It Just Keeps Happening

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

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

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

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

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

What follows is drawn from Judge Gallagher’s opinion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Your Radar …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chicago Police Investigate CBP Shooting

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

The Criminalizing of Protest

Two new pieces from TPM’s Josh Kovensky

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

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

Immigration Officers Focus on Voter Fraud

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

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

Elon Musk Off the Hook in Wisconsin

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

Trump DOJ Watch: Nevada Edition

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

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

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

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

Trump Destroyed USAID and Then …

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

Dolly Parton, 1946-2026

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

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First at TPM …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unpacking What SCOTUS Just Did

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Can’t Say He Wasn’t Warned

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

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

Today’s Absurdity: 🙃🙃🙃

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What Your Friends Say About You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawless Boat Strike Campaign Resumes

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

Sayanora, Ed!

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

Trump US Attorney Scheme Blocked Again

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

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

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

The Corruption: Live Nation Edition

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

Roberts Allows Ballroom Project For Now

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

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

The Purges: Stars and Stripes

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

Trump Threatens to Sue Think Tank

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

Completely Normal

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

History Repeats Itself With a Vengeance

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

Quote of the Day

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

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No One Is Safe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Will California Do About Tina Peters?

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

Oops …

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

Important Read

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

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

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

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

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

Midterms Watch

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

See Ya Monday

Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong Again

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

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

I’m not sure botched is strong enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clock Is Ticking on ICE Agent Extradition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Purge: The Sycophants

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

The Corruption: Census Bureau Edition

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

A Man-Child President’s Wounded Ego

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

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

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

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The Long Tail of Operation Metro Surge

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

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

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

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

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

But there’s more …

Trump DOJ Jumps In …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Deportation-Surveillance Complex

Greg Sargent:

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

Midterms Watch

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

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

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

2 Dan Sullivans Prompts Criminal Probe?

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

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

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

Ipso Facto Collusion

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

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

DOJ Whistleblower Calls Out Ivy League Attack

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

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

As the WaPo notes:

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

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

Face Palm of the Day

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

Quote of the Day

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

The video:

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It’s All Part of Retribution on Blue States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The appeals court rejected both moves as unlawful.

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

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

Keep an Eye on This

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

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

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

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

A Match Made in MAGA Heaven?

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

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

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

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

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

The 9th Circuit Giveth and Taketh

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

Quote of the Day: Doth Protest Too Loudly

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

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

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

Construction Work Halted in Big Bend

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

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The Family Values Party

We know that Donald Trump’s campaign of retribution against anyone he perceives to have wronged him — political foes, investigators, prosecutors, and judges — has no bounds. He abuses his office. He coopts government departments and agencies into his retributive schemes. He seeks vengeance without regard to the facts, the law, or common decency.

But in addition to that unprecedented malfeasance, Trump regularly subjects the family members of his targets to the same array of abuses.

Spouses have been a Trump rhetorical target since his first administration, when former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife was a frequent target of Trump abuse. While out of office, he attacked the wife of state Judge Arthur Engoron in the New York civil fraud case. In this term, he’s attacked the wife of U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of D.C., the judge in the Kennedy Center case.

Children are not above the fray either. Trump’s DoJ fired Maurene Comey, a well-respected federal prosecutor whose only transgression was being the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey.

Now comes new reporting from the NYT that the Trump DOJ opened an investigation last August into the fund-raising firm that had been co-owned by the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the Stormy Daniels hush money case against Trump. Loren Merchan, already a subject of Trump rhetorical attacks, was a VP at the firm, Authentic Campaigns, Inc., as recently as 2024, the same year Trump was convicted in the hush money case.

The year-long investigation is being run by Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros, whose mishandling of the Broadview Six case has prompted extraordinary judicial scrutiny of his office’s conduct in front of grand juries. The same two prosecutors who signed a grand jury subpoena targeting Merchan’s daughter were later involved in key aspects of the Broadview Six case.

In a grand jury subpoena reviewed by the NYT, Boutros sought the firm’s internal communications with a list of Democratic clients that includes former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), and the Democratic National Committee:

Prosecutors eventually modified the subpoena, narrowing it to focus on a $468 payment from Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, and emails between Ms. Merchan and her father, according to people with knowledge of the inquiry who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing legal matter.

In a now-familiar pattern, the politicized investigation was ostensibly spawned by a “criminal referral” targeting the Merchans from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. The current status of the DOJ investigation is not clear.

Beyond the obvious abuse of power involved in targeting the daughter of the judge who presided over Trump’s conviction, there’s the added abuse of the Justice Department using grand jury subpoenas to sift through the communications between a political firm and its Democratic clients.

At this point, it seems like only a matter of time before we learn that evidence gathered in Trump’s vindictive investigations — even if they never result in prosecutions — is being funneled back to the White House for use as political fodder, payback, pressure, and blackmail, similar to the notorious files kept by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The Retribution: Colorado Edition

It was already abundantly clear that the Trump administration had targeted Colorado for retribution for imprisoning Big Lie proponent Tina Peters and for its use of mail-in ballots. A federal judge had already determined that the pattern of retribution was real. But now a smoking gun email, first reported by the Denver Post, shows the Trump White House held a “brainstorm call” over how exactly to punish Colorado.

The email hasn’t yet been made public, but was read in open court last week during a hearing and the NYT reviewed the court transcript:

The goal, outlined in an email sent to officials at five federal agencies, was to “prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities,” the assistant, Emily Underwood, wrote on Dec. 15.

“Please come prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado,” Ms. Underwood added.

The next day, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, whose representatives were invited to the brainstorm, announced they were canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.

After the revelation in court, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson ordered the administration to turn over additional Trump White House communications and offered this real-time reaction:

The executive office of the president and the president himself are elected to serve all the people and all the states, not just the states that voted for one side or the other, not just the states that line up perfectly with priorities, but all the people. In fact, there’s an oath that’s taken to that effect.

In a related case in June, Jackson had already found strong evidence of retaliation by the Trump White House, writing: “The inference that retaliation played at least some role … is considerably strengthened by the fact that the federal government simultaneously undertook several other actions adverse to Colorado.”

The smoking-gun email moved the dial from strong inference to proof.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Just days before trial was set to begin, the Trump DOJ quietly dropped charges against a California man accused of sending threatening texts to federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, conceding that it lacked conclusive evidence that the man had committed a crime.

• Attorney General Todd Blanche — who refused this weekend to pledge that the DOJ would always act independently of the White House — and FBI Director Kash Patel openly campaigned for Republican candidates in New York at a rally with President Trump:

RIP Posse Comitatus Act

In a new memo, the Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel purports to expand the military’s power to arrest undocumented immigrants even outside of the designated “National Defense Areas” that it was already using along the border as way of expanding the military’s domestic police powers.

