A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Fealty to Trump Wins Out Again

In an early morning vote, the GOP-controlled Senate passed the reconciliation bill funding immigration enforcement — but without any language in it barring President Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund.

Hours earlier in the marathon session, Republicans had defeated an attempt by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to explicitly ban the slush fund. But Republicans had votes to spare, allowing vulnerable GOP Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Dan Sullivan (AK), and Jon Husted (R-OH) to vote for Schumer’s measure and campaign on opposing the slush fund even though all three senators ultimately voted in favor of the final bill.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the only GOP senator to cross the aisle and oppose the final bill.

Two GOP senators who were loudly opposed to the slush fund — Thom Tillis (NC), who is not seeking re-election, and Bill Cassidy (LA), who lost in the GOP primary — ended up voting for the final bill. “I’m taking the cue from my colleagues that are in cycle,” said Tillis. “Whatever suits their purposes.”

The Trump administration has been playing a nod-and-wink game on the slush fund all week long.

In Senate testimony Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declared the slush fund dead but refused to commit to it in writing. On Wednesday, President Trump publicly declared his “love” for the slush fund and claimed to be unsure whether it was in fact dead.

On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tweeted that the purported victims of Biden DOJ “weaponization” could still press their claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act, even if the slush fund were dead.

In response to Graham, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who signed the settlement agreement that resolved Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS by creating the slush fund, tweeted: “We’re on it.”

Woodward’s tweet was deleted Wednesday morning.

“Republicans are trusting the word of Todd Blanche, who built a career on lying, that the administration will just drop this slush fund,” Schumer warned on the Senate floor before last night’s final vote.

It appears likely that the Senate GOP’s failure to ban the slush fund will at the very least encourage the Trump administration to make abusive use of the Federal Tort Claims Act to reach sweetheart settlements with Jan. 6 rioters and plotters, along with other purported weaponization victims.

The Trump DOJ has already shown itself more than capable of friendly, non-adverse settlements of weak cases it could have defended, not just in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, but in million-dollar paydays for former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and Carter Page.

Voter Fraud Bamboozlement Alert

Main Justice is pressuring U.S. attorneys offices nationwide to pursue criminal cases against noncitizens who have illegally voted — an exceedingly rare occurrence that Trump has falsely claimed for years turns the results of elections.

During a May 13 conference call, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh complained that DOJ’s 90 open investigations of illegal voting were languishing and urged prosecutors to “get creative,” the NYT reports.

Jan. 6 Rioters Are Notorious Recidivists

A new Lawfare study reveals that at least 97 of the 1,500 people granted clemency by President Trump for their roles in the attack on the Capitol have been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of separate crimes since Jan. 6.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

After the Arizona Supreme Court yesterday declined to revive the original indictment in her fake electors case, state Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) said she would seek a new indictment against allies of President Trump who tried to subvert the state’s 2020 election.

For Your Radar: ICE Shooting Edition

There are growing signs that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) may refuse to extradite to Minnesota the ICE agent charged with shooting an undocumented immigrant through a closed door during Operation Metro Surge — then lying about it.

The agent declined to waive extradition yesterday in state court in South Texas, where he is being held on $200,000 bail. Earlier this week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) formally asked Abbott to extradite the agent.

Abbott’s office is not commenting on whether he will comply with the routine request from Walz.

John Bolton Expected to Plead Guilty

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton is expected to plead guilty later this month to one felony count of unlawful retention of national defense information. The circumstances of the Bolton prosecution set it apart from the prominent vindictive prosecution cases under Trump II.

Other Shoe Drops In Maine Senate Race

Even before the revelation last week that Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner had been sexting with women who were not his wife, the NYT had spent two months interviewing women with whom he had been romantically involved previously. After the publication of the NYT story yesterday, Platner did an extended live interview with Chris Hayes in which he conceded to “not exactly acting with the best behavior” but denied the account by one woman that he had physically harmed her.

FDA Moves to Restrict Abortion Pill Access

In an ominous move, the FDA — under pressure from antiabortion groups and GOP members of Congress — has launched a new safety study of mifepristone that is a thinly veiled move to restrict mail and telehealth access to the abortion pill.

“The administration is aiming for a robust study that will withstand legal criticism,” administration officials told the WSJ, previewing the intended outcome.

Boat Strike Death Toll: 207

Two people were killed Wednesday in the eastern Pacific in the Trump administration’s lawless campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats, bring the overall death toll to at least 207.

‘Woke’ Quotes Removed at Bunker Hill

After a visitor to the Bunker Hill monument complained that a quote on display related to women’s suffrage represented “woke” feminist ideology, the Park Service removed three other quotes on display:

• “We find, upon reflection, that our duty to our country has not ended … We as Vietnam Veterans, strongly feel that the United States should cease to build memorials to death and begin to glorify life.”—from a 1971 anti-war editorial by Vietnam War veterans

• “As we drew near to Boston, there stood Bunker Hill Monument, towering up towards the heavens, as if in silent, bitter mockery of the millions of slaves guarded by the professed lovers of Liberty, who reared it’s lofty column.”—from a 1846 letter to the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator

• “Now that a public orator has declared that foreign-born men have no association with the men of the Revolution, it is our duty to show that in love of freedom and loyalty to the republic, the citizens of foreign birth take no second place.”—from a Boston newspaper in 1875

The quote that prompted the complaint was allowed to remain.

See Ya Back Here Monday

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Blanche Audition for AG Succeeds

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s elaborate audition to out-degenerate Pam Bondi has apparently won him President Trump’s nomination for the permanent position.

In his short time as acting AG, Blanche has re-indicted James Comey, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, and turbocharged the South Florida investigation into a supposed “grand conspiracy” against Trump. Under his watch, the DOJ has targeted Fani Willis, Cassidy Hutchinson, E. Jean Carroll (where Blanche did recuse himself), and reporters in leak cases.

But that’s not even the worst of it.

In the course of unwinding the Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy prosecutions, Blanche created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund to be dispensed at Trump’s discretion with no transparency of accountability while improbably settling Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS by releasing Trump from some $100 million in potential IRS claims for unpaid taxes.

It’s a helluva track record for the two months since Bondi was fired as attorney general.

Blanche’s nomination sets up a potentially epic confirmation battle in an election year. Democratic senators are highly incentivized not just to block Blanche but to make the confirmation hearings a bloodbath for the Trump DOJ and White House. They’re further bolstered by a trio of GOP senators who may be out for blood after trump torpedoed their reelections.

Buckle up.

Zombie Slush Fund Not Dead Yet

While official Washington rushed to treat as credible the assurances from the White House and DOJ that the slush fund is dead, President Trump said he wasn’t sure that it’s gone for good: “I love it,” he said. “I think it’s so important.”

The Senate is considering the reconciliation bill on immigration funding today, and a small number of GOP senators want to insert language in the bill barring the slush fund, especially after Blanche declined to commit to put it in writing that the slush fund is being permanently abandoned.

Stay tuned.

MUST READ

Most of Morning Memo’s focus on the politicization of the Justice Department has been concerned with the big-picture problems like loss of independence from the White House, defiance of court orders, and purges of DOJ personnel for political reasons.

But there’s another super important dynamic that Bloomberg’s Ben Penn captures in an extraordinarily well-reported piece on Sigal Chattah, the top federal prosecutor in Nevada: The ways in which unqualified partisan prosecutors can run amok, allegedly pursuing their own vendettas, doing favors for preferred former clients and friends, and blowing off ethics concerns flagged even by the low-bar Trump DOJ.

Chattah is one of the acting U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department has tried to install on a semi-permanent basis, bypassing Senate confirmation:

The first-time prosecutor frequently sought status updates on cases despite warnings that she was disregarding recusals signed by the deputy attorney general’s office in Washington that barred her involvement in matters where she had conflicts of interest, said several individuals.

Chattah also took calls from outside attorney acquaintances and intervened in their pending matters opposite her office—seeking favorable outcomes for their clients. …

Unlike in other offices, the Nevada disruptions are frequently disconnected from Trump’s priorities and are instead largely of Chattah’s own making, added many lawyers familiar with the office—most of whom spoke anonymously to avoid retaliation or share sensitive deliberations.

Really worth a read.

Trump DOJ Watch: Only the Best People

Lindsey Halligan was the first or at least the most prominent example of Trump inserting White House political aides directly into prosecutor roles within DOJ that are connected to his desired retributive prosecutions. It hasn’t stopped:

• On Monday, Kurt Olsen, the White House election security czar who aided Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 ​election, joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, where the mother of all retributive investigations is being conducted into a “grand conspiracy” against Trump, Reuters reports. While it’s not confirmed that Olsen, who has no prosecutorial experience, is on the “grand conspiracy” team, he appeared in a photo of that team posted last month by Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quinones, according to Reuters.

• In a little-noticed report last month, CBS News confirmed that Trump ally and conservative firebrand Victoria Toensing was sworn in as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida. Toensing, a former federal prosecutor, is the wife of Joseph diGenova, who is leading the “grand conspiracy” investigation. “DiGenova declined to say whether she is working on the Brennan and grand conspiracy cases, but a source with direct knowledge confirmed she is,” CBS News reported.

• With the prospect of judicial sanctions, several prosecutors who played a role in the Broadview Six case have hired attorneys of their own, the Chicago Tribune‘s Jason Meisner reports.

The Retribution: SPLC Edition

The Trump DOJ obtained a superseding indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center that keeps the same counts and defendants as the original indictment but tightens up some of its loose and problematic language.

The SPLC immediately asked the judge to investigate how it came to be that a MS Word draft of the superseding indictment was distributed by Main Justice to reporters on Tuesday evening before the superseding indictment was docketed on Wednesday:

In decades of collective practice, including serving as prosecutors at DOJ, none of the SPLC’s counsel has ever seen anything remotely like what DOJ did last night—distributing what turned out not to be the actual superseding indictment returned by the grand jury and docketed today, but one that has no indication of its finality, in native Word that could be edited and reposted, and before the actual returned charges were unsealed, to a group of journalists.

The SPLC wants the judge to issue a show cause order requiring Main Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Alabama to explain their conduct and why they should not be sanctioned.

Picking Through the SCOTUS Carnage

The Supreme Court’s historically bad decision to allow Alabama to eliminate one of its two majority-Black congressional districts in time for the midterms, turning the 14th Amendment on its ear, continued to reverberate:

• Former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance: “The Roberts Court’s derogation of Americans’ voting rights, starting with Shelby County v. Holder, working its way up to Callais, and now, putting the final nail in the coffin in Milligan, will go down in history as a shameful failure.”

• Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern: “It is not a mere aftershock from Callais but a separate earthquake of the same or perhaps even greater magnitude.”

• Chris Geidner: “This is truly one of the worst things the court has done — both in terms of legitimacy and in terms of the law — since I have been covering the court.”

Mullin Puts His Foot in It

In an exchange during his Senate testimony Tuesday that didn’t immediately garner much attention, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin seemed to inadvertently open the door to sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to his preferred destination of Costa Rica rather than to Liberia or to one of the other African countries that the administration has sought to deport him to.

“Great, if he’s willing to do that, we’ll be happy to send him,” Mullin said under questioning from Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD).

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers didn’t miss the exchange and immediately notified the court in his habeas case.

It appears to be an inadvertent misstep by Mullin because he also testified that he was not aware that Abrego Garcia had agreed to be removed to Costa Rica or that Costa Rica has agreed to accept him.

4 House GOPers Break With Trump on Iran

The House voted 215-208 to curtail President Trump’s military adventurism in Iran. Four Republicans crossed the aisle to form a majority with Democrats: Reps. Tom Barrett (MI), Warren Davidson (OH), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), and Thomas Massie (KY)

IMPORTANT

Last Friday, the Trump administration unveiled new proposed regulations that would require the approval of political appointees for all discretionary federal grants based on tight far-right political criteria.

The proposed regs would interject political appointees into scientific and health research, limiting “the subjects that they can explore, the foreign labs with which they may collaborate and even the conferences at which they can appear,” the NYT reports.

Scientist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein called it “the end of American science as we know it.”

To catch yourself up, I’d recommend Don Moynihan’s wide-ranging piece on the proposed regs and their intended impact: “The bottom line is that Russ Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wants to move scientific decisions away from the scientists and into the hands of political appointees. I don’t mean the big picture, strategic decisions of American science, which should be political, but the micro-decisions about what is and is not good research.”

The Purges: Schedule F Edition

In a culmination of the Schedule F push that began in his first term, President Trump has removed civil service protections for some 8,000 senior federal workers and made them at-will employees.

A Sea Change in Public Monuments

In retrospect, 2020 was the high water mark for removing public memorials to racists, traitors, European explorers, and other right-wing shibboleths. Since Trump’s reelection, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, with wink-wink re-namings of military bases, resurrected Confederate memorials, and, as the WSJ reports, the restoration of statutes that had been gathering dust in storage for the past six years.

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Mourning All We Have Lost

Laying awake last night processing the Supreme Court’s latest galling decision, I reflected on how many evenings over the past decade have been consumed by late breaking bad news of another historic setback.

My professional reactions to such news have slowly changed over time, from rushing to alert readers because it felt like an alarm needed to be sounded to waiting until I could provide better context to a growing sense that I have unwillingly become an obituary writer, chronicling the losses here each day.

This isn’t a lament. It is not self-excoriation that my hair isn’t sufficiently on fire 10 years into the Trump era. It’s not resignation. It’s an observation that over the course of a decade, the response to repeated losses, the next more serious than the last, takes on certain patterns.

The initial gut punch. The disbelief. The shock, but not really anymore, of another setback. The immediate urge to do something in response and finding few good options. Casting about for someone or something that explains what is happening better than I can. Coming to grips with where the new battle line must now be drawn, but with less confidence each time that it will hold any better than the last one did. Not feeling enervated exactly, but finding it harder over time to direct my energy productively.

Each setback brings its own constellation of losses, often deeply layered and spreading outward until they get entangled with all the others you haven’t yet fully processed.

Last night’s losses are staggering, even when seen through the prism of history, which usually mellows the perspective: a constitutional amendment born of the carnage of a civil war; a century of enduring Jim Crow’s base indignities; a grand mid-century civil rights movement; another half century of painstaking work to try to hold on to those gains.

Seen through a personal prism, the losses are of a small scale but no less difficult to fathom, a jumble of disparate anecdotes and the flickers of fading memories. That interview with David Duke in the mid-90s when Pat Buchanan was foreshadowing the GOP’s 21st century agenda. Discreetly pointing out John Lewis to my wide-eyed kids at a Capitol Hill diner while showing them a photo of him with Martin Luther King, Jr.

