ICE’s Round-the-Clock Digital Dragnet

About a month ago, it emerged from upstate New York that the Department of Homeland Security was targeting online critics of ICE by trying to force them to sign a heretofore unheard of “Warning Notice” admitting that their criticisms were unlawful.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that those cases are just the tip of the iceberg of a larger DHS surveillance program targeting social media users nationwide. As with the previously reported cases, the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility is taking the lead — a dramatic departure from its previous role as internal affairs bureau investigating wrongdoing by ICE agents.

DHS has used, with varying degrees of success, administrative subpoenas and grand jury subpoenas to unmask social media posters, according to the new report.

There are, of course, some actually concerning threats online — and some subsequent convictions — but the scope of DHS surveillance program seems to go well beyond true threats. The WSJ attempts to put some numbers to it (emphases added):

• “To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE ‘may’ be a crime.”

• “The notice for OPR’s new threat initiative calls for the monitoring of nearly 20 social sites, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and the use of public documents such as DMV records and police reports to identify and map key relationships of users who have been flagged as a ‘threat originator.’”

• “OPR has investigated at least 131 incidents of doxxing and threats towards agency personnel between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a court declaration …”

• “DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted ‘content critical of federal actions.’ … Reddit determined that these users were engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment and objected to each, the person said, and DHS eventually withdrew the requests.”

• “The Wall Street Journal identified 10 people—nine Americans and one Canadian—who pushed back against DHS’s attempts to unmask them through the two types of subpoenas. Of those, judges have upheld four grand jury subpoenas. No charges have yet been filed in these cases. The agency abandoned three cases, while three more are pending.”

Funding is another tell.

A WSJ analysis found that ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants surged by 57% year over year to $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in office.

Lawyers told the newspaper that the spike in subpoenas for information on online critics began to spike in September, which coincided with when a new $8 million contract took effect between OPR and a software development firm called Amivero, which subcontracted the work to the global consulting firm Guidehouse.

Both of the previously reported upstate New York cases are apparently products of OPR’s new surveillance program. As Morning Memo noted last month, one of the targets in those two cases, David Streever, filed a lawsuit in D.C. with help from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression alleging that ICE’s OPR violated his First Amendment rights when it went to his home in June and then tracked him down while he was traveling to issue him a “Warning Notice” for a non-threatening but critical email opposing Operation Metro Surge that he sent to then-acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons.

Streever refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Ohio: With their Temporary Protected Status withdrawn, Haitians immigrants are being outfitted with ankle monitors by DHS, the WaPo reports.

• New York: U.S. District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino of Albany struck down the state’s law banning federal officers from wearing masks as a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

• D.C.: Democratic officials from 24 states and D.C. sued to block DHS from viewing personal details about millions of people receiving anti-poverty aid, Politico reports.

Senate Judiciary to Vote on Blanche

After a few days of delay, Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general looks likely to make it through the Senate Judiciary Committee today, which will stand for all time as a ratification by Senate Republicans of President Trump’s evisceration of the Justice Department and of Blanche’s lawless award of IRS immunity to Trump personally.

One more footnote on the IRS immunity, via the NYT: While the retroactive immunity is limited to the parties to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — himself, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization — the lawsuit defines the Trump Organization as the Trump Organization, LLC, and 418 other entities that are not specifically identified. Let that sink in.

More Reflecting Pool Cases Dropped

D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose job is in jeopardy for dismissing the highest profile of the bogus Reflecting Pool “vandalism” cases, has also moved to dismiss three other similar cases related to the peeling liner from what she now admits was a “hasty and botched” renovation job.

MAGA’s Crony Capitalism Comes With A Socialist Twist

The Trump administration has now taken ownership stakes in at least 30 corporations, according to the libertarian CATO Institute, which is closely tracking the new practice:

What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration, while a Republican-controlled Congress is not just letting it happen but may even enshrine the practice in statute.

Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.

As CATO notes, the Biden administration awarded funds to private companies under the same CHIPS and Science Act provisions that the Trump administration is using but without taking equity interests in the companies.

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Ethereal Phenomenon

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Wet Noodle Award: Cornyn and Tillis

Trump is Lucy. GOP senators are the football. D.C. political reporters are Charlie Brown.

For a decade now, the illusion that Republican senators in whole or in part would rise up against the outrages of the Trump presidencies has animated political reporting even as the Senate GOP conference has chronically failed to rise to the occasion.

The farcical effort required to sustain the illusion has required a willing disbelief and feigned innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So while the urge to pile on Senate Republicans like John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina for not driving a hard bargain with Trump over the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general is warranted, it must also be acknowledged, as painful as it is, that their pretend resistance actually works at yielding the headlines and reputational burnishing they’re looking for.

Most of this morning’s coverage of the overnight development bears this out.

After weeks of resistance, Blanche finally put in writing, in documents he posted to X, that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund is dead and that the IRS immunity for Trump is retroactive only. It was a limited concession, but it was enough for the two Senate holdouts, Tillis just confirmed on X.

The news coverage hailed this as a “formal” act by Blanche of rescinding the “anti-weaponization” fund. Some managed to cover the development without reference to Blanche’s disastrous anti-democratic run at a DOJ used as tool of retribution for the Trump White House.

This came after President Trump over the weekend continued to escalate his insistence that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund should still move forward. We’re supposed to belief Trump’s former personal lawyer and underling, not the president himself.

Just look at what Blanche did and did not do because it reinforces what a parody of a negotiation with the two senators this has been.

• Cornyn has rightly insisted that by the terms of the “settlement agreement” in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, only the parties to it, including Trump, can amend it. Only Blanche signed his “order” on the “anti-weaponization” fund. No amendment to the settlement agreement, if one exists, has been released.

• Blanche’s “order” purports to be the final word on the “anti-weaponization” fund but it’s not at all clear what, if any, legal authority it carries. Remember that Blanche has refused in one of the what he calls “frivolous” lawsuits challenging the slush fund to declare it dead under penalty of perjury. Nothing filed in court so far suggests a change in that position.

• Blanche’s “order” makes no mention of the IRS immunity for Trump. Instead, a separate statement from his office — unsigned and under no one’s name — stipulates that the IRS deal is only retroactive. This statement appears to be a sop to Cornyn who wanted Blanche to put his Senate testimony to this effect in writing; the statement reaffirms Blanche’s testimony. How this bald statement is legally binding on anyone is a mystery.

These vague assurances with no legal obligation are consistent with the weak demands Cornyn was making for his vote. For his part, Tillis gave away the game Saturday before Blanche’s written assurances, lamenting that Trump’s doubling down on the slush fund was hobbling Blanche’s confirmation (emphasis added): “It’s unfortunate that Todd Blanche, who I consider qualified for the job, will not be confirmed because of this reversal.”

Trump Appeals Sanctions in IRS Case

In related news, Trump and his lawyers are appealing U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ finding last month that he engaged in a collusive lawsuit against the IRS. They’re also asking for Williams to pause the sanctions while their appeal plays out.

Rather than immediately ruling on that request, Williams has asked the outside lawyers she previously appointed as friends of the court — since there were no adverse parties in the case by the president against his own administration — to brief her on the request.

In what would normally be a dry procedural order, Williams got in one more jab at the lack of adverseness between the Trump plaintiffs and the Trump administration defendants, noting that the outside lawyers were needed “in light of the fact that Defendants do not intend to appear or file a response to the Motion.”

Pass the Popcorn for Trump v. Pirro

The Reflecting Pool liner prosecution spectacularly imploded Friday with an embarrassing motion to dismiss by D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro that deserves a hallowed spot in the annals of the depredations of the Trump DOJ

The two most notable aspects of the implosion:

• Despite her “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to prosecutions like this one, Pirro publicly pointed fingers at the Interior Department for failing to provide at the outset crucial information that undermined the prosecution: “It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI.” That she didn’t seek that and other information before bringing charges is one of the glaring problems here.

• Pirro’s finger-pointing provoked a backlash from President Trump himself, who lashed out at her in a social media post Saturday: “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM …”

For his part, erstwhile defendant David Hearn was just a pawn in this sordid affair, first when Pirro rushed to placate the president over the embarrassment caused by his crappy pool liner and now as she tries to extricate herself and her prosecutors from of the mess she created without getting hit with heavy sanctions or a civil lawsuit for the baseless prosecution.

As Chris Geidner notes, there’s a lot more to come in this case: “Friday’s motion to dismiss the David Hearn case is more likely an opening — rather than the closing — salvo in this matter.”

MN Church Protesters Offered Plea Deals

In another in a series of crumbling cases against ICE protesters, the Trump DOJ has offered plea deals to 29 of the 38 people charged in the January anti-ICE demonstration in a St. Paul, Minnesota, church that would reduce their charges from felonies to misdemeanors. Apparently, none of them has accepted the offer.

2026 Midterms Ephemera

• Ohio: In a social media post Sunday, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R) said his former son-in-law, Rep. Max Miller (R), lacks the “basic standards of character” to serve in Congress. Moreno’s daughter Emily has accused Miller of abuse towards her and their young daughter; Miller has denied her accusations in the bitter custody battle.

• Virginia: Reversing the actions of former Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger announced Friday that she is restoring voting rights for some 66,000 people in the state with past felony convictions.

• Nationwide: FiftyPlusOne has a new midterms forecast out this morning that gives Democrats an 85% chance of winning the House and 55% chance of winning Senate control.

Previous NYT Subpoena Disclosed

A previously undisclosed grand jury subpoena was served on a NYT freelancer way back in February over a story he co-wrote for the newspaper last fall about a failed 2019 Seal Team 6 operation in North Korea, the NYT revealed over the weekend:

The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.

Freelance reporter Matthew Cole has been quietly fighting the subpoena from a grand jury in Newport News, Va., using the same attorney as the NYT, which separately fought subpoenas of its reporters over their Air Force One reporting. Cole’s co-author of the piece, NYT staff reporter Dave Philipps, was reportedly not subpoenaed.

Santos Fined for Alleged SOTU Scheme

Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has settled a claim — without admitting wrongdoing — by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that he manipulated prediction market Kalshi over whether he would attend President Trump’s State of the Union address.

His alleged manipulation included instances like this one, via the NYT:

For example, on Feb. 22, Mr. Santos posted on X asking his followers whether he should “wear a muted serious suit to the SOTU or a bedazzled one?”

That query caused the value of betting on Mr. Santos’s attendance to shoot up. The next day, regulators said, Mr. Santos exited his position and made about $3,400 in profits.

Under the terms of the settlement, Santos will return $17,570 in ill-gotten gains and pay a $17,500 penalty.

Meanwhile, in the Real World …

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Talk About Losing the Thread

In a social media post this morning, President Trump threw all of toys in the air and declared that he still thinks the “anti-weaponization” slush fund was the way to go after all.

While ostensibly calling for Todd Blanche to be confirmed as attorney general, Trump lost the thread and resumed defending his $1.776 billion slush fund, which would siphon money to Jan. 6 rioters and other supposed victims of the Deep State:

They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them. …

I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined!

The only arguable nod to the legal cases challenging the slush fund, which remain pending, is that Trump described how he “felt” and “will always feel” — not what he will do to revive the fund over which he would exert control and for which there would be no guardrails. The official Trump administration position before Congress and in court has been that the slush fund is “dead” and that no amount of public pining for it by the president should make anyone think that it’s coming back once public attention drifts elsewhere.

With Blanche’s nomination stalled not over the slush fund but over a separate provision in the same bogus “settlement agreement” that gives Trump immunity from the IRS — a giveaway potentially worth as much as $100 million from Trump in his official capacity to himself in his personal capacity — it was comical for the president to come to Blanche’s supposed rescue by reasserting the righteousness of the slush fund.

The real target of Trump’s scorn in the social media blast was Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who is the main hold up on the Blanche nomination even though the Senate Judiciary Committee Republican only asking for the barest fig leaf to camouflage the corrupt IRS immunity provision (see below). Trump’s impulsive reaction to Cornyn’s opposition is to mock him for having his political career ruined by Trump, which is amusing in its own right.

All of this came the day after Trump improbably threatened in another social media post to pull the Blanche nomination until Cornyn and fellow holdout Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) are out of office next year — a weak-handed threat that miscalculates the chances of the Senate being more friendly to Blanche after the midterms. No one is fooled.

The NYT Gets It! Cornyn’s Thin Red Line

The NYT has some real talk that ratifies yesterday’s Morning Memo on how Sen. Cornyn is actually seeking to entrench — not eliminate — the immunity President Trump got in his “settlement” with the IRS:

The red line that Mr. Cornyn has drawn is fairly thin. He and Mr. Tillis are not seeking to kill the deal that Mr. Blanche negotiated with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, which gave the president, his family and his businesses broad immunity, potentially saving them at least $100 million in penalties and drawing accusations from Democrats of self-dealing. They are merely demanding modifications — in writing. …

Mr. Cornyn’s request is fairly modest. He wants the Justice Department to guarantee what Mr. Blanche said under oath at his confirmation hearing: that the I.R.S. immunity would apply only to Mr. Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization, and that it would be limited only to audits of past tax returns.

“All we’re doing is asking them to put that in writing,” Mr. Cornyn said.

It’s telling, I suppose, that the White House refuses to make even this minor accommodation and instead attacks Cornyn.

“The fact that they’re balking at putting that in writing tells me that they were hoping to get by with this settlement agreement and his testimony, and then revitalize those provisions at a later date,” Cornyn told ABC News. “And that’s, I don’t think, good faith negotiations.”

Still, the news coverage of this collective hoodwinking has been abysmal and has allowed Cornyn to strut around like a dragon-slayer while actually giving away $100 million in potential tax liability forgiveness to Trump.

First at TPM: Judge Finds Trump Admin in Contempt

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Baltimore this week held the Trump administration in contempt of court for violating two of her orders enforcing a settlement agreement in a long-running class action case over the rights of unaccompanied minors to seek asylum in the United States.

