Trump DOJ’s now-presumed corruption is in the darkest sense the fruit of that corruption. It’s everyone getting the message that the Trump DOJ is open for business. The perverse pressures that puts on honest lawyers inside DOJ and outside lawyers who have cases against the department is enormous and irreconcilable.

The threat of a corrupt federal law enforcement apparatus run amok in America is a threat to everyone. No one is spared the risk, even if not everyone is eventually targeted. The arbitrary and capricious nature of corrupt justice creates an oppressive atmosphere of fear, doubt, and suspicion. It erodes civic life. It incentivizes people to stay in the good graces of the regime. It encourages ambitious scoundrels in and out of government to use the corrupt system to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of their foes, whether in politics, business, or their personal lives.

What Will California Do About Tina Peters?

California’s two Democratic senators have written to the state’s top election official expressing “grave concerns” about the prospect of convicted election denier Tina Peters being hired as an election administrator in Shasta County.

Oops …

The DHS recent claim that massive numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote in Nevada has already collapsed under the weight of its own bogosity.

Important Read

TPM’s Josh Kovensky contextualizes some of the latest filings by the defendants in the “Minneapolis 15” case:

• HSI’s expansion of the use of certified undercover (CUC) operations from infiltrating drug cartels and international money launderers to targeting domestic protesters;

• the tantalizing reference to “Op Keyhole,” which suggests the (unconfirmed) existence of a DHS operation targeting domestic protesters;

• how this all may fit together with the Trump DOJ’s Joint Task Force Vanguard, which seeks to treat anti-Trump protests as domestic terrorism; and

• a related legal fight over whether HSI’s bumbling undercover surveillance of protesters in Minnesota violated a court-ordered injunction against immigration enforcement in churches.

Midterms Watch

The Cook Political Report has moved the Senate races in Texas and Iowa in Democrats’ favor, from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up.”

See Ya Monday

Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong Again

Today we begin with a particularly striking example of the bleak inanity of executive branch immigration courts under President Trump, first flagged by Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The especially disturbing episode was revealed in an order yesterday by U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell of Ft. Myers, Florida, who granted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus by a Colombian national whose case was repeatedly botched by an immigration judge.

I’m not sure botched is strong enough.

The Kafkaesque tale, as recounted in Judge Polster Chappell’s order, began April 9, when Jorge Eliecer Madera Reyes was arrested by Orlando police for … opening a beer inside a convenience store … in violation of a local ordinance. His arrest brought Madera Reyes to the attention of ICE, which detained him on April 11.

Madera Reyes, who had no prior criminal history, has been in the United States since 2019, when he overstayed his visa. Since then, as Judge Polster Chappell describes it: “He has not departed the country since his 2019 arrival, and he has applied for asylum, obtained work authorization and steady employment, filed income tax returns, and developed family and community ties.”

Those are relevant facts which will be important in a moment.

When Madera Reyes sought to be released from ICE custody on bond, Immigration Judge Stuart Siegel denied his request in a flawed May 19 order that wildly misstated the facts that the denial was based on:

“There is no dispute that each of the three stated reasons for denying bond are factually incorrect,” Judge Polster Chappell wrote in her order. As we already know, Madera Reyes is not a recent arrival, he applied for asylum, and he hasn’t left the United States since he arrived. The immigration judge got each of those facts wrong.

Three strikes and you’re out. But it gets worse.

When Madera Reyes appealed, the immigration judge rejected it and “reiterated the incorrect factual basis for denying bond,” Judge Polster Chappell wrote.

Madera Reyes later managed to establish that the DHS allegations against him were incorrect, and DHS amended its charges against him. At that point, Madera Reyes renewed his request for release on bond.

No matter. The immigration judge denied bond for Madera Reyes on July 16 “without conducting a hearing and based on the same mistaken understanding of the facts,” Judge Polster Chappell wrote.

Finding that Madera Reyes had made a prima facie case that his Fifth Amendment rights had been violated, Judge Polster Chappell ordered him released within 24 hours.