An Extremely Unsatisfying Outcome

I confess that it had not occurred to me that the Alien Enemies Act litigation may be at an end point after the 5th Circuit last week dismissed the appeal in the leading case challenging President Trump’s invocation of the wartime statute. But Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck suggests that the administration may have permanently succeeded in avoiding a substantive ruling against it:

And yet, for as unsatisfying as the AEA litigation has been substantively, it’s worth coming back to the practical bottom line: procedurally, it has been wildly successful from the perspective of the countless non-citizens who might otherwise have been subject to AEA removals.

It is significant that no AEA deportations (that we know of) have been carried out since March 2025, but the administration’s success in deporting the original AEA detainees to CECOT in El Salvador in violation of court orders and the lack of any meaningful consequence for that lawlessness — either in the contempt proceedings before Judge Boasberg or in legal recourse for the wrongfully deported Venezuelan nationals sent to the Salvadoran gulag — does make this result extremely unsatisfying.

Trump’s Ballroom Bait and Switch

The WSJ has a nice rundown of how Trump has longed for a White House ballroom for more than a decade — but only recently, after being sued over it, began to couch the project as a “military complex” in order to avoid court scrutiny. It was a critical distinction in Trump’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on Friday to allow construction of the ballroom to continue.

Reflections on Musk and X/Twitter

• Vincent Bevins: “He destroyed a part of the public sphere where his enemies used to thrive. Along the way, he made racist and reactionary positions feel more normal to journalists.”

• John Ganz: “The X-ing of Twitter made the Trump administration and right-wingers more broadly think they had a mandate for their most extreme ideas because they only saw a world of chuds staring back at them. The opposition also risks becoming demoralized because they also see this world of total idiocy.”

THANK YOU!

Over the weekend, we hit our $500,000 goal for the TPM Journalism Fund annual drive. Thanks to all who contributed! We are all deeply grateful for your willingness to contribute in this way. We don’t take it for granted. It fires us up and propels us to dig a little faster and a little better.

FENIX 701

It took chipping away at it by the The Guardian, the New York Times, and others before the Washington Post blew the story wide open yesterday: “The mysterious strikes targeting multiple Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands this year were carried out as part of a covert CIA program.”

According to the WaPo, citing a source with knowledge, “the strikes were part of a ‘covert action’ program, a type of secret operation overseas that is approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged.”

With the Pentagon denying any knowledge of or involvement with the strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats — one of which remains missing, with its crew presumed lost at sea — suspicion had focused on covert ops, private military contractors, or other Latin American governments as the likely culprits. The WaPo notes that the CIA involvement doesn’t rule out the other potential culprits: “It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.”

The crews of the two boats that survived the mystery attacks ended up in El Salvador before being repatriated to Ecuador, the WaPo reports. Both crews reported being “rescued” by a blue boat that may have been involved in the attacks. Most of the men aboard the blue boat spoke English, and wore uniforms with American flag patches, the NYT previously reported.

The program of covert strikes is separate and apart from the Pentagon’s lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats: “It is unclear why, as the Trump administration touts its military attacks against alleged drug boats, it would engage in a separate clandestine effort targeting vessels, said former U.S. officials who previously worked in the region.”

The WaPo covers similar ground as the NYT piece earlier this week, but adds additional details about the strikes on the Ecuadorian fishing boats and about a mystery aircraft flying out of El Salvador that it identifies as a Cessna Citation Longitude using the call sign “FENIX 701.” (Given its sordid history, the CIA’s use of “Phoenix” in a covert op today is either tone deaf or a deliberate middle finger.)

The plane flew from Tennessee to El Salvador in November, was photographed from the ground and via satellite at El Salvador’s Ilopango International Airport, was tracked in the vicinity of the Ecuadorian fishing boat strikes, and was last detected landing in San Antonio, Texas, in April.

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

The revelation that the CIA is behind the mystery boat strikes reminds of the conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his podcast The Daily Blast:

I am really cognizant that we only know what we know, and that this administration has done myriad things to reduce transparency and accountability and ready access into what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

I’m thinking about things like the high-seas strikes on [alleged] drug smuggling boats. … I’m thinking special operations activities around the globe. I’m thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I’m not suggesting some dark, hidden conspiracy, I just mean we don’t know. … I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades unearthing things that happened during this period that we just didn’t know about.

COINTELPRO II?

It’s going to take some time to expose the full scope and scale of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation into protesters of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. But we got the first glimpse yesterday in a court filing that included internal DHS documents among some of the discovery provided by the government to a group of protesters facing criminal charges.

As TPM’s Josh Kovensky details, the invasiveness of the investigation is striking. In addition to making extensive use of undercover informants, it targeted labor unions and left-leaning groups, including using administrative summons and/or subpoenas to access records of financial transactions by labor unions, in some instances stretching back years before the protests.

As the NYT put it: “As part of their inquiry, the documents show, homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Houston: U.S. attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed that FBI tests didn’t find meth in the van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was fatally shot by ICE last month. The Trump DOJ made public its suspicion that the substance was meth before running any tests in what appeared to be a smear job to come up with an ex post facto political justification for the wrongful shooting.

• Tacoma: U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright awarded $5,498 in compensatory sanctions and $11,455 in attorney’s fees to an undocumented immigrant who was wrongfully transferred by ICE outside of her jurisdiction without notice twice, in what she found to be two willful violations of her court orders.

• Alien Enemies Act: The full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the leading challenge to President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act after the administration deported the three Venezuelan men who originally filed the lawsuit using a different law. That left the case without plaintiffs, and the appeals court refused the request to substitute new plaintiffs who had been targeted under the AEA.

Good Read

TPM’s Emine Yücel: The new OLC memo purporting to expand executive privilege to private advisers to the president is a “devious tactic” to cover up Trump administration corruption ahead of a potential midterm victory for congressional Democrats.

What Happened in the Wisconsin Gov Race?

G. Elliott Morris goes under the hood on a poll that missed big on the results of the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor and concludes that it was the largely result of (i) assuming the electorate would be younger and more progressive than it turned out to be; and (ii) a late move by David Crowley that continued after the last polls were in the field.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

A state judge in Nevada threw out criminal charges over the 2020 fake electors scheme, ruling that Attorney General Aaron Ford “failed to present sufficient evidence from which a reasonable grand jury could infer the requisite intent to defraud.” Ford vowed to appeal.

The New Cold War

• WSJ: An Italian fighter jet under NATO auspices shot down a foreign drone that entered Latvian airspace early Friday. Latvia hadn’t determined the drone’s origin but suggested it may have been a Ukrainian drone deflected off course by Russian counter-drone measures.

• WaPo: Poland says it thwarted a Russian assassination attempt in Warsaw on an unidentified U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin.

• NYT: Inside Russia’s big push to destabilize the Western-leaning government of Moldova.