As TPM first reported, the administration has deported nearly 100 asylum seekers in violation of the court-approved settlement agreement in the case.

But Gallagher’s order gives the administration a chance to “purge” its contempt by refraining from any further unlawful deportations in violation of the agreement:

To do so, the administration will have to comply with a series of new requirements that Gallagher imposed in the same order intended to prevent more unlawful deportations of members of the settlement class, when numbers north of 70,000 people.

Mass Deportation Watch

• The 7th and 9th circuits became the latest U.S. Courts of Appeal to reject the Trump administration’s re-interpretation of a 30-year-old law and turn it into a tool of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond. The circuit courts are now split 6-2 against the Trump policy, and the Supreme Court is likely to take up the issue in its next term, Politico reports.

• A Cameroonian national with an expired visa who is a former Fulbright scholar and is now a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University was detained by ICE this week while boarding a domestic flight as the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement efforts at airports, The Banner reports.

Judge Declines to Recuse in USA Case

A quick update on the most significant legal challenge to Trump’s corrupt U.S. attorney scheme: The outside judge assigned to hear the lawsuit against the administration by fired U.S. Attorney Roger Rogoff of Seattle has denied the Trump DOJ’s motion to recuse himself.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee, is the chief judge of the Eastern District of Washington, based in Spokane, and is a frequent visiting judge in Seattle. The Trump DOJ took issue with (i) how Bastian was assigned the case, arguing that the chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals should appoint an outside judge rather than the case being assigned to the usual visiting judge; and (ii) Bastian’s impartiality given his frequent work in the district.

Bastian found no legal basis for his recusal.

Morning Memo Playlists

On a random Friday in March 2024, I first dropped into Morning Memo a musical segue into the weekend that began a semi-regular feature. It’s ebbed and flowed a bit, but your response has been remarkably gratifying, especially because am I very much a musical neophyte. In response to reader requests, I’ve put together a playlist of the songs that have appeared here. I’ll keep adding to it as we go along:

I did a parallel playlist on YouTube that’s nearly the same as the Spotify playlist above, but a few tracks are available only on one or the other of the two platforms, not both.

See you back here Monday.

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Let’s See the Actual Language

I harbor a growing suspicion that a collective hoodwinking is going on in the Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general.

It’s hard to argue that the delay of today’s crucial Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Blanche’s nomination isn’t a pretty big deal (even though he could still remain on as acting attorney general for the balance of Trump’s term).

But when you look closely at what Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), backed by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), is demanding for his vote, it’s not at all clear what the dispute is actually over — and there’s quite a bit of reporting that suggests Cornyn is not driving a hard bargain at all.

If it seems weird to you that the breathless coverage of the Blanche confirmation is happening without anyone publicly knowing exactly what Cornyn is demanding, I agree! It’s weird.

Going into this dustup, the common understanding was that senators like Cornyn and Tillis wanted more ironclad reassurances that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund was well and truly dead. So far so good.

Then came the somewhat surprising and even refreshing news that Cornyn was also targeting the legally dubious immunity that Trump had also been given in the settlement of his lawsuit against the IRS. Even better.

If Blanche could stick around as acting AG anyway, then extracting a concession on the insanely corrupt IRS immunity provision of the settlement agreement was arguably a shrewd, if narrow, win for Cornyn and those of us in the anti-corruption brigade. If estimates are correct, the value to Trump of securing immunity from past tax liabilities to the IRS was in the range of $100 million. That’s not nothing.

But over the past few days, news reports on what Cornyn is demanding have been very fuzzy and often gloss over the specifics, just saying generally that Cornyn is targeting the IRS immunity deal. But what Cornyn has said himself and what a few reporters have picked up on raise serious doubts that Cornyn is actually targeting the Trump IRS immunity everyone has been up at arms about.

Instead, Cornyn seems to be aiming to keep the immunity deal intact but to limit it to the retroactive immunity everyone already understood to be part of the deal, not prospective immunity, which an expansive interpretation of the loose language of the agreement might have allowed. Cornyn also apparently wants to make sure no one else gets the benefit of the immunity deal other than the parties to the lawsuit — Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Org.

At this point, you should be saying WTF?

Again, I agree!

Here’s the most comprehensive statement of Cornyn’s position, from his own mouth on Monday (emphasis mine):

What I want is the written document to say the same thing [Blanche] did in his sworn testimony in front of the Judiciary Committee, and, as you recall, what he said is the weaponization fund is dead. He said the audit immunity basically doesn’t extend to parties beyond the lawsuit, and it doesn’t also extend to future actions by federal agencies other than the IRS.

I’m not sure how else to read that other than it locks in the retroactive immunity and applies it only to the Trumps and their company.

That’s still the line Cornyn was taking yesterday, not long before the committee vote was pushed off, as paraphrased by the WSJ (emphasis mine):

To earn his vote, Cornyn said, the simplest fix would be for the parties to the settlement—the Justice Department, IRS and Trump—to revise it to conform to Blanche’s testimony at his confirmation hearing: The weaponization fund is dead, the audit protection doesn’t apply to people beyond the parties to the lawsuit, and it only applies to the IRS, not other agencies.

Here’s how the NYT obliquely puts it: Cornyn “said he had received no written assurances from Mr. Blanche that the audit shield would not apply to future tax liabilities or be extended to a wider circle of people.”

Cornyn and the DOJ have reportedly traded draft language back and forth but none of that has been made public, so it’s impossible to know precisely what they’re haggling over — or if Cornyn is indeed giving away the whole store, as it has started to seem this week.

If the reporting on Cornyn’s demands is correct, then Trump, Don Jr., Eric, and their company still get the $100 million gift from the President’s own administration to himself. And locking that in has the political (though not legal) effect of Senate Republicans publicly ratifying the corrupt bargain by voting to confirm Blanche.

In another worrying sign that Cornyn isn’t really asking for much, both sides seem perplexed that things haven’t gotten worked out yet and confident that they can iron out whatever differences remain over the precise language.

“It’s not a big ask,” Cornyn said yesterday, in what may be the understatement of the week.

Quote of the Day

“This is so dangerous. I’m living proof of the danger. My son isn’t here because someone disagreed with the way I was handling a case in court.”—U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed and husband wounded in 2020 attack at her New Jersey home by a disgruntled attorney, on DHS General Counsel James Percival attacking district judges by name on X

TPM in the World

I talked with Greg Sargent yesterday about the blast of new filings in the James Comey “86 47” case — and about Trump bumping up against the limits of his powers in several different realms:

We Need You

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Comey Offers Judge an Easy Way Out

In new court filings last evening, James Comey unloaded a triple shotgun blast at the bogus “86 47” seashells prosecution against him.

I’ll get into the trio of filings — which include a cameo by Sammy the Bull Gravano and juicy details about President Trump’s intense personal interest in the case as relayed through internal Secret Service communications — in a moment. I promise.

But first let me orient you briefly to what I suspect is Comey’s strategy here.

As we discussed here yesterday, Comey had already filed another motion to dismiss the indictment on Monday before last evening’s flurry. That motion is the most straightforward, direct, least messy way for the judge to end this case, arguing (quite reasonably) that posting to Instagram a photo of an arrangement of seashells that spells out “86 47” is in no way a true threat to President Trump and in any event is constitutionally protected free speech.

Still, it’s a big step for a judge to dismiss an indictment — especially in a high-profile case like this — based solely on the indictment being facially insufficient. But the choice Comey is giving the judge makes that option seem like the easy way out compared to donning hip waders and venturing into the muck of a vindictive prosecution analysis, which involves peeling back the curtain on the rotten Trump DOJ, the over-involved Trump White House, and now the role of the Secret Service in this whole mess.

While Comey is clearly exalting in exposing some of the depredations of the Trump II presidency and its corrupt misuse of the Justice Department, he first and foremost wants to get out from under this indictment and spare himself and his family the risks of a conviction. And so the sequencing of the filings makes the judge’s hard lift of straight-up dismissing the indictment for failure to allege an actual crime seem a whole lot less heavy considering the alternative path this case could go down.

In one sense, this strategy could produce a disappointing result in a civics and democracy sense. Trump’s pursuit of Comey is a classic case of vindictive prosecution without precedent in American history. Yet, the corrupt and bumbling efforts are so inept that Comey may prevail in getting a prosecution thrown out for a second time without a judge even getting to the vindictive prosecution allegations.

In the Virginia case against him, Comey successfully disqualified Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney, which meant the indictment she obtained was no good. In this case, the indictment itself may also be so flawed that the case goes no farther. But probably the better way to view this is that corruptly predicated prosecutions produce corrupt investigations and shoddy lawyering. It’s all part of the same package of retributive conduct.

The New Filings

With the above framework in mind, here are the three new filings (for diehards, I’m linking to the substantive legal memoranda rather than the barebones motions themselves):

• Motion to Dismiss Indictment for Vindictive and Selective Prosecution: This motion covers a lot of familiar ground regarding Trump’s crusade of retribution against Comey, including the first failed prosecution in Virginia.

• Motion for Disclosure of Grand Jury Proceedings: This motion takes the known grand jury irregularities that judges found in the Virginia case and combines them with irregularities in the North Carolina case (including public statements by FBI Director Kash Patel and other acts and omissions revealed in discovery) to urge the judge to suspend the presumption of regularity and allow Comey access to the grand jury transcripts.

• Motion to Suppress and for Franks Hearing: Comey alleges that the FBI case agent made false statements and omitted material facts in the applications for two digital search warrants — one before the indictment to Apple and one after the indictment to Google — about the evidence gathered in the case, including exculpatory evidence.

There is a key fourth filing: a 21-page affidavit from Comey attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (the former Chicago U.S. attorney) with a whopping 43 attached exhibits that is filed in support of all three motions and offers a narration of the discovery Comey has obtained from the government thus far that is relevant to the three motions.

Rather than analyze each motion separately, I’m pulling out some of the key themes from all three motions, which are also separately narrated by Fitzgerald, who provides specific citations to the supporting documents obtained in discovery.

If you’re still with me, this is where we get into the good stuff.

Trump’s Keen Interest in the Case

Some of the juiciest details from the discovery in the case offer a glimpse of President Trump tracking the Secret Service investigation in real time from Air Force One.

Internal Secret Service communications describe the head of Trump’s protective detail, Special Agent in Charge John Bush, “expecting to have to brief POTUS. He has since briefed the Chief of Staff on the below updates….”

Later, Bush emailed from Air Force One seeking a “readout” of the Secret Service’s imminent interview of Comey at headquarters: “As I am getting LOTS of questions, is it possible for me to get an immediate readout (call) of the interview?”

Another document obtained by Comey noted that “POTUS was requesting a copy of the interview notes to use in his 6 pm press conference.”

Bush responded: “It is a hot topic on the plane and [redacted code name for President Trump] is very interested.”

At one point, Bush asked about any further updates noting “the COS just asked me.”

Another document relays that a Secret Service official was told by the Protective Intelligence Operations Center “that they received a request from SAIC Bush who received a direct request from [Secret Service code name for the President] for a summary of the interview when available.”

Ultimately, an executive summary of the Comey interview was sent to Bush on Air Force One, according to the filings.

Illegal Surveillance of Comey

After Comey arranged to talk to the Secret Service in person when he returned from the beach in North Carolina to his home in Virginia, the Secret Service tracked his cell phone despite doubts revealed in internal communications that they had the proper legal justification to do so, according to the filings.

When a senior Secret Service official said it was a “bad idea” to ping Comey’s cellphone, Bush agreed it was “legally questionable” but indicated “we might anyway.”

The Secret Service agent who signed the emergency request to Verizon to ping Comey’s cellphone said he did so “with hesitation.” Another senior Secret Service official said that “the # 3 guy at DOJ ‘wanted to ping the cellphone via an exigency request.’” It’s not clear to whom at DOJ he was referring because there was not a No. 3 official in place at that time.

Once the Secret Service pinged Comey’s cellphone, they tracked him electronically and in person on his return trip from North Carolina to Virginia, although the agents surveilling him physically lost track of him when Comey and his wife stopped at the gravesite of their infant son. The electronic surveillance continued during the cemetery visit. In a striking parenthetical, Fitzgerald writes: “(The Government later seized—pursuant to the challenged March 2026 search warrant—a photo Mr. Comey took of the flowers at his son’s grave that day.)”

A Rudy Giuliani Cameo

A recurring character in the filings identified only as Person-1 apparently knew the Comeys but had come to hold Comey in low regard. Person-1 texted Comey’s wife shortly after the Instagram post went up warning that “86” could be construed a violent term, according to the filings.

Person-1 said they initially thought “86” was a benign reference to the restaurant term but then heard a Rudy Giuliani media appearance and became convinced that Comey’s use of the term was nefarious and told the Secret Service as much when interviewed the day after hearing Giuliani.

Giuliani seems to have improbably kicked off an entire absurdist thread of the investigation when he claimed publicly that Comey had worked on organized crime cases where the term “86” was used to mean “kill.”

Trying Desperately to Find Mob Usage of ’86’ … and Failing

The most vivid scene that emerges from the slew of new filings, is a May 13, 2026, trip by the first assistant U.S. attorney and an FBI agent to the home of the notorious former mobster Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to try to establish that the mob regularly used “86” in a violent sense.

Gravano is the former Gambino underboss who famously testified against John Gotti, admitted to participating in 19 murders, entered then left the witness protection program, and was subsequently convicted again. “He is now a podcaster,” Fitzgerald dryly observes in a footnote.

Gravano said he was convinced Comey had to know the violent connotation for “86,” but Gravano had no memory of talking about it with Comey, who as a young prosecutor was involved in the Gambino case. While mobsters did use the term “86,” Gravano told investigators, they were careful not to use it in the presence of law enforcement.

That set off an astounding search by Comey investigators for references to “86” in decades of FBI files. After searching the entirety of the FBI’s Sentinel database, an agent reported:

These searches produced inconclusive results regarding the use of “86” or “eighty-six” as a slang term. Additionally, the searcher was unable to determine if the subject would have had access or been exposed to any potential files meeting the search parameters.