The losses on any given day come so fast and across such a wide spectrum of civic life that it overwhelms our capacity to mourn. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

Rest in peace, 60 Minutes and the military’s merit-based promotion system, but also the deep-ocean observation system that you probably hadn’t heard of before now but which you’re glad existed independently of naked partisanship and the raw urge for power.

Living through the Trump II presidency is an exercise in repeated loss and extended mourning for what is gone — while being daily confronted with the farcical and the absurd.

Bill Pulte as acting DNI. A Jan. 6 rioter hired in a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations. Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), his prison sentence commuted by President Trump, now under investigation for allegedly manipulating prediction markets by front-running on whether he would show up for Trump’s State of the Union address. Elon Musk’s coming IPO for SpaceX potentially catapulting his net worth past the unfathomable $1 trillion mark.

In looking for historical parallels to the current moment, I’ve often fallen back on 1942, America’s first year in World War II, when Imperial Japan was marauding across the Pacific. We know it as the darkness before the dawn of an Allied counterattack that eventually swung the war, but they didn’t know then when the tide would turn or if it ever would. A lesson for us, perhaps, in enduring setbacks and uncertainty.

In an astute analysis this week, Ned Resnikoff posits that Trumpism is hyperfascism, by which he doesn’t mean turbocharged or souped-up fascism, but “hyper” in the sense of over the top.

“It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found,” Resnikoff writes. “[I]t is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else.”

Hyperfascism eschews the hard work of sustaining itself, preferring the next spectacle to the grind of consolidating and entrenching its power through bureaucracy and structural advantages, at least as compared to other long-running authoritarian regimes.

“The good news is that this means hyperfascism can’t survive long as a governing ideology, because it has no program for long-term institution-building,” Resnikoff argues. “The bad news is that there may be no limits to the damage it can cause if left unchecked.”

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Fool Me a Thousand Times …

A confusing mishmash of reporting Monday afternoon inadvertently revealed that Donald Trump can still play Congress and the press like fools.

The flurry of reporting, mostly from Capitol Hill, was about whether the political heat around the corrupt “Anti-Weaponization Fund” had become too much to stomach, especially for GOP senators. The vague news, largely attributed to unnamed White House sources, was that Trump was signaling he “plans to drop,” “pause,” “retreat,” “backtrack,” and “back off” from the slush fund.

Adding an absurdist twist to the afternoon, the Trump DOJ put out a meaningless statement that it would abide by a court order blocking the slush fund.

Note that all the uproar yesterday only dealt with the slush fund — and only with the political furor over the slush fund. That represents only part of the corrupt scheme to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, which has three main elements:

• the slush fund;

• the IRS’ release of Trump et al. from any tax claims that predate the settlement (I should note there’s also an argument that the loose language of the settlement releases Trump et al. from any civil and criminal claims by the U.S. government prior to the settlement date);

• the fraud on the court for some combination of bringing a frivolous claim, collusively settling it, and using the court to launder public funds for Trump’s slush fund.

Despite all the talk on the Hill about the politics of the slush fund, it’s never been clear exactly what Republicans in Congress were going to do about the slush fund and whether it would be sufficient. My understanding is that Trump wanted to include authorization for the slush fund in the reconciliation package (still no publicly available language on any such provision), and Senate Republicans were considering putting some guardrails to prevent payouts to people who assaulted police on Jan. 6, a noble enough but limited goal and hardly the only corrupt aspect of the $1.776 billion slush fund.

What remains unclear this morning, but seems increasingly likely, is that Senate Republicans will merely not include a slush fund provision in the reconciliation bill. That would set up a grim scenario where Congress is silent on the matter, raising the possibility that Trump takes that silence as a greenlight to arrange some off-the-books executive branch funding for it. Some GOP senators want more concrete assurances from Trump that the slush fund is indeed dead, but why would anyone trust such assurances?

In an ideal world, Congress would bar the slush fund and anything like it. We are not, dear readers, in an ideal world.

Even if the Republican Congress stands up to Trump on the slush fund, it doesn’t appear to be preparing to scrutinize, let alone unwind (if it’s possible) the corrupt release of the IRS’ claims against Trump and fam. It’s a huge giveaway — $100 million, by some estimates — under extraordinarily corrupt circumstances. The improper leaking of Trump tax returns by an IRS contractor isn’t a proper justification for dropping all of the IRS claims against Trump, let alone other civil and criminal claims the government may have had against him or his family members.

Separate and apart from the political dimension, the legal side of this fiasco is on its own track regardless of what Congress does or fails to do:

• In Miami, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams set a deadline of June 12 for Trump to explain why the settlement wasn’t a fraud on the court.

• In the Eastern District of Virginia, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema already ordered the slush fund halted, with a hearing set next week in a civil lawsuit challenging the settlement.

• In D.C., a hearing is scheduled for next week in second civil lawsuit challenging the settlement.

• In a third civil lawsuit challenging the settlement, also in D.C., convicted fraudster Kevin Trudeau moved to intervene in the case, asserting that he is a claimant to the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and entitled to enforce the settlement agreement.

It’s still unclear how far federal judges can go in invalidating or unwinding the collusive settlement, so I’m not holding these out as surefire winners. The ultimate solution here would be a combination of legal and political guardrails, but we’ve spent a year and half now watching the supine GOP Congress decline to rein in Trump in any meaningful way.

The pattern is familiar.

Trump pushes all of his chips to the middle of the table — a collusive lawsuit, a bogus settlement, a corrupt slush fund, and a get-a-out-of-jail-free card for himself — and then merely signals that he’s pulling back one chip, and official D.C. gets the vapors.

BREAKING … Pulte Named Acting DNI

In a disastrous move, President Trump named Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has been moonlighting as political retribution czar, as acting director of national intelligence until he nominates a permanent replacement for Tulsi Gabbard.

Jim Comey, Call Your Office

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss of D.C. issued a temporary restraining order barring the National Park Service from interfering with the display of a “86-47” flag near the National Mall, ruling that “86” in the context of this case was not a threat against President Trump: “The question whether “8647” constitutes a true threat cannot be resolved in the abstract, without consideration of context, and, here, the relevant context makes clear that no reasonable observer could have viewed Plaintiff’s display of the flag as a threat to the President’s life or physical safety.”

Pete Hegseth Watch

• Anti-trans policy: In a complicated ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals split on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ban on transgender servicemembers, finding that the policy was the result of unconstitutional animus and “the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group,” but struggling with how to respond to Supreme Court’s recents limits on nationwide injunctions.

• Racist and misogynistic promotion policy: In a highly unusual move that undermines merit-based promotions, Hegseth blocked nine Navy captains from becoming one-star admirals, including three women and two Black officers. The final list of 22 promotions includes no women and only two nonwhite officers.

• Anti-press policy: With news outlets still challenging in court the Pentagon’s revamped press policies, the Defense Department has designated its press office a classified space and banned journalists from accessing it.

Another Trump Defeat: Colorado Edition

U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson of Denver blocked the Trump administration from forcing Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research to relinquish its Wyoming Supercomputing Center.

Jackson found that that the broader administration effort to dismantle NCAR — the country’s premier weather and climate research center — came after Colorado failed to release convicted Big Lie promoter Tina Peters when Trump pardoned her: “The inference that retaliation played at least some role in the transfer decision is considerably strengthened by the fact that the federal government simultaneously undertook several other actions adverse to Colorado.”

Freed Tina Peters Spews More Big Lies

In a world where Tina Peters was repentant and chastened by her conviction, Democratic Gov. Jared Polis’ decision to commute her nine-year sentence could have been justifiable. Nine years or two years or something in between wouldn’t have made much difference.

But she isn’t, and it wasn’t:

Among his many missteps in the case, Polis got himself wrapped around the axle of Peters’ supposed free speech rights, which is a category error in the criminal context. Contrition, genuine remorse, acknowledgement of guilt are key elements in sentencing and pardoning decisions that, because of the underlying conviction, don’t impede on First Amendment rights.

In post-coup America, we remain a long way from truly grappling with the persistence of a powerful cultish movement that includes seditious conspiracists who have already proven their willingness to bring down the Constitution.

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Accountability Blitz

Friday was a blitz of important news on the accountability front — an ICE agent arrested on state charges, a federal judge demanding reasons from the Trump DOJ for dismissing the Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy indictments, another federal judge ordering Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center — but the biggest development came in the previously closed case of Trump v. Internal Revenue Service.

In a strikingly worded order, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of Miami demanded that Trump and the other Trump-related plaintiffs in the case respond to the allegations of collusion raised by 35 former federal judges about the settlement of the case, which purported to create the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund and to grant Trump et al. a sweeping release from as much as $100 million in back-tax liabilities.

Judge Williams’ decision to entertain whether she and her court were used to, among other things, launder public funds for use by Trump to award his allies sets up a categorically different kind of clash between the federal judiciary and rogue executive than we’ve seen thus far in Trump II.

This is largely uncharted territory. We have not encountered before a president audacious enough to sue his own government and corrupt enough to have his thumb on every lever of government such that he is essentially settling with himself. It is the lack of an adverse party in the case that caught Judge Williams’ attention in the first place, but the administration raced to settle the case before she could weigh in.

Now she’s taking another stab at it, giving Trump et al. until June 12 to respond to these three allegations:

(1) the charges of collusion and whether the Parties are truly adverse;

(2) the assertion that the dismissal in this case was premised on deception by the Parties; and

(3) the question of whether the case should be reopened because the Court was the “victim of a fraud.”

Williams seemed none too happy when she dismissed the case last month and even less pleased with what she has since learned. In three bristling footnotes to Friday’s order, she called out DOJ for not having ever formally entered an appearance in the case, for the strange settlement “addendum” signed only by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that potentially violates department policy on settlements, and for not defending the IRS against Trump’s claims with the vigor it has in other similar litigation.

But at least for now, it’s not the Justice Department that will get to respond to Williams because it never entered an appearance in the case. It will fall to Trump to respond.

Among the things to watch for: Trump immediately appealing to the 11th Circuit to avoid responding to Williams; the DOJ seeking to intervene so that it may respond (a tricky strategic decision for it to make at this stage); and the political pressure building from Senate Republicans opposed to the slush fund to drop it so that even more immigration enforcement funding can pass.

New Details on the Slush Fund Scheme

• Trump personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn has emerged as a key figure in the scheme to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS and establish the “anti-weaponization” slush fund, the NYT reports: “Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in moving forward the deal to end the suit, coordinating and holding discussions with all of the sides involved: Mr. Trump, the president’s personal lawyers and Justice Department officials, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.”

• On the DOJ side, very few lawyers were reportedly involved, but among them was acting Blanche’s top aide, Trent McCotter, and the Office of Legal Counsel led by T. Elliot Gaiser, which blessed the scheme, according to multiple reports.

• As many as 12 Senate Republicans have balked at the scheme, and Trump’s top aides have “discussed whether he should kill” the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” in order to get the reconciliation bill on immigration enforcement passed, the WSJ reported.

Quote of the Day

“I mean, it’s deeply offensive to me that you could have a fund that could even possibly compensate people who assaulted police officers or vandalized the Capitol on January 6th.”—former Vice President Mike Pence, who made a harrowing escape from the mob at the Capitol

Jan. 6 Never Ends

• U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of D.C. ordered the Trump DOJ on Friday to provide a fuller justification for seeking to dismiss the indictments of Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy, including founder Stewart Rhodes. In additions to commutations and pardons of Jan. 6 defendants by the president, the Trump DOJ has moved to wipe the historical record clean of the indictments and convictions arising from the attack on the Capitol.

• Tina Peters is scheduled to be released from state custody in Colorado today following the commutation of her sentence by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.

The Retribution: Vindictive Prosecutions

• James Comey: Matthew Petracca, the rookie federal prosecutor who brought the “86” case against former FBI Director James Comey, has dropped off the prosecution team and withdrawn from other criminal cases he was handling in the Eastern District of North Carolina. “Petracca had contemplated leaving the Justice Department altogether, according to two people familiar with the matter, but instead remained a Justice Department employee after taking a week off,” NBC News reported.

• SPLC: The Trump DOJ’s retributive prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center came after an earlier IRS review of the civil rights organization’s paid informant program in 2019-20 concluded that it was legal, CBS News reports: “The tax portion of the investigation, which has not been previously reported, was initiated during President Trump’s first term as an expansion of an FBI probe into whether that same former chief financial officer may have embezzled money from the SPLC, the sources said.”

ICE Agent Arrested on State Charges

Christian Castro, the ICE agent rung up on state charges of shooting an undocumented immigrant through the closed door of their residence during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and then lying about it, was arrested in South Texas by Texas Rangers on a nationwide warrant. The arrest was made in the presence of Minnesota law enforcement officers and agents from the DHS Inspector General’s Office.

In announcing the arrest, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said her office has more than 30 other open investigations of federal immigration agents who took part in Operation Metro Surge, including the fatal shootings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the NYT reported.

Judge Orders ‘Trump’ Off Kennedy Center

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of D.C. ruled Friday that tacking Donald Trump’s name on to the Kennedy Center, the official memorial for President John F. Kennedy, violated federal law.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” Cooper wrote in giving the administration two weeks to remove Trump’s name.

The adverse ruling sent Trump on long meandering weekend tirades against the judge and the judge’s wife.

2026 Midterms Watch: Maine Senate

The wife of Graham Platner, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R), disclosed to his campaign last August that she had discovered on his phone in the spring of 2025 sexually explicit texts with other women, the WSJ reported.

The campaign confirmed that Platner had engaged in the sexting with other women and posted a video of his wife, Amy Gertner, responding to the news reports.

Genevieve McDonald, the Platner campaign’s political director until she resigned in October, was apparently the staffer in whom Gertner had confided. McDonald shared with the NYT a screenshot of a text message exchange she had with Gertner at the time.

A current Platner campaign official said that Platner had been communicating with up to six women but that the conduct had stopped before his Senate campaign launch, according to the NYT.

Two More Lawless Boat Strikes

A total of four U.S. strikes last week against alleged drug-smuggling boats brought the death toll in the lawless high seas campaign to more than 200:

• Friday: Three men were killed in a strike in the eastern Pacific.

• Saturday: Three more men were killed in a strike in the eastern Pacific

Ebola Watch

Jonathan Cohn in the Bulwark: Ebola Veterans Are Aghast at Trump’s Plan for the Outbreak

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Fund Halted Until at Least June 12

In a ruling just out this morning, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the creation of the $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that emerged as part of the purported settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia paused any action on the fund while the case proceeds on an expedited briefing schedule that she issued simultaneously. She set a June 12 hearing for arguments on issuing an injunction in the case brought by a group that includes a former Jan. 6 prosecutor, Common Cause, and the National Abortion Federation.