Clock Is Ticking on ICE Agent Extradition

I planned to follow up on yesterday’s Morning Memo with an item on the urgency of Minnesota’s lawsuit against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to force the extradition of ICE agent Christian Castro to face criminal charges for the January shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis — but Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck has an excellent rundown this morning on why the clock is ticking:

[T]he statute that authorizes holding a fugitive for the asylum state governor’s benefit also sets a [90-day] deadline for the asylum state governor to act. But the deadline carries no consequence for the governor who blows it. The only consequence falls on the demanding state, which loses its defendant. Thus, delay isn’t a litigation risk for Governor Abbott. Delay is the remedy he almost certainly is seeking.

The 90-day deadline in Castro’s case appears to be next week. Hence Minnesota’s urgency in not just getting a court order requiring Abbott to act, but in seeking a separate order preventing the sheriff in Texas’ southernmost county who arrested Castro from releasing him.

As Vladeck notes: “Minnesota’s entirely plausible concern appears to be that release from a border town like Brownsville would allow Castro to slip into Mexico—at which point no interstate rendition warrant, however belatedly signed, would be worth much of anything.”

I just wanted to fill out that picture a little bit more because in its filing Minnesota presented somewhat more than a hypothetical fear that Castro would flee to Mexico. Jailhouse calls reveal that Spanish-fluent Castro has been “in frequent communication” with a woman in Mexico talking about marrying her and buying a house there after he’s released, Minnesota alleged:

On information and belief, law enforcement’s initial review of Castro’s Cameron County jail calls reflects that Castro has substantial ties to Mexico and there is a real risk that he may flee and avoid prosecution if he is released from custody. Castro would be released close to the Mexican border. Castro is fluent in Spanish and has been in frequent communication with a woman in Mexico, including about marrying her and buying a house in Mexico when he is released.

Gotta hand it to the writers’ room that they came up with a plot device where an ICE agent might flee across the border to Mexico to escape the U.S. criminal justice system.

After the Purge: The Sycophants

After firing inspectors general en masse, President Trump has installed sycophants as replacements and redirected their focus from the departments that they’re supposed to investigate to politicized allegations of fraud in blue states, the New York Times reports.

The Corruption: Census Bureau Edition

It’s hard to overstate how much this bogus new report that claims Trump really won the 2020 election is a corruption of the Census Bureau, it’s stellar reputation for methodological rigor, and its nonpartisan neutrality.

A Man-Child President’s Wounded Ego

The Trump-controlled Kennedy Center told a federal judge Wednesday that a tarp covering up the space where President Trump’s name was illegally bolted to the marble facade must remain indefinitely because of … reasons — including assessing damage to the stonework.

It’s not clear what “damage” it’s referring to, but Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio board member who successfully sued to have Trump’s name removed, told the judge she suspects it’s from adding the president’s name in the first place: “The current statement also refers to vague ‘reported panel damage’—which apparently means damaged caused by the installation or removal of President Trump’s name the first time around.”

Beatty’s position remains that the tarp is Trump’s way of defying the court’s order to take his name down by complying with the literal removal but not making publicly visible on the performing arts venue it’s official name honoring President John F. Kennedy: “His name should once again be visible on the façade and Defendants’ childish refusal to accept this Court’s ruling to that effect should end now.”

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The Long Tail of Operation Metro Surge

The mostly below-the-radar effort to block Minnesota’s effort to prosecute federal agents for alleged crimes committed during Operation Metro Surge finally burst into public view yesterday.

On behalf of Minnesota, state Attorney General Keith Ellison sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who has refused to extradite ICE agent Christian Castro to face states charges arising from his pursuit of an undocumented immigrant that ended with him allegedly shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis through the front door of a home in Minneapolis. Castro allegedly lied about the incident, claiming Sosa-Celis and another man attacked an ICE agent with a snow shovel and broom. Surveillance video later undermined that account, and the ICE agents involved have been under internal investigation by DHS.

The Jan. 14 non-fatal shooting of Sosa-Celis was sandwiched between the fatal ICE shootings that month of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. No one has been charged yet in those killings, but Minnesota continues to investigate and has succeeded in breaking through the Trump administration’s long-standing refusal to turn over evidence it gathered in those two shootings.