Investigators did a separate search of the Gambino case file: The case file contained no references to the term “86.” Same with the trial transcript: nada. They also talked to two former FBI agents who investigated the mob who had never heard “86” used to mean “kill.”

Secret Service Seemed Satisfied There Was No Crime

The discovery in the case leaves the strong impression that after its initial investigation into Comey’s Instagram post, the Secret Service — which has a unit dedicated to the nonstop stream of threats directed towards its protectees — was satisfied there was no crime here.

After leading the May 2025 interview of Comey in person at Secret Service headquarters, a senior official emailed a group of other Secret Service personnel, suggesting that the case was “resolved,” as so many initial threat investigations are: “You all contributed, some in non-traditional ways, to this issue being resolved in a professional and efficient manner.”

Discovery shows the Secret Service treated the Comey investigation as a “non-referred” matter meaning under internal policy “the determination can be made based upon initial investigation that there is no risk of an unwanted outcome and there is no judicial outcome.”

The Secret Service investigation, after the initial flurry, went nowhere and by the fall of 2025 it seemed like it had died. But in October, it was revived by the FBI out of its Charlotte office.

Comey Attorney-Client Privilege Violated AGAIN

The violation of Comey’s attorney-client privilege had already been an issue in the Virginia case and spawned an entire separate case involving Daniel Richman, the Comey attorney who is also a Columbia University law professor, who prevailed against the Justice Department.

But stunningly it happened again in the “86” investigation, Comey claims.

In the search warrant for Apple, “the government made no provision whatsoever to screen Mr. Richman’s communications,” Fitzgerald alleged. In addition, investigators only filtered for office landline numbers of another Comey attorney, and not his cellphone number.

Last month, prosecutors agreed to “quarantine” two text conversations Comey had with the second lawyer, according to Fitzgerald, but only after those communications had already been reviewed by the first assistant U.S. attorney, two other assistant U.S. attorneys, the FBI case agent and an FBI supervisor. They told Fitzgerald last month they had looked at the text thread only after they had obtained the indictment against Comey.

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One of Dozens of Failed Prosecutions

More than a year after arresting him, the Trump Justice Department moved Monday to drop the criminal case against California labor leader David Huerta arising from his June 2025 protest of an ICE raid in Los Angeles.

Huerta, who suffered a head injury during his arrest, was engaged in protest at the peak of tensions in the city over ICE raids. The next day, President Trump federalized the California National Guard and deployed it to the city.

Prosecutors had already downgraded the case against Huerta from a felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction, resistance, or opposition of a federal officer. Now the remaining charge will be dismissed.

Huerta’s case is just one of dozens of prosecutions of ICE protestors in Los Angeles to fall apart in recent months.

To try to save face in the Huerta case, prosecutors yesterday framed the dismissal as an “agreement of the parties” by which Huerta would continue to abide by the terms of his release for another 30 days, at which point the case would be dismissed.

“This is not where he’s been absolved of wrongdoing,” Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., told Politico. “He’s accepted responsibility.” (For those keeping track, Essayli is not the U.S. attorney, but is installed as the first assistant in the office as a way of avoiding Senate confirmation.)

For his part, Huerta hailed the outcome as complete vindication of him and his constitutional rights.

DHS Watch

• In an extraordinary attack on the federal judiciary, James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, posted a screed on X last week vilifying by name four federal judges who had ruled against DHS in high-profile cases, including Paula Xinis, who has overseen the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case in Maryland.

• A longtime immigration policy wonk who most recently served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics has resigned from the Department of Homeland security, saying in a LinkedIn post over the weekend:

[I]t will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.

Comey: 86 My Prosecution

Former FBI Director James Comey has filed his first of at least two motions to dismiss the federal indictment of him in North Carolina for posting to Instagram an image of seashells arranged on a beach to spell out “86 47,” arguing that it’s preposterous to treat his actions as a true threat to President Trump and that, even if they were construed to be a threat, they amounted to constitutionally protected political hyperbole.

The Corruption: Crypto Edition

The Trump DOJ filed a motion to dismiss the fraud case against the alleged mastermind of a $722 million crypto Ponzi scheme, Bloomberg reports.

What Is Cornyn Bargaining for Exactly?

With the critical Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general set for Thursday, new comments from Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) suggest he may not be driving as hard of a bargain for his vote as initially reported.

Last week, Cornyn said he wasn’t just interested in making sure the bogus anti-weaponization fund was dead, but also nixing the tax immunity Trump received when he settled his lawsuit against the IRS. To do this, Cornyn wants the settlement documents amended because by their own terms only the parties can modify the documents. But yesterday in remarks to reporters, Cornyn’s own description of what he was after seemed more narrow than at first appeared (emphasis added):

We just need for the documents to conform to what [Blanche’s] testimony was at the hearing, where he said the weaponization fund was dead [and] he said that the immunity from future audits does not extend to people beyond the parties to the lawsuit.

That sure sounds like the parties to the lawsuit — who include Trump personally, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization — would still receive the immunity contemplated in the settlement agreement.

Politico uses ambiguous language language on this point, reporting that the changes to the settlement agreement Cornyn wants include “restricting the scope of tax audit immunity granted to the president and his family.” It’s not clear whether that means limiting the scope of the immunity the Trumps are getting or limiting who gets immunity to only the Trump family.

Stay tuned …

Trump IRS Lawsuit Miscellany

• Attorney Fees: After the judge in Trump’s lawsuit ruled that she would consider awarding attorney fees to the amici who filed briefs in the case — to be paid by Trump, the other plaintiffs, and his lawyers as sanctions for their misconduct in the case — the amici submitted their attorney fee requests yesterday. The Democracy Forward Foundation, which represented one set of amici, is seeking $39,000. The four law firms representing 35 former judges said their fees exceeded $100,000 but they are seeking only a symbolic $1 per law firm plus modest out-of-pocket expenses of less than $5,000.

• Law School Deanship: Daniel Epstein, Trump’s lawyer in the IRS case who was sanctioned by the judge with the monetary penalties above plus a one-year ban on practicing pro hac vice in the Southern District of Florida, is the incoming interim dean of the Florida International University law school. Epstein didn’t even make the law school search committee’s list of top 20 candidates for the permanent position, but was named interim dean anyway after the search for a permanent dean failed, the Miami Herald reports.

Trump Takes Elections EO to SCOTUS

After losing at the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals last week, the Trump administration quickly went to the Supreme Court to try to revive the president’s executive order purporting to revamp mail voting ahead in time for the midterms.

Chilling Headline of the Day

WSJ: Two Wars Converge in the Caspian Sea as Ukraine Hits Iranian Supply Line to Russia

Let’s See How AI Is Going … WUT!?!

• Futurism: AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale

• Futurism: A Whole Bunch of People’s Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There’s Some Wildly Private Stuff in There

Who’s Your REAL Daddy?

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Now Lost in Salvadoran Prison System

A new court order Friday in federal court in south Texas, first flagged by Politico’s Kyle Cheney, reveals that another Salvadoran national has been unlawfully deported twice by the Trump administration in the past eight months in violation of separate orders by a federal judge and an immigration judge.

In an under-the-radar case reminiscent of the brutalization of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Nelson Ariel Umanzor Chavez was deported to Mexico in November despite a federal court’s temporary restraining order barring the administration from removing him from the United States. As in the Abrego Garcia case, the court ordered the administration to facilitate his return from Mexico and he was in fact returned to the U.S. by the end of November.

But then in January — despite a 2019 immigration court order barring his removal to his native country because he was “more likely than not to be tortured” there — the administration deported him to El Salvador anyway, where he was immediately imprisoned.

His condition and the exact location of his detention remain unknown.

“Salvadoran authorities have transferred Petitioner between prisons and his family has not been provided information regarding his current location, his condition, or whether he is alive,” according to the latest court order, citing a declaration filed in the case.

Umanzor Chavez unlawfully entered the United States in 2015 but was released as an unaccompanied minor. His asylum claim was rejected in 2019, but he was granted withholding of removal to El Salvador under the Convention Against Torture. He appears from the court order to have remained free for a decade, until he was detained in May 2025 in Baltimore during an ICE check-in.

In his order Friday laying out the circumstances of the case, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. (a Trump appointee) denied the relief Umanzor Chavez was seeking because his request was based on his earlier deportation to Mexico, not his more recent deportation to El Salvador. The judge gave him until next month to amend his pleadings to challenge the second deportation.

Houston ICE Shooting: No Drugs in Van

The substance that the FBI found in the work van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was shot and killed by an ICE agent tested negative for narcotics or illicit drugs, the House district attorney announced Friday. The fact that the news came not from the FBI but from the local prosecutor reinforced suspicions that the Trump administration had tried to sully the victim’s reputation. For reasons which remain unclear, the search warrant for the van which revealed the FBI’s suspicion of meth was unsealed unusually early in the case amidst outrage over the shooting.

ICE Plans to Target Haitians

With the Supreme Court ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protection for more than 300,000 Haitians, ICE is planning for a potential arrest and deportation blitz, CBS News reports.

Boat Strike Watch: Grisly Stats Edition

A new report from the Washington Office on Latin America says the death toll from President Trump’s lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats is 221.

But despite the illegal carnage, the campaign is failing to achieve its own stated objective of strangling drug trafficking by sea, the WaPo reports:

The Trump administration’s deadly military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States, but they’re prompting criminal organizations to develop new strategies and tactics and undermining traditional investigative methods, according to a previously unreported assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a closed-door congressional briefing and interviews with current and former U.S. and foreign officials.

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon

• NYT: An Admiral’s Rise Reveals the Politics Driving Hegseth’s Pentagon

• WaPo: After Trump’s order, West Point curbed faculty speech. One professor said no.

NYT Still Crushing It on Air Force One

Undaunted by the Trump DOJ’s unlawful subpoenaing of five of its reporters, the New York Times continues to crank out new stories on President Trump’s scandalous new Air Force One boondoggle:

• Inside the Rushed Effort to Get Trump His New Air Force One

• Iranian Threat to Air Force One Prompted Plane Swap During NATO Summit

• VIDEO: How Trump’s New Air Force One Poses Potential Security Risks

• In Rush to Track Down Leaks, Justice Dept. Reversed Its Own Process

Exporting the MAGA Vision Abroad

Over the weekend, Brazil announced that it denied visas to two senior State Department officials — assistant secretary Riley M. Barnes and deputy assistant secretary Samuel Samson — who were being dispatched by the Trump administration “on a mission to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the country’s electoral system” ahead of the Oct. 4 presidential election, the WaPo reports.

Trump Loses on Election Meddling Gambit

The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals handed the administration an important loss Friday when it declined to pause a lower court order that blocked the administration from moving ahead on President Trump’s executive order purporting to revamp mail voting ahead of the midterm elections.

The Retribution: Blue State Edition

In a little-noticed court filing, the Trump administration admitted that it canceled $7.5 billion in federal clean energy grants “based solely” on the projects being in states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

MAHA: Measles Cases Soar

NYT: “More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined.”

Sad Trombone

The White House Correspondents Dinner — interrupted in the spring by a gunman’s assassination attempt — finished up over the weekend. It was … something:

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Blanche and Clayton Own This Mess

The responsibility for the Trump DOJ’s unlawful use of subpoenas as a tool of retribution against NYT reporters — for writing about the deficiencies of President Trump’s beloved new Air Force One — falls most heavily on two men: acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, both of whom are awaiting Senate confirmation for promotion to higher offices.

In the alternate world of normal politics that we used to inhabit, the NYT subpoena debacle — especially what happened in court yesterday — would be the cherry on top of the myriad reasons that neither man could win Senate confirmation even with a Republican majority. Instead, we slouch onward, with Clayton expected to be confirmed as DNI and with Blanche making accommodations to a few remaining GOP holdouts who need a fig lead to camouflage his historically awful 18 months at DOJ.

The Justice Department withdrew the NYT subpoenas yesterday rather than endure the greater humiliation of U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian ordering them quashed, which he made clear he was prepared to do. But prosecutors, most notably Clayton’s hand-picked deputy U.S. attorney Sean Buckley, still faced a public rebuke from the judge over their multiple errors and missteps in the case — although that may be too generous of a characterization.

“It seems like the inadvertent errors and ‘we should’ve done things differently’ are piling up,” Subramanian said.

To say that prosecutors merely mishandled the case is to presume a level of good faith that is not warranted. The errors and missteps flowed directly from the retributive abuse of the powers of the federal government to retaliate against unflattering news coverage. The rush to subpoena reporters at the earliest stages of the investigation was itself unlawful, but the haste also produced predictable errors, like not thoroughly researching the law, providing misinformation to the court, and mistakenly subpoenaing the phone records of reporters’ family members.

Judge Subramanian isn’t done with prosecutors yet. He asked during the hearing why he shouldn’t consider sanctions against prosecutors. In an order following the hearing, he demanded that the administration provide him with any internal communications it had about the non-disclosure order it sought regarding the subpoenas to the phone service providers of the reporters:

Subramanian seems to be zeroing in on this discrete part of the case for potential sanctions because prosecutors admittedly mislead the magistrate judge that issued the non-disclosure order, failing to tell him that the phone subpoenas involved journalists and misrepresenting that the investigation wasn’t public when prosecutors were already engaged with NYT counsel in the case.

While the NYT won a resounding victory in court in the narrow confines of this case, the Trump DOJ remains an enormous, unprecedented, and unchecked threat to civil liberties, including freedom of the press. And the people most responsible for this travesty of justice are the president’s picks to be attorney general and DNI.

Attack on Higher Ed: Penn Wins

After the University of Pennsylvania put up an extended fight, the Trump administration withdrew its subpoena for the names and personal information of Jewish people on campus as part of a purported investigation into antisemitism.

Border Patrol Agent Indicted

A Border Patrol agent was indicted in Texas last month on state charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after he allegedly ran over an undocumented immigrant with his vehicle during an enforcement operation in January 2025.