Just the Pettiest Shit Imaginable

The Trump-appointed board of the beleaguered Kennedy Center voted yesterday to sidestep a federal court order blocking it from renaming the performing arts institution for Donald Trump by:

• closing the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations and carving this inscription into the building’s white marble facade, just beneath the marquee with JFK Jr’s name: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump”;

• adding another line if an endowment fund named for Trump reaches $100 million: “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

• renaming the physical site on which the center stands to “The President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

See Ya Monday

This is the last weekend of summer for a lot of folks. Make it memorable.

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Trump DOJ Colludes on Trump Appeal

All of a sudden the Justice Department wants to be involved in President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — and it’s gunning to get the judge who imposed sanctions on Trump’s attorneys removed from the case.

After sitting out the IRS case in any official way at the trial court, the Trump DOJ overnight jumped into the appeal of the case by Trump and his co-plaintiffs that challenges the sanctions imposed by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams as punishment for the collusive lawsuit.

The Trump DOJ’s failure to defend the lawsuit — unlike it had in other similar lawsuits for illegal IRS leaks of taxpayer information — was the centerpiece of Judge Williams’ concerns that there was no true adversity between the parties. It’s why she appointed distinguished outside counsel to serve as friends of the court so that she would be able to hear something approximating “the other side” in the case. It was a major factor in her ultimate conclusion that the Trump plaintiffs and Trump administration defendants were all on the same side.

The new DOJ filing at the 11th Circuit was signed only by Trent McCotter, a political appointee only just installed as acting deputy attorney general this week after Todd Blanche was confirmed as attorney general. It was McCotter who earlier this week was upbraided by a federal judge in Brooklyn for his conduct in dropping a criminal fraud prosecution of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani.

While it’s been perfectly clear all along whose side the Trump DOJ has been on in the IRS lawsuit, the Justice Department was careful to keep some distance from the case in court. No government lawyer entered an appearance in the case. No responsive pleading to the Trump complaint was ever filed. No defense to the Trump lawsuit was ever mounted.

Judge Williams noted all of these irregularities in her order finding that the lawsuit was collusive and imposing sanctions on Trump’s personal lawyers, while referring top DOJ officials Blanche and Stanley Woodward for potential attorney discipline at the state level. It was one of her critical findings in her conclusion that the Trump lawsuit and the resulting “settlement” that created the “anti-weaponization” slush fund and unlawfully granted IRS immunity to the Trumps was bogus:

For the 109 days that this case was pending, no attorney representing the United States filed a notice of appearance or any document indicating the government’s position, interest, or awareness of this matter.

As recently as Aug. 1, Judge Williams threw another dart at the Trump DOJ for failing to defend the case. When Trump and his lawyers asked her to pause her sanctions order while they appealed, Williams asked the court-appointed amici to weigh in on the motion “in light of the fact that Defendants do not intend to appear or file a response.”

Now the Trump DOJ is actively colluding with Trump at the appeals court, but doing so even more openly and brazenly that it did in Judge Williams’ court.

McCotter has leaped in on the side of the Trump plaintiffs’ side in supporting their motion to pause the sanctions while their appeal proceeds. McCotter urges the appeals court to stay Judge Williams’ sanction order, argues that the Trump plaintiffs are “exceedingly likely” to win their appeal, and then rehashes many of the Trump team’s arguments for why Williams overreached.

But McCotter doesn’t stop there. He mounts a more aggressive attack on Judge Williams that the Trump plaintiffs did by seeking to have the appeals court reassign the case from Williams to a new judge, accusing her of “improper political motivation”; suggesting she timed her sanctions order to derail Blanche’s nomination as attorney general; and improbably accusing her of intentionally keeping Blanche and the DOJ from participating in the case (even though they had gone out of their way to avoid appearing in the case).

In arguing for Williams’ removal from the case, McCotter writes:

This Court need not conclude that the District Court’s actions were improperly motivated, but rather only that reasonable members of the public would view them that way. That standard has certainly been satisfied. This Court should order reassignment. To be sure, no remaining proceedings are needed or appropriate in the District Court: the Order should be stayed and ultimately vacated, and the District Court lost jurisdiction months ago. The District Court is the only one insistent on trying to keep the lower-court proceedings going, on the flimsiest of bases. But for precisely that reason, this Court should order reassignment.

Because of the way this case has proceeded, it’s not even clear that the government is a party to the appeal since it never participated in the case. The appeals court has styled the case as Donald Trump, et al v. Thirty-Five Former Federal Judges, with no mention of the original federal government defendants (the IRS and the Treasury Department). Reinforcing the weirdness, McCotter’s unusual filing is styled as “Defendants’ Response to Appellant’s Time-Sensitive Motion for a Stay,” but it’s docketed as an “Amicus Brief as of right or by consent of the parties filed by R. Trent McCotter for Internal Revenue Service and Department of Treasury.”

But the precise legal permutations aren’t the point here. It’s the No. 2 political appointee at DOJ, with no backing from career attorneys, aggressively jumping to President Trump’s defense in a case whose central dispute is the finding of collusion between the Justice Department and the president — and doing so after carefully sitting out the early rounds of the case at the trial court to make the travesty look slightly less obviously bad. Now the Trump DOJ has dropped any pretense.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Illinois: An ICE agent pleaded guilty to a state misdemeanor battery charge for throwing a protestor to the ground while off duty during Operation Midway Blitz. He was sentenced to a year of court supervision.

• Worldwide: Trump’s detention archipelago spans 35 countries, including far-flung places like Eswatini, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Ghana, Palau, Uzbekistan and Moldova

Ukraine Beats US in Military Exercise

Having mastered modern drone warfare, Ukraine has run circles around the U.S., U.K., and Sweden in recent military training exercises in Europe, the WSJ reports.

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Letters of Marque???

Back in June, The Guardian had a confounding story about drone attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats for which the Trump administration disclaimed any responsibility. Given the administration’s eagerness to distribute and promote snuff films of its strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, its denial can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Now comes the NYT with a follow-up story with quite a few tantalizing new details and the suggestion — though unproven — that private military contractors, perhaps operating under letters of marque from the administration, may be carrying out the strikes.

In its main advance of the Guardian story, the NYT tracks the movement of a maritime patrol plane based at a military base in El Salvador and registered to a company that lists its address as a private mailbox in a UPS store in Richmond, Virginia. Flight data reviewed by the newspaper showed the plane “flew in the direction of” three Ecuadorian fishing boats in the days before they were attacked . One boat was lost at sea in January, with eight crew still missing and presumed dead.

Air traffic control recordings captured the pilots speaking English with American accents. Fisherman who survived one of the two strikes in March recount being targeted by English-speaking “gringos” wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches who rescued (or captured, depending on your perspective) them and eventually turned them over to Salvadoran authorities.

Unlike the sophisticated drones used in the well-publicized strikes by the Pentagon, the weapons used to attack the Ecuadorian fishing boats have been crude drones fitted with explosives, according to survivors’ accounts.

