The Corruption: IRS Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Court-Appointed Lawyers Weigh In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump DOJ Watch

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

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

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

Abortion Pill to Remain Available

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

The Great Whitening: S.C. Edition

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

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

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

13 U.S. Boat Strike Victims Identified

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

Another One

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

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Judges Rein in the Administration and …

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

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

Rhode Island: Anti-Trans Subpoena Quashed

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

McElroy lets it rip right from the top:

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

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

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

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

DC: A New ‘Facilitate’ Case

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

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

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

Colorado: Injunction Violation

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

DC: First Amendment Violation

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

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

… The Administration Pushes Back

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

DC: Jan 6 Never Ends

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

Rhode Island: New Attack on Judge

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

The Great Whitening: An Update

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

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

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

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

It’s Always Black Women

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill:

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

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

CIA in Mexico: The Plot Thickens

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

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Welcome!

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

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

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

Liberia or Bust

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

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

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

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

“It’s important to read,” she chided.

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

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

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

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

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

Then things got more awkward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite Court Order, Patel Disparages Abrego Garcia

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

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

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

Mass Deportation Watch

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

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

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

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

The Corruption: IRS Edition

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

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

Trump DOJ Watch

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

Thank You!

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

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‘Treason’

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

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

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

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

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

More Questions Than Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump DOJ Watch

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

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

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

SCOTUS Goes From Bad to Worse

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

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

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

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

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

Another Problem With Louisiana v. Callais

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

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

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

The Shadow Docket for Dummies

Only the Best People: Kari Lake Edition

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

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The Tilted Playing Field

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

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

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

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

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

How It Shakes Out for 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Whitening: Southern Edition

Virginia

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

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

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

Alabama

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

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

South Carolina

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

Great Watch

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

Trump DOJ Watch

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

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

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

Jan. 6 Never Ends

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

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

Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 192

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

Quote of the Day

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

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America’s Original Sin

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

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

Integration went from never to too soon to enough already.

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

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

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

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

Sign of the Times

BREAKING: Virginia Supreme Court Overturns Democratic Redistricting

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

The Great Whitening

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

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

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

Alito Cited Misleading Data

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

Must Read

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

Trump DOJ Watch

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day

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

Jan. 6 Never Ends

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

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

Special Counsel to Investigate DOJ Lawyer

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

Mass Deportation Watch

Some of the week’s most important developments:

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

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

Trump Tariffs Blocked Again

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

NEH Thumps DOGE

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

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The Trump II Consolidation of Power

From the racist redistricting rush across the South to the weaponization of the Justice Department to the criminalizing of opposition ideology, we’re witnessing Trump Republicans using the power of the state to consolidate and entrench their own political power and squeeze out Democrats’ ability to meaningfully contest that power.

It’s happening at the federal and state level simultaneously. In the long term, it’s an attempt to create permanent or near-permanent structural advantages for the GOP, with a big lift from the Roberts Court. In the short term, it’s aimed at hobbling Democrats with criminal investigations (or threat thereof) from the Trump DOJ and on-the-fly redistricting to keep them from effectively slowing down the Republican putsch.

Let’s start with the latest on the GOP’s anti-Black redistricting bonanza.

The Great Whitening: South Carolina Jumps Into the Fray

South Carolina

Under pressure from President Trump, the state House in South Carolina has kicked off the process of congressional redistricting before this year’s midterms, with the goal of eliminating the state’s sole majority-Black seat, held by Rep. James Clyburn (D).

The state House passed a resolution late last night on a 87-25 party-line vote that opens the door to redistricting even after the legislative session ends on May 14. It doesn’t guarantee redistricting will happen, but it keeps GOP lawmakers’ options open and allows the pressure from MAGA forces to build.

The state Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required, is expected to vote on the resolution as soon as today. Trump is aggressively lobbying Republican state Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, with phone calls on Monday and Tuesday, pushing him to fall in line, Politico reports. Massey has been a vocal opponent of redistricting, concerned it could actually cost the GOP seats in the House.

Qualifying for House races has already closed, and military ballots have already been mailed, but things have shifted dramatically in South Carolina since the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Furthermore, Trump allies are trying to leverage his successful primarying of anti-redistricting statehouse Republicans in Indiana this week to increase the pressure on reluctant GOP lawmakers in the South.

Mississippi

In an interview with the Daily Caller, Gov. Tate Reeves (R) exhibited quite a bit of wobbliness over whether he’ll push to redraw congressional maps before the midterms. In a sign of the pressure he’s under, Reeves left open the possibility of expanding an already-called special session of the legislature to include congressional redistricting, even though House primary elections have already been held.

“No final decisions have been made on congressional redistricting,” Reeves said. “We’re also looking at whether any new maps may or may not apply in 2026 or 2028.”

The state’s sole majority-Black district is held by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D).

Alabama

In an extraordinary move, the Alabama House passed a contingent measure that requires the governor to call a special session for House redistricting this summer if the Supreme Court lifts an injunction barring the state from using a 2023 map with only one majority-Black district.

What makes it extraordinary is that it would void the results of the upcoming May 19 primary and hold do-over primaries for four of the seven congressional districts where the map would change.

Tennessee

In a special session of the legislature, Tennessee Republicans unveiled a new congressional district map that would eliminate the state’s sole majority-Black district, represented by Steve Cohen (D), who is white. A vote on the new map could come as soon as today.

The Big Picture on Louisiana v. Callais

Still unspooling the many implications of what happened at the Supreme Court last month:

• A critical point from Duncan Hosie in The Atlantic on how Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion hamstrings Congress from ever reinvigorating the Voting Rights Act:

But to view Callais as merely the final hit in the Voting Rights Act’s destruction is to miss its deeper ambition. The bigger shift is that Callais also closes off the possibility that a future Congress could respond with new legislation combating racial discrimination in the electoral system. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, joined by the other Republican appointees, rests on an interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment that effectively bars Congress from remedying the very inequities Callais unleashes—inequities the amendment itself was designed to eradicate and prevent.

• Gaby Goldstein in TPM on the the decision’s devastating impact on Black representation in state legislatures:

Most analysis since Callais has focused on Congress. But the devastation in state legislatures may be as bad or worse, and the consequences even more immediate for people’s daily lives. … Nearly half of all majority-minority state legislative districts in the South could simply disappear.

A Second Redemption

The historical perspective on where Louisiana v. Callais fits into America’s fitful fight over its own racism:

• Thomas Zimmer:

Because Louisiana v Callais is, in many ways, the culmination of a “backlash” against multiracial democracy, and because it will in turn fuel the escalating reactionary countermobilization, it signifies the end of a distinct phase in U.S. history. The Second Reconstruction is over; we are into the second “Redemption” now.

• David Cole:

The decision in Louisiana v. Callais may be the Roberts Court’s most radical and far-reaching yet, rivaled only by the 2022 elimination of the right to abortion. It will almost certainly usher in a bleaching of the nation’s legislative bodies—federal, state, and local—unlike anything this country has seen since the “Redemption” of 1873–1877 ended Reconstruction and returned white supremacists to power throughout the South.

Pay Attention to Virginia

The Trump DOJ launched two frontal attacks on elected Democrats in Virginia yesterday:

• The FBI raided the offices and business of Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D) of Portsmouth in what is reportedly a corruption probe that originated under the Biden administration but didn’t go anywhere in any public way until after it was reportedly pushed by then-acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan to boost Republicans before the midterm elections. Lucas, a Black woman, was one of the strongest, most outspoken proponents of Democrats’ recent mid-decade redistricting in Virginia.

• The Trump DOJ announced a civil rights probe of Steve Descano, the elected Democratic state prosecutor in Fairfax County, the state’s largest, over conservative complaints that he’s too lenient on criminal defendants who are undocumented immigrants. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon trumpeted the election-year investigation in typically MAGA terms: “This investigation will uncover whether this prosecutor is putting the community at risk in offering sweetheart deals to illegal immigrants charged with serious crimes.”

Quote of the Day

“We have a Department of Justice today that targets people for criminal prosecution simply because the president doesn’t like them. … We have a department that fails to move on cases because they might uncover facts that are inconvenient to narratives the president would like to press.”—former Special Counsel Jack Smith, in a video obtained by the NYT of remarks he made to a private gathering last month in D.C.

Criminalizing Political Opposition

As TPM’s Kosh Kovensky reported, MAGA goofball Sebastian Gorka finally rolled out a long-awaited Trumpified national counterterrorism strategy that ropes in purportedly left-wing ideologies as terroristic:

In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.

This is part of the MAGA long con of creating an amorphous shadowy oppositional strawman not just to repeatedly knock down but to justify using the powers of the state to stifle political opposition.

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Sword for Foes and Shield for Friends

It appears the Trump DOJ is 86-ing the campaign finance investigation into Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), Phil Williams of Newschannel 5 in Nashville reports.

There were already signs that the investigation, which began before Trump was re-elected, had stalled out since his second inauguration.

Then yesterday, Ogles notified the court that he was withdrawing his long-standing motions for the return of his phone and emails seized by the FBI because the Justice Department had agreed to give it back to him voluntarily without even examining it.

“In discussions with the Office of the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice, the Government has advised defense counsel that it will promptly return or destroy the property and information obtained pursuant to the respective search warrants at issue,” Ogles’ attorneys said in the filing.

Ogles hailed the apparent end of the criminal probe.

“From the day the FBI showed up, I said this investigation should never have happened and that the Biden DOJ had no right to rummage through a sitting congressman’s legislative communications. Today, the Justice Department has effectively acknowledged I was right.”

Career prosecutors in Nashville withdrew from the case shortly after Trump re-took office, and the case was transferred to the Main Justice’s Public Integrity Section, which has since been decimated by the Trump II purges.