Castro was arrested in May in Texas on a nationwide warrant for the Minnesota charges. The new three-count lawsuit (which names as a co-defendant the sheriff of Cameron County, Texas, who has Castro in custody) filed in federal court in Brownsville seeks Castro’s extradition under the Constitution’s Extradition Clause, the federal Extradition Act, and the Texas Uniform Criminal Extradition Act.

Minnesota has been working since early June to secure Abbott’s sign-off on Castro’s extradition, according to the lawsuit. Repeated efforts to move the extradition paperwork off the governor’s desk have been slow rolled for more than two months now, Minnesota alleges. Meanwhile, extraditions of other defendants from Texas to Minnesota have proceeded as normal while the Castro extradition has languished.

But there’s more …

Trump DOJ Jumps In …

Meanwhile, in a separate case in which Minnesota is attempting to prosecute a federal agent for alleged misconduct, the Trump DOJ has leaped in to muddy the waters on behalf of ICE agent Gregory Morgan, Jr. of Maryland.

Morgan, who was charged in April with brandishing his service weapon in a road-rage-style incident, has sought to move the case against him from Minnesota state court to federal court. Under certain circumstances, federal law entitles federal officers to have their state criminal cases heard in federal court, though state prosecutors would still handle the case and it would be tried under Minnesota law.

The removal fight in the Morgan case has been bubbling for several weeks. There is a hot dispute between Morgan and Minnesota prosecutors over whether he is entitled to removal to federal court, mostly centered on whether Morgan was acting under color of his office at the time of the Feb. 5 incident in which he was driving in an unmarked rental vehicle back to the Whipple Federal Building with his partner at the end of their shift.

Into the middle of this dispute jumped the Trump DOJ last month, filing a Statement of Interest of the United States that weighed in on Morgan’s side to urge the removal of his case to federal court. But what really set things on a different course was that in its filing, the Trump DOJ alleged that the driver at whom Morgan brandished his weapon may have been guilty of criminal conduct for allegedly swerving to prevent Morgan from passing him illegally on the right shoulder of the roadway:

Given the probable cause to believe the driver committed a federal crime and may well have intended to do so again, Officer Morgan was justified in making a show of force.

The prospect of federal criminal prosecution of the driver prompted him and his passenger to assert their Fifth Amendment rights not to testify at the removal hearing without a grant of immunity. That has raised the prospect that the two victims won’t testify at trial either, which would undermine Minnesota’s ability to make its case.

Minnesota sought immunity for the victims to overcome their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves, but the Trump DOJ declined to provide them with immunity. Minnesota is now asking the federal court to grant use immunity. It’s a complicated legal dispute over whose immunity it is to give: Minnesota’s or the federal government’s. The underlying removal question is arguable, too. The removal hearing has been cancelled twice. It has not yet been rescheduled.

The complexity of the legal questions and the slow pace of the proceedings makes this hard to capture with banner headlines and 24/7 coverage. But if you’re looking for accountability for the worst abuses during Operation Metro Surge, this below-the-radar fight to prevent it is where to focus.

The Deportation-Surveillance Complex

Greg Sargent:

It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive, covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict.

Midterms Watch

Florida-Senate: A stunning win in the Democratic primary by longshot state Rep. Angie Nixon, a newly converted Democratic Socialist who was outspent 16-1 by Alex Vindman and did not run a single TV ad in the state, but still prevailed 56%-44%. Nixon will seek to unseat appointed Sen. Ashley Moody (R) in the special general election to finish Marco Rubio’s term.

Florida-07: Rep. Cory Mills was too sleazy even for Republicans, losing 47%-34% to former local TV news anchor Ryan Elijah in the GOP primary.

Alaska-Senate: In the unusual top-four-advance primary, former Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK) outdrew incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) 48%-43% in a preview of the general election. The other Dan Sullivan drew 2%.