In pressing pause, Brinkema delineated in her order exactly what she doesn’t want happening between now and next month’s hearing. She barred the administration “from taking any further action pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund.”

In a footnote to her order, the judge said that it’s “important that the status quo be maintained” and cited previous claims by the plaintiffs that the Trump DOJ refused to commit to not rushing ahead with the fund:

… especially as plaintiffs allege in their Expedited Motion that defense counsel “was unable … to provide assurances of how long [the] status quo would last” and declined plaintiffs’ “request that the government commit to not transferring money to the Fund or processing or paying claims until at least June 19 to allow for less compressed briefing in this case.”

The case before Brinkema is one of a handful of early legal challenges to the corruptly conceived “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” A separate line of attack on the underlying IRS settlement with Trump emerged this week when a group of former federal judges asked the trial judge to reopen the case she had already dismissed.

Trump DOJ: We’re Targeting ANOTHER Trump Foe, Not E. Jean Carroll!

Quite of bit of conflicting reporting since CNN first scooped Wednesday that the Trump DOJ is investigating Trump sexual abuse victim E. Jean Carroll over bogus allegations of perjury in her successful civil lawsuit against him.

In an unusual move, Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros issued an outright denial that his office has opened an investigation into Carroll: “In light of wide-spread reporting and intense media and public interest into the E. Jean Carroll matter in New York, the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office can confirm that it has not opened — and has never opened — a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll. Any claim to the contrary is categorically false.”

That lines up with other reporting Thursday that the investigation in question is looking into Reid Hoffman and his nonprofit American Future Republic, which helped to fund some of Carroll’s legal costs in pursuing Trump. Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, has been a major donor to Democrats and progressive causes.

The probe is reportedly looking at alleged money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction at American Future Republic over its payments for Carroll, CBS News and Reuters reported.

It doesn’t appear this is a case of CNN getting it wrong. Some of the conflicting reporting come from sources whose accounts have changes, as in the case of Reuters: “The source had told Reuters on Wednesday that the investigation was examining ​whether Carroll had committed perjury regarding the funding of her suit in a 2022 deposition. But the person said on Thursday that ​while the probe is examining that funding, Carroll is not a focus of the investigation.”

Still, most of the reporting suggests it’s not an either/or situation but rather the Hoffman probe seems by design likely to sweep in the bogus perjury allegations against Carroll. As the WaPo put it: “The investigation, which is expected to look at statements Carroll made during a deposition, could also morph into a criminal perjury probe against the 82-year-old columnist.”

A lot of dancing on the heads of pins going on here.

Jan. 6 Never Ends: Wisconsin Edition

A revisionist Trump DOJ “investigation” of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin has been percolating in the background for a few weeks now. Like similar investigations in Georgia and Arizona, the focus is not statewide but on Democratic big cities, in this case Milwaukee.

The timing of the investigations and the focus on minority-heavy urban areas suggest a dual purpose of advancing President Trump’s Big Lie and muddying the waters ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The WaPo rounds up some of the recent reporting on FBI interviews in the state:

FBI agents recently showed up at the homes of former election officials in Milwaukee, according to two people familiar with their activities who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The visits came after agents spoke to the state’s deputy elections director, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This week, agents were planning to interview police officers who escorted the election official responsible for delivering the city’s 2020 results to a Milwaukee County election office, according to WISN-TV.

What is particularly concerning in Milwaukee is the prospect of the FBI seizing ballots like it did in Atlanta, especially absentee ballots (emphasis mine): “The confiscation of tens of thousands of absentee ballots from Wisconsin’s largest city would set off alarms because Milwaukee maintains its absentee ballots in a way that could allow agents to determine who voters selected — undermining the secrecy of their ballots.”

One irony of of this is that typically Milwaukee County would have destroyed its 2020 ballots long ago but has refrained from doing so due to litigation over the results.

Unitary Executive Extremism

In former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey’s wrongful termination lawsuit against the Trump DOJ, the administration argued in court yesterday that the president has sweeping powers to remove career civil service employees “even if there were political motivations.”

It led to this exchange, reported by Politico:

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman pressed [DOJ lawyer] Lesperance on whether there are any limits to the president’s Article II powers. Could the president, for example, decide to fire people in order to achieve an “all-white executive branch? Or all-black?” he asked.

Lesperance stammered in response, finally saying, “I can’t answer on behalf of the government.”

Furman replied: “You’re here representing the government.”

Comey’s lawsuit is an important test case of whether wrongfully purged federal civil service employees can challenge their terminations in federal court or must go through the old civil service appeal process that has since been rigged by the Trump administration.

ICE v. Its Opponents

• The Spokane Three: A federal jury convicted three ICE protesters of conspiracy after an eight-day trial in a case that prompted the resignation of the acting U.S. attorney.

• Online commenters: D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has sent grand jury subpoenas to Reddit and X seeking the names, addresses, and banking information of commenters critical of the administration’s mass deportation policy, Bloomberg reports.

Boat Strike Death Toll Climbs to 199

The death toll in the Trump administration’s lawless high-seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats has now reached 199, after factoring at least 22 people who survived an initial strike only to be hit again or left to die at sea, the AP reports.

Quote of the Day

“West Point cadets are already, by definition, smart, tough and patriotic. They are not snowflakes who will somehow be harmed by learning about controversial issues or competing viewpoints. They will not somehow be weakened in their future defense of our country if their classroom discussions are robust and open.”—U.S. District Judge Cathy Seibel, blocking one of the Trump administration’s most heavy-handed assaults on academic freedom

Preach, Brother

G. Elliott Morris, on why so much of the analysis of close elections is basically useless: “Close elections are what social scientists call overdetermined — that is, the product of too many factors to decipher what dominated. This means they are also underpowered as causal evidence; when everything was enough to cause the loss, nothing is uniquely to blame for it. The election just doesn’t carry enough information to tell you which factor was the factor.”

As If On Cue

After my extended item yesterday about the rising threat of Russia attacking NATO territory, a Russian drone crashed into an apartment building in NATO-member Romania. Two people were wounded in the incident after Romania jet fighters attempted to intercept the drone.

“It was the first known time that a Russian drone had caused damage and injuries in a major urban area on the territory of the Western military alliance,” the New York Times reports.

The drone does not appear from early reports to have fired munitions at the building in the city of Galati but instead literally crashed into the roof of the building. It’s not clear yet whether the incident was a deliberate provocation or an inadvertent spillover of the war from across the nearby Ukrainian border.

A senior Western military official told the NYT the cause of incident was “probably some combination of careless behavior by the Russian military and that the drone may have been jammed off course.”

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There Is No Bottom

I wish I could say we have reached the nadir of President Trump’s abuse of his office and debasement of the Justice Department. But the news, first reported by CNN, that the Trump DOJ has launched a criminal investigation of E. Jean Carroll, the high-profile victim of Trump’s sexual abuse, feels like a downward spiral with no end in sight.

The top-line outrage here is clear but it’s so astounding that it bears repeating: The president is using the powers of his office to settle not just political but private scores against someone adjudged by juries to be a victim of his sexual abuse and defamatory attacks. Carroll, 82, has been awarded nearly $90 million by juries in the two Trump cases, whose verdicts he is still appealing.

It is abuse heaped on top of abuse.

As with the other Trump II retributive investigations and prosecutions, the predicate to the Carroll investigation is bogus, but is it especially tenuous here. The DOJ is zeroing in on conduct that even if true (and it’s not) is rarely if ever prosecuted, federally or otherwise: perjury in a civil deposition.

Trump already tried and failed to make Carroll’s incorrect deposition answer an issue at trial, but the judge flicked it away as a nonstarter, and a unanimous appeals court agreed.

No other Justice Department would have even entertained a criminal investigation under these circumstances. But no other DOJ has taken orders directly from the White House on whom to investigate and for what.

In this case, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has recused himself because of his prior representation of Trump personally. But Main Justice is so thoroughly corrupted now that other top officials moved ahead on it, CNN reported: “Senior leaders at the Justice Department referred the investigation to federal prosecutors in Chicago, according to two sources familiar with the matter.”

The irony of referring the Carroll case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago is almost too rich to bear. The office is currently embroiled in a furor over its misconduct in front of the grand jury in the Broadview Six case, with potential sanctions coming down the pike. The fallout is spreading to at least one other criminal prosecution and just yesterday “prompted U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros to order ‘sweeping’ internal reforms to the office’s grand jury practices, including ‘deep-dive’ training from outside national experts,” the Chicago Tribune reports.

In a departure from past practice that reinforces the abusive nature of the criminal investigation of Carroll, the Trump DOJ all but confirmed the existence of the probe in an unusually contorted statement to CNN: “We can confirm that no U.S. Attorney’s Office has declined to investigate any case relating to the subject matter of CNN’s inquiry. We will not comment beyond that.”

Enough said.

A $1.776 Billion Hail Mary Pass

Thirty-five former federal judges have joined together to seek to re-open President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS as a backdoor way to try to scuttle the “settlement” that led to the creation of the corrupt $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

RIP 60 Minutes

CBS News had declined to renew the contract of “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who spoke out after Bari Weiss spiked her segment on the Alien Enemies Act detainees consigned to CECOT in El Salvador.

Stephen Miller’s ‘Wins’ Meeting

Stephen Miller is leading a White House push to pressure Latin American countries into allowing the U.S. military to conduct joint counternarcotics operations inside their territories, the NYT reports. It’s part of the larger militarization of counternarcotics that includes the lawless campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats on the high seas:

Mr. Miller chairs a bimonthly meeting — called a “wins” meeting — at which various government agencies report on recent successes, with the Pentagon’s death toll from boat strikes regularly highlighted as one of the biggest, according to those two people and one other person familiar with the meeting.

So much winning.

Two Boat-Strike Survivors Left at Sea

The 58th strike in the Trump administration’s lawless high-seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats killed one person and left two survivors adrift in the eastern Pacific on Tuesday. The death toll from the campaign now stands at at least 194 souls.

Venezuela Iran Cuba Madness

The U.S. Navy has now assembled an armada in the vicinity of Cuba sufficient to launch a military attack against the island nation if President Trump gives the order to do so, Politico reports.

For Your Radar: Russia-NATO Edition

This story is unfolding too slowly to be captured by Morning Memo’s daily news filter, but by historic standards it’s an incredibly fast-paced realignment of international geopolitics, so I want to take a step back to bring your attention to President Trump’s steady erosion of the NATO alliance at a moment of heightened risk that Russian President Vladimir Putin will turn his attention from Ukraine to more substantial provocations elsewhere in Europe.

Across European capitals, long-standing fears have been rekindled that in the face of a stalemate with Ukraine that is costing Russian more troops per month than it can recruit, Putin will expand his aggression against NATO allies beyond hybrid attacks.

“Several European national-security officials have warned that Russia could try to test the cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by targeting one of the Baltic nations, Swedish and Danish islands in the Baltic Sea or alliance territory in the Arctic,” the WSJ reported on Tuesday

Russian hybrid attacks are already a persisent background noise in Europe:

Among the aggressions that European officials have blamed on Russia are a swarm of drones and explosives placed on a rail line in Poland; jamming aviation-navigation systems over Sweden; hacking a dam in Norway; and plotting to put incendiary devices on cargo planes. Lithuanian officials recently announced the arrests of nine people accused of plotting murders and sabotage across Europe at the behest of Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U.

In a speech Wednesday at the famed Bletchley Park, the director of the British electronic surveillance agency warned that “Russia is scaling up its daily hybrid activity against the U.K. and Europe.”

The European response to the increased Russian threat has focused on strengthening military and diplomatic ties independent of the United States, where the Trump administration is mercurial and unreliable at best and outright hostile to NATO at worst.

Among the latest developments:

• Poland and the U.K. yesterday signed a new defense and security treaty.

• In a move away from the U.S., Norway ​is opening talks with France about joining its nuclear umbrella.

• NATO is racing to turn the vulnerable Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea into a military stronghold. A Russian attack “could happen anytime,” the chief of defense for Sweden, which joined NATO in 2024, told Politico during a major NATO training exercise on the island last week.

While Europe is rushing to re-arm, Trump is further destabilizing the alliance. The Pentagon notified NATO allies last week that it is substantially shrinking the pool of forces earmarked for deployment to Europe in the event of a crisis.

All of this comes after a significant inflection point in U.S.-NATO relations earlier this month that further unnerved Europe. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abruptly canceled two planned troop deployments to Poland and Germany, respectively, only for Trump to seemingly reverse course on the Polish deployment.

Rather than backstopping NATO in its time of need, Trump is backing up his longstanding threats to withdraw from the alliance with reduced and fickle support, sending an unmistakeable message to Putin that Europe is his for the taking.

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Friday’s ruling that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Justice Department has already been cited by two other Trump targets under criminal prosecution.

In a new motion to dismiss the indictment against it on vindictive prosecution grounds, the Southern Poverty Law Center extensively cited from the U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr.’s ruling in the Abrego Garcia case in Nashville.

In a second much-less-covered case in Miami, Smartmatic, the voting machine company, cited yesterday the Abrego Garcia ruling in a new motion to compel discovery into the Trump DOJ’s decision to add it as a defendant in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prosecution of its former employees who were initially indicted in August 2024.

As Smartmatic is quick to note, it is the first company to be prosecuted under the FCPA in 15 years and at a time when the Trump administration has explicitly and publicly de-emphasized enforcement of the anti-bribery act. Smartmatic was added to the existing indictment last fall after, it says, cooperating with the investigation and after the Biden DOJ had declined to indict the company.

Smartmatic alleges that the Trump DOJ “refuses to engage in meaningful conversations regarding discovery” even after the judge in the case on May 11 ordered the parties to meet and confer about the scope of potential discovery into Smartmatic’s vindictive prosecution claim. As evidence of the Trump DOJ’s bad faith, Smartmatic says it emailed prosecutors its proposed discovery requests the same day the judge ordered the meet and confer, but they did not provide a response until the afternoon of May 20, the day the judge had set as a deadline for the parties to confer, and it was “half-baked.”

It’s no surprise that defendants would cite to a favorable vindictive prosecution ruling in another case. I would expect Judge Crenshaw’s ruling — cited some two dozen times in the SPLC motion and seven times in the Smartmatic motion — to pop up in the motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution that former FBI Director James Comey is planning to file in the “86” case in North Carolina, where he is preposterously accused of threatening President Trump’s life.