Ogles originally claimed that he’d personally loaned his 2022 congressional campaign $320,000. But in the wake of the fabulism and campaign finance fiasco surrounding the eventually expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), savvy investigative reporting from Newschannel 5’s Williams exposed a number of fabrications and exaggerations by Ogles and questioned whether Ogles had the financial resources to make such a loan, since his financial disclosure form didn’t even list a savings account.

Ogles later admitted the filing was in error and made an amended filing that reduced the personal loan amount to $20,000. The FBI executed a search warrant in the case in August 2024, seizing, among other things, Ogles’ cell phone. It also obtained a warrant to seize his personal email records from Google.

As is not uncommon in criminal investigations of sitting members of Congress, Ogles objected on constitutional grounds to the seizure of his phone and emails. The Justice Department agreed not to examine the seized material until a court ruling on the matter. The case has since languished, without a ruling from the court. The new agreement between Ogles and the Trump DOJ means the FBI will never review the materials, a sign the criminal case has or is about to be abandoned.

“This is a complete win for the responsible exercise of prosecutorial discretion and respect for the Constitution’s Separation of Powers,” Ogles said in his statement.

A separate but related House Ethics Committee investigation has also languished since January 2025.

Quote of the Day

“We can survive a lot: bad policies, funky elections. There’s a bunch of stuff we can overcome. We can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system — the awesome power of the state. You can’t have a situation in which whoever is in charge of the government starts using that to go after their political enemies or reward their friends.”—former President Barack Obama, in an interview with Stephen Colbert at the soon-to-open Obama Presidential Center in Chicago

Judge Refers DOJ Attorney for Possible Discipline

U.S. District Judge Melissa R. DuBose of Rhode Island said Tuesday she is referring a Trump DOJ attorney for possible discipline after he withheld from her the existence of an overseas arrest warrant for murder charges against a ICE detainee whom she ordered released.

Kevin M. Bolan, the head of the civil division of the Rhode Island U.S. Attorney’s Office, apologized to DuBose in court on Monday for failing to divulge the information to the court, saying ICE instructed him not to reveal it.

“It’s the candor and the lack of candor to this court that has to be addressed,” DuBose said Tuesday in making the referral of Bolan. “And it has to be fully investigated, so we don’t have anything like this happen again.”

DuBose was especially incensed because the Trump DHS issued a press release (the link is still live) titled “Activist Biden Judge Releases Violent Criminal Illegal Alien Wanted for Murder” even though the administration failed to inform her of the outstanding warrant.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Illinois: State police said Tuesday that they’re investigating the fatal ICE shooting of Mexican national Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez last summer in suburban Chicago.

• Minnesota: The Department of Veterans Affairs conducted internal investigations into employees who attended the vigil for VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by federal immigration officers.

• Nationwide: The Trump administration is abandoning the accelerated training program it used to quickly deploy the thousands of recently hired ICE agents and will instead provide them with additional instruction in the field, Politico reports.

2026 Ephemera

• OH-09: Former ICE official Madison Sheahan lost the GOP primary to challenge Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D).

• OH-Guv: Vivek Ramaswamy won the GOP nomination for governor.

• MI: Democrats held onto a narrow majority in the state Senate on Tuesday by winning a special election in a closely divided district.

• IN: In the Republican primary, President Trump succeeded in ousting five incumbent GOP state senators who voted against his mid-decade redistricting proposal.

Lawless Boat Strike Campaign: 190 Deaths

Three people were killed Tuesday in a U.S. strike against an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the death toll to at least 190 in the lawless high-seas campaign.

We’re Almost There

Okay, folks, TPM is closing in on our goal of adding 1,000 new members during our annual membership drive. This morning we’re at 915.

I know some of you want to join and just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I totally get it. My to-do list is always burdened by stragglers that I keep rolling over to the next day … week … month.

So I’m asking you to please go ahead and check off that box today. It’ll just take a moment, it will help us immensely, and it will be one more thing off your mind.

It matters. Every additional membership helps. We run a tight ship. We feel the difference with every new signup.

For existing members, thanks for your support, especially at a time when politics is hard to take. A lot of people have averted their gaze from the daily carnage. Not Morning Memo readers. You’re confronting the tough realities every day.

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

Partisan Hackery

Destroying the Voting Rights Act wasn’t enough.

The Supreme Court gifted Republicans another partisan political advantage Monday, deviating from its normal procedure by immediately certifying last week’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais and sending it back to the lower court, rather than waiting the usual 32 days under its own rules. The court offered no real explanation for its ruling.

Accelerating the usual timing will make it easier for Louisiana to redraw its House district maps to eliminate at least one of its two majority-Black districts before the midterm elections.

It also added insult to injury, as the Roberts Court has been wildly inconsistent in applying its own principle that federal courts should not intervene in redistricting cases too close to elections. In this case, the court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais came after mail-in voting in the House primary elections were already under way. The new special dispensation for Louisiana came after its Republican governor suspended the House primaries in order to redraw the districts in light of Louisiana v. Callais.

The court’s procedural decision prompted a heated dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who noted the court had made a similar decision only two other times in the least 25 years:

These post-Callais developments have a strong political undercurrent. … Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation. The Court’s decision to buck our usual practice … and issue the judgment forthwith is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.

In a concurring opinion penned solely to respond to KBJ, the always-indignant Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas) called her dissent “insulting” and accused her of being hotheaded: “It is the dissent’s rhetoric that lacks restraint.”

It’s not clear which justices voted to rush the certification of its ruling. “It is, still, somewhat of a surprise that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor did not sign Justice Jackson’s dissent,” election law professor Rich Hasen observes.

There’s a final element of bitter irony here to unpack, as KBJ and Alito wrangle over whether the 2026 election should be conducted using old or new maps. Back in the 2022 cycle, the Roberts Court allowed Alabama to use House district maps that lower courts had found to be unconstitutional but then after the election affirmed the lower courts.

It wasn’t just that the election was run with legally flawed maps. It was the difference maker in control of the House, as Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck points out:

… one can draw a straight line from the Court’s unsigned, unexplained February 2022 intervention in Alabama to at least five congressional districts that should have been redrawn before the 2022 midterms but weren’t. Republicans won all five of those seats—giving Republicans their exact margin of control in the House in the 118th Congress.

The Roberts Court’s unique ability to be nakedly partisan and thin-skinned about it mirrors the Trumpian attitude of the current era: We will behave with impunity, and we don’t want to hear a peep from you about it.

The Great Whitening

The fallout from Louisiana v. Callais continues:

• Louisiana: The state Senate committee overseeing redistricting will likely favor a map that eliminates only one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts when it convenes Friday, its chair said.

• Alabama: A crowd of 150 people protested the start of a special session of the legislature called to redraw the state’s congressional district map to eliminate at least one near-majority-Black district before the midterms.

• Tennessee: The special session to eliminate the state’s sole majority-Black district begins today.

Digging in on Supreme Court Reform

Expanding the Supreme Court — which last had a majority of justices appointed by Democratic presidents in May 1969 — is but one of the means of reforming the court:

• Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck (again!) offers a quick summary of the history of Congress exerting its powers over the Supreme Court, many of which it has declined to assert in recent decades.

• Jonathan Bernstein: “The truth is that Democrats cannot expect anything they do in 2029 to survive, no matter how large their majorities might be in 2029 or how seemingly solid the Constitutional case for their actions might be, as long as the current GOP majority runs the high court.”

The Big Lie Never Ends

The Trump DOJ has demanded the identities of every worker — including thousands of volunteer poll workers — who staffed the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of its retributive investigation of Trump’s loss.

Judge Mulls Contempt Against DOJ/DHS

U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose of Rhode Island was incensed that the Trump DOJ failed to tell her about an outstanding international warrant against an ICE detainee whom she ordered released — but that the Trump administration then put out a press release claiming she knowingly freed the man wanted for murder.

A Trump DOJ attorney “profusely apologized” to the judge, saying ICE instructed him not to share the existence of the Dominican Republic arrest warrant with her.

“DuBose said at the hearing Monday that she is considering whether to hold officials from DHS or DOJ in contempt of court for their handling of the situation,” Politico reports.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Federal Reserve: D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has dropped her appeal of U.S. District Judge James Boasbeg’s ruling quashing her two subpoenas of the Federal Reserve and chair Jay Powell, but she asked Boasberg to vacate his ruling so that it doesn’t stand as precedent on the constitutional issues the Trump administration claims are at stake.

• Cole Allen: D.C. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui ripped local jail officials for treating the alleged White House Correspondents Dinner gunman more harshly than the Jan. 6 defendants.

• Hannah Natanson: The Trump DOJ lost its appeal of a magistrate judge’s ruling that he and not prosecutors would review the electronic devices seized from WaPo reporter Hannah Natanson in a classified leaks case. In the same case, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the pretrial release of the government contractor charged with leaking to Natanson.

Lawless Boat Strike Campaign Continues

Two people were killed Monday in a U.S. strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea, bring the the death toll in the months-long campaign to at least 187.

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Biggest Threat To Abortion Since Dobbs

UPDATE: The Supreme Court on Monday morning issued administrative stays in both of the weekend’s appeals from mifepristone manufacturers, meaning that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ nationwide ban on the remote dispensing of the abortion pill is lifted at least until May 11 at 5 p.m. ET.

By now, you’ve seen the Friday p.m. news that a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals effectively instituted an immediate nationwide ban on the prescribing of the abortion pill mifepristone by telemedicine and on sending it to patients by mail.

Rather than seeking a review by the full appeals court, the pill’s manufacturers went directly to the Supreme Court on Saturday seeking emergency relief from the new in-person dispensing requirement.

The ban, which came in a case brought by the state of Louisiana against the FDA, applies in red and blue states alike, though it bites especially hard in states that have mostly banned abortion.