The real eye-opener in the story is the NYT seriously entertaining the notion that the Trump administration may have issued letters of marque to modern-day privateers who are responsible for the strikes:

The letters, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, were circulated among various agencies for their input in May and were supposed to complement the Pentagon’s boat strike campaign in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Discussions around letters of marque seemed to stall around June, and the Pentagon would not say whether any have been issued. When asked about the attacks on the fishing boats, it said, “We have no knowledge of, nor were U.S. Southern Command forces involved in, the incidents described.”

On this basis, the NYT sought comment about the Ecuadorian strikes from Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame. “[N]either Erik Prince nor any entities affiliated with him have any relation to these events,” a Prince spokesperson said.

First at TPM: Abrego Garcia Wins a Point on Appeal

This is a small development, but it’s not been previously reported. Yesterday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss one aspect of the Trump DOJ’s appeal of his case.

The reason it’s worth noting is because of what the Trump DOJ had tried to do: impose its own deadline on U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis for her to rule on two of its pending motions in the case. If she didn’t rule by the DOJ’s own deadline, it would deem the motions constructively denied and appealed this. Xinis took umbrage at the Trump DOJ trying to set her court’s schedule, but DOJ appealed anyway on the basis her not ruling fast enough for its liking.

With minimal comment, the appeals court granted Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss this part of the DOJ appeal because it lacked jurisdiction since there was no final order from Xinis to be appealed.

In a period when appeals court judges have not always had the back of district judges confronting Trump administration lawlessness, this is one exception.

Mass Deportation Watch

• ICE plans to outfit officers with special gloves called Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (G.L.O.V.E.) that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals, the AP reports.

• Virginia: An ICE agent brandished a weapon at a U.S. citizen while falsely claiming she had tried to run over federal agents in her vehicle, the woman’s videos show. In response, DHS fell back on its usual refrain, claiming she “attempted to harm officers by weaponizing her vehicle against them—all in an attempt to help illegal aliens get away.”

• Texas: Bulldozing underway within Big Bend National Park for border wall construction.

• Illinois: A batch of 10 criminal complaints against federal agents stemming from Operation Midway Blitz were filed this week with Chicago police.

MUST READ: Trump’s New Census Scheme

TPM’s Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky: A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated

TL;DR: John Light has the key takeaways from the TPM exclusive.

2026 Midterms: Generational Change

Rep. John Larson (D-CT), 78, who has served in the House since 1999, lost his re-election bid in the Democratic primary to former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, 47.

“Bronin’s win makes Larson the seventh Democratic House incumbent to lose reelection this year; six lost to younger challengers,” the WaPo notes.

Trump DOJ Watch: Jeanine Pirro Edition

• Reflecting Pool: The White House is pressing the Justice Department to bring a new misdemeanor case against David Hearn on bogus charges of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, the WSJ reports, even though D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro already dismissed the original case against Hearn and told a court that it wasn’t vandalism but a botched job by the pool-lining contractor.

• D.C. Special Grand Jury: In an unusual move, Pirro has empaneled a special grand jury to be overseen by one of her own loyalists, Steven Vandervelden, the WaPo reports. It is unclear what the new special grand jury will be investigating, but the ability of a special grand jury (unlike a regular grand jury) to issue a report at the conclusion of its investigation means it could be used as a tool to “name and shame” Trump foes, offering a way to placate the president in instances where there’s insufficient evidence to bring a criminal case.

Trump Contests Sanctions in IRS Case

President Trump, two of his sons, his business, and his lawyers have asked the 11th Circuit to block the sanctions imposed by the judge who oversaw his collusive lawsuit against the IRS, which spawned the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund and the unlawful grant of IRS immunity.

In a scathing overnight filing, the Trump-related parties savaged U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami for sloppiness, haste, legal error, and exceeding her sanctions power:

The Sanctions Order was riddled with multiple errors. It materially misquoted Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., misidentified both the court and dissenting judge in Keepseagle v. Perdue, used the wrong docket number for Jackson v. United States, gave the wrong citation for Trump v. Clinton, cited the syllabus rather than the majority opinion in Seila Law, misidentified a Wall Street Journal author and URL, and repeatedly mangled case names, government titles, and source attributions.

They are seeking to put the sanctions order on hold while their appeal proceeds.

$900 Million and Counting

WaPo:

The Trump administration plans to spend at least $900 million for construction projects on the White House grounds, a significantly larger price tag than has been previously reported and one that would be covered primarily by taxpayers, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.

Instead of securing money directly from Congress, the records show, the administration has pieced together funding from other agencies and private donors and directed it to a little-known account that typically holds a few million dollars for routine maintenance of the executive mansion.

Unpacking the Air Force One Debacle

Garrett Graff, the preeminent reporter on continuity of government, calls Trump’s secret flight out of Turkey “a Russian nesting doll of scandal, one that exposes at least five levels of scandal, ranging from foreign influence to corruption to national security compromises to inappropriate geopolitical gambles.”

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Air Force None

By now, you’ve likely ingested many of the details from the bombshell Washinton Post report on the elaborate security operation and public misinformation campaign to spirit President Trump out of Ankara, Turkey, following last month’s NATO summit in order to avoid a credible threat to his life from Iran.

The entire ruse is remarkable by the historic standards of security theater and continuity of government protocols that have hovered over our political consciousness since the peak tensions of the Cold War nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.

Especially striking is that White House staff and the press pool who remained on the older model Air Force One that everyone thought Trump was aboard ended up serving as decoys — sitting ducks for whatever scheme Iran had conjured up but ultimately failed in or decided not to execute.

The image we conjure in our minds of Trump boarding Air Force One on one side of the plane before secretly exiting the other side into a waiting catering truck is indelible. But I’m just as taken by what happened after Trump’s secret flight landed in the U.K.

Once on the ground, Trump had to be secretly returned to the older Air Force One, then make a show of disembarking from it before boarding the new Qatari Force One that he took across the Atlantic to Joint Base Andrews. As you may know, the Air Force One call sign only applies when the president is aboard the aircraft, but I’m taking some liberties with the term here for the sake of clarity.

“It’s not clear how Trump moved from the C-32A to the legacy Air Force One after landing,” the WaPo noted.

The NYT has a more robust account of this part of the operation: “Before that, unbeknown to reporters, Mr. Trump was brought by vehicle from the third plane that he had arrived on to the older Air Force One, boarded it through a different entrance and strode down the step from the upper left-side door as he would typically do, according to the U.S. official.”

Here is he pretending to have just flown in on the older Air Force One:

Here he is walking between the old and new Air Force One aircraft:

This entire episode would be notable in its own right, but the NYT’s subsequent reporting on the ostensible version of what happened — the old Air Force One was used because the new Qatari-gifted one lacked sufficient defense capabilities given the Iranian threat — gave rise to a leak investigation and highly controversial subpoenas to NYT reporters.

Those subpoenas have since been withdrawn, but it’s a bit of a mindfuck to try to piece together that related saga in light of this new information. Was the administration, for instance, agitated not just that the new Air Force One was being denigrated by the NYT’s reporting but that the NYT was onto the secret mission to extricate Trump from Turkey? We don’t know if the NYT had additional information on the ruse that it didn’t publish, though its followup to yesterday’s WaPo exclusive didn’t betray any previous unpublished knowledge of the operation.