But for individual defendants seeking to blunt the corrupt acts of the Trump DOJ, each successful vindictive prosecution claim builds a foundation for subsequent claims. Especially because vindictive prosecution claims so rarely succeed, each win may also increase federal courts’ willingness to see these retributive prosecutions for what they are. At least up to a point …

Vindictive prosecution claims are particularly fact-dependent, which makes each case different. For instance, Abrego Garcia benefitted greatly from ill-advised but remarkably candid public comments from then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche about the administration’s motive in prosecuting him. Judge Crenshaw leaned heavily on those comment first in finding that Abrego Garcia had established a rebuttable presumption of vindictive prosecution and then in finding that the government had failed to rebut the presumption, leading him to dismiss the case.

Trying to follow a similar path, Smartmatic filed an appendix to its motion for vindictive prosecution that provides a timeline of relevant events in the Alabama case, including a series of Truth Social posts by President Trump pushing the Big Lie about the 2020 election, some of which explicitly refer to Smartmatic.

In the Alabama case, SPLC’s motion is similarly replete with post-indictment public comments about the civil rights group from Trump and Blanche, plus Deputy Associate Attorney General Aakash Singh (who also figured prominently in the Abrego Garcia case), FBI Director Kash Patel, and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon.

It is a defining feature of the Trump II DOJ’s vindictive prosecutions that the line prosecutors themselves are rarely if ever the source of problematic public statements that undermine their cases. The performative retribution is coming from Main Justice and the White House.

In the new the Smartmatic motion, there was a tell in prosecutor’s “half-baked response.”

Smartmatic, which claims that Fox News is leveraging the indictment to defend against Smartmatic’s separate defamation lawsuit arising from the network’s 2020 election coverage, had asked for all communications between Fox Corporation and DOJ relating to Smartmatic.

DOJ objected that the request was too broad, but allowed that “case prosecutors … have no communications responsive to this request.” The implication was clear: Other components of DOJ may very well have had communications with Fox Corporation or its lawyers about Smartmatic. Cue the dramatic music.

This Is Plain Weird

In Maurene Comey’s wrongful termination lawsuit against the Trump DOJ, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche yesterday filed a memorandum dated May 26, 2026 that purports to “ratify and affirm” Comey’s July 16, 2025 firing.

The filing is reminiscent of the flailing efforts by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to ratify after the fact the appointment of Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia in an unsuccessful effort to prevent her from being disqualified and the vindictive prosecutions against Maurene’s father James Comey and New Attorney General Letitia Games dismissed.

2026 Midterms: Texas Edition

Senate: State Attorney General Ken Paxton didn’t just beat incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary runoff. He smoked him 64%-36%, with most of the votes counted. Cornyn led the initial three-way March primary, where considerably more votes were cast. But yesterday Paxton narrowly exceeded his vote total from March, while Cornyn won only a fraction of his previous total. I’m not sure Trump’s endorsement, while helpful to Paxton, was the difference-maker here, which tells you more about Texas GOP primary voters than about Trump.

18th District: Rep. Christian Menefee defeated Rep. Al Green in the Democratic primary runoff after the two sitting congressmen were redistricted into the same heavily Democratic district.

35th District: Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist prone to making anti-semitic comments, lost in the Democratic primary runoff to Johnny Garcia.

Attorney General: Rep. Chip Roy lost in the GOP runoff to the more MAGA-fied state Sen. Mayes Middleton.

Railroad Commission: Votes are still being counted in a close GOP primary runoff, but the uber-right-wing Bo French is leading incumbent commission chair Jim Wright.

Good Read

Mother Jones: Oligarchs are robbing America blind, and the IRS is powerless to stop them.

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New Frontiers in Jan. 6 Revisionism

The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is just a part of the broader rewriting of the history of Jan. 6, the pace of which seems to be accelerating ahead of the midterms.

Among the things that make the $1.776 billion reparation so toxic is that it builds off the Big Lie fantasy that the Jan. 6 defendants are victims to create a slush fund to perpetuate the Trump regime. It’s a bank shot that requires such epic gall that even GOP senators, who’ve shown themselves willing and able to swallow whatever Trump asks them to, are balking over it.

“One of the roughest meetings I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R) said in describing GOP senators’ meeting last week with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Fiery does not begin to cut it,” said Cruz, who noted that some senators were screaming at Blanche.

Since senators left town for the holiday without resolving the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” here’s what happened:

• Late Friday, the Trump DOJ moved to dismiss the seditious conspiracy indictments against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. “[E]ver since Mr. Trump began his second term by granting clemency to all of the defendants, the department has taken steps to unwind almost every aspect of its enormous effort to hold the rioters accountable for disrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power after the 2020 election,” Alan Feuer writes in the NYT.

• The Trump DOJ has loudly and proudly scrubbed its website of official press releases about the criminal charges, convictions, and sentencings of the Jan. 6 rioters. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” DOJ posted on X. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”

• In a failed effort to institute a national system of hand-counted paper ballots, the Trump White House’s dubious election-security czar, Kurt Olsen, last year sought to ban Dominion voting machines used in more than half of the states by asking whether the Commerce Department could declare their components national security risks, Reuters reports.

We Are Conscripts in Jan. 6 Revisionism

Harry Litman:

The American people are being compelled to fund—and by funding to implicitly endorse—a bounty for the people who stormed the Capitol, beat police officers, and tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. All of us are, in effect, being conscripted into Trump’s campaign to rewrite the history of January 6th. The message the fund sends—that the rioters were victims, that their convictions were injustices, that the government owes them not accountability but a check—is sent in all of our names, with all of our money. We are being made, without our consent, co-signatories to the biggest lie of Trump’s presidency.

Abrego Garcia Criminal Case Dismissed

A federal judge in Nashville ruled Friday that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump DOJ and dismissed the criminal case against him.

The ruling came after a day-long evidentiary hearing in February where the DOJ had a chance to prove the prosecution was legitimate. U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, Jr. was unmoved by the government’s presentation. “The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” Crenshaw wrote in his ruling.

Mass Deportation Watch

• New Jersey: ICE agents pepper-sprayed protesters and Sen. Andy Kim (D) in a clash Monday outside Delaney Hall in Newark.

• Minnesota: Radley Balko goes deep on the new state criminal charges against an ICE officer in the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis — and the extensive and systematic lying about the incident by the Trump administration.

• Colorado: State law enforcement officials warned their counterparts across the country that DHS social media posts recruiting for ICE contained so many white supremacist themes that they could endanger the public, according to internal records obtained by The Intercept.

Stat of the Day

The Telegraph: “All but three of the 6,069 refugees taken in by the United States since October are White South Africans, according to state department statistics.”

The Great Whitening

• Alabama: Despite the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a three-judge panel this morning blocked Alabama from using a congressional district map that it found intentionally discriminates against Black voters. It’s a result that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had urged in her May 11 dissent when the Supreme Court sent the Alabama case back down, arguing that while the high court had decimated the Voting Rights Act, the lower court’s decision on the 14th Amendment violation was untouched: “Nothing in the District Court’s Fourteenth Amendment analysis is affected by this Court’s opinion in Callais.”

• Maryland: Bill Ferguson, the Democratic leader of Maryland Senate who single-handedly blocked Gov. Wes Moore (D) from implementing a redistricting plan for the midterms that would have eliminated the state’s sole GOP seat, is now prepared to proceed … in time for 2028. Moore is still pushing to do it in time for the midterms.

Quote of the Day

“Callais is well on its way to becoming the Dred Scott of our time, a decision so reviled by civic society that it marks a before and after in our constitutional democracy. And like Dred Scott, which denied Black citizenship, and other anti-canons that live in infamy, the ruling will be remembered less for its full caption or precise legal holding than by the harm it caused Black and marginalized people, our body politic, and the idea of these United States.”—Cristian Farias

7 Signs of a Personalist Regime

Don Moynihan with an indispensable list:

1. The leader is everywhere
2. The rule of law is secondary to the leader’s whims
3. The inner circle has free rein to pillage
4. The routine debasement of other public leaders
5. Presidential vibes, not facts, determine our new reality
6. Conspiratorial ravings become a loyalty test
7. Only loyalists need apply

Democracy Dies in HR

Drawing on the new book on Argentina’s Dirty War by two German political scientists, “Making a Career in Dictatorship,” Amanda Taub writes: “It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.”

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‘Our Majority Is Melting Down Before Our Eyes’

Senate Republicans have always felt like the weakest of the political bulwarks protecting Trump and Trumpism, but real signs of senators crumbling en masse have remained few and fleeting. Yesterday’s developments were more real and may not be so fleeting.

Resistance within John Thune’s conference to Trump’s vanity ballroom and the travesty of the anti-Weaponization Fund coupled with House GOP leaders yanking a vote to rein in the Iran War because they were going to lose on the floor gave the real sense that Republicans see their own midterm prospects as dim.

“Our majority is melting down before our eyes,” a GOP senator told Punchbowl.

But there’s a lot of nuance here that suggests something less than a sea change in the underlying political dynamics. Our eagerness to see real change, real opposition to Trump, and a real erosion of his political support is so overwhelming that it can skew our perspective.

Nearly half of GOP senators reportedly spoke out against the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s face in a contentious Senate lunch yesterday, but the only senators going on the record with their criticisms are the usual suspects: lame duck senators already on the outs with Trump, Punchbowl notes:

In most cases, the only Republicans who are publicly speaking out against these initiatives are the victims of Trump’s revenge tour or otherwise not seeking reelection. But GOP leaders’ decisions on both the ballroom and weaponization fund make clear that they feel the same way.

Another dynamic in play: Senators may feel emboldened now not just because things are looking bleak electorally in the fall but because the window for Trump to primary them has mostly closed. That’s not a mark of courage, but it does inform the underlying politics.

What isn’t happening is important, too. Senate Republicans still aren’t keen to defend Congress as an institution against a rogue executive intent on stealing its powers as his own. They’re not rising up in defense of the rule of law. They’re not drawing a line in the sand: This far, no further.

Rather, they’re trying to nickel and dime their way to something that is more politically palatable. It’s about the “optics.” This gives rise to half-measures like the proposal being floated to prohibit “Anti-Weaponization Funds” from going to those who assaulted cops on Jan. 6. That’s great as far as it goes, but it still leaves $1.776 billion in unappropriated funds in the hands of an unchecked president for him to use to prop up his political machine.

Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) was an exception, saying he didn’t think any guardrails could fix the fund: “I don’t like the fund at all.”

In normal times, craven self-preservation is sometimes all the democratic system offers as a means of course correction, but so long as one of the two major parties is on an authoritarian bender, these will not be normal times.

The Tax Side of the Corruption

It’s been interesting to observe the world of tax professionals and former IRS officials entering the debate, agog over the sweeping release granted to Trump et al. in the deal for the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

At its core is the immense disconnect between the I.R.S.’ wrongful leak of Trump’s tax returns and the reward of absolving Trump from complying with the tax laws at any point prior to the signing date of this week’s corrupt bargain.

“It’s just completely contrary to the notion that you’re supposed to comply with the law and the I.R.S. is there to make sure you do that,” George Yin, a tax law professor and former chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, told the NYT. “The idea that you can get a free pass from the I.R.S. or anyone can get a free pass from the I.R.S. is just completely ridiculous.”

Quote of the Day

“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.”—Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Get in Line

MAGA World figures are already posturing about why they deserve a portion of what Sen. Thom Tills (R-NC) called a “payout pot for punks.”

Among the notable figures, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio says he expected to get between $2 million and $5 million from the fund. “I’m not greedy,” Tarrio told Reuters. “But my life was all fucked up because of this.”

It’s not just insurrectionists and those once criminally charged seeking compensation but a whole cross-section of right-wing groups and Trump allies, ranging from abortion foes (who the settlement specifically invited to apply) to “millions of Americans whose online speech was censored at the behest of the government, parents silenced at schoolboards, senators whose records were secretly subpoenaed, churchgoers targeted by the FBI, and so on,” according to a DOJ overview given to GOP senators.

Down the Memory Hole!

While President Trump is corruptly accruing funds to pay off his insurrectionist allies, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued orders yesterday without explanation clearing the way for the Trump DOJ to dismiss the seditionist conspiracy and related indictments arising out of Jan. 6.

Pardons and commutations aren’t good enough. Convictions by juries can’t be allowed to stand on the record. It will be as if the indictments themselves never happened.

Broadview Six Case Collapses

The Trump DOJ dropped all remaining charges in the prosecution of the ICE protestors in the Broadview Six case in Chicago during an extraordinary day in court that revealed extensive prosecutorial misconduct and irregularities in front of the grand jury.

“I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” U.S. District Judge April Perry said, after reviewing grand jury transcripts behind closed doors and without defense counsel present.

Redacted grand jury transcripts that had been previously been produced to the judge left out the most damaging and incriminating parts of the proceedings, and DOJ prosecutors had not revealed that fact to her, even as she had openly surmised that the redactions were probably just IT glitches.

“And frankly, it is that that I find the most problematic,” the judge said, adding, “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”

Thread of the Day

Criminal defense attorney Ken White goes through the transcript of the highly irregular hearing yesterday in the Broadview Six case:

ICE Agent Will Surrender on State Charges

The ICE agent facing state charges in Minnesota for a road-rage-style incident during Operation Metro Surge will surrender after Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty issued a nationwide warrant last month for his arrest.

Colbert’s Last Late Night Show

The cancellation of a late night show doesn’t rank with the losses of the last 16 months, but the underlying principles under attack are as important as any that Trump has assailed, and the capitulation by CBS mirrors the other cases where institutions and corporations have crumpled rather than stand strong.

Stephen Colbert closed it out with a singalong led by Paul McCartney, who famously first performed in America on the same stage 62 years ago:

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How Bad It Really Is

Even normally temperate legal experts and political observers are aghast at the ways in which the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” deal — and its broad release of claims against Trump, his family, and his businesses — crosses into new territory of venality, graft, and abuse of power (even for Trump).

• Former DOJer Jennifer Ricketts: “I have never heard of the department ever being willing to grant blanket immunity. That seems blatantly corrupt. It’s a shocking gift to the president.”

• Barbara A. Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center: “Presidents have had corrupt, even criminal, family members. But none of them succeeded to the extent of the Trump family in the level of graft achieved. … They have won the presidency twice, emasculated Congress, created a supportive high court, and reshaped the law and institutions to absolve them of any wrongdoing, while making billions of ill-gotten dollars.”

• Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck: “I am, by training and disposition, a person who writes about doctrine. I try (sometimes, to significant criticism) to avoid emotional pleas. But I am asking you, today, to care about this story in a way that may well be disproportionate to the volume of media coverage it is going to get.”