“While this is not the final word on the case, this decision represents the most sweeping threat to abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, said in a statement. “If allowed to stand, it would severely restrict access to mifepristone in every state, including those where abortion is broadly legal and where voters have acted to protect abortion rights.”

The 5th Circuit panel (Kyle Duncan, Trump; Leslie Southwick, Bush II; and Kurt Engelhardt, Trump) found that Louisiana would be harmed if access to the pill continued while the case proceeds because it would cause unlawful abortions within the state’s borders. As Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck observed over the weekend: “[M]ost gallingly, the panel’s ruling pays no attention to the other side of the equities—the harm not just to Louisianans, but to people in states in which abortions are generally legal from an order reimposing an in-person dispensation requirement.”

The Supreme Court previously torpedoed a challenge to mifepristone out of the 5th Circuit on standing grounds, but hadn’t ruled on the merits. The district court in this newer case found that Louisiana was likely to prevail on the merits but declined to allow the ban to take effect while the case proceeds. With its decision Friday, the 5th Circuit reversed that ruling.

We should hear from the Supreme Court on this matter as soon as today.

For Your Radar …

Chris Geidner has a good rundown on the three major categories of cases currently in the uber-reactionary hands of the 5th Circuit:

• the mifepristone case (see above);

• a disturbing anti-trans subpoena of a Rhode Island hospital that the DOJ hand-picked U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Texas to enforce, which he promptly did within hours last week; and

• The impact of Louisiana v. Callais on Louisiana’s House district map (see below).

The 5th Circuit has not just consistently tried to push the Roberts Court further to the right but it has actively looked for opportunities to do so.

Trump DOJ Watch

• D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro suggested Sunday that she is still gunning for Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell even though she made a public display last month of dropping her investigation of him.

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday that not everyone who posts “86 47” online will be prosecuted and continued to vaguely refer to “other evidence” that makes the case against former FBI Director Jim Comey different.

• The FBI redirected a quarter of its personnel to work on Trump’s mass deportation operation, according to records FOIA’ed by The Intercept.

The Corruption: Trump Lawyer Edition

Politico: In Trump II, at least 10 of the president’s former lawyers have landed jobs in the administration or been nominated to the federal bench.

Post-VRA House Redistricting Wars

Things are moving awfully fast after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. On Friday, two Republican governors in the South called their legislatures back into immediate special sessions starting this week to redraw House maps in time for the 2026 midterm elections:

• Alabama: On Friday, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey called a special session of the legislature beginning this afternoon that looks likely to eliminate at least one of the state’s two majority-Black districts in advance of this year’s midterm elections. Republicans in the state, where the primary election is set for May 19, are considering holding special elections for House districts under a new map. The GOP machinations remain contingent on the Supreme Court allowing the state to revisit its House district map.

• Tennessee: On Friday afternoon, Republican Gov. Bill Lee called a special session of the legislature beginning Tuesday to eliminate the state’s sole majority-Black district, in Memphis, in time for the midterm election.

• Louisiana: Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s suspension of the primary for House races to give the state time to eliminate one or both majority-Black districts before the midterms caused confusion on the first day of early voting on Saturday. Meanwhile, at least two lawsuits have been filed in federal and state court challenging Landry’s move.

From Beyond the Grave …

Quote of the Day

“I’d be a shitty Republican.”—Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), on the quiet GOP effort to persuade him to switch parties

Mass Deportation Watch

WaPo: Internal ICE records reveal widespread use of force in detention centers

Giuliani in Critical Condition

Rudy Giuliani is in critical but stable condition in a Florida hospital, according to his spokesperson, who provided no additional details on the former NYC mayor.

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A Complete Remapping

The map of American politics is about to change more dramatically than at any time since Reconstruction.

This week’s Supreme Court’s decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, has unleashed a re-gerrymandering of the House that will eventually extend to state and local political districts across the country.

With the two major political parties are still assessing what’s in their partisan interests to attempt to do and with years of legislative and legal battles still to come, it’s too early to map out the exact shape and form all the changes will take.

For our purposes, it makes sense to put the gerrymandering-on-steroids into two buckets: (i) what will happen between now and the 2026 midterms in November; and (ii) what will happen in the long term after 2026.

The Rush to Act Now

In the wake of Alito’s opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, Republican electeds have adopted the rhetorical posture of declaring all minority-majority districts unconstitutional, which lets them take the position that the midterm election cannot legally be run on unconstitutional maps. That throws the door wide open to making immediate, and perhaps even retroactive, changes to congressional district maps.

Among the key developments since yesterday:

• Louisiana: With early voting set to begin tomorrow, the Republican governor declared an emergency and postponed the primary elections for the U.S. House (and only those primaries; the other primary elections will proceed as scheduled). That will give Louisiana, which was a party to the case in which the Supreme Court neutered the Voting Rights Act, time to pass new congressional district maps that eliminate one or both of the state’s majority-Black districts.

• Tennessee: President Trump began jawboning Gov. Bill Lee (R) into eliminating the state’s sole majority-Black district, held by white Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen in Memphis. Trump announced, perhaps self-servingly, that Lee had told him “he would work hard to correct the unconstitutional flaw in the Congressional Maps of the Great State of Tennessee…This should give us one extra seat.”

• Alabama: The state rushed back to the Supreme Court, where its congressional district map is already being litigated, seeking expedited treatment of its case, which has already had a long and winding road to get to this point. Two majority-Black districts are at stake there. Gov. Kay Ivey (R) had said Wednesday that she would not ask the legislature to redraw the state’s map, but that was before yesterday’s move in court.

• Georgia: This morning, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) said he won’t cancel the May 19 primary but signaled he may call the legislature back at some point to redraw the state’s congressional map for 2028, but not for 2026.

Beyond 2026

The political landscape is poised to be reworked, especially in the South, as Nate Cohen mapped out in a extensive analysis of what extreme gerrymandering in the post-Louisiana v. Callais world might look like in medium term:

As Greg Sargent reports, the Supreme Court decision raises the stakes on state legislative races this year. The party that controls statehouses will have an outsize advantage in redrawing election maps for 2028. One analysis from the voting rights group Fair Fight Action gives a wide range of 10-22 seats that Democrats could pick up for 2028 with aggressive redistricting in blue states, depending on how Democrats fare in statehouse elections, Sargent notes.

An additional wrinkle for Democrats is the tension that aggressive redistricting in blue states will create with its minority constituencies because it will hasten the loss of minority representation in Congress, as election law expert Richard Hasen points out:

Some Democrats may say this “cracking” of minority districts benefits all Democrats, including minority voters, because electing more Democrats gives Democrats more power to help minority voters and others. But Democrats who represent fewer minorities are less likely to champion the interests of minority communities than minority-preferred candidates. And the pressure that these minority-preferred candidates can bring to bear in Congress (such as through the Congressional Black Caucus) is crucial to encouraging the Democratic Party to be responsive to the needs of minority voters.

RIP Voting Rights Act

A sampling of well-informed reaction to and analysis of Louisiana v. Callais:

• Hasen: “In the end, Alito is afraid to stand up and say what his opinions necessarily imply: that Congress cannot do anything to protect minority voting rights short of banning intentional discrimination despite the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, despite the 15^th Amendment’s ban on race discrimination in voting, and despite the fact that both amendments explicitly give Congress the power to enforce the measures by ‘appropriate legislation.’”

• Law professor Atiba Ellis: “I think it highly ironic that under the guise of a colorblind Constitution communities of color in a diversifying America could lose the lion’s share of their voice in government.”

• Public policy professor Don Moynihan: “The VRA was crowning achievement of the Civil Rights movement, the product of a civil war, constitutional amendments, and intense political and social battles. Its intent was clear. And it was swept away, bit by bit, by a court whose majority was nominated by a President who lost the popular vote. …”

The Retribution: Comey Edition

The Trump DOJ has revived its previous failed investigation of Comey involving Columbia law professor Daniel Richman, but instead of making it another false statement to Congress case they’re treating it as a leaked classified information case, Bloomberg reports.

It’s not entirely clear where the investigation is centered. Bloomberg says it’s in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Comey lives, but that the case could be brought in New York, where Richman live. In contrast, the NYT reports:

Details are scant. But prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, Mr. Blanche’s old office, are said to be examining a possible leak of sensitive material by Mr. Comey, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation.

Settlement in Facebook Meme Arrest Case

A settlement appears to have been reached yesterday in the lawsuit by a Tennessee man who was jailed for more than a month on a $2 million bond after posting a meme to Facebook that trolled the memorial service for the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, according to the online docket in the case. No details on the terms of the settlement were provided in court records.

The MAGA Surveillance State

WSJ:

In the battle against illegal immigration, the U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tools that give federal agents easy access to the home and workplace addresses of American citizens, their social-media accounts, vehicle information, flight history, law-enforcement records and other personal information, as well as data to track their daily comings and goings, The Wall Street Journal found.

‘You’ll See Me in the News. I Promise You’

JTA: “A soldier stationed at Fort Polk in Louisiana was arrested last week after he told users on the popular messaging platform Discord that he planned to conduct a mass shooting at a synagogue.”

The Destruction: EPA Edition

• The NYT’s Lisa Friedman: How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A.

• The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert: Can the E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?

See You Back Here Monday

A Whole New Battleground

The Roberts Court’s decision to effectively neuter the Voting Rights Act gives Republicans new life in their bid to hold on to their fragile House majority in 2026.

Consider just a few of the developments in the 24 hours since the decision in Louisiana v. Callais was handed down:

• Louisiana: Gov. Jeff Landry (R) plans to suspend next month’s primary elections so state lawmakers can pass a new congressional map that eliminates one or both of the state’s majority-Black districts.

• Florida: The GOP-controlled legislature passed its already-planned new congressional district map that could net Republicans four House seats.

• Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina: Top GOP candidates, elected officials and party chairs “called for special legislative sessions to dismantle minority-majority districts and create more aggressive gerrymanders benefitting their party,” Politico reports.

The upshot already is that Republicans have regained the lead in the mid-decade redistricting battle, seizing it back only days after Democrats had edged ahead.

The GOP advantage is small, but the already-narrow divide in the House makes any changes to the national map potentially decisive in either direction. Even if only a handful of Southern states seize on the Supreme Court decision, the gains could be enough to shift the map further in the GOP’s favor, all else being equal. (Conversely, it’s also true that these marginal shifts can be rendered largely meaningless if Democrats win in November in a wave election that washes out any structural GOP gains.)

Much of the analysis yesterday accurately noted how tight election calendars in many states may prevent the GOP from taking full advantage of an electoral map unencumbered by the Voting Rights Act. But it’s also true that it’s generally easier to redistrict in red states than in blue ones. With the the GOP’s firm control of many statehouses, its top-down hierarchical structure, and its culture of rewarding impunity, it is not just better positioned to capitalize on the current moment, it has little to lose.

Against this backdrop stands one Donald J. Trump, whose entire political existence, financial fortunes, and fractured psychology are dependent on holding onto the House. Why wouldn’t Republicans do everything in their power to push the envelope as far as they can between now and November? It’s how they got to this point. It’s what they do. Why would they stop now?

2028 and Beyond

A couple of additional points about the on-the-ground impact of the Roberts Court’s decision:

GOP’s Structural Advantage Grows

Even if the timeframe is too crunched for Republicans to maximize the effect of the Supreme Court ruling in time for the 2026 elections, the impact on the 2028 congressional district map is going to be enormous. A political playing field that already tilts structurally in favor of Republicans (thanks to the Senate, Electoral College, and partisan gerrymandering) will be a dramatically steeper climb for Democrats.

“We’re very likely to see the biggest drop in minority representation of the modern era — maybe even bigger than the drop we saw in the end of Reconstruction,” Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos told the WaPo.

(Yes, Republicans risk diluting their districts by eliminating majority-minority districts, but this is a manageable risk that frankly is often overstated. Over the long term, it might yield median candidates in red districts who are slightly less to the right, but in most cases the overall electoral advantage still goes to the GOP.)

It’s Not Just the House

The impact of the Roberts Court’s decision is far-reaching in state and local maps, too: legislatures, city councils, judicial districts, etc. Election law expert Richard Hasen calls it the “bleaching” of American politics, a whitening of elected officeholders at every level of government.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) had already called a special legislative session to address the state’s judicial maps, and now the state will get one of the first bites next month at the apple offered by the six-judge conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

With local elected offices serving as a points of entry for higher office, eliminating minority representation there snuffs out political careers before they can even begin, creating an additional structural impediment to would-be candidates of color at all levels of government.

Quote of the Day

“If you tell me I have to be white to serve in Congress from Louisiana, I can’t do nothing about that.”—Rep. Cleo Fields (D-LA), reacting to the Roberts Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act

A Sampling of the Legal Reax

• Law professor Richard Hasen: “Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.”

• TPM’s Kate Riga: “The conservative justices know that Callais makes Section 2 cases virtually impossible to bring, that it’ll have the same effect as their previous deteriorations of the VRA. They know that they’re making minority voters vulnerable to being redistricted or restricted out of electoral power — and they also know that most of those minority voters vote Democrat.”

• Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill: “[I]t is a mistake to consider today’s decision just a blow for the political rights of racial minorities. Today’s decision strikes a blow at the fragile infrastructure of our democracy. It casts aside the precious and noble actions undertaken by countless generations of activists, lawyers, and legislators, who worked to bring this country closer to becoming a true multi-racial democracy. It rides roughshod over the will of Congress. In its place, the Court leaves a bare-fisted zero-sum game of partisan politics and an open door to the return of full-on racial exclusion in political representation. So long as it’s dressed up as partisan gerrymandering or incumbency protection, it’s all good.”

Thread of the Day

Maine Senate: Janet Mills Suspends Campaign

Citing insufficient financial resources, Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) has suspended her Senate campaign.

Fallout From SPLC Indictment

Fidelity and Vanguard have cut off the Southern Poverty Law Center from receiving charitable donations through their donor-advised funds as a result of the bogus retributive indictment of the civil rights organization.

Jim Comey Allowed to Surrender

While an arrest warrant was issued in North Carolina for former FBI Director James Comey after his new retributive indictment by the Trump DOJ, he was allowed to make his first appearance in his home district of Virginia rather than face the spectacle of an arrest.

U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick rejected prosecutors’ request to impose conditions on Comey’s release pending trial. “I don’t think conditions of release are necessary,” the judge said. “They weren’t necessary the last time, and I don’t see why they’d be necessary this time.”

Judge Gets Serious About Trump’s Bogus Settlement With the IRS

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of Miami, on her own initiative, appointed distinguished outside counsel to serve as friends of the court in helping her assess whether the pending settlement of Donald Trump’s $10 billion claim against the IRS.

The move comes after Williams expressed skepticism last week that Trump and the IRS were truly adverse to each other, given the president’s embrace of the unitary executive theory. Without truly adverse parties, the court would lack jurisdiction since there would no controversy for it to resolve.

Williams ordered six attorneys from three firms, including former Obama-era Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., to “assist the Court in identifying the applicable law governing an analysis of this issue.” Their legal memo is due May 21.

What Really Happened With the Broadview 6?

The Trump DOJ dropped felony charges in the Broadview 6 case and will only proceed with misdemeanor charges against the ICE protestors arising from the October incident.

The key point: The DOJ moved to drop the most serious charges on the same day it was supposed to bring grand jury transcripts to court on order of U.S. District Judge April Perry. Making the felony case go away deprives defense counsel of access to the transcripts since the misdemeanor charges aren’t dependent on a grand jury indictment.

Failson Fails Upward

Amazon, which owns The Apprentice back catalog, is considering rebooting the Trump reality TV show with Donald Trump Jr. as the host.

If the Day’s News Wasn’t Bad Enough …

WaPo: “Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth’s food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won’t get the nutrients they need to thrive.”

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

How Low Can They Go?

Three major developments in Donald Trump’s retribution campaign yesterday laid bare more than ever before — as hard as that may be to believe — the depths to which the Justice Department will go under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to do the president’s bidding.

And yet … amid the carnage was proof positive that the Trump vendettas are fundamentally weak cases that can be effectively fought and won. While that doesn’t spare the Comey family or dozens of other putative defendants from the financial and emotional costs of Trump retributions, it does stiffen the spine as we settle in for a long siege on the rule of law.

1. SPLC Comes Out Swinging

In its first formal response to the deeply flawed federal indictment of its paid informant program, the Southern Poverty Law Center aimed a one-two punch at the Justice Department.

The civil rights organization — which has added D.C. attorney Abbe Lowell to its defense team — fired back with two motions that felt like brushback pitches:

• Motion to Address the Government’s Materially False Statements and to Enforce Rules Prohibiting Further Prejudicial Extrajudicial Statements

• Motion to Disclose Transcript of Grand Jury Proceedings

The big picture issue that both motions are concerned with is the SPLC’s history of providing law enforcement, including the FBI, with information it has obtained from its paid informants.

The first motion above targets extrajudicial statements by Blanche on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show claiming: “There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement.”

Not just false in the abstract, the SPLC alleges. It claims that weeks before the indictment it gave federal prosecutors in Alabama information that showed instances in which the organization had shared information from its informants with federal law enforcement.

The SPLC’s attorneys went so far as to send an April 17 letter to federal prosecutors imploring them to inform the grand jury of six categories of exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors did not respond to the letter. The indictment was issued on April 21.

The SPLC wants DOJ to correct or retract Blanche’s comments.

The more substantive of the two motions seeks the grand jury transcripts in an effort to get the indictment dismissed before even having to argue that this is a vindictive prosecution and legally flawed in other ways.

The prospect that prosecutors improperly instructed the grand jury was evident as soon as the indictment was issued. An essential intent element to the fraud allegations was not included in the indictment, and the SPLC seizes on this and statements from Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and President Trump to argue that the grand jury was “actively weaponized” against it:

The SPLC claims it was never contacted nor subpoenaed by prosecutors before the indictment. Instead, its attorneys reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alabama. Prosecutors told them they thought the records of the informant program had been destroyed. Not so, the SPLC said. It says it accepted a subsequent grand jury subpoena and produced some 15,000 pages of records on April 17. The indictment came down two business days later.

In its motion seeking the grand jury transcripts, the SPLC (in what turned out to be an especially timely move) cites Comey’s first prosecution in Virginia, where he succeeded in obtaining the grand jury transcripts because of notable irregularities in how the Trump DOJ handled his case.

2. The New Comey Indictment Is Laughable

The First Amendment problems with the new indictment of James Comey, this time in North Carolina, are so obvious that the effect is to dispense with any pretense that this is anything other than a vindictive prosecution, despite Blanche’s flustered protestations at yesterday’s tense press conference at Main Justice:

A sampling of the informed reaction:

• “No reasonable person could believe that Comey intended to threaten the president via seashells,” a DOJ official told Ryan Reilly of NBC News. “Everyone at this DOJ should be ashamed. I know I am.”

• Eugene Volokh digs into the elements of the alleged seashell crime and concludes: “I think this prosecution is unjustified, and will get thrown out.”

• Ken White, former federal prosecutor and longtime criminal defense attorney:

The point of the indictment is to demonstrate that the United States Department of Justice is wholly an instrument of Donald Trump’s senescent pique, no more independent of him than a boil on his ass. The point is to show that the administration can, and will, use the Department’s mechanisms to punish enemies. The point is to show that the Department can, and will, punish protected speech. The point is to show that the Department is staffed by committed fanatics willing to do anything, however unethical and unconstitutional, to promote Trump.