Quote of the Day

“I got carried away, frankly.”—Elon Musk

Is Kagan Playing A Kind of Long Game?

The accounts of Justice Elena Kagan remarks yesterday about the Roberts Court make her sound tone deaf, naive, and perhaps not up to meeting the current moment:

• “You just have to deal with the fact that there’s a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do, and I can really dislike that. But it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration.”

• “[I]s this court kind of a puppet for the current administration? I think definitely not.”

• “I think that is a bad rap.”

A perhaps more generous interpretation is that Kagan is approaching the challenge of being in what is likely to be a permanent minority for the rest of her career with a very granular sense of what counts as wins and losses.

Not only does she see herself as a bridge between the three liberal justices (herself included) and the six-justice conservative majority (in particular the Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who can, on occasion, either side with the liberals or moderate the conservatives), but she keeps a very fine-grained score of the game being played — collecting wins that are almost imperceptible and trying to stack those on top of each other over time in a way that starts to count for something.

Or … her approach may simply be too precious and self-regarding to meet the moment. The jury is still out for me on which it is.

The Age of Fire

David Wallace-Wells, on the Pyrocene:

[P]erhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the years of warnings that climate change might not inspire global solidarity, but the opposite — an intensifying, zero-sum competition over a world pinched by perceived resource scarcity and pockmarked by more and more frequent extreme weather. If you insist on believing climate change isn’t real, or that its effects must be trivial, then whenever you find yourself overwhelmed by those effects, you have to place the blame somewhere.

See Ya Back Here Monday

Only Loyalists Need Apply

A new and ironic development in the first-of-its-kind legal challenge to President Trump’s U.S. attorney scheme gives me a chance to pull back the lens a bit to show the full scope of the corruption involved and why it matters.

The lawsuit by fired U.S. Attorney Roger Rogoff of Seattle that I wrote about at length yesterday has been re-assigned to Judge Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee from outside the district, since the federal judges who appointed Rogoff have a stake in the case.

One irony of Bastian hearing the case is that he is chief judge in the Eastern District of Washington, which has had its own recent U.S. attorney issues. The Trump administration has used one of its patented blue-state workarounds in Bastian’s district to install a U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation or allowing federal judges to appoint an interim U.S. attorney.

It started when acting U.S. Attorney Richard R. Barker, a career prosecutor, resigned last July from the Justice Department rather than sign off on an indictment of ICE protesters. (Barker’s successor scaled the case against the protestors way back, dropping most of the felony charges to misdemeanors if the defendants stayed out of trouble for 18 months, the New York Times reported.)

“I knew there was no place for me in the Justice Department if I was being asked to bring felony charges against these protesters in a way that would compromise my integrity,” Barker later told the NYT. “This was not an organized conspiracy. It was a protest where people were exercising their free-speech rights.”

Barker was succeeded as acting U.S. attorney by another career prosecutor, Stephanie Van Marter, who lasted only a month. She was succeeded in August by Pete Serrano, the mayor of Pasco who had no apparent prior experience as a prosecutor.

That is when things started to get even more squirrelly.

Serrano’s statutory 120-day term ended in December. By statute, the judges of the district could have appointed Serrano to remain on past the 120 days. They did not. Whether that was an affirmative decision by the judges reflecting a lack of confidence in Serrano or simply a failure to act isn’t clear, but I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between those two scenarios.

At that point, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi engineered a workaround that as of March she had used in at least nine other districts around the country, mostly in blue states, including in high-profile postings like the Los Angeles U.S attorney’s Office: Bondi named Serrano a special attorney and made him the first assistant U.S. attorney, which without an acting or interim U.S. attorney in place effectively means he has remained the top prosecutor in the district without Senate or judge approval.

The workaround has been used mostly in cases where the interim U.S. attorney has exceeded their statutory term and judges have ruled that they’re unlawfully serving in the post, Politico noted. In Serrano’s case, Bondi acted before he had overstayed his 120 days. President Trump has not nominated anyone for the permanent position in Spokane. The plan seems to be to keep Serrano, like other similarly entrenched top prosecutors, in place indefinitely.

The underlying motive for the scheme goes back to Trump’s frustration with the Senate’s blue-slip tradition, which essentiallygives senators veto power over U.S. attorney nominations in their own states. When you’re turning the Justice Department into a tool of your White House, non-loyalist U.S. attorneys simply won’t do.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has been public in her opposition to Serrano and to the workaround to entrench him in place: “The Trump administration is attempting a transparent end run around the Constitution and Congress by appointing Pete Serrano to a position he is not qualified to hold after the Eastern District declined to extend his tenure as U.S. Attorney.”

It’s against this backdrop that Judge Bastian will be hearing Rogoff’s legal challenge to Trump’s scheme. In Rogoff’s case, the district judges acted and unanimously appointed him as interim U.S. attorney, but Trump fired him in less than an hour, the fourth such termination of judge-appointed interim U.S. attorneys around the country.

Trump’s scheme in all it various forms is intended to keep blue-state U.S. attorneys from being too independent, too autonomous, and too un-beholden to the Trump White House. There is great utility in having loyal and compliant U.S. attorneys in blue states as Trump targets Democratic elected officials and other political foes for retribution. See, for example, the next two items below.

The Retribution: Midterms Edition

The Trump White House has come up with an inventive new way to sic the Justice Department on Democratic elected officials ahead of the midterm elections, Bloomberg reports: “DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, which Vice President JD Vance established in January, is building out a team exploring how politicians and state officials facilitate the misuse of taxpayer dollars — either by actively participating in or failing to prevent schemes under their watch, said three people familiar with the effort.”

The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition

House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a criminal referral against former Special Counsel Jack Smith to the Trump DOJ yesterday, accusing him of perjury in testimony to Congress in December, the NYT reports.

Smith’s lawyers immediately rejected the allegation that Smith committed perjury and accused Jordan of making a “spurious claim.”

The pattern here is now tediously obvious and has gone on since at least the Benghazi investigation more than a decade ago: House Republicans launch politicized investigations against civil servants, Democrats and other foes of President Trump and march their targets into a perjury trap on the Hill. At the same time, they use their investigations to gin up fodder in the form of documents, emails, and other communications that they leak to right-wing media.

What’s new is that House GOPers now have a Justice Department run out of the Trump White House that is eager to play along.

Must Read: AF1 Leak Probe Edition

Like orcas pulverizing a sunfish, the NYT has eviscerated the Trump DOJ for subpoenaing its reporters in a new filing that comes ahead of an important hearing scheduled for this afternoon in federal court in Manhattan.

The unusual and unprecedented use of subpoenas to reporters as an early (rather that last ditch) investigative step in the Air Force One leak investigation has come under intense scrutiny as a threat to a free press and civil liberties.

As I explained earlier this week, the Trump DOJ conceded to the judge that it made major legal missteps in how it handled the case. In the new filing, the NYT seizes on those admissions, with a level of aggressiveness and urgency rarely seen in a such a major case, and urges U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian not to let the Trump DOJ get away with just putting the subpoenas on hold for two weeks, as prosecutors had suggested, but rather quash them today at the hearing.

The filing takes the form of a letter, which makes it an easier read. It’s worth your time.

Blanche Lavishes Alaska for Murk’s Vote

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is pulling out the stops in lavishing Alaska with goodies in an effort to win undecided Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote for his confirmation to the permanent position, Politico reports.

The 5th Circuit Pulls a Wild Move

In an important new development in the legal fight over the Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond hearings, it wasn’t just what the 5th Circuit did but how it did it, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck writes: “[T]he Fifth Circuit went out of its way to grant the federal government an unprecedented form of unexplained emergency relief without deigning to explain why such relief was remotely appropriate.”

On a Slow Boat to Venezuela

For those keeping track, the slow-rolling contempt of court inquiry against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case is still crawling along. The full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is re-hearing the case after a three-judge panel cut U.S. District Judge James Boasberg off at the knees. The Trump DOJ filed its appellate brief yesterday. Oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 29.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Financial Times: “The Trump administration has collected more than $13bn in revenues from Venezuelan oil sales this year, according to FT calculations, but has said almost nothing about what has happened to the money.”

The Latest Trump Attack on Higher Ed

The Trump administration’s ongoing attack on colleges and universities is now merging with its corrupt tendencies to create an alarming new scheme to divert the pipeline of government funding for “life sciences” research into the private sector, with an ostensible focus on AI, robotics, and nuclear energy.

The scheme combines weakening higher ed with the politicization of scientific research while opening new pathways for corruption and self-dealing. What’s not to like?

Graphic of the Day

NYT: How Trump Is Getting Richer in Office

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A Low-Key U.S. Attorneys Scandal

Eighteen months in, President Trump’s strategy to circumvent the Senate on the appointment of U.S. attorneys does not yet seem to have sunken in as one of the defining elements of bringing the Justice Department to heel under the White House.

While Trump’s appointments of charlatans like Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan to temporary gigs as U.S. attorneys have been headline-grabbers, they are only part of of a larger Trump scheme to seize control of the appointment of U.S. attorneys in blue states despite what the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and federal statutes say.

Trump’s play is basically this: With blue state senators essentially having a veto over U.S. attorneys in their states (thanks to the Senate’s blue-slip tradition), Trump has used a variety of different workarounds to get his preferred people into those U.S. attorney slots. Those workarounds have avoided the constitutionally required Senate confirmation and in some instances have violated the law on acting or interim appointments. In a third use case, where district judges have appointed an interim U.S. attorney, Trump has promptly fired their appointee, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has promised to fire future judge-appointed U.S. attorneys unless they are approved by the administration.

Trump’s scheme is about to be put the test by a carefully planned, first-of-its-kind legal challenge from the judge-appointed U.S. attorney in Seattle, Roger Rogoff, who was fired last week by the president within an hour of his appointment.

In his new lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington state yesterday, Rogoff — whose legal team includes former Obama Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. — places his firing in the broader context of Trump’s strategy to circumvent the Senate and the law:

By disregarding the carefully calibrated statutory framework that Congress enacted to address U.S. Attorney vacancies, Defendants ignore Congress’s exercise of its authority under the Appointments Clause to determine how inferior officers are appointed, and they claim the power to install and remove U.S. Attorneys at will in this district—and elsewhere—without Senate confirmation and outside the bounds of federal law. As illustrated in districts across the country, those actions threaten the very harms that the Appointments Clause was intended to prevent, leaving the President (and all future Presidents) free to appoint whomever he chooses as de facto U.S. Attorney indefinitely, regardless of their qualifications for the role.

Rogoff is the fourth judge-appointed U.S. attorneys to be fired, following similar terminations in the Northern District of New York, New Jersey (Habba’s former position), and the Eastern District of Virginia (Halligan’s former position). In New Jersey, the judges and DOJ eventually reached an agreement on a judge-appointed interim U.S. attorney.

Rogoff’s lawsuit points to three other jurisdictions — the Central District of California, New Mexico, and Nevada — where Trump’s workarounds violated the law but district judges have not stepped in to appoint U.S. attorneys.

This case is ultimately about whether the president can install U.S. attorneys indefinitely no matter how unqualified or corrupt or beholden to him they are, and in the process sideline the Senate and judges, to whom the law gives roles in checking the president’s powers in this regard.

What’s next?

Shortly after filing his lawsuit, Rogoff filed a motion for preliminary injunction seeking to invalidate his removal and to restore him to his position as interim U.S. attorney until the Senate confirms a permanent U.S. attorney. That puts the case on what should be a faster track to resolution, perhaps within weeks. That will largely depend on whichever judge ends up taking the case. It won’t be a local judge since they have an interest in the matter. Expect the 9th Circuit, which covers Washington state, to name an outside judge to hear the case.

But there’s one more wrinkle to this unprecedented case to bear in mind.

The federal judges in Seattle appear to have decided this is a fight they wanted to fight. They asked applicants for the interim position whether they would contest their anticipated firing by the president. Rogoff indicated he would, and they named him to the position. The speed with which Rogoff filed his lawsuit and motion for preliminary injunction, the quality of the complaint, and the caliber of the lawyers representing him all suggests this is going to be a hard fought, fully engaged case that ends up before the 9th Circuit and perhaps the Supreme Court.

The Retribution: Blue State Edition

The Trump administration is withholding an additional $1 billion in Medicaid funds from California and Minnesota based on spurious allegations of fraud.

Mahdawi Loses on Appeal

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a district court lacked jurisdiction when it ordered the release of pro-Palestinian advocate Mohsen Mahdawi from immigration detention, a decision could pave the way for him to be detained again, Reuters reports.

BBC Puts the Screws to Trump

In President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the BBC, a magistrate judge ruled that Trump must turn over to the broadcaster detailed financial information.

The Corruption: Pardons Edition

In an unprecedented expansion of White House clemency power, President Trump has issued pardons for companies, not just people, Bloomberg reports.

A Virtually Infinite Enemies List

At The Bulwark, Matt McManus chronicles the far-right’s ever-growing enemies list, with its special focus on racial minorities, feminists, and intellectuals.

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A Huge Clusterf***

The Trump administration’s Air Force One leak investigation targeting the New York Times is encountering severe turbulence already.

In an overnight filing, the Trump DOJ admitted to serious errors in how it has handled the case so far — and in a huge concession that it attempts to mask as reasonableness it has put on hold for two weeks all of the subpoenas aimed at NYT reporters.

The major errors by federal prosecutors in Manhattan are largely of their own making, a result of a rushed investigation intended to appease an outraged President Trump, embarrassed that the NYT exposed his Qatari-gifted 747 as having subpar missile defense capabilities compared to the existing fleet of Air Force One aircraft.

Now that the case has been unsealed, we have a much clearer picture of what happened. Let’s break it down:

New Subpoenas Revealed

This all kicked off when a total of five grand jury subpoenas were issued to NYT reporters. The feds successfully served three of them on reporters Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt. They were unable to serve subpoenas on reporters Tyler Pager and Adam Goldman.