Why Challenging It in Court Is So Hard

Police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 filed a lawsuit in federal court in D.C. yesterday to challenge the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” and the case was assigned to iconoclastic senior U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon. But the path for legal recourse remains obscure and difficult, most legal experts agree:

• University of Michigan law professor Samuel R. Bagenstos: “It is really difficult to think about how to frame a judicial challenge to what the president has done here. That doesn’t mean people aren’t trying, and that doesn’t mean something might not succeed.”

• Lawfare: “What makes this particular episode so unsettling is that it’s not clear how it would be stopped. The legal avenues to challenge it are untested and the standing hurdles are formidable. Meanwhile, the legislative appetite to act—at least in this Congress—is not yet apparent. By the time a future Congress might try, nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds may be largely gone, dispersed to recipients whose identities may never be publicly known.”

Don’t Hold Your Breath

There are some rumblings on Capitol Hill that Senate Republicans increasingly concerned about the GOP’s prospects in the midterm elections may impose some restrictions on the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” Punchbowl reports:

But it’s unclear how Republicans plan to impose eligibility restrictions on the ‘weaponization’ fund. They’re especially concerned about potential taxpayer-funded payouts to Jan. 6 rioters convicted of violence against cops, as well as the overall political optics of the fund. This was a big discussion point at the Republicans’ lunch meeting on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, in the GOP-controlled House, Judiciary Committee Republicans rejected Democratic efforts to subpoena Trump administration officials involved in creating the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Like Pigs to the Trough

Among the various charlatans, ne’er-do-wells, pardoned criminals, and others eyeing the $1.776 billion in the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”:

• Former Trump I official Michael Caputo became the first person to attempt to file a claim, for a cool $2.7 million.

• Mark McCloskey, the gun-toting pro-Trump lawyer who comically defended his St. Louis home during the George Floyd protests, is considering applying.

• Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), whose sentence was commuted by Trump, doesn’t want compensation, just an apology.

• Pardoned Jan. 6 defendant Yvonne St Cyr: “I hope I get $10 million but the dollar collapses like it should.”

That’s just beginning.

Polis Censured for Freeing Tina Peters

By an overwhelming vote, the Colorado Democratic Party censured Gov. Jared Polis (D) for commuting the prison sentence of Big Lie purveyor Tina Peters.

‘Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf’

The Trump DOJ obtained an indictment of a former federal prosecutor in Florida for allegedly stealing an electronic copy of the still-sealed Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

The four-count indictment of Carmen Mercedes Lineberger was handed down May 19 and unsealed on May 20 in the Fort Pierce Division of the Southern District of Florida, where U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is the only judge. It is Cannon who has corruptly sealed the report and kept it from public view since before the 2024 election. Her decision to do so is currently on appeal.

Lineberger allegedly emailed DOJ files, including the sealed report, from her work account to her personal account last year, using file names like “Chocolate_Cake-Recipe.pdf.” The file name for the sealed report was allegedly “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf.”

The case against Lineberger, who pleaded not guilty yesterday, was brought by attorneys from outside the Souther District, where Lineberger had previously worked.

Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart, who was originally assigned the case, recused himself in an order this morning. He did not give a reason, but he approved the search warrants for Mar-a-Lago.

Judge Orders Compliance With PRA

U.S. District Judge John Bates of D.C. ordered White House aides to continue to abide by the Presidential Records Act despite a DOJ memo that declared the law unconstitutional. Bates, not known to be a show horse, started his opinion with an Orwell quote: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Trump’s Obsession With Colossalism

Good news and bad news on Trump’s effort to remake the nation’s capital in his gaudy image:

• The Good: Senate Republicans are running away from Trump’s vanity ballroom project and are on the verge of killing off funding for it. The funding was included in the reconciliation bill, but the Senate’s parliamentarian ruled over the weekend that it violated reconciliation rules. Rather than rework the language, the provision is going to be dropped, largely because of a lack of GOP support, even to get to a bare 50 votes.

• The Bad: The Trump administration plans to proceed with constructing the president’s monumental 250-foot arch commemorating the nation’s 250th birthday without approval from Congress. In a sign of some desperation, the administration is citing a century-old law authorizing a D.C. project that was never built as already giving it congressional authority to build the arch.

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Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

President Trump’s corrupt $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is the gift that keeps on giving … to Trump.

New details continue to dribble out about the so-called settlement agreement resolving Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.

Foremost among them: A thin, shoddily drafted single-page document dated May 19 and signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that purports to release any claims that the IRS might have against Trump, his family and his businesses:

The date of the release, quietly posted on the DOJ website early yesterday, is important. Reporting over the past few days had suggested that the settlement agreement would include some sort of release of Trump, or at least abandonment of the IRS audits of Trump, where he faced a potential penalty of as much as $100 million. But no such language appeared in the settlement agreement that was dated May 18 and released the same day. It’s not clear if the apparent side agreement the next day was planned all along, was a rushed make-do in reaction to Trump ire over the terms of the settlement agreement, or was the result of some other chicanery. The odd circumstances also raise questions about the enforceability of the side agreement, since Trump’s lawsuit was dismissed the day before the side agreement was reached.

Notably, the release is so broad and poorly worded that it left some legal commentators wondering if it covered not just any tax cases against Trump, which is bad enough, but any other criminal conduct. It uses the ill-defined and loaded terms “Lawfare and/or Weaponization” in a way that seems sweeping and unlimited. The better reading of the side agreement is that by its own terms it covers only claims by the IRS and Treasury Department, who were defendants in the Trump lawsuit, which would seem to limit it to tax-related matters. Still, the Blanche-signed document is vague, loose, and imprecise in ways that invite over-broad interpretations and future legal wrangling over what it means, which may not have been by accident.

The president’s former personal attorney granting him sweeping release from government claims against him is a stunning conflict of interest unheard of in past administrations. It comes less than a week after a CNN report that as soon as Blanche arrived at the Justice Department last year, he was told by the DOJ’s top ethics lawyer that he would have to recuse himself from matters involving Trump personally. The DOJ said then that Blanche was complying with his ethical obligations.

Among the other developments:

• The IRS thought it could successfully defend the Trump lawsuit against it. The NYT reports on a previously undisclosed memo to that effect:

I.R.S. officials prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining what they saw as flaws in Mr. Trump’s suit and advising the Justice Department to move to dismiss it, according to two people familiar with the memo. That memo was provided to Treasury officials in April, and it is unclear if they passed it along to its intended recipients at the Justice Department, according to the people, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal government deliberations.

• The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” lacks the rigorous controls that are typically put in place for compensating victims, Bloomberg reports. “They’ve apparently just decided to give money away. That’s what this looks like,” said Arthur Gary, former general counsel of DOJ’s Justice Management Division.

• Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) wants the testimony of Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer until he resigned Monday after the settlement agreement was announced.

• Months ago, DOJ official Ed Martin told a GOP ally that big payouts were coming for the Jan. 6 defendants, though he estimated it would only be $40 million, not the $1.776 billion it turned out to be.

Just In: Facebook Meme Case Settles

A Tennessee man wrongfully jailed for 37 days for posting a meme to Facebook in the aftermath of the 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk has settled his case against Perry County, Tennessee and Sheriff Nick Weems for $835,000, his lawyers announced this morning.

Retired law enforcement officer Larry Bushart’s comment on a Facebook post promoting a Kirk vigil in Perry County, Tennessee recycled a Trump meme from a 2024 school shooting in Perry County, Iowa:

Even though the sheriff later admitted he knew it was a preexisting meme about an out-of-state school shooting, he claimed that it was being interpreted as a threat to Perry County High School in Tennessee and sought and obtained a warrant for Bushart’s arrest. Bushart, who lives in a nearby county, was held on a $2 million bond before the case fell apart after widespread media attention.

The settlement, in which the defendants did not admit to fault or liability, is being paid by the county’s insurer. As part of the settlement, Bushart and Weems issued a joint statement today.

“I am pleased my First Amendment rights have been vindicated,” said Bushart, who was represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy. I am looking forward to moving on and spending time with my family.”

For his part, Weems sounded unchastened: “As Sheriff, there is no responsibility I take more seriously than protecting the children in our community, who are some of the most vulnerable among us. Ensuring their safety is not just a duty of this office, it is a commitment I carry with me every single day. I am happy to have this matter resolved, and I look forward to continuing to serve and protect the people of Perry County.”

2026 Ephemera

• KY-04: The iconoclastic Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was successfully primaried by Trump-backed Ed Gallrein, further shrinking any nominal GOP resistance to Trump on Capitol Hill.

• GA-Sen: In the GOP primary to determine who will challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff (D), Rep. Mike Collins advanced to the June 16 runoff against Derek Dooley, son of Georgia football legend Vince Dooley.

• GA-Gov: In the GOP primary, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — who famously resisted Trump’s effort to overturn the state’s presidential election in 2020 — was squeezed out of the runoff by two election deniers.

• AL-Sen: In the GOP primary, Rep. Barry Moore ran well ahead of Attorney General Steve Marshall, but they’re headed to a June 16 runoff.

• AL-Gov: Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R) and former Sen. Doug Jones (D) won their respective primaries to set up a rematch of their 2020 Senate race.

• TX-Sen: After dangling for weeks a possible endorsement of Sen. John Cornyn (R), President Trump threw his support at the last minute to Attorney General Ken Paxton in the May 26 GOP primary runoff.

‘A Government of Laws, Not Men’

In protest of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” an advocacy group for current and former DOJ employees invoked John Adams:

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Not Possible in a Functioning Democracy

A whirlwind of developments closed the deal yesterday on what is arguably the single most corrupt scheme of the Trump II presidency to date.

In broad daylight, President Trump raided the U.S. treasury to the tune of $1.776 billion, to be disbursed at his discretion to an assortment of insurrectionists, pardoned criminals, and disgraced former officials whom he counts among his political allies.

The day unfolded like this:

• A settlement agreement is signed by Trump’s personal attorney, the DOJ’s No. 3, and the IRS commissioner to resolve Trump’s collusive lawsuit against the IRS in federal court in Miami and establish an “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

• Trump dismisses his lawsuit before U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams can weigh in on whether the IRS and Treasury Department are under Trump’s effective control, which would have ended the lawsuit and prevented any “settlement.”

• The DOJ touts the settlement in a press release and issues a bare-bones summary of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

• With obvious reluctance, Williams, whose hands are tied by court rules, orders the Trump case closed.

• The DOJ releases the settlement agreement itself.

• Brian Morrissey, the general counsel of the Treasury Department, resigned Monday just hours after the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” was announced and only seven months after he was confirmed as the department’s top lawyer.

A few observations:

Six pages! The settlement agreement, at a mere six substantive pages, has to be among the skimpiest legal documents ever drafted for a settlement of this scale. The ratio of settlement agreement pages drafted to dollars committed is off the charts.

How convenient! The settlement agreement contains a nifty provision that purports to allow only the collusive parties to the agreement — and no one else — to challenge it.

Conflict of interest much? The No. 3 at DOJ, Stanley Woodward, represented a host of clients, including Jan. 6 defendants, who stand to be beneficiaries of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

A free-for-all! None of the documents released by the DOJ, including the settlement agreement itself, defines “weaponization,” provides clear standards for reviewing claims, or otherwise establishes any guardrails for transparency of accountability.

In a normal, functioning democracy, none of this would be possible. If it were attempted, the legal and political blowback would ruin careers, lead to prosecutions, end in impeachments, and might shift the balance of power away from those associated with the culprits for a generation for more.

The importance of what happened yesterday is that Trump and his cabinet declared to the world that they can do anything they want — and they will. Unshackled by the Roberts Court before he was even sworn in and backed since then by a supine Republican Congress, Trump is free to raid the Treasury, to use public funds to prop up his political machine, to use the federal courts to launder his schemes, and to unleash upon civil society domestic terrorists, insurrectionists, and other bad actors to perpetuate his regime.

Only the Best: Trump DOJ Edition

In a stunning decision late last week, three federal judges in Wyoming dismissed felony indictments in nine different cases due to prosecutorial misconduct in front of the grand jury by then-interim U.S. Attorney Darin Smith of Wyoming.

The dismissed indictments, which can be resubmitted to a new grand jury, included murder, weapons possession, drug distribution, and possession of child pornography.

In their joint order dismissing the indictments, the judges describe an avalanche of errors by Smith in a March 16 grand jury session, which they grouped into two categories: (i) “conclusive statements about the bad character of the Defendants and the weight of the evidence”; and (ii) “statements and conduct that erode the independence of the grand jury.”

Despite this fiasco, Senate Republicans took the interim tag off of Smith last night by confirming him as U.S. attorney.

Minnesota Charges ICE Agent in Shooting

For the second time, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty has brought criminal charges against a federal agent involved in Operation Metro Surge. The latest charge comes in a notorious shooting incident after a pursuit, where the ICE agent allegedly fired his gun through the closed front door of a home, striking a Venezuelan national. Moriarty identified the ICE agent publicly for the first time as she brought assault charges against him and obtained a nationwide warrant for his arrest.

Midterms Money Business Watch

• President Trump seized on a legitimate error in the distribution of mail-in ballots for Maryland’s upcoming primaries to order a Justice Department investigation and to make wild and unfounded allegations on social media that the state “sent out 500,000 Illegal Mail In Ballots, and they got caught!” adding that “nobody knows what’s happening with the first 500,000 they sent.” The state caught the error by a vendor, which led to some voters receiving ballots for the wrong party, and is working to resend the correct ballots.

• A coalition of 10 big city district attorneys are expected to announce as soon as today that they will investigate and prosecute any suspected voter intimidation by federal agents during the midterms.

Judges Duel Over Anti-Trans Subpoena

In dueling court cases in Rhode Island and Texas, two federal judges have issued conflicting rulings over a Trump DOJ administrative subpoena served on Rhode Island Hospital for records of its transgender care program.

In the most recent development yesterday, notorious right-wing federal judge Reed O’Connor of Fort Worth, who previously upheld enforcement of the subpoena, ordered the hospital to begin producing the subpoenaed records beginning today for him to hold in chambers while various appeals proceed.

O’Connor’s order — which comes after U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy of Rhode Island last week blocked enforcement of the subpoena — includes a highly unusual injunction that prohibits the hospital from seeking relief from his order except at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court:

[The hospital] is hereby ENJOINED from seeking relief, encouraging others to seek relief, or cooperate with others in seeking relief from any other court related to these proceedings, and from aiding and abetting others or encouraging others from seeking relief from any other court but those identified …

At least seven other federal courts have agreed to quash or limit the expansive civil subpoenas sent to more than 20 doctors and hospitals last summer, the AP reports.

Anti-Trans Watch

• Colorado: The state Supreme Court ordered Children’s Hospital Colorado to resume providing transgender care for minors. The hospital had paused such care after the Trump administration moved to block federal funding for hospitals that provide such care.