3. The OTHER Comey Case

There’s a good argument to be made the most important news of the day came in the civil lawsuit by Comey’s daughter Maurene, who won a significant ruling as she challenges her unlawful firing as a federal prosecutor.

Maurene’s case is shaping up to be a major case not because of who her father is but because she’s confronting head-on the trap that the Trump administration has set for fired government workers. The Trump trap goes something like this, in short:

• Fire government workers without cause or advance notice, citing merely Trump’s powers under Article II of the Constitution.

• Force fired government workers to take their complaints to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

• Stack the formerly independent Merit Systems Protection Board with loyalists and make clear that their jobs depend on doing Trump’s bidding.

It’s quite a bit more complicated than that in the particular, but that’s the box the Trump administration was trying to put Maurene in. It had moved to dismiss her lawsuit on the grounds that she had to pursue her complaint through the MSPB.

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of Manhattan elegantly sidestepped many of the most bedeviling legal arguments in yesterday’s ruling. He rejected the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss, ruling that Trump’s invocation of his Article II powers in firing Maurene took her case out of from under the auspices of the MSPB and entitled her to proceed in federal court.

It’s a major win for her and potentially for a swath of federal workers summarily fired with a broad and vague hand-wave toward Article II powers, but there’s a long way to go in this litigation.

TPM Exclusive

Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky: Inside The ‘Red Team’ House Dem Task Force That’s Running War Games And Taking On Trump’s Election Threats

Lawless Boat Strike Campaign Accelerates

New York Times: “In the past few weeks, the military has without public notice increased the number of secret fixed-wing attack aircraft and armed MQ-9 Reaper drones operating from bases in El Salvador and Puerto Rico, allowing the military to accelerate the strikes, the two people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discussion operational matters.”

Latest on CIA Deaths in Mexico

We’re slowly inching closer to some semblance of the truth about the role of the CIA in Mexican counternarcotics operations.

The Chihuahua special prosecutor confirmed yesterday that there were two other “foreigners” at the scene of the car accident that killed two CIA agents after a raid of a Mexican drug lab, but did not confirm that they were additional American CIA agents.

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that two other CIA officers “were present during the raid” and were following the vehicle that crashed down a mountainside, at which point they “went down the mountain by foot in hopes of saving their colleagues, but it was too late.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Circuit Split on Mandatory Detentions: In a 3-0 ruling, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s ahistorical interpretation of a 30-year-old statute that has flooded the federal courts with habeas cases. The appeals court, in an opinion written by a Trump appointee, found significant constitutional questions with “what would be the broadest mass detention-without-bond mandate in our Nation’s history for millions of noncitizens.”

• 3rd Country Removal Nightmare: NPR interviews five of the 15 Latin American migrants shipped off to the Democratic Republic of Congo by the Trump administration.

• Asylum Seekers Blocked Again: After losing an appeal court decision last week over its policy of restricting asylum seekers at the border, the Trump State Department has implemented a new policy to try to preempt asylum seekers by refusing to issue travel documents to anyone who fears returning to their home country.

The Retribution: ABC Edition

The FCC, chaired by Trump toady Brendan Carr, has launched an early review of all station licenses owned by ABC, a full-frontal assault on a major broadcaster behind the tissue-thin-veil of an investigation into the network’s DEI policies. The move comes after President Trump and the first lady demanded that ABC fire late night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Vanity Ballroom Jumps the Shark

I’ve spent years now warning of the dangers of Donald Trump taking over the Department of Justice, and yet I feel like I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief.

What I initially envisioned — Trump obliterating the Chinese wall between the White House and DOJ and putting undue pressure on DOJ leadership to do his corrupt bidding — certainly came to pass but now seems quaint.

If you can get away with that, Trump reasoned, why not run the Justice Department out of the White House. So he proceeded to check that box.

Once you cross the line of running the DOJ out of the White House, then who really needs DOJ leaders other than as figureheads. And if they’re only figureheads, then why not dictate to them the exact words to use in their legal filings on your behalf.

That seems to be the line we crossed last night with a new filing in the vanity ballroom case that reads like a Trump Truth Social post or one of those interminable digressions in his two-hour campaign speeches.

For context, the plaintiff challenging the legality of demolishing the East Wing of the White House and constructing a ballroom-bunker without approval from Congress using corruption-prone private donations is the do-good National Trust for Historic Preservation, an exemplary organization.

The Trump-dictated filing, which Chris Geidner was all over last night when it was first filed, begins by calling the the National Trust’s name “FAKE” in all caps, declares it “very bad for our Country,” and accuses it of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly called TDS”:

It goes on like this for two pages, much of it devoted to leveraging Saturday night’s assassination attempt into a new justification for the ballroom, before turning to anything that purports to be actual legal arguments.

The filing is over the signature of the No. 3 official at DOJ, Stanley Woodward, who was a Trump world criminal defense attorney before Trump II, who had not previously appeared in the ballroom case. It is extraordinary for the associate attorney general to get involved directly in a case, but this isn’t the first time. He’s also personally defending Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s vindictive prosecution claim.

Clearly, the thwarted attack at the White House Correspondents Dinner has catalyzed Trump’s pre-existing obsession with the ballroom. Woodward does what he can to integrate Trump’s bombast into the staid confines of a legal filing, but fails miserably.

One tell of Trump’s contributions: exclamation points. They pop up three times, and bear the unmistakeable Trump tone:

• “It is all one highly integrated unit!”

• “What he did on Saturday night could not have taken place in this new and highly secure facility!”

• “Congress has never dictated or tampered with the zoning, permitting, or architectural aspects of any Project, especially one being given FREE OF CHARGE AS A GIFT TO THE COUNTRY!”

All caps are the other Trumpian giveaway:

• “FAKE”

• “STANDING”

• “FREE OF CHARGE AS A GIFT TO THE COUNTRY!”

• “DONALD J. TRUMP”

• “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”

After giving over the introduction of the filing to Trump, Woodward seems to have given him the conclusion, too:

As Geidner puts it: “It was yet another dark, embarrassing moment for DOJ — one that summed up the destruction that Trump and his sycophants have unleashed on the institution.”

Just a reminder that the issue here isn’t the grotesqueness of the monstrosity Trump wants to build or the safety and security of the head of state. It’s the constitutional allocation of the spending power to Congress, and the related issue that the president doesn’t own the White House or any other federal property. He is merely a caretaker, at most.

Quote of the Day

Garrett Graff, on the ballroom-bunker mentality:

I do think a major reason that White House construction and renovations should unfold with the assent and understanding of Congress and through the appropriations system is so that Congress as a separate-and-equal branch has a check-and-balance in just how extensive the fortifications of the White House end up being. Strong enough to sustain a hostile attack? Absolutely! Strong enough to withstand the end of democracy? Absolutely not.

IMPORTANT

Read Steve Vladeck to understand why the Supreme Court’s summary reversal yesterday of a three-judge panel’s ruling on Texas’ congressional district map was so important.

(One note, because it may not be obvious to lay readers: Unlike most cases seeking Supreme Court intervention, appeals from three-judge redistricting panels skip the intermediate circuits courts of appeals and go straight to the Supreme Court, which must consider them.)

Trump DOJ Watch

Lawfare reviewed dozens of hours of media appearances by new “grand conspiracy” prosecutor Joseph diGenova. Their conclusion, in summary: He has spent years accusing President Trump’s perceived enemies of crimes, attacking their character and even demanding their imprisonment — all of which casts real doubt on his ability to act as an independent or impartial prosecutor.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

HuffPo: “All 40 of his nominees to lifetime federal judgeships so far have given misleading or false responses to questions about the 2020 election in the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Another Mike Flynn Settlement

Anna Bower: The Trump administration has agreed to a second settlement with former national security adviser and Trump ally Michael Flynn.

A Friendly Public Service Announcement

This is the kind of “news you can use” that I share with loved ones (and did this morning), so I’ll end today with a gentle nudge on your personal cybersecurity:

The gist: “If there was ever a time to finally take your cybersecurity practices seriously, it’s now.”

The action items: “Use strong passwords that are unique across every site, preferably through a trusted password manager. Better yet, when a site offers a passkey, take it. A passkey lets you sign in with your face or fingerprint — no typed password that could be stolen by phishing. For accounts without passkeys, use an authenticator app for two-factor authentication, not text messages. Always keep all your software up to date, and uninstall unnecessary apps.”

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When Everyone Is on the Same Side

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of Miami expressed skepticism on Friday that President Trump and the IRS he oversees are sufficiently adverse to give her subject matter jurisdiction over his $10 billion claim for the leak of his personal tax information.

To put it more plainly, if there’s not a true controversy between adverse parties, there’s no case here. To add to the irony, it’s Trump’s robust application of the unitary executive theory that is causing him trouble.

Here’s the key footnote in her order:

Williams ordered more briefing from the parties on the adverseness issue.

With everything that happened this weekend, I didn’t want this new roadblock to a potentially massive looting of the Treasury to get overlooked.

The Corruption: Meme Coin Edition

President Trump made a quick trip to Mar-a-Lago to hawk his meme coin at a Saturday luncheon before returning to D.C. for the ill-fated White House Correspondents Dinner that night.

Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube

All that needs to be said — and much that doesn’t – has already been uttered about the attempted massacre of the nation’s leaders Saturday night

The pervasiveness of political violence will be a hallmark of the Trump era. Full stop.

While there is no one cause, Trump himself is dazzled by violence. He instigates it. He enables it. He revels in it.

Combine his fetishization of violence with our combustible politics and a civilian population absolutely awash in firearms, and historians won’t be puzzling over the why for long.