But we learned yesterday that in addition to the grand jury subpoenas, the feds had also subpoenaed the phone records of the reporters from their phone providers. Or to put it more precisely, they sought toll records and subscriber
data for the phone numbers they believed to be associated with the reporters.

Feds Go After Reporters’ Families

The feds turned out to be at least partially mistaken about the reporters’ phone numbers, the NYT told the federal judge overseeing the case, because they actually targeted phone numbers of family members of the reporters, including:

• the mother of a reporter who is “a mental health professional with confidential client relationships.”

• the spouse of a reporter who is “the general counsel of a major law firm.”

• another spouse of a reporter.

In response, prosecutors vaguely waved at a “law enforcement database”:

Any subpoenas served for a phone number not used by one of the movants was a result of information in a law enforcement database indicating that the phone number was associated with the movant. If the Government determines that these phone numbers were not used by the movants, the Government will not pursue the corresponding subpoena(s).

More on the phone records subpoenas below.

Big Screwup #1

Second Circuit Court of Appeals precedent, which covers New York, establishes a reporter’s privilege and requires the government to meet certain elements to overcome that privilege, one of which is to show that the information it seeks from the reporter cannot be obtained from any other source.

The government appears to have not considered that precedent in this case, the NYT alleges, citing correspondence from the government:

The Government’s letter itself confirms that the Government did not even consider this Second Circuit precedent when it should have done so: before it issued the subpoenas. Instead, the Government apparently began evaluating the legality of the subpoenas after it began preparing its response to the Motion to Quash.

But don’t take the NYT’s word for it. Prosecutors essentially conceded the point last night when they told the judge that they’re going to hold off enforcing any of the subpoenas for two weeks. It’s a remarkable concession, given the stakes of the case:

[T]here are particular investigative steps that the Government is seeking to take in the near term that the Government anticipates will be material to this Court’s assessment of application of any qualified reporter’s privilege here.

Translation: Judge, we’re going to go do some more investigating to see if we can obtain elsewhere the information that we had hoped to obtain from the reporters because you’re going to ask us about whether we tried to get it elsewhere and we don’t have a good answer for you on that.

It would be a mistake, however, to read this as merely incompetence. This kind of rushed investigation, without even basic research on the legal terrain prosecutors are venturing into, reinforces what was obvious from the get-go: This isn’t about nabbing leakers (or not solely about that); it’s about retaliating against the NYT.

Big Screwup #2

The NYT alleges that prosecutors misled it and the court by failing to disclose the existence of the phone record subpoenas even as the litigation over the testimonial subpoenas was getting underway. Prosecutors deny that allegation and contest the timeline of events that the NYT offers. But regardless of the tussle over the exact timing and who knew what when, prosecutors now essentially concede that they erred on the law (emphasis mine):

Although Department policy authorized non-disclosure of the subpoenas, in light of additional caselaw that the Government identified after the issuance of the subpoenas, the Government determined on July 17 that it was appropriate to alert counsel to those subpoenas so that counsel could advance any arguments—regardless of merit—in furtherance of their motion.

As you can see, it’s a total clusterfuck. Marcy Wheeler aptly headlined her post on this mess: “SDNY Asks for Two Weeks to Unfuck the Leak Investigation It Fucked Up in Rush to Please Trump”

Where Does That Leave Us?

While there’s a schadenfreude in the Trump DOJ being exposed in public for having botched the case, this isn’t simply a matter of making errors or bumbling or being in over their heads. Rather, these kinds of errors, mistakes, irregularities, overreaches, improprieties, and abuses are a prerequisite for President Trump to be able to use the Justice Department as a sword against the disfavored and shield for the favored.

Following the law, abiding by precedent, adhering to internal procedures, demonstrating candor to the court, conducting oneself with professionalism — all of those things get in the way when you’re using DOJ for your retribution.

That is what has been exposed here.

For Your Radar ...

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) appears to be hinging his decision on whether to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general out of the Judiciary Committee not just on the ending the anti-weaponization slush fund but also on the IRS immunity given to President Trump.

Cornyn brought up both elements of the bogus settlement agreement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, Politico reports. “Those are the issues we’re continuing to discuss with the administration to see whether we can get a modification of the settlement agreement,” said Cornyn.

That’s a bigger demand than Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) wanting Congress to ban the slush fund in return for his vote to advance Blanche out of committee. It also requires a lump of flesh from Trump himself, even if he never deserved the immunity in the first place.

Cornyn doesn’t seem to be messing around: “Well, does he want to get confirmed or not?” the senator said when asked if he expected concessions from the White House.

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Retribution, Destruction, and Corruption

President Trump’s mass deportation operation continues to embody all of the worst elements of his second presidency: the retribution, the destruction, and the corruption, a lawless trifecta that subjugates immigrants while eroding the rights of American citizens.

The first handful of items in today’s Morning Memo captures different aspects of the lawlessness as manifested in developments from just the past few days. It comes as DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s supposedly “kinder and gentler” ICE is proving to be a short-lived election-year feint, not a real retrenchment. Two fatal ICE shootings within a week have a way of ripping away the mask.

While immigrants have borne the brunt of the Trump brutality, the administration has been eager to systematically use the powers of the state against protesters. The viciousness of the mass deportation operation has created its own feedback loop: spurring more protests which create more opportunities for the administration to crack down on dissenters. As you’ll see below, that has proven to be a very bad strategy once it gets to federal court.

Be sure to make it at least as far as the final item in the series, which is about the never-before-used Alien Terrorist Removal Court that the Trump administration tried to breathe life into last week.

Cases Against ICE Protesters Collapse

In a comprehensive review of hundreds of criminal cases against ICE protesters, the New York Times found that an extraordinary number of those cases have crumbled, especially when compared to the Justice Department’s typical 90% conviction rate:

The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them. …

The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.

FBI Called Off of ICE Probes

The FBI issued guidance to managers nationwide on Thursday that the bureau would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — although DOJ and DHS denied in a joint statement the change in policy, the NYT reports.

What’s the upshot? It’s not entirely clear.

The NYT casts the change as making it less likely that the FBI will turn up damaging evidence against immigration agents involved in confrontations with protesters, but FBI agents have been seriously constrained in their investigations since Trump’s mass deportation operation began, a point the NYT also makes: “Under the Trump administration, when ICE agents have shot and killed people, the F.B.I. has been assigned to scrutinize a narrow question: whether the agents were assaulted before the gunfire.”

So it seems at least possible that this policy shift gets the FBI out of the business of pursuing protesters at the behest of the White House — though its hard to imagine FBI Director Kash Patel having the spine to resist that kind of pressure in the future.

Stay tuned …

Protester Allegedly Shot by ICE Contractor

An employee of the contractor that runs the ICE Processing Center in Aurora, Colorado, was arrested in connection with the Thursday evening shooting of a protester outside of the detention facility.

Brandon Booth, 42, faces charges of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, attempted first-degree assault, felony menacing, and unlawful carrying of a concealed weapon in the shooting of the protester, who suffered non-fatal injuries to her lower body.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Houston: Video of ICE agents pursuing the van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo before they shot and killed him doesn’t readily show them using lights or sirens on their vehicles. White House border czar Tom Homan wasn’t ready to concede the point in an interview Sunday, but did allow: “If they didn’t activate the lights, then it — then there’s an issue there.”

• Florida: The Mexican national hit and killed by a semi truck while fleeing an encounter with ICE was legally in the country on a tourist visa and had planned to return to his home country on Saturday, according to an account given by his wife that has not been independently confirmed.

• Maine: DHS still continues to refuse to release the name of the ICE agent involved in the fatal shooting of Colombian national Johan Guerrero last week, part of a pattern of concealing the identities of officers involved in shootings. In a ironic twist, DHS provided a statement to the NYT on this practice — but “would not identify the person who sent the statement.”

Sign of the Times

Politico crashed a boozy yacht party thrown in D.C. by the Mass Deportation Coalition that drew former GOP Reps. Steve King (IA) and Tom Tancredo (CO) and former officials from ICE and DOJ, including the pardoned coup plotter Jeffrey Clark.

Medicaid -> ICE -> Palantir

ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn’t supposed to have with Palantir, according to new court filings reviewed by NPR.

Meet the Alien Terrorist Removal Court

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court has existed since 1996, but it was never used until last week.

Seamus Hughes of Court Watch broke the news Saturday of its first use — and the creation of a bare-bones court website.

In its first order, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court rejected for now the Trump administration’s application to remove an unidentified individual but gave it a chance to supplement the record, noting that “the Government could benefit from the opportunity for more thoughtful consideration.”

The best reporting and analysis on this new development:

• Politico: Trump administration activates never-before-used ‘alien terrorist’ deportation court

• Chris Geidner: The Trump admin DOJ went to a secretive deportation court this week

• Steve Vladeck: Here’s what we know, and why we should (and shouldn’t) be worried.

Judge: Firing of FEMA CFO Was Unlawful

In a very important decision on the scope of the president’s powers to fire civil servants, U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff of Alexandria, Virginia, ruled from the bench Friday that the termination of FEMA’s chief financial officer Mary Comans last year without a hearing or the chance to transfer to another job was unlawful, Politico reports.

The Corruption: In All Its Dimensions

• IRS: Kenneth Kies, the Treasury Department’s top tax policy official who was appointed by President Trump, “was forced out of his job after he warned that the White House was at risk of violating a federal law prohibiting senior officials’ involvement in IRS audits,” the WSJ reported.

• DOJ: The Trump administration continues to pull back across the board on prosecuting corporate crime, the WSJ reports.

Quote of the Day

“Well, it has — it has a lot, and you know it has a lot of capability, but as I understand it, in about a month or so, they’re going to send it to have it be maxed out. So they’re going to be sending it, and they’ll have it be maxed out.”—President Trump, apparently conceding that his beloved Qatari Force One doesn’t have all the capabilities of its predecessors (a fact reported by the NYT that led to its reporters being subpoenaed in a leak investigation)

Mullin Threatens to Jail Election Officials

Following up on President Trump’s inane speech on election security, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials Friday with jail time if they don’t comply with the administration’s demands to change election policies.

2026 Ephemera

• Maine-Senate: In the race to replace Graham Platner, Troy Jackson has all but locked up the Democratic nomination after dominating county-level meetings this weekend, which prompted his top rivals — Dr. Nirav Shah, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and Dan Kleban — to drop out of the race.

• Nebraska-Senate: After independent Dan Osborn qualified for the ballot on Thursday, Democratic nominee Cindy Burbank withdrew from the race on Friday, clearing the way for Osborn to have a clean shot at unseating Sen. Pete Ricketts (R).

• Minnesota-Governor: Far-right conspiracist Mike Lindell, President Trump’s pick in next month’s GOP primary for governor, is registered to vote in Texas, not Minnesota, the Star Tribune reported.

DoD Withheld Iran War Casualty Figures

The Friday attack by Iran in Jordan that killed two U.S. service members and left a third missing and presumed dead was not the first attack in the country during the Iran War. At least three other Iranian attacks in Jordan in the week before the Friday attack injured dozens of American service members and damaged helicopters — but the Pentagon did not disclose those attacks or the casualties and damage they caused, the NYT reports.

New World Record in the Mile

Perhaps overshadowed by the final weekend of the World Cup (congrats, Spain), Britain’s Josh Kerr broke the 27-year old world record for the mile:

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Inside Rubio’s Confab on Lefty Terrorism

The Trump administration’s effort to create a new bogeyman of left-wing terrorism has now resulted in a major policy change unveiled by Secretary of State Marco Rubio Thursday in a speech to officials from more than 60 countries whom he gathered in D.C.

Declaring Islamic terrorism “severely diminished,” Rubio said the counterterrorism apparatus must be retooled to confront the supposed threat from “far-left terror,” Reuters reports.

“We can and we must identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it,” Rubio said, marking a dramatic shift away from the post-9/11 posture of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

To this point, the administration has aimed to elevate political protestors and progressive groups and activists into a vast far-left “antifa” conspiracy at home — and link it up with imagined fellow travelers abroad with wild and unsubstantiated claims of international coordination and connections. Establishing a (flimsy) link to international terrorism — a related effort which has been spearheaded by White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka and Rubio — seems intended to invoke counterterrorism powers under U.S. law that simply don’t exist for combating domestic terrorism.

What made Rubio’s remarks especially notable was how he broke new policy ground in prioritizing the purported left-wing terror threat of MAGA fever dreams while deprioritizing the decades-old real-world threat from radical Islamists. Later in the day, Rubio announced a new visa restriction policy “targeting far-left terrorist and other aligned groups.”

Rubio’s speech was a tour de force of disinformation, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and guilt by associations. He threw around terms like “Marxist” and “communist” while baselessly alleging that Iranian proxy networks are “intimately tied” to leftist militant groups and claiming that the George Floyd protests was left-wing terrorism that had been swept under the rug.

“They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist or Marxist,” Rubio said, according The Guardian. “It’s always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice liberation — an overwhelming need to tear down, to wreck, what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world through violence and through terror.”

But it was White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller who trafficked in the most reductionist and dehumanizing rhetoric in his speech to the gathered foreign officials:

The invention of a new turbocharged left-wing terrorism threat is bad enough by itself, but the real aim is to then conflate it with domestic political opposition to Trump and the exercise of constitutionally protected rights to dissent and protest. It’s a regime-protection racket, but now it’s coming at the additional expense of redirecting U.S. counterterrorism resources from actual threats to made-up ones.

The Latest on the Fatal Ice Shootings …

Maine

• The ICE agent who shot and killed Columbia national Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in a Monday traffic stop has been identified as David Brouillette, an Army veteran with an alleged history of mental illness, violent outbursts, and domestic abuse, some of his family members told the AP.

• Brouillette’s ex-wife Ashley told the Portland Press Herald that he called her after the shooting to ask her to vouch for his character and that she refused. “He was asking me to lie for him and to cover for his character,” Ashley Brouillette said. “I told him that I was not going to lie for him. And then he tried to say that it was a justified shooting because the guy tried to hit him with his car.”