• Kansas: A state judge blocked the state’s ban on transgender care for minors, finding that it ran afoul of the state Constitution’s expansive Bill of Rights.

• Texas: Under an agreement coordinated with the Trump DOJ to settle a state investigation by state Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas Children’s Hospital will create the nation’s first “detransition” clinic focused on medical care for young people who stop or reverse their gender transitions.

Pentagon IG Investigates Boat Strikes

The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating the Trump administration’s high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, according to a May 11 IG memorandum.

Ebola Watch

• The death toll from the ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, which raged for weeks before the alarm was sounded, has risen to more than 130 people, with more than 500 suspected cases.

• An American doctor working for a missionary group in the DRC tested positive for ebola after treating patients. He is being transported to Germany for treatment, along with six other Americans who had high-risk exposure to the virus.

• In response to the outbreak, the Trump administration limited entry to the United States from the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan.

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

BREAKING …

In a new filing this morning, President Trump attempted an end run around a federal judge by purporting to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns.

The move comes just days before this week’s deadline set by the judge in the case for Trump and the government defendants to explain how they are truly adverse, rather than all on Trump’s side.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of Miami had expressed concern that without a true dispute between adverse parties she lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. With no one to argue the other side, she had appointed highly regarded outside attorneys as friends of the court to advise her on the legal issues involved.

Late last week, perhaps anticipating an effort to end-run the judge, they submitted their memo more than a week ahead of their deadline, making a compelling case for why “President Trump enjoys ample actual and practical authority to control the Defendants.”

Trump’s latest filing is a notice of dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be refiled, but most importantly it contends that the right to dismiss the case is not subject to judicial review under the procedural rules since neither the IRS nor the Treasury Department had yet filed an answer or other responsive motion to the lawsuit.

“Accordingly, voluntary dismissal under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) is available as of right, and requires neither leave of Court nor the consent of any party,” Trump’s lawyers argue. They go farther in a footnote, in telling the judge that they are filing a notice of dismissal, not a motion to dismiss, because she has no say in the matter under appeal court precedent: “dismissal is self-executing, terminates the action upon filing, and divests the district court of jurisdiction.”

The bulk of the notice is dedicated to telling Judge Williams to back off: “Upon the filing of this Notice, no judicial analysis is appropriate, and any ‘subsequent order purporting to dismiss ‘all claims’ . . . [would be] a nullity,’” it contends, citing case law.

The notice also cheekily purports to assess fees and costs: “Each party shall bear its own attorneys’ fees and costs.”

The dismissal comes after significant new reporting over the weekend that built on ABC News’ blockbuster on Thursday that the case was on the verge of being settled through a unprecedentedly corrupt agreement where the U.S. government would set up a $1.7 billion slush fund under Trump’s purview to pay out “damages” to his allies who purport to be victims of the Deep State, including the Trump-pardoned Jan. 6 defendants.

In a followup story, ABC News reported that the exact settlement amount would be the historically resonant figure of 1,776,000,000 to be overseen by the “President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission.” It would be composed of five commissioners, four of them appointed by the attorney general, all of whom would be subject to removal by Trump without cause. “The commission would also be under no obligation to disclose the process for awarding the nearly $2 billion,” ABC News reported.

In another dark and cynical twist, the Trump DOJ modeled the proposed slush fund “on a landmark $760 million settlement fund the Obama administration created to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who were deprived access to federal subsidies for decades,” the NYT reported.

It has been apparent for a couple of weeks that Trump officials were racing to settle the IRS case (while bundling two other Trump claims against the government into the settlement agreement) before Judge Williams could weigh in. “A compensation fund for Trump allies but not for the president himself would offer a short-term fix, allowing the president to receive a deliverable benefit from the lawsuit before the judge could dismiss it, according to officials briefed on its details,” the NYT reports.

Now that Trump has dropped his lawsuit, it’s not clear that Judge Williams has any remaining power to probe the terms of the settlement agreement. It’s also not clear-cut who might have standing to challenge the settlement agreement in court.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) raised one potential avenue of attack in an interview last week with The New Republic, arguing that the 14th Amendment bars the federal government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

“Raskin said that if this fund hands money to the January 6 rioters, Trump will be ‘using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection,’” TNR reported.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

I doubt Morning Memo readers need the point driven home for them, but there is a tendency to see some of the developments of the past 72 hours as discrete events rather than as a singular story of a post-coup reckoning that is pushing a revisionist history of Jan. 6, subverting the rule of law, and setting the stage for future attacks on democracy.

The creation of “The President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission” funnels public funds to former insurrectionists. The GOP primary defeat of incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is payback for his voting to impeach President Trump over Jan. 6. The commutation of the sentence of former election official Tina Peters by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) on state charges related to her actions in support of the Big Lie comes after Trump retaliated against the state and threatened further adverse action.

It’s all of a piece, and unfolding in broad daylight.

The Corruption: Trump Stock Trades Edition

A sampling of some of the better coverage of the President Trump’s newly disclosed stock trades from the first quarter of 2026:

• Bloomberg: Trump’s More Than 3,700 Trades Astonish Wall Street Insiders

• Judd Legum: The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure

• CNBC: Trump touted Palantir on Truth Social after buying the company’s stock, records show

The Great Whitening

• South Carolina: Sitting in special session, the legislature will begin debate this week on eliminating the state’s sole majority-Black House district, held by Rep. James Clyburn (D).

• Virginia: With no noted dissents, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected state Democrats’ long-shot bid to pause the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling that threw out their voter-approved redistricting plan.

• Tennessee: After state Republicans redrew the congressional district map to eliminate his majority-Black district, longtime Rep. Steve Cohen (D) decided not to run for re-election this year.

Quote of the Day

“People are expecting overt violence and clubs and fire hoses and pitbulls. You don’t need that when you have the current Supreme Court that we have, when you have legislative bodies that do not want Black people to have representation.” —State Sen. Natalie Murdock (D-NC)

ICE Protestors Go on Trial in Spokane

In a closely watched case that prompted the acting U.S. attorney to resign, the Trump DOJ is bringing to trial this week three ICE protestors on unusual conspiracy charges, a move that legal experts says threatens to criminalize political dissent.

Televangelist-in-Chief

Sarah Posner, on Sunday’s nine-hour prayer marathon on The National Mall:

Trump’s evangelical supporters, who falsely contend America was founded by divine providence as a Christian nation, are trying to turn the anniversary of our independence from a king into a spectacle of worship of their wannabe king who compares himself to Jesus Christ. If there was any “rededication” going on at Sunday’s marathon on the Mall, it was not to the divine, but to the grift of Trump as the God-anointed savior of the “real” Christian America.

Trump Ballroom Funding in Jeopardy

The Senate parliamentarian ruled Saturday that funding for Trump’s vanity ballroom as currently written cannot be included in a reconciliation bill, meaning it cannot pass with a simple majority vote. Republicans are working on redrafting the ballroom funding language.

Greenland Talks

The NYT has a grim progress report after four months of talks in D.C. among the United States, Denmark, and Greenland over President Trump’s demands for a greater role on the island territory: “The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty.”

U.S. Conducts Military Strikes in Nigeria

A joint U.S.-Nigeria operation on Saturday killed a senior ISIS leader. Followup strikes on Sunday killed additional Islamist militants.

WHO Declares Ebola Emergency

On Friday, the World Health Organization announced an ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By Saturday, it had declared ebola to be a global health emergency, with two cases confirmed in Uganda’s capital, Kampala.

The re-emergence of the ebola threat comes after the Trump administration dismantled USAID, cut funding for the CDC, and withdrew from the WHO — all of which play significant roles in monitoring, containing, and responding to infectious disease outbreaks around the world.

An undetermined number of American citizens on the ground in the DRC have been exposed to suspected cases of the virus. The U.S. government is reportedly arranging transport for them out of the country to be quarantined elsewhere, though where remains unclear.

Most ebola outbreaks are small, but this one has been spreading for weeks, experts say. “The first known case was a nurse who developed symptoms on April 24,” according to the BBC. “It has since taken three weeks to confirm an outbreak is happening.”

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The Corruption: IRS Edition

A corrupt agreement is in the works between President Trump and his underlings at the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service that would settle his pending personal claims against the U.S. government by creating an unchecked $1.7 billion discretionary slush fund to pay his allies who have been “victims” of the Deep State, including the pardoned Jan. 6 defendants, according to an ABC News report.

The “expected” settlement agreement — whose final terms are not yet set — would resolve (i) Trump’s $10 billion claim over the criminal leak of Trump’s tax returns by an IRS contractor who was convicted and sentenced to jail time; (ii) his $230 million claim arising from the 2016 Russian collusion investigation and the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.

News of the potential settlement comes after the New York Times suggested this week the parties were racing to settle the IRS claim ahead of a May 20 deadline in federal court in Florida to file briefs showing that the case is legitimately adverse. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of Miami has raised concerns that Trump and the IRS are essentially on the same side, which would mean there’s not a real legal dispute for her to adjudicate (more on this below).

A spokesperson for President Trump’s legal team did not deny the ABC News report on the terms of the agreement, which would include a public apology from the IRS.

The reported terms of the settlement agreement are mind-boggling in their corrupt resolution of the underlying claims, but the pending agreement, as described by ABC News, opens up a whole new avenue of corruption by placing $1.7 billion under Trump’s purview to dispense to his allies without any oversight, accountability, or recourse.

The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself. …

The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight. Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars, the sources said.

Trump would reportedly be barred from personally receiving compensation from the slush fund for the pending claims being resolved, but ABC News’ sources said “entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”

All of the flaming red flags associated with this settlement “has led some administration officials to raise ethical concerns about the arrangement,” ABC News reports. Ya think?

Court-Appointed Lawyers Weigh In

Judge Williams appointed a panel of distinguished lawyers not involved in the case as friends of the court to brief her on the issue of adversity. They filed their memorandum last night: “This case is unprecedented: A sitting president seeks monetary damages for alleged harm to his personal interests from an executive agency that he controls.” Only 16 pages, it’s worth a read.

The amici don’t ultimately take a position on whether adversity exists but they compile a compelling case that it does not, concluding that “President Trump enjoys ample actual and practical authority to control the Defendants.”

In advising the judge on the particular circumstances of this case, they start with the extraordinary power Trump has exerted over the executive branch compared to past presidents. They cite, among other things:

• Trump fired IRS commissioner Billy Long “without providing a reason.”

• Trump “significantly expanded the President’s oversight and control over the Attorney General and DOJ, including in ways that blur the line between fidelity to the President’s policy priorities and fidelity to the President himself.”

• Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “expressed an expectation that DOJ attorneys demonstrate personal loyalty to President Trump.”

• The Trump administration “has taken the position that it has unreviewable authority to terminate high-level officials deemed insufficiently aligned with the Executive. … Some terminations of DOJ attorneys have already occurred on this basis.”

Then they get to the heart of the matter, whether in fact Trump is controlling the defense of his own litigation. Their assessment is striking: “There is also reason to believe that the President is, in fact, exercising his control over the Defendants in this litigation. President Trump’s own statements suggest that he believes he has control over the Defendants and the DOJ lawyers charged with defending this case.”

They contrast the handling of Trump’s claim with the vigorous defense DOJ has mounted in related litigation, circumstances which “raise the specter that Defendants and their attorneys may … be operating at the President’s direction.”

They suggest to the judge that there are numerous factual inquiries she could potentially make into DOJ’s handling of the Trump case and related cases to help her nail down the issue of adversity.

It’s not clear if settling the case before Judge Williams rules would leave the judge with any authority to review the settlement, and it’s a tricky legal question whether any outside parties would have legal standing to challenge the settlement. All of which is why the parties seem to be rushing to settle the claims before the May 20 briefing deadline.

“There’s a certain irony here,” notes former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. “The point of the lawsuit was to treat the federal court as a spot to launder a collusive deal and gain a judicial imprimatur. Now that a judge is actually doing her job, actually probing whether the whole enterprise is constitutionally void, they want to withdraw.”

Trump DOJ Watch

• CNN: Todd Blanche was told last year when he was still deputy attorney general that he would have to recuse himself from DOJ matters involving President Trump in his personal capacity, an ethics requirement that the department says Blanche has complied with.

• The Trump DOJ is planning to drop fraud charges against an Indian billionaire after his attorney — a former personal attorney to President Trump — made a Power Point presentation at Main Justice last month that included an “unusual offer,” the NYT reports: “If prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs, echoing a pledge he had made in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election.”

• The DOJ told a federal judge in D.C. that citizenship lists compiled under a Trump executive order and to be shared with state election officials are likely to be incomplete and unreliable for determining voter eligibility, the NYT reports.

Abortion Pill to Remain Available

TPM’s Kate Riga: Supreme Court Keeps Mifepristone Available For Now While Alito and Thomas Seethe in Dissent

The Great Whitening: S.C. Edition

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) did reverse course and call a special session of the legislature, but he stopped short of directly asking for a new congressional district map that eliminates the sole majority-Black district.

The tension here, as best as I can tell, is more over math than it is principle. Cramming the state’s Black voters into Democratic Rep. James Clyburn’s district makes the other congressional seats safely Republican. Eliminating Clyburn’s district runs the risk of putting some of those seats more in jeopardy.

It’s not hard to imagine the governor and Republican Senate majority leader, who opposes redistricting before the midterms, having a better grasp of their state’s math than the Trump White House.

13 U.S. Boat Strike Victims Identified

A joint effort by 20 journalists, led by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, has identified 13 of the more than 190 people killed in President Trump’s lawless campaign of high seas attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats.

Another One

The House Ethics Committee confirmed that it is investigating sexual harrassment and hostile workplace allegations against Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC).

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Judges Rein in the Administration and …

I want to give you the flavor of a handful of new smackdowns of the Trump administration from federal judges across the country in an array of cases, involving violations of the law, defiance of court orders, and assorted shenanigans.

All of these are from the last day or two, so a particularly notable cluster, even if ultimate accountability to the rule of law continues to be slow in coming:

Rhode Island: Anti-Trans Subpoena Quashed

In a sharply worded order that bristled with disdain for what the Justice Department has become under President Trump, U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy of Rhode Island blocked an administrative subpoena of Rhode ‌Island Hospital for its records on gender-affirming care for transgender ​youth.

McElroy lets it rip right from the top:

She concludes: “[T]he discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling. The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word—with
little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.’”

This is the case that has played out in parallel in Rhode Island and Texas, where DOJ went to Trump-friendly U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor to enforce the subpoena against the hospital. O’Connor granted the administration’s motion the same day it was filed without giving the hospital a chance to respond and then denied the hospital motion to stay while it appealed.