I take some consolation that previous periods of political violence in America, most recently the 1960s-70s, have ebbed and we’ve been able to return to a more peaceable baseline.

Security Theater

Lots of arm-chair quarterbacking about the security protocols for the Saturday night event, most of it misplaced. For a cold-eyed assessment, Garrett Graff has you covered.

SPLC Indictment Gets Worse and Worse

The closer you look at the Trump DOJ’s bogus indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the worse it gets:

• Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman: “This is, above all, a deeply dishonest indictment—politically motivated, intellectually bankrupt, and designed to leave a lasting false impression in the minds of people who will never look past the headline …”

• Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann: The Poverty of the DOJ Indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center

• Hats off to reporter Phil Williams, who observes that right-wing extremists are not buying the Trump administration’s claim that the SPLC was funding extremism.

Pirro Ends Sham Investigation of Fed

D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced Friday that she has ended her retributive probe of the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jay Powell, instead referring the matter to the inspector general for the Federal Reserve.

It’s not clear how much this is a permanent retreat by the administration versus a tactical sidestepping of Sen. Thom Tillis’ hold on the nomination of Kevin Warsh to succeed Powell. In response, Tillis did withdraw his hold, which should clear the way for Warsh’s Senate confirmation.

Mass Deportation Watch

• In a ruling on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending asylum access at the border.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Friday cleared the way for Texas to enforce its own controversial anti-immigration law, but delayed the effective date of its ruling until May 15.

• Many of the newly hired 140 immigration judges — replacing insufficiently harsh judges already purged by Trump administration — lack immigration law experience and are receiving less training than previous judges, the WaPo reports.

Lawless Boat Strike No. 53

Two people were killed Friday in a U.S. strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, raising the death toll to at least 182 in Trump’s lawless campaign.

Lawless Boat Strike No. 54

Just two days later, three more people were killed Sunday in the eastern Pacific in the seventh U.S. strike this month against alleged drug-smuggling boats, bringing the death toll to at least 185 since the campaign began last summer.

Mexico: CIA Not Authorized to Participate In Anti-Drug Ops

The Mexican government said Saturday that two CIA agents killed in a car crash last weekend after the raid of a drug lab were not authorized to participate in operations in Mexico. In related news, the Ministry of Security said one of the U.S. agents entered Mexico as a visitor while the other entered with a diplomatic passport.

The Purges: NSF Edition

On Friday afternoon, President Trump purported to fire all of the members of the independent National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation, the funding engine for much of U.S. public scientific research.

2026 Ephemera

All four Black Republicans in the House are leaving Congress after their terms end.

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A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma

Of all the charlatans, grifters, and ghouls in the Trump II playbill, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has always baffled me the most. I can’t figure out the motivations that drive him or the elaborate self-rationalizations that permit him to engage in wholesale misconduct and abuse of office.

I have been most confounded by his professional background. He spent more than a decade as a DOJ prosecutor in Manhattan, and another decade as a criminal defense attorney at major law firms in New York — which means that to spearhead DOJ politicization and weaponization, Blanche has had to set aside both the long-standing traditions of the Justice Department that he would have been immersed in and dispense with a criminal attorney’s instinctive revulsion at government overreach and prosecutorial abuse.

While I’ve encountered DOJers with little appreciation for DOJ tradition and defense attorneys who don’t fit the classic mold, it’s rare to find someone who embodies both of those departures from the norm. Add in that Blanche is 51, old enough to know better, that he had a solid previous career that wasn’t entirely dependent on Trump, and that nothing about his relatively modest past bears any obvious signs of a grasping ambition at the expense of all else, and I’m left to puzzle over his psychology, which I have neither the expertise nor access to meaningfully assess.

The inexplicable Blanche was on display at this week’s press conference announcing the shameful indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center. A seemingly nonplussed Blanche shrugged off the most pointed questions about what exactly the alleged fraud was, and made no attempt to offer assurances let alone solid evidence that this isn’t as political a prosecution as it appears on its face.

In a new story this morning, the NYT runs through a laundry list of bad acts Blanche has committed as acting attorney general. It’s framed in the context of Blanche shoring up his position against right-wing criticism in hopes of landing the permanent gig, or at least staying in the acting gig indefinitely, but let’s consider them on their own demerits:

• planning to revive the politicized prosecution of former FBI director James Comey, though on what grounds remains unclear;

• expecting to subpoena the bodyguards of Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis “possibly in connection with an investigation into her government-funded travel”;

• pushing ahead with putative cases against left-wing groups like the SPLC and Act Blue;

• green-lighting inquiries into Cassidy Hutchinson, the star witness of the House Jan. 6 committee;

• whipping greater urgency into the retributive investigation of former CIA Director John Brennan, including removing the career prosecutor overseeing it and replacing her with Trump loyalist Joe diGenova.

The NYT story also contains evidence of the contradiction that Blanche presents, crediting him — if that’s not too generous — with sending goofball Ed Martin out to pasture; being overruled after telling the White House there was insufficient evidence to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James; opposing the appoint of Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia to lead the James and Comey prosecutions; and cautioning against the immediate arrest of Comey for a social media post that was bizarrely trumped up into an assassination threat against the president.

It all leaves me with the unsatisfying conclusion that Blanche is simply morally obtuse and ethically tone deaf. Maybe that’s the simplest answer, but I’m left wanting a better explanation.

Digging Deeper on the Bogus SPLC Case

As the week as unfolded, I’m gratified that the public discourse has gradually moved toward greater recognition that the Trump DOJ’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center is a travesty:

• Former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance: “It’s a warning to anyone who might consider cooperating with anti-hate groups in the future: ‘Don’t do it!’ It’s a message of intimidation from the leadership of DOJ, delivered for the benefit of their audience of one—if you align yourself against us, we can take you down. In essence, this indictment is about protecting domestic terror groups from exposure, not about prosecuting a real crime that SPLC committed.”

• Bloomberg: “The Justice Department relied on a lesser-known bank deception statute to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center while omitting an element needed to prove the crime: intent to influence a financial institution. The infirmities suggest federal prosecutors in the Middle District of Alabama who brought the case may have improperly instructed grand jurors, which could lead a judge to dismiss the case or demand transcripts of the typically-secretive proceedings in which DOJ obtained the indictment, said several defense lawyers and former white-collar prosecutors.”

‘I Stand By Every Single Word’

The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick talks about her exposé on FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged drinking on the job and his subsequent defamation lawsuit against her and the publication: “One of the things that has most gratifying immediately after the story published was I have been inundated by additional sourcing, going up to the very highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work … providing us with additional corroborating information.”

The Purges: Trump DOJ Edition

Via a FOIA request, Reuters has tallied some of the staffing losses that DOJ and its components have suffered under Trump II:

• DOJ National Security Division: -38%

• ATF: -14%

• FBI: -7%

• DEA: -6%

• Bureau of Prisons: -6%

In total, DOJ employees 11,200 fewer people than it did during the ​fiscal year that ended three months before Trump began his second term, according to Reuters.

Down the Memory Hole

Leaning on the flimsy OLC memo that declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional, the White House Counsel’s Office has issued a new policy watering down document retention requirements, the WaPo reports.

Sign of the Times

An Army Special Forces master sergeant involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was indicted in federal court in Manhattan for allegedly using classified information on the operation to make $400,000 placing bets on Polymarket.

Latest on the Middle East …

• Hormuz Quagmire Alert: “He’s stuck with this, for as long as the strait remains closed,” an Iran expert tells the NYT, referring to Trump. “The speed with which this became a quagmire for the United States has been, also, quite stunning.”

• The ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon will be extended for three weeks after a second round of talks at the White House, President Trump announced.

• The Iran conflict has drained U.S. munitions to such a degree that some officials are warning that the United States can no longer fully defend Taiwan.

Pentagon Fires Ombudsman

The ombudsman for Stars & Stripes, charged by Congress with maintaining the independence of the military newspaper, was fired after speaking out against an overhaul of the storied publication that Trump officials accuse of being “woke,” the WaPo reports.

Thread of the Day

Mass Deportation Watch

• NYT: Trump DOJ Targets Hundreds of Citizens in New Push for Denaturalization

• WSJ: Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem Has Continued Using a Waterfront Coast Guard House Since Ouster

• Dropsite News: Two Iranian Women in ICE Detention Are Not, In Fact, Related to Qasem Soleimani, Documents Show

Quote of the Day

“First of all, I think it’s very important that the unity or division of the church should not revolve around sexual matters. We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality I believe there are greater and more important issues such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion that would all take priority before that particular issue.”—Pope Leo XIV

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WTAF

In March, the FBI began investigating New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson after her February story on the use of bureau resources by Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend.

The unprecedented move to target a journalist for politically damaging reporting proceeded on the flimsy premise that her coverage of Alexis Wilkins, a country music singer, was potentially in violation of federal anti-stalking laws.

Among the affirmative steps that the FBI took against Williamson: It “combed through the bureau’s databases to determine whether the federal government had any information on Ms. Williamson to help make the argument that she deserved further scrutiny.”

The NYT notes that Williamson spoke with Wilkins on the phone once and never met her in person.

After that initial inquiry, FBI agents “recommended moving forward with a preliminary investigation,” but ran into concerns at the Justice Department, where even Trump DOJ officials “determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation,” the NYT reports.

The FBI denied it ever investigated Williamson but confirmed that “investigators were concerned about how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking. The FBI has since dropped the investigation and is not pursuing a case against Williamson.

A key unanswered question: Did Patel sic the FBI on the reporter or did FBI officials take the initiative to do on their own?