Houston

• The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the Mexican national shot and killed by ICE in a July 7 traffic stop, says the baggies found in the work van he was driving didn’t contain meth but salt. “Our understanding is that this was granulated salt, which is paired with lemon and water as a homemade electrolyte mix used by outdoor workers in extreme Texas heat, not methamphetamine or any other illicit substance,” said an attorney representing the family.

• Controversial Houston U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz issued an unusual public statement commenting on the case that appeared intended in part to tamp down public outrage but at the same time was heavily coded in anti-immigrant language and also mentioned “several small bags of a white, crystal-like substance” in the van.

• In an interview on CNN, the Houston district attorney cast doubt on the FBI’s suspicion that meth was in the van: “Based on the information we have regarding who Mr. Salgado was, and just eyeballing the evidence as it was collected yesterday, we don’t believe that they are drugs,” Sean Teare said.

Quote of the Day

“It doesn’t matter whether or not there were drugs. It has no bearing on why Mr. Salgado and the other three individuals were targeted. It has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the use of force that killed Mr. Salgado was justified.”—Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare

Sign of the Times

President Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator is under investigation for allegedly using his inside knowledge of the president’s speeches to win more than $100,000 on prediction markets. Gabriel Perez, who is on unpaid administrative leave, is in talks with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to settle the settle allegations against him, ABC News reports.

Shrewd Audience

A quick anecdote from seeing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey last night. I’ll leave the reviews to others since movie blockbusters aren’t really my thing, but there was a memorable moment before the film even started.

It wasn’t clear at first if what was on screen was a trailer or an ad. It featured a slideshow of striking visuals with voiceovers intended to represent a diverse range of ordinary folks asking thoughtful and sometimes hard questions about AI. At the end, it was revealed to be an advertisement when the Anthropic and Claude logos appeared on screen — and the small audience in the theater immediately and spontaneously booed all around me.

It was especially striking because it didn’t feel in the moment like a blanket anti-AI reaction, but a more nuanced rejection of the pretense than any AI company could purport to act as a convener or moderator of the AI debate. Or maybe it was both.

This was a D.C. audience, perhaps inured to the constant barrage of reputational ads that target audiences in the nation’s capital, but even that sort of hard-boiled skepticism is more than I usually see in public settings. This is the ad in question, which you may have already seen because it’s gotten quite a bit of coverage.

See You Back Here Monday

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The Bizarre Todd Blanche Split Screen

Perhaps never before has a nominee for attorney general come before the Senate with as clear of a track record already doing the job as Todd Blanche.

But it turns out that GOP senators — the only ones who can block Blanche’s confirmation — don’t need to look that far back to assess his work.

An unpredicted confluence of events Wednesday produced an extraordinary split screen, with the Justice Department continuing to operate as a rogue federal law enforcement apparatus even as Blanche spent most of the day testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Each of these developments was significant news in their own right, but the timing was remarkable and accentuated the whistling-past-the graveyard approach of GOP senators to Blanche’s confirmation:

Scheming to Avoid Senate Confirmation of U.S. Attorneys

In Washington state, Blanche immediately fired the interim U.S. attorney who had just been unanimously appointed by the federal judges there less than an hour earlier. The firing of Roger Rogoff — at least the third such dismissal of judge-appointed interim U.S. attorneys — sets up the potential for the first litigation directly challenging the president’s power to fire court-appointed U.S. attorneys.

For months, there have been rumblings that the federal judges in Seattle were looking for an appointee who would be willing to file suit if fired and had gone as far as formally asking candidates about their willingness to do so. Rogoff has retained an employment law firm, and in interviews after he was fired indicated he was considering challenging his termination.

“The president gets to choose his US attorney, but only with the advice and consent of the Senate,” Rogoff told Bloomberg. “We have a situation that is untenable, not constitutional, and not legal.”

Separately, in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Blanche had previously fired a court-appointed interim U.S. attorney, he named a local attorney Theo Stamos as the new first assistant U.S. attorney, which effectively makes her the top federal prosecutor there because the U.S. attorney position remains vacant. Stamos, formerly elected county prosecutor as a Democrat, has no prior federal prosecution experience.

All of this scheming is part of the Trump administration’s effort to bypass Senate confirmation of U.S. attorneys in mostly blue states, where the Senate’s blue slip tradition gives home state senators of the opposing party an effective veto over U.S. attorney nominees. Historically, that has led to accommodations by both sides to find consensus candidates, but President Trump prizes loyalty above comity.

Running Air Force One Leak Probe Out of White House

President Trump’s freakout over the New York Times’ reports on the inadequacies of his beloved new Qatari-gifted Air Force One has inadvertently revealed the extent to which Blanche is content to let the White House run DOJ.

Not only was FBI Director Kash Patel running the investigation from the White House last Friday, as previously reported, he was doing so alongside Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, CNN reports: “Patel posted up in an office next to Wiles’ for roughly seven hours, as the two established what one source referred to as a ‘war room’ in the West Wing.”

As part of the investigation, some officials were asked to turn over their phones to investigators on White House grounds, CNN reports. Investigators have even sought out Secret Service agents who accompanied Trump on the trip to the NATO summit in Turkey that exposed the aircraft’s lack of missile defense capabilities compared to its predecessors, per the NYT.

The NYT report mirrors CNN’s account in making the unprecedented revelation that Wiles is “personally” leading the investigation with Patel.

One of the first investigative steps — which Blanche personally approved, he testified at his confirmation hearing — was to subpoena four NYT reporters over two stories about the deficiencies of the aircraft. The NYT moved yesterday to quash those subpoenas in filings that remain under seal.

Blanche Direct Report and Top ‘Antifa’ Prosecutor Is a Jan. 6er

In an exclusive report, TPM’s Josh Kovensky revealed for the first time — more than five years after the fact — that an assistant U.S. attorney in a Trump 2020 baseball cap with a star-spangled face mask marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Trump DOJ confirmed that Brian W. Lynch “was present but never entered the capitol, left the grounds after a brief period, and did not commit and was never accused of any violation of law.”

One photo obtained by TPM shows Lynch in what Michael Romano, who was a deputy chief in the DOJ’s since-disbanded Capitol Siege Section, says was a restricted area around the Capitol:

Lynch was appointed earlier this year to co-lead Joint Task Force Vanguard, which is taking the lead at DOJ in targeting left-wing opponents of Trump in a sweeping administration-wide effort to inflate the threat of “antifa” and categorize political opposition, protest, and civil disobedience as “domestic terrorism.” It comes in response to Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum (NPSM-7) issued in September.

Lynch reports directly to Blanche.

Combined with the FBI’s apparent attempt to muddy the water in the fatal ICE shooting in Houston last week (see below), the series of developments yesterday made the Blanche confirmation hearing seem almost surreal, with Blanche assuring senators he would continue to always do the right thing even as wrongdoing was on full display outside of the committee room.

Trump Ritualistic Humiliation Syndrome

Jay Clayton is the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney in Manhattan, a former chair of the SEC, and the president’s nominee as director of national intelligence, a role that, among many other sensitive duties, includes protecting U.S. elections from foreign interference.

In short, Clayton is a grown-ass man who should know better, but he, like so many Trump acolytes before him, willingly submits himself to the ritualistic humiliation that Trump inflicts on all his supporters: pretend that Trump won the 2020 election:

Quote of the Day

“This is a concerted effort of death by a thousand cuts. Every day is another battle, but the war that we’re fighting is to maintain our democracy.”—Ingham County, Michigan, Clerk Barb Byrum (D), on Trump’s expanding whole-of-government effort to target free and fair elections

Trump Out of the Loop on ICE Traffic Stops

After two fatal ICE shootings in two weeks, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and the acting director of ICE made the decision Monday evening to halt traffic stops by immigrant agents nationwide — but no one briefed President Trump on the decision, the WSJ reports: “He only caught wind of it from critical coverage on cable TV and furious outside allies, who took to social media to register their disapproval.”

That led to Trump’s social media post Wednesday morning overruling Mullin’s decision and resuming traffic stops — and Mullin’s ignoble social media post of his own last night, weakly declaring: “President Trump and I are on the same page.”

Beyond Gross

It appears that the FBI in Houston has taken unusual steps to muddy the waters around the fatal ICE shooting Monday of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Claiming to have observed on the day of the shooting what appeared to be baggies of meth in the work van that Salgado Araujo was driving when he was shot, an FBI agent on Tuesday — a week after the shooting — sought a search warrant from a federal magistrate.

The search warrant application, which includes photos of the alleged meth, appears relatively normal on its face and not obviously improper (although this line jumps out: “The United States is currently gathering all facts related to this incident, including what may have caused the occupants of the vehicle to flee.”)

Where things get weird is that the search warrant application, which was filed under seal as is normal, was very quickly unsealed, which led to widespread news coverage yesterday that the FBI had found suspected drugs in the van. It’s not clear from the public docket in the case how the search warrant application came to be unsealed.

More temperate news outlets — wary of being used to try to justify the use of force, however strained — were careful to note how unusual it was for a search warrant to be unsealed so quickly at this stage of a case:

• CNN: “While not unheard of, it is unusual for an FBI search warrant to be publicly available during an active and high-profile investigation of this nature.”

• NYT: “Search warrant applications are usually kept under seal. A review of other applications in the Southern District of Texas found that they are rarely unsealed so rapidly.”

What’s tricky about writing about this — and it was obviously difficult to navigate for other news outlets yesterday — was the presence of illegal drugs would not justify (i) the initial stop (ICE agents didn’t know about the alleged drugs and were in fact targeting another immigrant who was not even present in the van); or (ii) the use of deadly force.

Taken together, these developments reinforces a point I made Monday after the fatal ICE shooting in Maine: There is a widespread misimpression that the FBI is working to get to the bottom of these ICE shootings and charge immigration agents criminally, if warranted. That’s simply not true. The FBI is not only not investigating ICE, it’s actively investigating the people ICE shot.

‘ICE Is Out of Control’

Radley Balko: “In 20 years covering policing, I’ve never seen a government agency thumb its nose at the very concept of justice, rights and the rule of law the way D.H.S. and ICE have over the last 18 months.”

Because Iran Is Going So Well?

CBS News: “Military planners have in recent weeks examined a range of options for possible action against [Cuba], including an Army-led air assault involving thousands of U.S. soldiers to be carried out by the 101st Airborne Division, the only unit trained for such a task, according to multiple U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions.”

We’re So Cooked: U.S. Mint Edition

Despite legal restrictions on placing the visages of living people on official currency, the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia will begin producing commemorative coins with President Trump’s mug emblazoned on them that will be available as soon as this fall.

“It won’t include any gold or precious metals but will have a gold-like finish,” the WSJ reports.

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What I Got Wrong

Writing about politics every day inevitably leads to an internal mental landscape full of regrets, self-recrimination, and second-guessing about how you covered the news, what you skipped that you shouldn’t have, and what you plain got wrong.

I had anticipated only last month that Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general would “cue up the mother of all confirmation battles” and “sets up a potentially epic confirmation battle.” So far, that really has not come to fruition, even though this is most important nomination the Senate has ever considered

As the confirmation hearing began this morning, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed poised to confirm Blanche, with ostensible holdouts Thom Tillis (NC) and John Cornyn (TX) creating a bare modicum of drama but giving themselves plenty of room to jump on board the Blanche bandwagon when the time comes to vote.

The nomination is most hung up on the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund, with Tillis insisting on a vote on standalone legislation to ban it before he’ll vote for Blanche. Note that he’s only demanding a vote, not passage.

This is one of those patented Capital Hill smokescreens, where a senator reduces a complicated, wide-ranging, multi-dimensional issue to a single high-profile element of that issue — then offers an easy way to talk him off the ledge on it. These kinds of maneuvers are so transparently about not taking a stand that I can’t believe they still work to fool anyone, reporter or voter. But clearly they still do, because they remain an invidious part of congressional politics.

But Tillis and Cornyn — whose political careers Trump ended — deserve no more scorn that the rest of Senate Republicans, who know exactly what Blanche has done and have a chance to put a stop to him doing any more of it. As my colleague John Light puts it, Republican senators are voting on the future prospects of Trump’s ongoing retribution campaign.

For a year and half at DOJ — including as acting attorney general for the last few months — Blanche has unmistakably shown who he is and what he will do if confirmed. He has been nothing less than a travesty: destroying the independence and professionalism of the Justice Department; capitulating to the president and letting the White House run DOJ; abusing the powers of his office for the president’s personal benefit; and hijacking the criminal justice system to use it as a tool of political retribution.

But sure, tell us more about how the slush fund is a bridge too far for you.

My error in anticipating the mother of all confirmation battles wasn’t so much misplaced confidence in GOP senators doing the right thing. It was in under-crediting the fact that Blanche, having already been confirmed by the Senate as deputy attorney general, can stay on as acting attorney general for the rest of Trump’s term of office, even if the Senate rejects his nomination. That creates a perverse dynamic where GOP senators would have to assume all of the risk of rising up against Trump but have very little to show for their efforts in the end.

And so GOP senators sit back once again — abdicating their constitutional roles and prioritizing their own self-preservation — while watching democracy slip away at an ever quickening pace.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Grand Juries: “Federal judges are increasingly peering under the hood at the Trump-led Justice Department’s use of grand juries aimed at well-known adversaries of President Donald Trump,” Politico reports. “And they don’t like what they’re seeing.”

• DOJ Case Quotas: In a blunt, statistics-driven, quantity-over-quality move, Aakash Singh, the associate deputy attorney general overseeing US attorneys’ offices, has announced the imposition of case quotas on line prosecutors, Bloomberg reports.

• Law Firm Subpoenas: In a convoluted and head-scratching move, the Trump DOJ is subpoenaing the nine law firms that struck deals with the White House plus four other firms that fought that Trump executive order, the NYT reports. The latest development comes after the American Bar Association, in its lawsuit against the administration for attacking law firms, sought to force the White House to turn over internal documents and communications among it, Trump personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn, and Stephen K. Bannon. The most charitable explanation for the DOJ move is that this falls under the rubric of “the best defense is a good offense,” but it still doesn’t really make any sense.