While McElroy stepped in, she made clear she wasn’t purporting to overrule O’Connor, which she doesn’t have the power to do. “What this Court holds is that the subpoena itself lacks a congressionally authorized purpose, was issued for an improper purpose, and demands the production of records that cannot be obtained consistent with the constitutional privacy rights of Rhode Island children.”

For the full backstory on the case, the always-on-it Chris Geidner has you covered.

DC: A New ‘Facilitate’ Case

Citing Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a Colombian national it has deported last month to the Democratic Republic of Congo after the DRC refused to accept her because of her serious medical issues.

The DRC government told ICE in a letter it could not accept the 55-year-old woman because it could not provide her with adequate medical care.

“The government sent her to the D.R.C., anyway. …. Sending plaintiff to the D.R.C., therefore, was likely illegal,” Leon wrote.

Colorado: Injunction Violation

U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson of Denver found that ICE has “materially violated” his preliminary injunction barring warrantless arrests without first establishing probable cause they are a flight risk. Jackson imposed a host of new reporting and training requirements on ICE.

DC: First Amendment Violation

In another ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon found that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment when it sanctioned United Nations official Francesca Albanese over her calls for war crimes charges against Israeli officials.

“Albanese has done nothing more than speak!” Leon wrote. “It is undisputed that her recommendations have no binding effect on the ICC’s actions — they are nothing more than her opinion.”

… The Administration Pushes Back

At the same time the administration was taking it on the chin in the case above, it made two aggressive new moves:

DC: Jan 6 Never Ends

In a major escalation of its attack on state bars, the Trump DOJ filed suit to block the DC bar from disciplining Jan. 6 coup plotter Jeffrey Clark as an unconstitutional infringement on federal power. The lawsuit, which was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward but no career attorneys, also comes to the defense of U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, who faces disciplinary proceedings in DC.

Rhode Island: New Attack on Judge

In a column at the right-wing Federalist, DHS general counsel James Percival launched a new attack on U.S. District Judge Melissa R. DuBose of Rhode Island, accusing her of being a “radical” and “activist” who is “engaged in a political public affairs battle and intimidation campaign against DHS” after she referred a DOJ lawyer for possible discipline. This is the case where the DOJ, at ICE’s request, withheld from the judge the fact that an ICE detainee was wanted on murder charges abroad, and then DHS attacked her for releasing an alleged murderer.

The Great Whitening: An Update

• South Carolina: Despite GOP opposition in the state Senate, Gov. Henry McMaster is expected to call a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s congressional district map before the midterms and eliminate the sole Democratic seat, held by Rep. James Clyburn (D). The special session could start as soon as tomorrow, after the regular session ends today. McMaster’s move was a reversal from his previous opposition to a special session and came after pressure from President Trump and his allies and just days after the state Senate failed to pass a measure that would have led to a special session.

• Mississippi: Gov. Tate Reeves (R) will no longer call a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s Supreme Court districts and seemed to take off the table any monkeying with the state’s congressional district map until after the midterms.

• Maryland: Maryland state Senate President Bill Ferguson (D), who blocked a push last year to redraw the state’s congressional district map and eliminate the state’s sole GOP seat, held by Rep. Andy Harris (R), is “talking to allies about a path forward on possible redistricting,” NOTUS reports.

• Georgia: Gov. Brian Kemp (R) called a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s congressional district map for the 2028 elections, keeping his commitment to leave the map alone for the 2026 election but making sure the map is redrawn before he leaves office in January while Republicans still control the statehouse.

It’s Always Black Women

While Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) isn’t pushing to change the state’s congressional district map before the midterms, he did sign into a law a sneaky GOP bill targeting the Democratic-heavy Atlanta area.

The new law takes party affiliation off the ballot for county elected offices in five metro Atlanta counties, including plurality-Black Fulton County, so that Republicans have a better shot of winning without the “R” by their names; but it retains party affiliation for county elected offices in Republican-heavy rural areas.

“All five counties covered by the law have Black Democratic women serving as district attorney,” the AJC reports. That of course includes GOP target Fani Willis in Fulton County.

This is exactly the kind of nonsense that pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act was intended to scupper before it disadvantaged minority voters. But Chief Justice John Roberts famously torpedoed pre-clearance in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder decision.

Quote of the Day

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill:

[T]he effort by Trump and Republican state leadership to gerrymander Black representation out of Congress must be understood as not only an attack on Black people, but on democracy itself. If the Republican racial gerrymandering effort is successful, the U.S. will lose any claim to democracy for a generation or more.

And the forces that stand today against citizenship and political representation for Black people won’t stop there. They will not tolerate meaningful political representation for any group that opposes their oligarchical Christian nationalist ideology. They seek a one-party political system in a country ruled by authoritarians. The political oppression of Black people is not the end. It is the conduit.

CIA in Mexico: The Plot Thickens

This is the first time I’ve linked from Morning Memo to my own social media post, and I won’t make it a habit, but this thread is an efficient way to catch up on this week’s important developments:

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Welcome!

Hello to the 300+ new Morning Memo readers who have signed up after seeing Josh Marshall and Kate Riga interviewed by Heather Cox Richardson.

A quick word on what to expect: a rundown of the day’s essential political news in your inbox midmorning on weekdays. Over the past year, that’s meant mostly chronicling the worst depredations of the Trump II presidency. No fluff or bullshit, but some occasional whimsy to leaven the serious times in which we live.

The current moment can be hard to face, but if you’re feeling a civic duty to stay informed, I try to make Morning Memo sufficient for you to check off that box. I hope you find it useful.

Liberia or Bust

I was in the federal courthouse in suburban Maryland for a hearing yesterday in the civil case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The case is deep in the procedural weeds at this point, but it continues to produce moments I’ve never seen in court.

The context is that the Trump administration is still trying to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, and U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has blocked his removal, which the Trump DOJ is currently appealing to the 4th Circuit.

Nothing was resolved in yesterday’s hearing, but Xinis took the opportunity to upbraid DOJ lawyers for misrepresentations it made about the case to the appeals court.

To take one example, Xinis said it was “sticking in my craw” that the Trump DOJ told the appeals court she had not made the requisite findings before issuing an injunction in the case. She demanded to know who wrote the filing that was submitted to the appeals court (it was a more junior attorney at the government table), at which point she read in open court from the transcript of the earlier hearing showing that she did make the required findings as she issued the injunction.

“It’s important to read,” she chided.

Then she turned to the more senior DOJ attorney: “It is not accurate to tell the 4th Circuit that I did not make findings. Do you disagree?”

“Based on what you just read,” he said, “you have made findings.”

Then why did you tell the 4th Circuit otherwise? she asked.

“I’m sure it was a mistake regarding where the appropriate responses were being looked for in the docket,” he said, in weak defense of his colleague. “It may be that that … was not looked at.”

Xinis remains particularly irritated that the Trump DOJ took it upon itself to decide she hadn’t ruled fast enough on one of its motions and therefore deemed it denied and appealed that denial. She walked through the many points in the case when DOJ either asked for more time, including to brief her on its motion, consented to delays, and voluntarily agreed not to remove Abrego Garcia, and she pressed the DOJ lawyers why they had not shared that context with the appeals court.

Then things got more awkward.

“On what authority can you dictate a court’s schedule on a motion like this?” Xinis asked.

After some hemming and hawing from the lead DOJ attorney, Xinis asked for a specific case that would allow the DOJ to deem its own motion denied. “Cite your best case,” she urged.

The DOJ attorney had nothing, at which point Xinis deftly distinguished the cases DOJ had cited in its notice of appeal.

Both DOJ lawyers in court yesterday were career employees, not the political appointees who previously took the lead in the case, and the kind of errors and omissions that Xinis focused on were different in kind and degree from the brazen defiance that the Trump administration exhibited in this case for most of the past 14 months.

But in a sign that the Trump DOJ is still playing fast and loose in the notorious case, it refused to say whether it would dismiss the criminal case against Abrego Garcia in order to remove him to Liberia. “It’s a fair question to ask what about the criminal indictment,” Xinis said, but the lead DOJ lawyer would not engage.

Whether intended or not, the hearing ended up being a chance for Xinis to preview for Abrego Garcia’s attorneys the arguments she would make to the appeals court, where briefing isn’t due until this summer.

Despite Court Order, Patel Disparages Abrego Garcia

In the kind of performative verbal combat that has become de rigueur for Trump officials in congressional hearings, Kash Patel disparaged Abrego Garcia as a “convicted gang-banging rapist” and a “felon” in possible violation of a court order in his criminal case.

Back in October, a district judge found that Trump administration officials had already “made extrajudicial statements that are troubling” and directed prosecutors to provide all DOJ and DHS employees with a copy of his court order reiterating the local rule against statements about “the prior criminal record … or the character or reputation of the accused.”

The judge warned at the time: “With knowledge of the Local Rule, any future statements that pose a clear and present danger to Abrego’s fair trial rights may subject the speaker to sanctions.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• The DHS inspector general has launched a probe into the $38 billion warehouse-to-detention program championed by former Secretary Kristi Noem, the Wall Street Journal reports.

• David Venturella, a former career ICE employee and private prison company executive, will be tapped as the new acting director of ICE.

• An exhaustive analysis by Politico shows that federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration’s unprecedented mandatory detention policy more than 10,000 times, which represents 90% of the habeas cases challenging the no-bond detentions.

• The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday became the latest appeals court to reject the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy, mirroring similar decisions by the 11th and 2nd circuits. The 5th and 8th circuits have upheld the policy, and the 7th Circuit deadlocked on it. The Supreme Court will ultimately have to resolve the circuit split.

The Corruption: IRS Edition

Trump DOJ officials are having internal discussions about settling President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for leaking his tax information, which might include dropping any audits of him, his family, or his businesses.

What caught my eye is the suggestion in the the NYT story that they’re trying to settle the case before a federal judge weighs in on whether there’s a sufficient adversarial relationship between the parties to make it a legitimate lawsuit. The judge has ordered briefing on the matter by May 20. “White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline, according to the people,” the NYT reports.

Trump DOJ Watch

• The FBI has begun interviewing current and former CIA officers as part of the Trump-driven investigation into ex-CIA Director John Brennan’s role in an intelligence assessment that found Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, NBC News reports.

• A team of FBI agents specifically put together to handle Trump’s retributive cases is being referred to internally as the “payback squad,” NOTUS reports.

• Former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who is suing over his wrongful termination, recounts to Anderson Cooper some of the more bizarre moments of his brief tenure in the early days of Trump II:

Quote of the Day

“I’m unaware of anything like this, with this involvement of senior government officials, on this scale, trying to paint this false picture of the United States as a quote unquote Christian nation. Trump’s rhetoric in the past 18 months is how he’s ‘going to make America Christian again,’ that it’s his job to push religion. This is all part of that piece.”—Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, on the nine-hour-long prayer festival planned Sunday for the National Mall using some public funds for the America’s 250th birthday and expected to feature Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)

Thank You!

With a big boost at the end from Heather Cox Richardson, we blew the doors off our goal of adding 1,000 new members during TPM’s annual membership drive. As of this morning, we’re at 1,600+ new members. Thanks to everyone who became TPM members, especially Morning Memo readers who took the plunge. You can join TPM at any time, of course, but I’ll be laying off the membership pitches for now. Again, many thanks for your support.

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‘Treason’

Rattled by leaks from within his own administration about the Iran War, President Trump has directed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to target reporters and news organizations who are the recipients of the leaks, according to new reporting.

“In one meeting, Trump passed a stack of news articles he and other senior officials thought threatened national security to Blanche with a sticky note on it that said ‘treason,’” an administration official told the WSJ, which was itself the recipient of a grand jury subpoena in a leak case.

Rather than abide by longstanding DOJ policy that journalists should only be subpoenaed as a last resort when other investigative tools have come up empty, Blanche has been eager to follow Trump’s direction.

“If it means sending a subpoena to the reporter, that’s exactly what we should do and that’s exactly what we will be doing,” Blanche said in a press conference last month. It came the day after Trump had complained about news reports on the rescue of a U.S. airman downed in Iran: “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘national security; give it up or go to jail.’”

The combination of Trump accusing reporters of “treason” for exercising their First Amendment rights and eagerness to see them jailed with Blanche’s willingness to go along strongly suggests that they are using leak probes in part as a pretext for targeting independent media.

More Questions Than Answers

The reporting so far is rather murky on the scope of the Trump assault on press freedoms.

The WSJ revealed for the first time yesterday that it and its reporters received grand jury subpoenas dated March 4 for records related to a Feb. 23 story it published titled “Pentagon Flags Risks of a Major Operation Against Iran.”

But despite its self-reveal, the WSJ story raised as many questions as it answered, among them:

• When did the WSJ receive the subpoenas? If it was back in March, why did it wait more than two months to disclose the existence of the subpoenas?

• Did all three reporters on the byline for Feb. 23 the story — Alexander Ward, Lara Seligman, and Shelby Holliday — receive subpoenas? The story implied they did, but didn’t say so explicitly.

• Is the WSJ seeking to quash the subpoenas? Even that wasn’t clear, with a spokesperson for the WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones saying vaguely: “We will vigorously oppose this effort to stifle and intimidate essential reporting.”

• Did Axios and the WaPo, which each published similar stories on Feb. 23, also receive grand jury subpoenas? When asked, neither outlet would comment to the WSJ.

• Did the New York Times receive a subpoena over its April 7 article that also reportedly angered Trump? When asked, the NYT would not comment to the WSJ.

In a follow-up story that didn’t address whether it had also been subpoenaed, the NYT reported that the WSJ inquiry “is one of multiple leak investigations being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia.” The story did not indicate whether other news outlets had been targeted in those leak investigations.

The WSJ article leaves the impression that it’s not alone in being targeted: “In recent months, prosecutors have sent subpoenas to media organizations as well as to email and phone providers seeking information in leak inquiries, according to people familiar with the requests.” (The other high-profile leak case involving journalists is that of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, which went further than a subpoena to include a search of her home, car, and phone.)

The WSJ did not say whether its email and phone providers had been subpoenaed, though might not know if they had been.

Trump DOJ Watch

• John A. Sarcone III, the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of New York, has been found to have engaged in professional misconduct by a committee of the state appeals court. Neither the details of his misconduct nor the sanction against him were made public, but the disciplinary action came in response to a complaint by a watchdog group. Sarcone was at one point last year the acting U.S. attorney in Albany until the district judges declined to extended his term. In one of the Trump DOJ’s clashes with the judiciary over U.S. attorneys, Sarcone has been running the office as first assistant without a U.S. attorney in place.