Another Raid on the US Treasury

The Trump administration has agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page’s claims that the FBI and DOJ illegally entangled him in court-ordered surveillance. Page, who had lost in lower court proceedings, had appealed his case to the Supreme Court, but solicitor general D. John Sauer told the high court yesterday that the case has settled.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Bloomberg: Ahead of the midterm elections, the Trump DOJ has dismantled a centralized election week command post at the FBI, discontinued mandatory election law training for prosecutors, and restricted access to threat briefings for state officials.

• The Bulwark: How The Blaze’s crackpot reporting on the Capitol Hill pipebombs prompted a wild, unnecessary FBI raid.

• Bloomberg: President Trump has nominated Don Berthiaume, a veteran federal watchdog attorney, as the DOJ inspector general. He has been serving as the acting DOJ IG.

Hmmm …

A report in the Los Angeles Times offers some new tidbits about the CIA deaths in Mexico last weekend that don’t quite square with the officials accounts from Chihuahua state officials, who maintained that the Americans were dozens of miles away and didn’t participate in the raid:

• “The agents in Sunday’s raid were dressed in Chihuahua State Investigative Agency uniforms to blend in with Mexican officials,” according to unnamed sources familiar with the operation.

• Two other CIA officers “were present during the raid.” They were in a pickup truck following the lead vehicle, which crashed, and “went down the mountain by foot in hopes of saving their colleagues, but it was too late.”

The CIA declined to comment on the report.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Senate Republicans overnight used the budget reconciliation process to push through a blueprint for $70 billion in additional funding for immigration enforcement and reopening DHS. The 50-48 vote saw only Republican Sens. Rand Paul (KY) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) break party ranks.

• In a ruling yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a California law requiring federal agents to wear identification.

• The Trump administration is considering sending more than 1,000 Afghans who aided the anti-Taliban effort to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the NYT reports. The group, which includes interpreters and family members of U.S. service members, have been languishing in Qatar since they were evacuated from Afghanistan for their own safety.

2026 House Battlefield Map

Two of the major super PAC funding sources for House campaigns made their initial fall ad buys, which serve as a map of sorts for the 2026 battleground:

• Punchbowl: Speaker Mike Johnson’s Congressional Leadership Fund purchased $153 million in air time for about 30 districts, roughly evenly split between defending GOP seats and trying to snag Democratic seats.

• WSJ: The $272 million ad buy from the pro-Democrat House Majority PAC was overwhelmingly — nearly 80% — focused on GOP-held seats.

Quote of the Day

Andy Craig:

In an autocracy—most vividly in overt monarchies but also many modern dictatorships—the state is embodied in the sovereign ruler. Their face is on the money; institutions and governments are denominated “royal”; infrastructure projects are named in their honor; and their birthdays are public holidays. The nation is, quite literally, theirs. “L’État, c’est moi.” …

A republic, with symbolism tracing back to antiquity, deliberately inverts these trappings of personal rule. The institutions belong to the public—res publica, in which all have a stake. The people, and not the rulers, are sovereign. The officeholder is a temporary steward, not a proprietor. When a president stamps his name and likeness on federal buildings and government programs and the national currency, he is asserting the monarchical claim: that these things are extensions of himself.

This is not something to be shrugged off as incidental. It is corrosive of America’s fundamental principles.

Revealed: Trump Ballroom Contract

The WaPo has obtained the secret contract for donations to President Trump’s vanity ballroom project. It was signed in October, just two weeks before the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make room for colossal addition to the historic complex:

The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public.

The contract came to light only after Public Citizen sued to obtain it.

De-Trumpification

Gregg Gonsalves in The Nation:

The scope of the damage, and the enormous amounts of money, time, and energy that will be required to bring us just back to 2024 levels, boggles the mind. I am not sure anyone has really wrapped their heads around what this means, given that so many other areas of public life will need Marshall Plans of their own. Trump, in his malfeasance, malice, and incompetence, is running up quite a tab, and we, our children, and our children’s children, will be left with the bill.

I Can’t Shake This One

My tendency is to shy away from anecdotal accounts as a poor proxy for complex problems and an obstacle to clear thinking, but I have not been able to shake this personal appeal from a British mother whose newborn daughter contracted measles in a 2013 outbreak, before she was old enough for the vaccine, and died of complications from the disease in 2023.

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Too Cute by Half

The colossally corrupt indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center shows just how powerful a politicized DOJ can be in the hands of a rogue president — and how difficult it is even this late in the game for the press and the public to have a clear-eyed view of retributive prosecutions.

While the SPLC has long been a tormenter of extremists and therefore targeted by the right, it has not been subjected to the kind of drumbeat narrative against it from President Trump that would help to elevate the bogus nature of the prosecution more clearly in the public mind. So there was a lot of “let’s wait and see what they’ve got” in yesterday’s coverage of the new federal indictment out of Alabama. Even I felt some trepidation about assuming it was another bogus politicized prosecution until we got a better handle on the allegations.

But let’s be clear: They got nothing. Period. Full stop.

The indictment reads like what you would expect a bunch of young conservative lawyers who fancy themselves as clever and who have an axe to grind against an anti-white supremacy organization to come up with. It’s too cute by half. It insists that up is down.

SPLC payments to informants to get intel on extremist group activities that it then shared with law enforcement were, in this telling, funding white supremacism. Setting up shell entities to protect the informants by shielding the origins of the payments is recast as a money laundering conspiracy. Running the payments through normal banking channels somehow turned the banks into victims and gave rise to a slew of wire fraud and false statement charges.

I watched the full press conference by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, and it was breathtaking how little they have against the SPLC and how ill-prepared they were to address the most obviously troubling questions that the case raises, like what was the fraud precisely? Or what evidence exactly makes decades of payments to extremist informants not a watchdog function but the promotion of extremism?

In a telling moment, Blanche let slip that the SLPC investigation originated under Trump I, was shelved under Biden, and then reanimated in Trump II.

For context and history plus a real unpacking of the indictment, I recommended:

• Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama: “At first blush, these allegations feel like an extension of the revenge docket and the attacks on universities and law firms, an effort to delegitimize and marginalize an organization that is pushing back against the administration. We’ll have a chance to study the charges as we learn more about the government’s evidence. The government’s core theory is that the SPLC paid high-ranking white supremacists, but they seem to ignore the reason—that the use of paid informants was essential to the intelligence the Center was gathering on the groups they were members of, including intelligence that was shared with the FBI.”

• Chris Geidner, who shows how the facts pleaded in the indictment itself belie Blanche’s claims during the press conference, where he went well beyond the indictment by alleging that the SPLC “was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.”

The underlying danger here goes well beyond the SPLC. Not every vindictive prosecution is going to be as open and obvious as those against James Comey, Letitia James, John Brennan, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, etc. Even a well-respected, longstanding organization with a distinguished history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan and right-wing extremism that most reporters are very familiar with is easily placed under a pall of suspicion and doubt by the most transparently bad faith DOJ in our history.

Investigate the Investigators Watch

The latest developments in the bogus “grand conspiracy” retributive prosecution that the Trump DOJ is running down in south Florida, now under auspices of the newly-appointed Trump loyalist Joseph diGenova:

• The NYT reports that weekend subpoenas sent out from a D.C. grand jury in the politically motivated case against former CIA Director John Brennan were promptly rescinded on Monday. The cooperating witness who had been subpoenaed will be interviewed voluntarily instead, which would be the more typical DOJ practice.

• While the mother of all vindictive prosecutions is based in Florida, the purported perjury case against Brennan arises from a deposition he gave to Congress, so he would likely need to be indicted in D.C. Both the NYT and WaPo report that Miami U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones has been given special authority to bring cases outside of his home district, including in D.C.

• The WaPo reports that Quiñones has been regularly meeting for months with Blanche’s office about the case. Blanche was in Florida Monday and met with diGenova and the case team and then posted on X about it:

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A National Disgrace

Garrett Graff on the unrelentingly bad tenure of FBI Director Kash Patel.

Pull Out the Checkbook

The former Capitol Police officer who defended against the Jan. 6 attack but was then falsely accused of setting pipe bombs the night before has sued The Blaze and two of its reporters for defamation in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Shauni Kerkhoff, who now works at the CIA, has hired top-flight attorneys to pursue what could be an existential threat to the far-right media company founded by Glenn Beck. One of the Blaze reporters on the story, Steve Baker, was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct (his case was later dismissed when President Trump granted sweeping clemency to the Jan. 6 rioters).

Kerkhoff was for a time a suspect in the pipebombing case before being exonerated by the FBI, but new reporting from the NYT suggests Baker himself may have been the one to finger her as a suspect before he published his story:

But Mr. Baker said he may have helped trigger that investigation. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Baker said that shortly before his story published, he had taken his theory to sources at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

A spokesperson for the office said that a “whistle-blower” had come forward last year with an allegation about a security concern, which the agency documented and lawfully reported to the employing agency of the person, who was a member of the intelligence community.

The Blaze never contacted Kerkhoff before it published the false allegations against her, she says. More than three weeks after publishing, The Blaze took down its story.

Dems Win Virginia Redistricting Vote

In a big boost to Democrats in the mid-decade redistricting wars, Virginia voted to redraw its map, in a move that is expected to yield a pick-up of four Democratic seats. The win in Virginia means Democrats now have a 10-9 seat advantage over Republicans nationwide in the redistricting race, as both parties try to eke out gains to win House control in the fall’s midterm elections. The state’s Supreme Court could still step in to block the redistricting.

Rep. Cherfilus-McCormick Resigns

Indicted Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) resigned her seat just minutes before the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on whether to recommend her expulsion from the House.

More on the CIA Deaths in Mexico

While the NYT followed up the WaPo with its own confirmation that the two Americans killed over the weekend in a car accident in Mexico worked for the CIA, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government would investigate the incident to ensure no laws were broken, which could lead to a Mexican admonishment of the U.S. “We’re investigating what these people were doing and what agency they were working for,” she said.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Colorado: Customs and Border Protection agent charged with assaulting a protester.