2 Dan Sullivans Prompts Criminal Probe?

With the news that federal grand jury subpoenas have been issued over the campaign of the other Dan Sullivan to unseat incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) in the Alaska Senate race, election law expert Rick Hasen cautions about the First Amendment implications of criminalizing this kind of election finagling which, as he notes, happens all the time:

I don’t see how the government could criminalize his running for office for having impure motives. And if it could do so, then it could be a crime every time that the Republican Party backs a Green Party candidate, or Democrats support a MAGA candidate in a primary in the hopes that the candidate would be weaker against a Democrat in the general election. This stuff happens all the time.

To put a blunter point on all of this: The Alaska Senate seat is key to Democrats’ difficult quest to win the Senate. Sen. Sullivan losing votes to the other Sullivan imperils that seat and puts President Trump at greater risk of facing a Democratic-controlled Congress for the rest of his term. Trump controls the DOJ with an iron fist. The DOJ is now investigating the matter.

Ipso Facto Collusion

Elaborating on many of themes from last Thursday’s Morning Memo, Harry Litman explains the inanity of the Trump DOJ suddenly parachuting into the anti-weaponization slush fund/IRS immunity case:

The best way for the Department to support Trump while being nominally opposed was to stay out of the fray. It worked for a time, until its very absence became a factor in the determination that the case was a collusive fraud on the court. Now it has to execute an impossible two-step: supporting Trump in every particular while feigning opposition to him.

DOJ Whistleblower Calls Out Ivy League Attack

Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, is blowing the whistle on what everyone already knew: The Trump administration’s Title VI investigation into alleged antisemitism on Ivy League campuses was pretextual.

Van Erem’s allegations are detailed in a letter that her attorneys sent to Congress while seeking whistleblower protection.

As the WaPo notes:

Her disclosures Tuesday could bolster concerns raised by critics that the administration’s self-proclaimed push to combat antisemitism on campus was in fact an effort to punish schools it deemed ideologically opposed to its agenda. Van Erem’s account raised questions about past settlements the administration has struck with universities under investigation as well as pending probes that have yet to be resolved.

Van Erem says she resigned from the Justice Department in May 2025 rather than participate in politically motivated investigations.

Face Palm of the Day

The head of the once-famed DOJ Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, is openly galavanting in DC with Tina Peters, the convicted election denier from Colorado:

Quote of the Day

“I’m just going to be honest here. I’m not that informed on national security.”—Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC), during a TV debate ahead of next week’s runoff in the GOP primary to fill her late brother’s seat

The video:

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It’s All Part of Retribution on Blue States

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that disqualified Sigal Chattah as the purported top prosecutor in the Nevada United States Attorney’s Office.

The ruling deals a blow to the Trump scheme of bypassing Senate confirmation to install poorly qualified loyalists as top federal prosecutors in blue states — a key element of Trump’s campaign of retribution.

The particular element of the broader scheme at issue here was whether the attorney general can dole out the “first assistant U.S. attorney” designation to just anyone and install acting U.S. attorneys of its choosing in already-vacant positions.

Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the first assistant U.S. attorney automatically assumes the role of acting U.S. attorney when that post becomes vacant. The Trump DOJ took that provision and ran with it, using the first assistant designation on people like Chattah to circumvent both Senate confirmation and the law allowing federal judges to name interim U.S. attorneys.

What the the three-judge 9th Circuit panel (two Trump appointees and a Clinton appointee) unanimously decided is that the first assistant must have been serving in that role at the time of the vacancy in the U.S. attorney position in order to automatically ascend. Someone like Chattah, who was designated first assistant after the fact of the vacancy, is not eligible to serve as acting U.S. attorney on the basis of that designation.

The “rule of automatic succession applies only to a first assistant who held that position at the time the vacancy arose; it does not apply to a first assistant who never served under a validly appointed official,” the appeal court decided.

The appeals court also rejected the attempts by Trump attorneys general to “create a de facto Acting U.S. Attorney by delegating all of the functions and duties of the U.S. Attorney to someone else.”

Chattah’s case is instructive because of how many elements of manipulation and scheming are involved. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi properly named Chattah to the statutorily mandated 120-day term as acting U.S. attorney on April 1, 2025. Then things got weird.