• Former FBI Director James Comey took the relatively unusual step of doing a national TV interview while under indictment, ostensibly to promote his new crime novel. He didn’t comment at length about his new indictment, but provided extensive commentary on the weaponization of the Trump DOJ, including the concocted investigation in Florida of a “grand conspiracy” against Trump: “They found an 81-year-old guy, Joe diGenova, to come back to government for the first time since Duran Duran was on the charts and lead an investigation.”

• Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall has seized on the Trump DOJ’s politicized indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center to launch his own investigation of the civil rights group. He sounds very measured and sober about it: “Thanks to the U.S. Justice Department’s action to deal with the S.P.L.C., the state’s efforts have now received a shot in the arm,” Marshall said in a statement. “We look forward to learning more about the inner workings of an organization that we have long believed was rotten, but until recently, has been impervious.”

SCOTUS Goes From Bad to Worse

The Roberts Courts’ hypocritical, inconsistent, politicized, and unexplained decision yesterday to effectively allow Alabama to eliminate at least one of its majority-Black congressional districts and run House elections on a new map was the cherry on top of the shit sundae of Louisiana v. Callais.

The timing, just a week before the scheduled primary, was especially egregious considering the court’s erratic history of applying the Purcell principle — its own oft-cited maxim that federal courts shouldn’t intervene too close to elections — but there’s lots here that further delegitimizes the court:

• Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck (writing yesterday before the Supreme Court acted in the Alabama cases): “[G]ranting emergency relief in the Alabama cases, in particular, would bespeak blinding hypocrisy on the Court’s part—not only because it was this same Court that agreed with the district courts three years ago that Alabama had violated both the VRA and the Equal Protection Clause (in a majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts), but because Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Callais labored mightily to distinguish that ruling—not to overrule it.”

• Reporter Ari Berman: “This is absolutely outrageous. SCOTUS reinstated Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before primary because they claimed it was too close to election to block it but now allowing Alabama to gerrymander one week before primary after trial court found map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters.”

• Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, on how the court’s decision doesn’t just turn the Purcell principle on its head, it turns it on its head in this case: “Despite Black Voters’ win three years ago, which meant the Court found that the maps the state legislature had drawn illegally discriminated against them, the state went through an additional election cycle using those maps. Alabama had argued that any changes, sought in February ahead of a June primary, came too close to the election and violated the Purcell principle. … Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just made the mother of all changes in Alabama one week before the primary.”

Another Problem With Louisiana v. Callais

At the core of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion eviscerating the Voting Rights act is a statistical error that “would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101,” G. Elliott Morris writes:

The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.
…

The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!

The Shadow Docket for Dummies

Only the Best People: Kari Lake Edition

President Trump is nominating election-denier and VOA-destroyer Kari Lake as ambassador to Jamaica.

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The Tilted Playing Field

The impact of the redistricting decisions by the U.S. and Virginia supreme courts is beginning to get factored into analyses of the 2026 House elections, but let’s start with this top line: their effects on the Mid-Decade Redistricting War, since that sets the structural conditions on which the election will be run.

Just a few days ago, Democrats had edged into a small lead over Republicans, largely thanks to the Virginia redistricting. With the setback Friday in Virginia, the Republicans now have what is widely considered an 8-seat advantage over Democrats that could grow to as many 10 seats depending on how aggressively Republicans target majority-Black districts in Louisiana and Alabama.

Much of the discourse over the past few days immediately pivots to what the structural changes mean for the 2026 elections, with exhortations for Democrats to overcome their disadvantages by maximizing turnout or questioning whether these are true pickup opportunities for Republicans. Unfortunately, the GOP’s anti-majoritarian advantages often end up baked into people’s expectations in ways that obscure rather than illuminate. It’s as if we have come to accept the tilted playing field as normal and just try to build a team that’s fast enough to outrun the opponent if though they’re running uphill.

The assessments of which seats are pickups for redistricting purposes give us a good sense of what the baseline map is. It’s not the same as predicting election outcomes using the same map, but it’s a marker for the field of battle. And some of the structural changes are permanent or at least semi-permanent. Democrats can’t count on wave elections every cycle to overcome those structural disadvantages, and it wouldn’t be fair to expect them to. I’m reminded of the line about Ginger Rogers: She did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards in heels.

With one-a-decade redistricting now seeming to be a thing of the past, it’s important to keep separate scoring on the redistricting fight, which is likely to resume again ahead of the 2028 election, especially in blue states which didn’t have time to respond to Louisiana v. Callais this cycle.

How It Shakes Out for 2026

The analyses of prospects for winning control of the House in the November quickly get very technical, especially with the fluidity of the redistricting battle creating multiple scenarios to factor in. So I’m going give you a sampling of topline numbers and assessments.

• “To win the House, Democrats could need to win the House combined national popular vote by around four percentage points, according to our estimates,” Nate Cohn assesses.

• Leaning on the Cook Political Report, the NYT summarizes it as a 10-seat swing toward Republicans in just the past 10 days:

At the end of April, the Cook Political Report, which handicaps political races, listed 217 House seats as at least leaning Democratic — meaning the party would have needed to win just a single “tossup” race to seize the majority. As of Friday, Cook rated 208 seats as at least leaning Democratic — meaning the party would need to win 10 of the 18 “tossup” races.

• G. Elliott Morris goes deep into the numbers, projecting different scenarios, to come up with a GOP advantage that’s closer to +6 seats, with the potential loss of two more majority-Black seats in the South making it a +8 advantage for Republicans. Morris similarly calculates that Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by 3-4 points to win control of the House:

This does not mean that Democrats cannot win the House this November, only that they will have a more difficult time doing so. The recent gerrymandering in Florida and Tennessee, plus likely losses of Democratic seats in Alabama and Louisiana, gives Republicans a real shot at holding their majority, of which they had very little hope just a month ago.

This century has already witnessed Democrats twice win the popular vote but lose the presidency and get shellacked in the post-2010 census redistricting war. As Cohn observes: “If the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision and Mr. Trump’s mid-cycle redistricting campaign allowed Republicans to win the House while badly losing the national vote, it would be yet another blow to the credibility of American institutions during a time of bitter division.”

The Great Whitening: Southern Edition

Virginia

In the aftermath of the state Supreme Court decision voiding the voter referendum that approved the Democratic redistricting plan, the state’s Democratic attorney general told the court he will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Election law expert Rich Hasen calls it a “quixotic effort” since the decision was based on state not federal law. But, in an ironic twist, Virginia may press its case to the Supreme Court on a version of the independent state legislature theory most recently popularized by Republicans.

On the ground, potential House candidates scrambled to react to the changes to the Virginia map. “With the stroke of a pen in Richmond, some campaigns effectively went poof, other candidates suddenly were in far tougher districts and one went from on the verge of dropping out to gearing up for a long-shot battle in a deep-red part of the state,” the NYT reports.

In a phone call Saturday that included Virginia’s Democratic House members and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the lawmakers considered responses to the state Supreme Court decision that ranged from making do with the old map to a far-fetched proposal to lower the mandatory retirement age for state Supreme Court justices from 73 to 54, replace the existing court justices, and re-enact a new map.

Alabama

In light of Louisiana v. Callais, the state filed an emergency application on Friday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to use a 2023 congressional district map with only one majority-Black district — even though the Roberts Court has already upheld the injunction that bars Alabama’s use of the map. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion “goes out of its way to purport to distinguish” Alabama from Louisiana, as law professor Steve Vladeck notes, but Alabama argues that the earlier court rulings against its preferred map are “irreconcilable” with Louisiana v. Callais.

Meanwhile, in an alarming sign of how far and quickly the Overton window is shifting, the speaker of the Alabama House in a Friday press conference appeared to call for the Supreme Court to “overturn the 14th Amendment.”

South Carolina

On a 3-2 party-line vote, a state legislative panel advanced legislation Friday to push back the state’s congressional primaries from June 9 to August 11 as state House Republicans set the stage to eliminate the sole majority-Black House district in a potential special session this summer.

Great Watch

I didn’t get a chance to watch this segment until this weekend, but civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill does a superb job of breaking down for laypeople the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais and the Supreme Court’s history of dismantling the Voting Rights Act:

Trump DOJ Watch

• CNN offers new details on the bogus “grand conspiracy” against Trump being investigated out of the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office and why the career prosecutor leading the case was jettisoned in favor of Trump loyalist Joe diGenova, who has now ensconced himself in Ft. Pierce, where U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon presides.

• “More than a half-dozen prosecutors have been demoted or pushed out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia due to fallout from the Justice Department’s push to prosecute former FBI director James B. Comey, leaving a key prosecutorial office understaffed and weakened,” the WaPo reports.

• Former President Joe Biden is expected to challenge in court the Trump DOJ’s decision to release 70 hours of partially redacted audio recordings of interviews he conducted in 2017 with a ghostwriter for his memoir that were turned over to Special Counsel Robert Hur. The conservative Heritage Foundation sued last year to access the materials.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

• The FBI is in the preliminary stages of “investigating” the 2020 election in Wisconson, including interviewing a high-ranking state election official in recent days, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

• Republicans who took leading roles in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election appear on track to win the GOP nominations for governor in several battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the WaPo reports.

Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 192

A U.S. strike Friday on a suspected drug-smuggling boat killed two people — and left one survivor adrift at sea, fate still unknown — bringing the known death toll in the lawless Trump administration campaign to at least 192.

Quote of the Day

“Trump’s most lethal policy will almost surely be his 71 percent cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide in their first year. A recently published study in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of 5.”—Nicholas Kristof

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America’s Original Sin

Republicans stripping majority-Black Memphis, where 39-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated 58 years ago, of its majority-Black congressional district takes its place in a rancid arc of American history that seems to be bending backwards.

The same folks who fought integration tooth and nail in the 1960s, continued to drag their feet in the 1970s and ’80s, and spent the intervening decades fomenting racial strife for their own electoral gains became the first people to insist — without irony or self-awareness, let alone repentance or shame — that racism was behind us.

Integration went from never to too soon to enough already.

One of the features of white supremacy, if you’re a white supremacist, is you get to expurgate your own sins.

You can shed the robe and hood. You can get cosmetic surgery, as David Duke literally did, and made yourself inoffensive and telegenic. You can craft elaborately self-serving legal theories stripped of overt racial animus. You can even flip the script and play indignant victim when accused of racism. But you never ever have to be accountable for America’s original sin.

In blue states, there will soon be a real tension between maximizing partisan gerrymandering to counter Republicans and maximizing minority representation. Once again, Black Americans will be asked, if only implicitly, to sacrifice for some greater good, to take the the long view, to settle for now.

Faced with the old burdens anew, State Rep. Justin J. Pearson (D), who was running for the eliminated congressional seat in Memphis, echoed civil rights leaders of the past in drawing on scripture: “This is not over. We will fight and will not stop until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Sign of the Times

BREAKING: Virginia Supreme Court Overturns Democratic Redistricting

The Virginia Supreme Court has just invalidated the state referendum that Democrats used to pick up an expected four seats.

The Great Whitening

• Tennessee: Amid loud protests at the state capitol, the legislature passed and Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed into law a new congressional district map that eliminates the state’s sole majority-Black district, in Memphis. The NAACP quickly filed suit in state court challenging the new map under state law.

• Alabama: The Alabama Senate could vote as soon as today on a plan to come back into special session later this year, void the results of the congressional primary set for later this month, revert to the 2023 map that eliminates one of the state’s two Black-held seats, and re-run the congressional primaries. It’s all dependent on the Roberts Court lifting an injunction that bars Alabama from using the 2023 map.

• South Carolina: The state Senate adjourned for the week without taking up a state House-passed measure that would give the the legislature the option of coming back into special session this summer and eliminating the state’s sole majority-Black district. A Senate vote could come next week, but some GOP senators remain leery that the newly released map would actually net Republicans more House seats.

Alito Cited Misleading Data

In his majority opinion in the landmark Louisiana v. Callais case, Justice Samuel Alito cited voter turnout numbers in the state that were based on a misleading data analysis provided by the Trump DOJ, The Guardian reports.

Must Read

A great piece by TPM’s Josh Kovensky: A unique feature of Texas’ electoral system that allows county political parties to run primaries gave the local GOP in Dallas a sandbox in which to build its ideal election. It was a disaster.

Trump DOJ Watch

Sweeping up a few developments that got pushed to the backburner because of the GOP redistricting-palooza in the South:

• FBI Director Kash Patel has ordered polygraphs of more than two dozen members of his team as part of his criminal leak investigation into who leaked details of his alleged on-the-job drinking and other proclivities to The Atlantic.

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche: “I wake up with a very clean conscience every morning. We are absolutely doing nothing but what we should be doing at the Department of Justice.”

• The Trump DOJ is attempting to sabotage E. Jean Carroll’s $83.3 million jury verdict against Donald Trump for defaming her by seeking to intervene and asking the Supreme Court to replace Trump as defendant with the United States. “That would require dismissal of the case because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation,” as Politico reports.

Quote of the Day

“As with every other aspect of the norms and best practices of the Department of Justice, Blanche, consumed by a desire to impress the president, has turned the standard to underpromise and overdeliver on its head.”—Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman

Jan. 6 Never Ends

A federal judge in Georgia denied Fulton County’s request for the FBI to return the 2020 ballots it seized as part of DOJ’s Big Lie “investigation” of Trump’s election loss.

In related news: Lawfare has obtained and published part of the investigative file in the since-abandoned RICO case brought by Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis over Trump’s interference in the state’s 2020 election.

Special Counsel to Investigate DOJ Lawyer

The federal judges in Rhode Island have appointed a special counsel to investigate whether a Trump DOJ lawyer should be disciplined for failing to disclose to one of the judges an outstanding arrest warrant on murder charges for an ICE detainee she ordered released. Despite telling the DOJ attorney not to disclose the warrant, the Trump DHS then attacked the judge as an “activist Biden judge” for the release.

Mass Deportation Watch

Some of the week’s most important developments:

• In the original Alien Enemies Act case, the ACLU is attempting to salvage U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s contempt of court inquiry into the Trump administration’s conduct by asking the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule a Trump-appointee-heavy three-judge panel that blocked Boasberg’s efforts.

• The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals became the second appeals court to reject the Trump administration policy of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond hearings. That makes two circuits opposed and two in favor of the administration’s radical new interpretation of a 30-year-old law. A fifth appeals court, the 7th Circuit, deadlocked on the issue earlier this week.

Trump Tariffs Blocked Again

The Court of International Trade overturned new tariffs that President Trump enacted to replace the tariffs previously blocked by the Supreme Court.

NEH Thumps DOGE

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon of Manhattan ruled Thursday that DOGE-driven cancellation of more than 1,400 previously approved grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities was unconstitutional.

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