The Corruption: Trump DOJ Edition

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis sharply criticized principal associate deputy attorney general Trent McCotter in dropping criminal fraud charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and several of his co-defendants.

Judge Garaufis largely (but not entirely) granted the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, but, in a withering 47-page order, he shellacked political appointee McCotter for pushing the dismissal through without consultation with investigators:

On the current record, McCotter appears to have eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment. The fact that McCotter came to this decision largely in collaboration with defense counsel, and seemingly without input from the FBI and SEC agents who investigated the alleged misconduct, or the attorneys from the Department, SEC, and U.S. Attorney’s Office who brought the case, appears to be highly unusual.

Garaufis also flamed McCotter for claiming the indictment was the handiwork of a politicized Biden DOJ:

McCotter appears to be accusing officials across four different government offices of bringing a detailed 54-page, 5-count indictment out of spite. However, he has not provided a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the timing of the unsealing of the indictment, or the charging decisions, in this case was politically motivated. McCotter’s baseless assertion is unbecoming of his office.

The dismissal of the case against Adani, essentially a foreign bribery case of the kind that the Trump DOJ has de-emphasized pursuing, came after Adani retained Bob Giuffra and Jamie McDonald (who Trump later nominated as Manhattan U.S. attorney) of Sullivan & Cromwell (which is representing Trump personally in other matters). In a presentation to McCotter at the Justice Department, Giuffra reportedly said that Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy if the charges were dropped, according to CBS News.

Trump DOJ Watch

• ICYMI: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s motion for vindictive prosecution was denied Friday by the trial judge, who declined to look past federal prosecutors in Alabama to Main Justice or to the White House in assessing improper motives for bringing the politicized case.

• Reflecting Pool: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) will make an effort to extract information from the Trump DOJ about the charging decision in the since-dismissed Reflecting Pool case against David Hearn, Greg Sargent reports.

• OLC Dramatically Expands Claimed Scope of Executive Privilege: The president can assert executive privilege over communications with “private advisers … so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential,” the Office of Legal Counsel asserts in a new memo flagged by Punchbowl.

Photo of the Day

Former Trump lawyer Emil Bove swears in former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general in front of President Trump in the Oval Office, Aug. 10, 2026:

Painful Flashback Alert

NYT: How a Counterintelligence Inquiry Into Trump’s Russia Ties Was Derailed by Rod Rosenstein’s Appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel

Mass Deportation Watch

• Politico: Families, lawyers and judges describe a year of frantic emergency cases after a Trump administration memo reversed decades of interpretation of federal law and allowed ICE to begin detaining without bond hearings people who have lived in the U.S. for years. Federal judges have since ruled against the Trump detention policy more than 16,000 times.

• Arizona Daily Star: “Conditions are deteriorating to dangerous levels at a decommissioned hotel in Equatorial Guinea, where dozens of immigrants have been imprisoned since the U.S. deported them to the African nation, without warning or due process, the immigrants and their attorneys say.”

• The American Prospect: An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned in 2023 after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a $244 million no-bid federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody.

• NYT: New Evidence Shows Agents Using Slurs, Bolstering Profiling Claims

Quote of the Day

Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, writing about President Trump’s new birthright citizenship executive orders:

The Citizenship Clause was indeed written to repudiate Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black people could never be citizens. But the Reconstruction Congress did not swap one caste rule for a narrower one; it extended the promise to “every free-born person in this land.” The idea wasn’t just to retroactively protect “the babies of slaves”; it was to prospectively forestall all future efforts to deny citizenship based on whatever other non-sovereignty-based criteria might be politically popular in any given moment.

The Pyrocene Keeps Pyrocening

July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, nudging past July 2012 and July 1936. The average temperature of 76.9F was more than three degrees above the 20th century average.

In completely unrelated news, the Swiss Re Institute warned today that wildfire risk is the fastest-growing weather peril globally.

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The Bureaucratic Hellscape of Trump Authoritarianism

This morning I want to focus your attention on another especially Kafkaesque example of the worst of the Trump mass deportation operation combined with — and this is critical — the administration’s lawless behavior in federal courts.

Across numerous cases — the Alien Enemies Act, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, “Cristian“, Nelson Ariel Umanzor Chavez, and others — I have been focused not just on the brutalities of the immigration system (many of which pre-dated Trump), but on the new layers of barbarism plus the administration’s direct challenge to the constitutional role of the federal judiciary in policing the mass deportation operation.

In the case of Guatemalan national Faustino Pablo Pablo, we have both in spades.

In a new ruling Friday, which has not been previously reported, U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama of El Paso ordered Pablo released from ICE detention after a surreal nine-month journey through the worst of the Trumpian immigration system compounded by highly misleading representations — if not outright lies — by the administration in court. Because of the limited public remote access to habeas corpus cases in federal court, we are largely reliant on Judge Guaderrama’s publicly available orders for the narrative of what befell Pablo.

Pablo arrived in the United States in 2012 after fleeing Guatemala. While Pablo would come to have an order of removal against him, an immigration judge in 2013 issued a withholding of removal to his native Guatemala under the Convention Against Torture, finding that Pablo had “shown it is more likely than not that he will be tortured by, or with the consent or acquiescence of, the Guatemalan government.”

As a result, Pablo was released under an order of supervision and had been living his life freely in the United States for more than decade until Nov. 5, 2025, when he showed up for a routine ICE check-in appointment in California and was detained without notice or explanation.

On Nov. 17, Pablo was transferred to Camp East Montana, the brutal tent encampment on Ft. Bliss in El Paso. The following day, Pablo filed a writ of habeas corpus in federal court in the Western District of Texas. On Nov. 20, he sought an injunction prohibiting the administration from removing him from the court’s jurisdiction while his habeas case was pending. By the time the Judge Guaderrama issued the injunction later that day, Pablo had already been unlawfully deported to Guatemala.

In an admission that it resisted making in other similar cases, the Trump administration conceded that the violation of the immigration judge’s order barring Pablo’s removal to Guatemala had been “unlawful” and began the process of returning him to the United States.

It wasn’t without, shall we say, hiccups.

When Pablo wasn’t returned as promised on a Dec. 4 flight, Judge Guaderrama decried the “blatant lawlessness” of Pablo’s removal and set a deadline for the administration to return him. As TPM first reported, the administration finally returned him to the United States on Dec. 11.

But the saga was not nearly over for Pablo, a Mayan whose native language is Mam, a fact which will become relevant in a moment. What ensued, as outlined in Judge Guaderrama’s order Friday, is the sort of mind-bending behavior from the administration that is part Trumpian authoritarianism and part bureaucratic hellscape.

Even before Pablo’s return, DHS was threatening him with removal to a third country: “One thing is certain: he is not going to be able to remain in the U.S.,” the bombastic then-DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. “We will deport him to another country.”