Is ICE Really Halting Traffic Stops?

Reports yesterday — confirmed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) — that ICE was halting traffic stops nationwide in the wake of two fatal shootings by federal agents in Houston and Maine were quickly contradicted this morning by President Trump in a social media post:

… we CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.

The initial decision immediately seemed like a sop to Collins, who is in a tough re-election campaign. But only momentarily.

“It’s not a policy change. It’s a temporary pause,” Trump administration border czar Tom Homan told Fox News.

Even that was too much of a concession for Trump.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Florida: A Mexican national running from an “encounter” with ICE at a gas station was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer on a nearby roadway.

• Mexico: President Claudia Sheinbaum is demanding U.S. criminal investigations into the deaths 14 Mexican nationals who have died in detention centers and three who have been killed in ICE operations since President Donald Trump took office, the WaPo reports.

• Targeting ICE protesters: A new report documents 412 verified incidents of the “misuse” of “less-lethal weapons” against ICE protesters from June 2025 through May 2026 that led to 203 injuries, including blindings, traumatic brain injuries, lacerations, fractures and contusions, according to the Guardian.

The Corruption: ‘Development Fee’ Edition

A $2 million “nonrefundable development fee” made last year to President Trump’s holding company by a South Korean company “illustrate[s] the minefield Mr. Trump has created by maintaining personal financial ties with nearly 30 different business ventures with foreign counterparts worldwide — unlike any other president in modern American history,” the NYT reports.

In Hegseth’s Navy, Women Need Not Apply

NYT:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of seven senior Navy officers, five of whom are women or people of color, to two-star admiral rank, current and former defense officials said.

The highly unusual move means that for the first time in more than a decade, no female active-duty naval officers are likely to be promoted to admiral this year, officials said.

Musk’s $1 Million Checks Broke Election Law

The Wisconsin Elections Commission found last week that Elon Musk likely broke state law when he handed out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election and referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office for possible prosecution, the AP reports.

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‘Now We Have All the Evidence’

The first hints that the Trump administration might be softening its position of refusing to cooperate with Minnesota’s investigations into the three shootings by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge emerged on June 22.

In its unusual lawsuit against DOJ and DHS in federal court in D.C. seeking to obtain evidence that the feds refused to share, the state of Minnesota asked for filing deadlines in the case to be pushed back 11 days until July 6 because state and federal law enforcement agencies had “recently reengaged in discussions about the prospect of mutual information sharing.”

Then on June 30, both sides jointly asked for another much larger extension of 45 days, until Aug. 20, “in light of ongoing discussions … about the prospect of mutual information sharing” between state and federal law enforcement.

We now know that sometime in the past two weeks the Trump administration finally relented and coughed up what state prosecutors are suggesting was the whole enchilada of evidence gathered by the feds in the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.

The evidence includes the car Good was driving when she was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. It also includes body cam footage and statements by federal agents across all three cases.

“The wonderful thing is now we have all the evidence,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a press conference in Minneapolis yesterday announcing the breakthrough:

As part of the information sharing, Minnesota law enforcement reciprocated by sharing with federal law enforcement the evidence it had independently gathered in the three cases.

The Trump administration has not publicly acknowledged that it has come down from its maximalist position of withholding evidence from state investigators. Even after Moriarty’s press conference, Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen “refused to confirm any cooperation agreement between state and federal agencies,” according to Steve Schleicher, an attorney representing the Pretti family who met for an hour with Rosen yesterday afternoon.

It took a virtually unprecedented lawsuit by a state against the federal government to puncture what had effectively been a cover-up of the shootings — which given everything we know about the Trump administration would have been directed from and by the White House. What we don’t know is why the White House relented, if, in fact, it did.

The Associated Press suggests the breakthrough came after, ironically, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office sought evidence from the Minnesota
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension about its investigation into the shooting of Sosa-Celis, which led to the state indictment of ICE agent Christian Castro. In a June 3 letter filed in the D.C. case, BCA superintendent Drew Evans told federal prosecutors that the state would share its evidence if the feds would share theirs.

While this breakthrough is huge and gives state prosecutors a fighting chance to complete full investigations and make sound charging decisions, a lot has already been lost that could come back to bite any attempted prosecutions of federal agents.

There’s little indication that federal law enforcement fully investigated the three shootings so while the evidence the feds do have is critical it may be incomplete. In addition, time was wasted. Leads that might have been followed if the evidence was available may be harder to follow now.

If any federal agents are eventually charged, they may use the fact of the contested investigation in their defense, raising questions about the delays, the chain of custody of the evidence, and other anomalies that wouldn’t have occurred if the feds hadn’t circled the wagons and refused to cooperate.

It’s also difficult to draw any broad lessons from this episode that might apply in future cases, especially after fatal ICE shootings over the past week in Texas and Maine — other than the obvious: Minnesota’s elected Democratic officials presented a united front and took aggressive action to assert their rights to investigate state crimes and protect their prerogatives in our federal system.

For Your Radar …

In a notable departure from recent ICE shootings, DHS said the agent in the fatal shooting of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, in Maine yesterday fired after “fearing for public safety” — rather than fearing for his own life.

I’m not sure what to make of this exactly, especially given that DHS provided a separate explanation to Congress saying the driver had “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement.”

Stay tuned …

Quote of the Day

“I heard agony. I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”—Mary Hayes, a witness to the fatal ICE shooting in Maine, who described seeing a screaming woman on her knees, next to a young girl.

ICYMI …

This story last week from Bolt is newly relevant: “Maine Lawsuit is Testing the Boundaries of Suing Federal Immigration Agents”

Judge Blasts Trump’s IRS ‘Settlement’

You’ve seen by now that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams eviscerated President Trump, his lawyers, and top Justice Department officials for Trump’s collusive lawsuit against the IRS and the purported “settlement” of the case which produced the since-abandoned $1.776 slush fund and the still-live federal tax immunity for Trump.

I don’t have much to add except to note that Williams went as far as she could given the limits of the law — sanctioning Trump’s lawyers and sending her order to bar authorities in two states that have open complaints against two of the three top DOJ officials, Todd Blanche and Stan Woodward — but that is still not enough and won’t be enough until Republicans in Congress begin to put country above party and prevent the wholesale looting of the Treasury.

There is every reason to think Trump and Blanche will find some other way to compensate Jan. 6ers other than the aborted slush fund.

Good Read

Via NOTUS, Rapper Boosie Badazz is in arbitration with TPM faves Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after he paid them $600,000 to work on obtaining him a pardon from President Trump. They allegedly told him they had secured him a pardon, but it never materialized. Now they say they’re effectively bankrupt.

Quick Reminder

I’ve heard from some of you who have already contributed to the TPM Journalism Fund during our annual fund drive, and some who have given and plan to give more. Thank you! Really!

If you haven’t taken a moment to contribute yet, it’s a streamlined process intended to get you in and out quick. If you can swing it, we’d sure appreciate it. Click here.

Don’t You Dare Say the New Air Force One Has No Clothes

Just 18 months into Trump II, the president feels the confidence and swagger to demand that grand jury subpoenas be served immediately upon the nation’s leading newspaper for reporting that his beloved new Qatari-gifted Air Force One doesn’t haven the same defensive capabilities as the older models.

In a striking move to intimidate and coerce a free press, FBI agents were at the homes of New York Times reporters with the grand jury subpoenas Friday night, only a day after newspaper’s second big scoop of the week on the airplane’s deficiencies. But as stark as it was an overreach of government power, it was also a fit of personal pique from a thin-skinned president who pushed hard to rush the aircraft into service even if meant reduced capabilities.

One of the ironies of the story is that initial reports were that FBI Director Kash Patel was summoned to the White House Friday because of irritation that he was planning to use a government plane that day yet again to fly to go see his country music singer girlfriend perform, this time in Chicago. Subsequent reporting from the NYT itself revealed that the White House put the screws to Patel in that meeting to investigate the leaks that produced the NYT’s scoops (emphasis mine):

Mr. Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than F.B.I. headquarters — a major departure from historical practice. Mr. Patel also briefed senior administration officials on the investigation, two people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.

Of course, both versions of why Patel was summoned to the White House can be true — and given Trump’s way of doing business they plausibly are both true. The eager-to-please Patel — under the gun for his travels to the point that Republican senators are becoming irritated — was an easy mark for Trump to strong-arm into launching a leak investigation and targeting his nemesis, the NYT.

The speed of the subpoenas to the NYT was breathtaking and undermined DOJ claims that the leakers were the target, not the NYT. The earliest the investigation could have started was Wednesday, after the first NYT story on Trump taking the old Air Force One back from the NATO summit in Turkey, before transferring to the new one in the U.K. (pictured above) for the transatlantic flight home. The subpoenas call for the reporters — Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt — to appear before a grand jury in Manhattan this Wednesday.

To ramp up an investigation up that quickly and begin serving subpoenas stretches the bounds of the space-time continuum under which the Justice Department has historically operated in almost any circumstance. It was especially striking given long-standing DOJ policies, since dispensed with under Trump II, that made seeking evidence from journalists an investigative avenue of last resort.

While there are no substantial legal impediments to the feds subpoenaing journalists, coercing testimony from reporters was typically treated gingerly, researched thoroughly, came after other investigative techniques proved fruitless, and was made at the highest levels of the DOJ, not the White House. The abbreviated time frame between the first NYT story and Friday’s subpoenas suggests the Trump DOJ is starting the investigation by coercing reporters to testify.

The contrast isn’t just a stark sign of how much has changed or pearl-clutching over norms. The facts give away the game: The NYT is a Trump target here. It is not merely incidental to the leak investigation.

At a minimum, targeting the NYT gives him a chance to take some of the political heat off by flexing his executive powers and avoiding the appearance of being on the defensive over having undermined national security and the continuity of government by using an inferior aircraft. But much more is at stake than that.

I don’t know how to say it any more clearly: The president of the United States is ordering investigations, being run from the White House, of the nation’s leading newspaper in order to intimidate it into ceasing to publish stories that are personally and politically embarrassing to him.

This is all of the worst fears of a Trump II presidency coming home to roost.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Politico: U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly of D.C., a Trump appointee, reluctantly granted the Trump DOJ request to drop the seditious conspiracy convictions of high-ranking members of the far-right Proud Boys, but not before taking one last shot at conveying to posterity the seriousness of the Jan. 6 attack.

• Bloomberg: Top Trump DOJ officials plan to drop charges against alleged $722 million crypto fraudster Matthew Goettsche, who was indicted in Trump I and was scheduled to go to trial in October. Even then-acting New Jersey U.S. Attorney Alina Habba resisted pressure to drop the case:

But after further advocacy from Goettsche’s team earlier this year, senior DOJ official Aakash Singh convened a meeting in Washington last month between the defense and prosecutors to discuss a resolution. … The mediation culminated in the deputy attorney general’s office decision that New Jersey’s new US attorney, Robert Frazer, would back away from criminal charges while still seeking to recoup a portion of investors’ losses, the people added.

Scenes From a Gerontocracy

The sudden and unexpected death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), 71, from an aortic dissection was followed this weekend by the barely convincing written statement from hospitalized and soon-to-retire Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), 84, that he is still alive and functioning.

Lindsey Graham’s Real Legacy

President Trump gives the late Sen. Lindsey Graham a lifetime score of 99 out of 100:

The Corruption: Gov’t Contracts Edition

• DHS: Inspector General Joseph Cuffari has found evidence that Corey Lewandowski may have been involved in improperly awarding government contracts while he served as a unpaid senior aide to then-Secretary Kristi Noem, the WSJ reports:

The investigators are examining many of the contracts the department signed in Noem’s tenure, and department officials had been surprised at how involved Lewandowski was in the process, some of the people said. He personally signed specific contracts, according to people who reviewed those documents or had knowledge of the approvals, despite not technically serving as a full-time U.S. government official.

Lewandowski denies issuing contracts while at DHS and says he hadn’t been contacted about the ongoing investigation.

• Kennedy Center: Former project managers claiming whistleblower status have sent Congress internal documents that they say show how the performing arts venue bypassed government contracting norms in work carried out under President Trump, the NYT reports.

Must Listen

The New Yorker’s David Remnick interviews Atul Gawande, the author and Biden-era USAID official, on the astounding death toll since the Trump administration’s obliteration of the foreign aid agency and the difficulty of tracking mortality rates: “The U.S. was the provider of some of the best, highest-quality data in the world—out of U.S.A.I.D., which was dismantled.”

Marco Rubio: Viceroy of Venezuela

An essential read from the NYT on on how Marco Rubio effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources, and its government in a quasi-colonial arrangement since the U.S. capture of President Nicolás Maduro.

Breaking: Possible ICE Shooting in Maine

Authorities haven’t released any information yet on an incident this morning in Biddeford, Maine, but state Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau (D) said in a Facebook post that it was a fatal shooting and ICE was involved.

Piecing Together the Houston ICE Shooting

The NYT visual investigations team does its best with the limited footage available of the pursuit that ended in the ICE shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston last week.

Sign of the Times

Dave Matthews: “This father and grandfather who was murdered by ICE in Houston, Texas. Then they say he’s not even the guy they were looking for. Well then don’t pull the trigger you assholes. It just makes me mad. I want to send this to the memory of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo”
by u/CantStopPoppin in EyesOnIce

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A Case of Mistaken Identity

The ICE shooting of an unarmed immigrant in Houston — who had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years, raised a family, and had no known prior run-ins with the law — has turned from deeply troubling to acutely tragic as new details of the Tuesday incident have emerged.

The most dismaying new news is that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not the target of the traffic stop that ended in his shooting death. There was another man in the white work van that Salgado Araujo was driving whom ICE agents thought was one of the two men they were looking for — but that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

The other news that has come out over the past 24 hours paints a picture of ICE continuing to act with the flagrant disregard for good policing practices and without fear of real accountability:

• Despite a huge infusion of new federal funding and promises to issue body cameras, the agents involved in the incident were not wearing body cams at the time.