Chattah is a Trump loyalist with no prior prosecutorial experience who has reportedly abused the office for personal and political gain. The federal judges in Nevada did not move to retain her in the role, which they have the power to do under statute.

Just before Chattah’s 120-day term ended, she resigned and Bond designated her as first assistant U.S. attorney. Bondi’s order declared that by law Chattah automatically ascended back into the acting role she had just resigned. In a belt-and-suspenders move, Bondi also made Chattah a special U.S. attorney and purported to delegate all the powers of the Nevada U.S. attorney to her.

The appeals court rejected both moves as unlawful.

It’s important to note that these challenges to the unlawful appointments of U.S. attorneys — like the similarly successful challenges of Alina Habba’s appointment in New Jersey — are coming from criminal defendants seeking to have their indictments thrown out. (The lower court in the consolidated cases brought by multiple criminal defendants had declined to dismiss the indictments, and the appeals court yesterday said it lacked jurisdiction at this stage to consider whether dismissal of the indictments was an appropriate remedy).

So not only is the Trump DOJ engaged in squirrelly workarounds to install loyalists in blue states and bypass the Senate, but it’s risking having legitimate criminal prosecutions thrown out in order to do so.

Keep an Eye on This

I know this seems even more in the weeds, but the precise mechanism has been finalized for running one portion of the Justice Department directly out of the White House to target what it euphemistically calls “fraud” but really means elected Democrats in blue states.

The move — reported by Bloomberg’s Ben Penn — shifts bureaucratic power from Main Justice’s Criminal Division to the new National Fraud Enforcement Division, which is being closely overseen at the White House by Vice President JD Vance and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

“The regulation also creates leeway for the new operation to take on a vast array of unspecified other cases,” Penn notes.

All indications are that this will be a new tool of retribution even more directly wielded by the White House than Attorney General Todd Blanche is. Also, as I mentioned yesterday, these White House-driven investigations don’t have to yield prosecutions in order to be beneficial to Trump and damaging to his targets. Wide-ranging subpoenas on spurious claims of fraud gives the White House access to documents, communications, personal information, and other potentially useful fodder to use against Democrats and other Trump foes.

A Match Made in MAGA Heaven?

Shasta County, California — which has been a hotbed (or petri dish, as we once called it) of Big Lie boosterism — may be hiring Tina Peters, the convicted former Colorado county elections official newly freed from prison, to help run its elections.

Clint Curtis, the outgoing Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, said in an interview with a conservative radio host that he’s bringing Peters on next month as the new assistant registrar of voters. “She has experience,” he said. “And she’s able to take the rocks and arrows.”

Some words of caution about the absurdity of all this, from the New York Times:

It was unclear how real Mr. Curtis’s job offer actually was or whether Ms. Peters would accept it. Ms. Peters’s prison sentence was commuted, but the terms of her parole limit her ability to leave Colorado. And Mr. Curtis will only be in office until January, after losing the June election to a former elections official whom he had fired.

So to summarize, Curtis was just voted out of office and he’s now claiming that for his last hurrah he will bring in Peters to help him run the midterms, but she might violate her parole by going to California. Got it.

The 9th Circuit Giveth and Taketh

In a 2-1 opinion, a 9th Circuit panel last week upheld one of the controversial administrative subpoenas targeting providers of transgender care and seeking invasive patient information, Chris Geidner reports in Law Dork. The majority consisted of a Bush II and Trump appointee; a Clinton appointee dissented.

Quote of the Day: Doth Protest Too Loudly

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”—the Trump White House, in a post on X, attacking CNN reporter Kristen Holmes for asking the president an anodyne question about Natalie Harp

E. Jean Carroll Gets to Keep Trump’s $5M

The Supreme Court rejected for the second time President Trump’s bid to challenge E. Jean Carroll’s $5 million judgment against him for defamation and sexual abuse.

Construction Work Halted in Big Bend

Amid rising opposition, including from Republican elected officials in Texas, the head of Customs and Border Protection announced Monday a pause in the controversial construction underway in Big Bend National Park to deter illegal immigration.

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