After his return, the administration spent the next several months purporting to be preparing to deport Pablo to Mexico, its stated choice as a third-country destination for him.

As he had successfully done for Guatemala, Pablo applied for withholding of removal to Mexico under the Convention Against Torture, but an asylum officer denied his claim of fear of removal in December, clearing the way for his deportation to Mexico.

At that point, the administration repeatedly told Judge Guaderrama that it was prepared to deport Pablo to Mexico and that his injunction barring Pablo’s removal was the only remaining impediment. In his order Friday, Judge Guaderrama documented the administration’s representations to the court:

January 20, 2026: If the Court lifts the stay of removal, ICE will proceed with removing Petitioner to Mexico . . . . The only impediment to removal is this Court’s Order staying removal.

April 6, 2026: If this Court vacated his stay of removal, ERO does not foresee additional procedural hurdles to removing Petitioner to Mexico. Absent any unforeseen circumstances, ERO believes they could effect removal to Mexico within a week of this Court lifting the stay of removal.

July 15, 2026: But for the judicial stay of removal entered in this case, third country removal to Mexico is significantly likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.

In response, Judge Guaderrama lifted his injunction barring Pablo’s removal but in a subsequent order required that an immigration judge review the denial of Pablo’s application for withholding from removal to Mexico. “As far as the Court could tell, the aforementioned IJ review was the Government’s only ‘impediment to removal,’” Guaderrama wrote in his newest order.

But Pablo remained trapped in a bureaucratic maze.

Pablo was scheduled for a hearing in front of an immigration judge on July 27, but his claim of fear of removal to Mexico was not reviewed at the hearing. In addition, the administration did not provide a Mam interpreter so Pablo was unable to understand the proceedings, and Pablo’s attorney wasn’t admitted to the virtual hearing until after it had ended. When Pablo’s attorney was eventually brought in, the immigration judge’s legal assistant informed the attorney that “[t]he judge did not think it was important for [her] to be [t]here,” the attorney later told Judge Guaderrama.

Getting fed up, Judge Guaderrama held an evidentiary hearing of his own on July 29. At issue was whether Pablo’s continued detention was lawful. Even with an order of removal, a detainee cannot be held indefinitely. The Supreme Court has declared detentions lasting up to six months to be presumptively reasonable. Continued detention past that point is lawful only if there is a “significant likelihood” that the detainee will be deported in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

Guaderrama required the administration to make the still-detained Pablo available for the hearing. Also present for the hearing: two ICE officers with personal knowledge of Pablo’s removal process.

What emerged at the evidentiary hearing was shocking, given the trajectory of Pablo’s case and the many assurances (listed above) from the administration to Judge Guaderrama.

“At that hearing, the Government revealed that Mexico was not (and had never been) a viable option for third-country removal,” Judge Guaderrama recounted in his order.

It turns out that back in December, Pablo had opted out of the only program which would have allowed the administration to deport him to Mexico. So Mexico was never an option, and in the intervening months the administration had not identified any another third country options.

But it gets worse (emphasis Guaderrama’s): “The Government has not taken any steps since December 2025 to identify another country that would accept Petitioner’s removal.”

In a cynically ironic moment at the hearing, an administration lawyer asked Guaderrama, after all this time, for “the opportunity to be able to determine if there’s another third country” to which to deport Pablo.

The developments were eerily similar to those in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The administration had likewise unlawfully deported Abrego Garcia in violation of an order of withholding. After dragging its feet for months, it reluctantly returned him to the United States to face what was eventually ruled a vindictive prosecution, but in the meantime purported to be preparing to deport him to various African third countries. Ultimately U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland rejected repeated claims by the Trump administration to the court that Abrego Garcia’s third-country deportation was imminent, finding no evidence that the administration had actually taken steps to arrange a third country that would accept him.

In both cases, the claimed plans for third-country deportations ended up looking like a pretext created to justify the punitive continued detention of an immigrant whose wrongful deportations had embarrassed the administration.

In what may have been among the final straws for Guaderrama, the immigration court held another hearing in Pablo’s case on Aug. 5. Again, no Mam interpreter was present for Pablo, and the immigration judge has not reviewed the asylum officer’s denial of Pablo’s fear claim. Pablo was scheduled for another immigration court hearing to be held on Aug. 31.

In a court filing the next day, the administration managed to make things worse by conceding that it has no plan to move on from Mexico as its country of choice for Pablo, Judge Guaderrama recounted:

The Government does not plan to start looking in the near future, either. One day after Petitioner confirmed that he still does “not accept removal to Mexico,” the Government explained that it will wait to look into “an alternative third country for removal” in case Petitioner has a sudden change of heart.

Guaderrama had had enough.

In his 19-page opinion Friday, Guaderrama said that no matter how he applied the law, even when interpreting it least favorably for Pablo, the continued detention of Pablo was a violation of the Constitution and statute.

Guaderrama ordered the administration to release Pablo no later than today and to confirm his release to the court by COB tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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Good Riddance

It takes a lot to be among the most odious Republican members of this Congress. Let me reacquaint you with Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN).

What makes Ogles special is that he managed to be a virulent Islamophobe, Christian nationalist, and fabulist — really the trifecta of qualifications for current House GOPers — and still alienate his fellow Republicans.

Ogles went down to a stinging defeat in the GOP primary in Tennessee last night, losing 53%-47% to former state agriculture commish Charlie Hatcher.

While Ogles maintained an endorsement from President Trump, many state Republicans were done with him. Gov. Bill Lee (R) and former Gov. Bill Haslam (R) had endorsed Hatcher.

Ogles was a piece of work in so many ways.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” he tweeted in March.

“America and Islam are incompatible. Time for a muslim (sic) ban,” he posted in another tweet around the same time.

He posted AI-generated images of himself and senior Trump administration officials in front of the Capitol dressed as Crusaders.

He had campaign finance issues and resume-inflation issues.

Ogles’ nemesis back home was the relentless investigative reporter Phil Williams, of Nashville, who unearthed much of what we’ve come to know about Ogles and to whom I defer on cataloging Ogles’ sins:

• Ogles had claimed to be an economist; he was not.

• He had boasted about being trained in investigating international sex crimes; he had not.

• He had claimed to have done graduate work at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth; that was a lie.

• His resume showed he had served on the board of directors for the city of Franklin, Tennessee; Franklin does not have a board of directors.

• He claimed to have personally loaned his campaign $320,000 in his first run for Congress in 2022; he did not have that kind of money to lend.

• The FBI opened a criminal investigation into those fraudulent campaign disclosures, but that investigation was canned by the Trump administration.

In a fitting end to his losing campaign, Ogles banned Williams and select other news outlets from an Election Day event — and Williams got ahold of the blacklist.

What gives Ogles’ primary defeat a little extra boost of schadenfreude is that he was running in a pretty dramatically re-drawn district thanks to state Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting. Call it a small (but inadequate) consolation prize for the elimination of the state’s only majority-Black district in Memphis.