• In what is hard not to see as a convenient way of covering up the details of the shooting, ICE has detained the three other men who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s brother, and is pressuring them to self deport, a representative of the men’s families told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent.

• The three other men in the van told a lawyer that Salgado Araujo never veered toward federal agents and that a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle, the Washington Post reports. Attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra said he met with the three men individually while they were in detention and they separately gave similar accounts. “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra told the Post. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”

While video of some portions of the incident has emerged, none of it captures the shooting itself.

The Houston district attorney, which is investigating the incident, is consulting with local prosecutors in Minneapolis about the challenges of investigating an ICE shooting without cooperation from the federal government, the AP reports.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Chicago: A federal judge in Chicago who hauled a chastened U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutrous into court yesterday concluded that he had violated her order sealing a criminal case when he spoke publicly about it at a Main Justice press conference last week, but she concluded that he did not do so for “any nefarious purpose” and declined to impose sanctions against him.

• D.C.: Even Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), who has been unfailingly solicitous of FBI Director Kash Patel until this point, has concerns about Patel’s use of an FBI plane for personal travel and the FBI’s purchase of BMW vehicles. Grassley quietly sent Patel a letter in May inquiring about these issues, MS Now reports — though Grassley was quick to grouch about the reports of his minimal efforts at oversight.

Trump Fires EAC Commissioners

Just Security’s Aaron Blacksberg on the practical impact of President Trump’s unprecedented firing of all the remaining commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission, leaving it commissioner-less.

Tidbit of the Day

President Trump’s recent stock-trading frenzy was triggered by an appeal court’s August reversal of New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $500 million judgment against him. Off the hook for that penalty, Trump quickly began investing the $175 million he had sitting in a Schwab account as collateral for the appeal bond, the WSJ reports: “Within days, the Schwab account was snapping up and selling dozens of stocks as an automated trading strategy put the cash to work.”

The Emperor’s New Airplane

President Trump is essentially flying naked when he boards his cherished new Qatari-gifted Air Force One because it “lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities,” the NYT reports.

The White House and Air Force are dodging questions about Trump’s push to rush the airplane into service before it was thoroughly retrofitted for the job of protecting the nation’s head of state while he travels.

UPDATE: TPM Journalism Fund Drive

Folks, we’ve gotten off to a rip-roaring start in our annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. It launched Tuesday with a goal of $500,000, and we’ve already crested $200,000 in the first three days and change. Still a ways to go, but a fantastic way to start. Thank you!

The early success was helped by our single biggest contribution ever to the TPM Journalism Fund: $20,000. But the first three days still looked like what we have seen in past drives: broad-based support from readers giving what they can, which ranges from single-digit contributions to the occasional five-digit boost.

The sooner we can hit our mark, the quicker I can stop pitching you. So as the week ends, please consider taking just a moment to pitch in now and support our work. I and the rest of the team could not be more appreciative for your support.

Good Weekend Reads

• TPM’s Josh Marshall: Why the Democratic Party Has No ‘Base’ and Why That Matters

• Off Message’s Brian Beutler: How Democratic voters began to question, and ultimately lost faith in, their party’s establishment: a comprehensive history.

See Ya Monday

Time to Pay Up, Bub

President Trump’s last-ditch bid to avoid having to cough up $5 million to pay the judgement that E. Jean Carroll won against him for sexual abuse and defamation was rejected by an appeals court.

The late-evening denial by the Second Circuit came after the trial judge earlier in the day ordered the court clerk to disburse to Carroll the money Trump had deposited with the court, plus some $800,000 in accrued interest.

In an accompanying opinion, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Manhattan accused Trump of “stalling” the case for years before declaring it was time for Trump to pay up:

Carroll has waited a long time, not so much for the money, but for the comeuppance Trump so richly deserves and has spent most of his life avoiding with the help of a family fortune, a endless string of enablers, and hardball litigation tactics.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Houston: The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the immigrant killed by ICE this week in Houston, is demanding an independent investigation at the same time the Houston district attorney is saying the feds have sidelined local officials from participating in any investigation.

• Eswatini: Eleven more migrants have been deported to the African country where they were immediately detained in its notorious Matsapha correctional facility, a U.S. lawyers told Reuters. “The arrivals ​bring to 29 the number sent to ​the southern African country under a $5.1 million ⁠agreement that has been challenged by lawyers ​who say deportees are being detained despite having ​already served sentences for crimes committed in the United States,” Reuters reports.

Judge Dugan Avoids Jail Time

Former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine but avoided any jail time for her conviction on a felony obstruction charge for shielding an immigrant from ICE agents in her courthouse last year.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Chicago: After a last-minute bid to avoid having to appear in federal court this morning was rejected by the judge, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutrous is set to have to explain why his public comments about a criminal case against reputed members of the Tren de Aragua gang didn’t violate the judge’s order sealing the case.

• Houston: Federal judges in the Southern District of Texas have appointed the virulently Islamophobic Aaron Reitz as interim U.S. attorney. “Islam is not compatible with Western Civilization,” Reitz declared this year, during his unsuccessful GOP primary campaign run for state attorney general, in an X post that remains live.

• Main Justice: The Trump DOJ has eschewed challenging mergers on antitrust grounds because of reticence from Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the department’s No. 3 official, Bloomberg reports:

He has taken an unusually active role in the work of the antitrust division compared to previous administrations, stifling merger litigation, according to people familiar with the matter. …

In meetings about antitrust issues, Woodward has questioned why the DOJ can’t simply stop reviewing deals and suggested that blocking a merger could violate a company’s constitutionally protected due process rights, according to some of the people, who are familiar with his remarks.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman surveys the states where election deniers are on the ballot this year to serve as top election officials: Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Vermont. They are all, of course, Republican candidates.

Platner Out

Graham Platner’s inevitable withdrawal came in a video posted last evening. Now Maine Democrats now have 18 days to try to salvage come kind of challenge to Sen. Susan Collins (R).

Hostilities With Iran Continue Into Day 2

With the ceasefire in in tatters, the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire overnight in the biggest escalation of hostilities since President Trump declared the Islamic republic’s “unconditional surrender” last month.

Criminalizing Dissent: International Edition

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invited senior ministers from more than 60 countries to a meeting in D.C. next week about the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism,” the WaPo reports, based on documents it reviewed.

The Trump administration has at various levels labeled left-wing opposition to the president as “domestic terrorism,” and has successfully brought criminal charges in at least one case.

White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka has been pushing the myth of a broader international union of left-wing terrorists, and the State Department meeting seems to fall in line with that push. A linkage to foreign terrorist groups “can unlock certain investigative tools,” such as surveillance, one U.S. counterterrorism official told the WaPo.

How Much Risk Does New AF1 Present?

At the Secret Service’s insistence, President Trump returned from the NATO summit in Turkey aboard the old Air Force One, not the fancy newly refurbished Qatari-donated one, seeming to confirm suspicions — despite White House denials — that the gifted plane was rushed into service without all of the necessary security features, the NYT reports:

But people briefed on the new plane’s capabilities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues, said the new plane does not have all the features of the older plane. The switch in the president’s aircraft when he departed Turkey was a precautionary measure made at the advice of the Secret Service and not because of a specific threat, they said.

RIP Bonnie Tyler

I don’t usually share purely pop music here, but the voice of Bonnie Tyler, who has died at 75 after an extended illness, still immediately transports me back to the first couple of years of high school, when her music was ubiquitous:

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Do Trump’s Bidding on Elections or Else …

In a pre-election blitz, the Trump administration has issued sweeping new threats to red and blue states alike if they don’t fall in line with the president on how to run their own elections:

• Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon sent similar letters to all 50 states and D.C. threatening election officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t take certain steps to crack down on the myth of noncitizen voting. Dhillon gave states five days to respond with details on how they intend to comply.

• FEMA has told states that they will lose 20% of their antiterrorism grants unless they transition to paper ballots, verify citizenship of voters and make other changes to election procedures, the NYT reports. The forced changes are part of the laundry list of dubious election rules that President Trump has pushed through executive order, proposed legislation, and endless misleading rhetoric.

The one-two punch of threatening criminal prosecution and making unrelated federal funding contingent unless states comply with Trump’s wishes represent a new level of coercion just four months before Election Day.

Trump’s previous efforts along these lines have been thoroughly rejected by federal courts on the obvious grounds that the Constitution leaves the running of federal election in the hands of the states and gives the president no authority in the election realm.

Some of the demanded changes at this late date, like switching to paper ballots, are absurdly impractical. Nearly all of the demands emerge from Trump’s relentless efforts to discredit free and fair elections, which has given rise to extensive conspiracizing on the right.

The latest moves are yet another way that Trump has harnessed the powers of the federal government to buttress his political position and seek retribution for his 2020 defeat.

In related news: Detroit election officials are pushing back against the DOJ’s plan to send voting monitors to the city for Michigan’s Aug. 4 primary.

Quote of the Day

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”—Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson (R), Utah’s top election official, on Harmeet Dhillon’s letter

Judge Quashes 2020 GA Election Subpoena

U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II, notably a Trump appointee, quashed a wide-ranging federal grand jury subpoena into the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia as too much, too late.

The subpoena for personal information on every county employee who worked on the 2020 election was “staggering” in its breadth, Ray ruled.

It was part of President Trump’s never-ending quest for retribution for his loss, a point that Ray made explicitly: “Thus, perhaps it makes sense that the DOJ, now unquestionably under the current President’s control, is seeking to identify individuals who might possess information or opinions in support of his claim that the 2020 Election was not legitimate.”

In a spicy footnote, Ray directed his scorn toward the DOJ’s tactic of using out-of-state prosecutors in the case, rather than the local U.S. Attorney’s Office: “To be clear, no evidence has been presented to the Court that the actual Grand Jury in the Northern District of Georgia seeks this information, as opposed to the out-of-district prosecutors who the DOJ has appointed to lead this inquiry who have served this Subpoena in the name of the Grand Jury.”

In the end, Ray based his decision to quash the subpoena on the rather narrow but sturdy contention that “the statute of limitations for any possible crime arising from the 2020 Election has long expired” and therefore the subpoena “would not lead to information that could be used to charge anyone with anything, at least not any viable charge.”

Inside the Fight Over MN Subpoenas

Documents from the intense fight over federal grand jury subpoenas of Democratic elected officials in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge are slowly being unsealed after U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz of Minneapolis quashed the subpoenas last month, Minnesota Public Radio reports.

The Trump DOJ engineered and defended the retaliatory subpoenas on the grounds that state elected officials were illegally interfering in ICE enforcement operations, an argument Judge Schiltz rejected: “The fact that connections between the information sought in the subpoenas and any possible criminal violation range from extremely weak to nonexistent only adds to the overwhelming evidence that these subpoenas were not issued to investigate, but to harass, coerce, and retaliate.”

ICE Shoots and Kills Houston Immigrant

An ICE agent shot and killed an undocumented Mexican national who had reportedly been in the United States for nearly 35 years during an attempted traffic stop arrest in Houston on Tuesday morning.

ICE, which has been notoriously unreliable in providing accurate details of shooting incidents, issued a statement from its acting director with an interesting caveat that seems like a nod to its troubling track record (emphasis mine): “From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”

The shooting is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office.

In an unrelated case in Nebraska last week, a Venezulean man pleaded guilty to one count of forcibly resisting arrest causing bodily injury as part of a plea agreement after the case against him for attempted murder of a federal officer fell apart. While DHS and federal prosecutors originally claimed that he had “violently attacked an ICE agent,” including choking her and slamming her head into the ground, video evidence of his arrest later contradicted those claims, Nebraska Public Radio reported.

The allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence,” U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said during sentencing, adding that he found the law enforcement reports “embellished” and “troubling.”

The Latest on Iran …

• NYT: U.S. Strikes Iran and Reimposes Sanctions in Retaliation for Tanker Attack

• WSJ: Trump Says Ceasefire With Iran Is Over After Latest Attacks

• NPR: New lawsuit alleges U.S. shared asylum application details with Iran

Trump Shakes NATO With New Threats

President Trump arrived at the NATO summit in Turkey and immediately resumed the bombast and threatening behavior that has weakened NATO to Vladimir Putin’s advantage:

• Trump reasserted his spurious claims to Greenland, saying “Greenland is very important for the U.S. but it’s not important for Denmark.” That prompted a strong reaction from Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen: “We are ready to defend every inch of NATO, including our own territory.”

• Trump improbably purported to halt U.S. trade with Spain.

What’s at Stake in Europe

One of the things I came away with from my trip last week to Denmark, where I got a good refresher on 20th century European history, was a new appreciation for how misguided America’s conceit about NATO is. The idea that Trump embodies isn’t new, but rather is the same self-serving notion that if we just leave NATO to its own devices we’ll get all of the benefits of the alliance without all of the cost.

That conceit is premised on the deeply flawed notion that NATO is a default arrangement, rather than the historical anomaly it is. Denmark, for instance, had a long history of maintaining neutrality, including during the First World War, until the cataclysm of the Second World War prompted it to become a founding member of NATO. For it’s part, Finland didn’t join NATO until 2023. There are innumerable other examples of how NATO represents a dramatic break from past statecraft on the continent.

The U.S. abandoning NATO now doesn’t mean Europe will revert to a 1914 mindset; too many economic, cultural, and political threads have been sewn together in the post-WWII period for it to revert to that arrangement. But it is a distinctly American myopia to think Europe will stand pat, won’t evolve on its own as it manages all of its own competing interests, makes it own internal compromises, and responds to the domestic political realities of each country.

The U.S. isn’t just abandoning NATO; it’s abandoning having a hand in managing those dynamics and minimizing their impacts on its own national interest — which is another, albeit more nuanced, way of saying Trump is putting his own interest above the nation’s.

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