BREAKING … Court Halts Trump Ballroom

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals halted Trump’s vanity ballroom project in a ruling just out:

We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now.

The ruling was 2-1, with Judges Patricia Millett (Obama) and Bradley Garcia (Biden) in the majority and Neomi Rao (Trump) in dissent.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Blanche nomination: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announced early this morning that she’s a “No” on Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general: “The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration. I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.” I want to very careful not to pump this up into a suspense-filled drama because the GOP conference is usually very strategic about parceling out the “No” votes to vulnerable or marginal members without jeopardizing the final vote — but Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is thought to be the only remaining holdout and the final vote Blanche needs to win confirmation. Late Update: Cassidy just announced his support for Blanche’s nomination on the Senate floor.

• IRS immunity: A revised legal challenge to the unprecedentedly corrupt “settlement” of Trump’s IRS lawsuit — which is what’s nearly sunk the Blanche nomination — is now also targeting the gift of IRS immunity that Blanche gave Trump. The case in the Eastern District of Virginia spearheaded by the Democracy Forward Foundation had already succeeded in winning a preliminary injunction in June blocking the “anti-weaponization” slush fund. Yesterday, DFF filed an amended complaint seeking to block Blanche’s order granting Trump immunity from the IRS.

• Reflecting Pool: The bogus vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn was officially dismissed by the judge yesterday, but he punted on the question of whether the dismissal should be with or without prejudice until he receives additional briefing from the parties and holds a hearing. He also held off ruling on Hearn’s alternative request for access to the grand jury materials that could potentially make D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro squirm even more than she already is. Stay tuned on this one.

Headline of the Day

Politico: Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote

Paul Threatens Nom Over ICE Shootings

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is threatening to hold up the confirmation of Lance Schroyer to lead ICE unless he gets more information about the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Worth noting that Paul has multiple interests here. Schroyer, an Oklahoman who led the security detail of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin when he was a senator, is Mullin’s pick for the job. Mullin is a well-known Paul nemesis.

Trump Orders New Leak Probe

Embarrassed by news reports of U.S. munitions shortages, President Trump has ordered another leak investigation, the WSJ reports. His previous reactive leak probes have immediately focused on journalists and pushed the bounds of the law and the First Amendment. Stay tuned …

Trump Avoids Giving Financial Info to BBC

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Miami granted the president’s emergency motion to delay having to turn over his financial information to the BBC in his defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster. To avoid implicating his own finances, Trump wants to amend his lawsuit, and the judge found it to be a “compelling argument” that the new lawsuit may moot the BBC’s need for the financial information.

New Lawless Birthright Citizenship EOs

Despite losing on birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court less than six weeks ago, President Trump rolled out two new executive orders that, taken together, run afoul of the high court’s recent decision.

U.S. Intel: Putin Could Provoke NATO

The steady drumbeat of warnings like this from Europe and from here at home continues, according the WSJ:

The U.S. had previously assessed that Putin wouldn’t provoke a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country while he is still fighting in Ukraine. But that assessment changed earlier this year, the U.S. officials said, as Putin is squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home to secure a victory.

If Putin is going to do this, I don’t see why the optimum timing for him would not be between now and the end of Trump’s term, when official U.S. resistance will be at its lowest ebb since NATO was formed — and that’s roughly the same period U.S. intel is most concerned about: “The time frame for any move by Russia is estimated to happen between this fall and 2029, according to the U.S. intelligence assessments.”

Help Us Wrap Up the Journo Fund Drive!

With a big final push, we can hit the $500,000 mark in our annual drive for the TPM Journalism Fund — and I won’t have to keep pitching you into next week. Let’s get ‘er done!

See Ya Monday

Before Elvis … before Willie … before the Pet Shop Boys … Gwen McCrae was the first to release “Always on My Mind“:

In case you missed it last week, I created a couple of Morning Memo playlists of the music I’ve shared: Spotify and Youtube.

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The Trump Retribution Feedback Loop

The targeting of Anthony Fauci stands as a textbook case of retribution by the Trump administration using, in tandem with Republicans on Capitol Hill, what has become a well-worn and ruthless feedback loop that has ensnared other former officials and targets of the president’s ire.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted this morning to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for having invoked his 5th Amendment rights not to testify at last week’s witch hunt of a hearing.

At least two Senate committees are actively going after Fauci.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chair of the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, revealed last night that he had obtained Fauci’s COVID-era phone from the Department of Health and Human Services, Fauci’s former government employer, which left Republicans salivating that they had another motherlode of fodder to stoke the fires against Fauci.

HHS has previously released Fauci’s diary to Congress, without having notified him. If you needed reminding, HHS is led by chronic Fauci critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote the 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”

But all of that is clearly not enough piling on Fauci in the current environment.

Attorneys general in Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia seized on the Fauci diary as a pretext to launch their own investigations of him. The three red-state AGs announced yesterday that they had subpoenaed Fauci for a wide range of records tied to grant money, awards and book deals, and other evidence of what they alleged was potential self-dealing by Fauci. It was primarily an opportunity to further smear Fauci by press release and jump on the bandwagon with Republicans in Washington.

This particular pattern of retribution is chillingly familiar: The Trump administration releases government documents (and diaries and phones) to Republican allies on the Hill who in turn often leak the information to the right-wing media apparatus. The resulting MAGA firestorm leads to GOP-run hearings on the Hill, which serve as opportunities to entrap witnesses and prompt criminal referrals to the Trump DOJ.

It was puzzling to see otherwise smart and respected people dumping on Fauci last week for taking the 5th when this pattern had just played out in the House with former Special Counsel Jack Smith less than a week before. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan dragged Smith in to testify about his two historic investigations of Trump and then ginned up a bogus claim of perjury that he referred to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution. James Comey and John Brennan have had their turns in the grinder, too, under similar though not identical circumstances.

Fauci has the advantage of a preemptive pardon from President Biden, which should in theory at least shield him from Trump DOJ persecution for alleged acts that predate the pardon. But testifying in a perjury trap set by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who chairs HSGAC, would have been post-pardon conduct and left him potentially exposed in the same way Smith is. Still, his refusal to testify sets him up for a potential contempt of Congress prosecution. No way out. Tails I win, heads you lose.

If you don’t see the broad pattern of persecution and the mechanics of the retribution feedback loop — and deeply cynical bad faith fueling it all — you can fall into precious arguments over the limits of 5th Amendment rights or the bounds of congressional power or other curiosities while entirely missing the forest for the trees.

We are witnessing a stunning abuse of power by the executive branch and a pliant legislative branch that they have together refined and systematized into a grinder that chews up and spits out Trump foes as a means of retribution and for the sheer spectacle of it. That is the real story here. Not the Wuhan lab or COVID policy or whatever other ostensible underlying issue is the pretext for feeding Trump foes into his vengeance machine.

Neutering the Watchdogs at DOJ

Within the Trump DOJ, the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of Inspector General have lost significant percentages of their staffs and seen investigations plummet under Trump II, Reuters reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

• ICE has threatened to seek criminal witness tampering charges against the elected county sheriffs in Minneapolis and Chicago for refusing to hand over inmates.

• Airlines are pushing back against ICE enforcement operations on airplanes and jet bridges.

• DOJ cites the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision to shield DOJ official Aakash Singh from scrutiny in the Broadview 6 case.

The Destruction: EPA Edition

Remember the $20 billion in grants that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin froze and tried to claw back in the early days of Trump II — with help from acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, who tried to turn it into a criminal case, prompting the resignation of a senior career prosecutor?

I know. It was a long time ago, and these things are hard to keep track of. Which is partly the point. The grant recipients have been in limbo ever since, forced in some cases to lay off workers because the EPA funds were not available, which is also part of the point.

After winning a preliminary injunction at the district court level in April 2025, the grant recipients have finally won on appeal to the full D.C. Circuit and will now be able to access the funds. The appeals court divided 6-4 in a convoluted per curiam decision that upheld the preliminary injunction.

The Corruption: WTF? Edition

Jennifer Mascott, a Trump appointee to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, continued to run the D.C. public relations firm she inherited from her late husband for at least six months after she was confirmed as a judge in October 2025, Politico reports.

Hoisted on His Own Petard

The BBC seems only too happy to use President Trump’s defamation suit against it to explore his finances — and Trump is now scrambling to avoid a court-ordered deadline of today to turn over details on his business empire to the broadcaster.

In a related move, Trump is seeking to amend his lawsuit — over how the broadcaster spliced together portions of his Jan. 6 speech on The Ellipse — to remove the language that put his finances in play in discovery in the first place.

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Saga Not Over Yet

While most of the reflecting pool coverage focuses on the reality TV-style palace intrigue among the ridiculous personas of Donald Trump, Jeanine Pirro, and Doug Burgum, pay attention to how hard the former criminal defendants in the now-dismissed “vandalism” cases push for court-ordered consequences for the misbegotten prosecutions.

As a first step, attorneys for David Hearn are asking a judge to dismiss the case with prejudice, which would keep Pirro from recharging him later. Pirro has sought to dismiss the charges without prejudice and keep her options open.

They take particular exception to Pirro’s claims that prosecutors were not aware of the fatal flaws in their case until shortly before they moved to dismiss the case. They provide a timeline of what prosecutors learned as the case unfolded that challenges the sequence of events Pirro provided the court in her motion to dismiss.

As Empty Wheel’s Marcy Wheeler notes, Hearn’s counsel also suggested to the judge in the latest filing that the court could still revisit their pending request for the grand jury materials — or review them in chambers.

There are also three other similar cases Pirro is trying to dismiss, as she tries to point the finger at Burgum and the Interior Department, save her job, and avoid court-ordered sanctions or ethics reviews.

And yet … I realize the palace intrigue has some appeal, so here you go:

• NYT: Inside the Oval Office Showdown Between Trump and Jeanine Pirro

• Politico: Jeanine Pirro struggles to give Trump the wins he craves the most

• WSJ: Pirro’s About-Face in Pool Case Followed Prosecutors’ Private Concerns

The Toll on the Federal Judiciary

U.S. District Judge John McConnell, the chief judge in Rhode Island, goes on the record about the numerous threats he’s faced after issuing several important rulings adverse to the Trump administration.

McConnell was among the judges to have received unrequested pizza deliveries, as a way a warning “We know where you live.” In his case, the name on the pizza order was Daniel Anderl, the slain son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, who was killed by a disgruntled lawyer in an attack at the judge’s New Jersey home.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, reluctantly granting the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the seditious conspiracy indictment against eight members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, including Stewart Rhodes, all of whom were convicted but later had their sentences commuted by President Trump:

This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed. Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle. The court cannot write a different ending.

Profile in Courage Ducking for Cover

Facing a tough re-election in a key Senate race, Maine Sen. Susan Collins is being given cover by Senate Republicans to vote against the nomination of Todd Blanche for attorney general. She didn’t announce her opposition until after Blanche cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. With two senators still officially undecided, there remains some faux drama around the confirmation, but Collins getting a get-out-of-jail-free card confirms where this is headed.

2026 Midterms Watch

• Michigan-Senate: In a nail-biter that pre-election polling did a poor job of picking up on, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed eked past Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary. The race was too close to call for much of the night, but the AP has now declared the race for El-Sayed, who hold a 49-48 lead with 99% of the votes counted.

• Missouri-01: In a rematch of the 2024 Democratic primary, Rep. Wesley Bell defeated former Rep. Cori Bush.

• Virginia-05: Former Rep. Tom Perriello (D) won the Democratic primary to challenge incumbent Rep. John McGuire (R).

House GOP Scandal Update

• Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) has dropped his re-election bid in the aftermath of a cringey-as-hell House Ethics Committee report with excruciating details about his awkward and uncomfortable behavior toward two young women staffers in his office.

• Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), who has been accused of abusive behavior by multiple women, including his ex-wife, the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), went on CNN to defend himself in an extended interview with Jake Tapper and, oh boy:

The Antisemitism Is Ubiquitous

TPM’s Hunter Walker: Colorado Republicans Attack Jewish Gov Candidate With AI ‘Cartoon Devil Horns’ Graphic

Make America Wipe Again

From a NYT Mag profile of Dr. Sean O’Mara, whose dietary recommendations have been embraced by Vice President JD Vance, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy:

“When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

I just can’t with this.

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ICE’s Round-the-Clock Digital Dragnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funding is another tell.

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

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

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

Streever refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”

Mass Deportation Watch

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

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

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

Senate Judiciary to Vote on Blanche

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

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

More Reflecting Pool Cases Dropped

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

MAGA’s Crony Capitalism Comes With A Socialist Twist

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

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

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

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

Just $85,000 To Go

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Ethereal Phenomenon

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Wet Noodle Award: Cornyn and Tillis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Appeals Sanctions in IRS Case

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

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

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

Pass the Popcorn for Trump v. Pirro

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

The two most notable aspects of the implosion:

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

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

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

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

MN Church Protesters Offered Plea Deals

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

2026 Midterms Ephemera

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

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

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

Previous NYT Subpoena Disclosed

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

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

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

Santos Fined for Alleged SOTU Scheme

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, in the Real World …

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Talk About Losing the Thread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NYT Gets It! Cornyn’s Thin Red Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First at TPM: Judge Finds Trump Admin in Contempt

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

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

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

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

Mass Deportation Watch

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

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

Judge Declines to Recuse in USA Case

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

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

Bastian found no legal basis for his recusal.

Morning Memo Playlists

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

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

See you back here Monday.

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Let’s See the Actual Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this point, you should be saying WTF?

Again, I agree!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

TPM in the World

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

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RIP Glen Hansard

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