• Florida: 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns injunction that aimed to shut down “Alligator Alcatraz.”

• Texas: Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is using Trump-style tactics in fight with blue cities over ICE.

Good Read

ProPublica: Trump’s Counterterrorism Czar Sebastian Gorka, a Man Without a Counterterrorism Plan

Latest From the Middle East …

• President Trump announces the U.S. ceasefire with Iran is extended indefinitely.

• Vice President JD Vance hit pause on his planned trip to Pakistan as planned talks with Iran broke down.

• President Trump is weighing punishing NATO allies who refused to back the Iran war, Politico reports: “The effort, which officials worked on ahead of NATO head Mark Rutte’s visit to Washington this month, includes an overview of members’ contributions to the alliance and places them into tiers, according to three European diplomats and a U.S. defense official familiar with the plan.”

10 Commandments in Schools Law Upheld

By a 9-8 vote, the hyper-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas law requiring the 10 Commandments to be posted prominently in every public school and university classroom in the state. The case is headed to the Supreme Court.

Anti-Vax Shenanigans

• NYT: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refused to commit to supporting the vaccine recommendations of the new CDC director.

• WaPo: CDC won’t publish report showing COVID shots cut likelihood of hospital visits.

• NYT: Pentagon to Stop Requiring Members of Military to Get Flu Vaccines

Hard Read

NYT: A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss

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Sheinbaum: ‘We Were Not Informed’

A rather unusual series of events over the past 48 hours has exposed the extent of the CIA’s involvement in counternarcotics operations in Mexico.

A brief timeline to catch you up:

Sunday: Four government investigators — two from Mexico and two from the United States — were killed around 2 a.m. local time in a car accident in the northern state of Chihuahua while viewing newly discovered drug labs, according to Mexican officials. A government convoy was navigating the rugged highlands of the Sierra Madre Occidental when the lead vehicle plunged about 200 meters down a cliff and caught fire, killing all four occupants, the NYT reported. The two Americans were “training officers assigned to the United States Embassy in Mexico,” according to the report.

Monday: The story took on a surprising new dimension when Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded an explanation for the operation in which the investigators were killed, the AP reported:

“It was not an operation that the security cabinet was aware of,” Sheinbaum told journalists. “We were not informed; it was a decision by the Chihuahua government.” She said they must have authorization from the federal government for such collaboration at the state level “as established by the Constitution.”

Adding to suspicions of something being afoot, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico declined to identify who the U.S. investigators were or which agency they worked for, saying only that they were “supporting Chihuahua state authorities’ efforts to combat cartel operations,” according to the AP.

Tuesday: The reasons for the initial secrecy and vagueness became clear when the WaPo reported this morning that the two dead U.S. investigators worked for the CIA “as part of a significantly expanded role in battling narcotics trafficking in the Western Hemisphere”:

The four died as they were returning from meeting with Mexican officials in the aftermath of the operation to dismantle a clandestine drug lab in a remote area. Chihuahua’s attorney general, César Jáuregui Moreno, told Mexico’s El Universal newspaper that the Americans did not directly participate in the Mexican raid on the lab, which he called “perhaps one of the largest ever located.”

Looming over the story is Mexico’s extreme sensitivity to historic U.S. violations of its sovereignty. So you have President Sheinbaum insisting that “there are no joint operations on land or in the air,” only sharing of information within a “well-established” legal framework. And you have the attorney general of Chihuahua rushing to offer assurances that Sheinbaum was not notified about the operation because the CIA personnel were only involved in training and not in the raid on the drug lab, which involved only Mexican agents:

He said the Americans, whose agency affiliation he did not identify, were doing training work “about eight to nine hours away” from the location of the operation against the drug lab. After that operation, they met with personnel from Chihuahua’s state investigation agency, known as AEI, which participated in the raid, Jáuregui told El Universal. The accident occurred hours later, he said.

The Trump administration doesn’t have a good track record of recognizing let alone abiding by these kinds of finely drawn lines, as evidenced by its lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. It has not offered its own account of the incident in Mexico.

Fishing Boat Crew Survived U.S. Strike

The crew of an Ecuadoran fishing boat recounts to The Guardian what they claim was a U.S. drone attack on their vessel on March 26, some 200 miles northwest of the Galápagos Islands. No one was killed in the attack, but several crew members were injured. After being rescued by what they described as a U.S. patrol boat, they were transferred to a Salvadoran patrol boat and eventually taken to El Salvador, where they were questioned at a military base before being repatriated to Ecuador.

Great Read

NYT: The Night the Government Closed the Skies Over El Paso

Headline of the Day

Another not-in-my-lifetime headline: “Japan lifts post-World War II ban on lethal weapons exports”

DC Grand Jury Involved in Brennan Case

While the “grand conspiracy” investigation of Trump investigators is anchored in southern Florida, a D.C. grand jury is involved, CBS News reports:

Former senior intelligence and FBI officials who are cooperating with the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal probe into whether former CIA Director John Brennan lied to Congress were subpoenaed over the weekend to testify before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.

Trump DOJ Targets SPLC

The Southern Poverty Law Center announced this morning that it is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Trump DOJ. It believes the probe is focused on its past use of paid informants to infiltrate right-wing extremist groups.

Extremism Is Also a Grift

WaPo: The far-right influencer Nick Fuentes has pocketed roughly $900,000 from superfans since the start of 2025.

TPM on the Radio

TPM’s Josh Kovensky was on Texas Public Radio’s Texas Matters to talk about his article on the GOP’s election year imperative to revive Islamophobia as a way of firing up its base:

Only the Best People

Scandal-tarred Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is resigning.

‘The Literary Find of a Lifetime’

A bound volume of original love letters from John Keats that was stolen from the Whitney estate sometime before 1989 has been recovered after a man showed up at a Manhattan rare books store last year trying to sell it.

The story is cinematic in its details, including the British-mystery-TV-show-style involvement of rare book dealers in getting their hands on the long-lost volume and alerting law enforcement.

I was also gratified to learn that there is an Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. I clearly missed my calling.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

‘Conspicuous Inebriation’

Update: Kash Patel has filed this morning a defamation lawsuit against the Atlantic and staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick in federal court in D.C.

On Friday evening, The Atlantic published a devastating account of Kash Patel’s first year as FBI director.

The gist of the piece is this: “the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.”

Most of the piece focused on Patel’s alleged drinking on the job. The anecdotes were numerous … and astounding:

• “On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for ‘breaching equipment’—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.”

• “Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.”

• “FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk.”

Patel responded to the story pre-publication by threatening to sue The Atlantic: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.” Post-publication, he threatened to sue as soon as today and posted this quite memorable, though legally inaccurate, statement on X regarding defamation law: “actual malice standard is now what some would call a legal lay up.”

As has become a pattern among on-the-outs officials during Trump II, Patel tried to save his own neck by redoubling his efforts to go after Trump’s political foes during a round of appearances on the Sunday morning TV shows:

DiGenova Helms ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case

After a bunch of rapid-fire reporting from multiple news outlets from Friday afternoon into Saturday, the shuffling of the deck chairs in the mother of all Trump vindictive prosecutions in south Florida looks like this:

• Career DOJer Maria Medetis Long is out as the lead prosecutor in the case “after she resisted pressure to quickly bring charges” against former CIA director John Brennan, CNN reports. Her boss, Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, had told DOJ “officials that charges could still be months away, sources say, which top Justice officials told him was not acceptable.”

• Former D.C. U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, 81, who represented Trump’s 2020 campaign and Trump during the earlier Russia investigation, is now leading the “grand conspiracy” investigation, with the title of counselor to the attorney general. DiGenova starts today.

• Also assigned to the case: Christopher-James DeLorenz, a former clerk to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon during the Mar-a-Lago investigation who was transferred to south Florida from Main Justice, where he’d been an aide to then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The south Florida case, some of which is happening in Ft. Pierce, where Cannon is the only judge, is supposedly pursuing a grand-unifying conspiracy theory that the federal government was out to get Trump across multiple investigations that spanned nearly a decade.

Trump DOJ Watch

• In a letter last week signed by Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump DOJ demanded that Detroit-area ballots from the 2024 federal election be turned over, escalating its bogus scrutiny of spurious election fraud claims, which judges continue to reject en masse.

• HuffPo: “As legal claims against the Trump administration stack up, several federal lawyers defending the U.S. government — and its repeated failures to follow court orders — have regularly fallen back on the same argument: They simply have no idea what’s going on.”

• WSJ: In a letter that uses highly politicized language, the Trump DOJ is refusing to cooperate with the French investigation into Elon Musk’s X.

Todd Blanche Auditions for AG Post

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman: “In Todd Blanche’s three weeks as Acting AG, he has taken screws that seemed fully turned and tightened them another notch. His initial moves suggest that, hard as it is to conceive, he will be even more vicious, more slavish toward Trump, and more willing to jettison the public interest and the rule of law than was his consummately servile predecessor.”

Extraordinary Glimpse Inside SCOTUS

In a well-packaged blockbuster, the NYT obtained a tranche of internal Supreme Court memos from the 2016 case that ushered in the shadow docket as we know it today:

• The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

• VIDEO: The Origins of the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket

• A Breakdown of Five Days of Secret Supreme Court Memos

• Takeaways From the Supreme Court’s Shadow Papers

• Read the Supreme Court’s Shadow Papers

Shadow docket expert Steve Vladeck has a very accessible column this morning on the upshot of the NYT’s remarkable reporting.

No SCOTUS Retirements This Year

Contrary to all the speculation, Justice Samuel Alito doesn’t plan to retire this year, Fox News reports. Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t going anywhere either, according to CBS News’ Jan Crawford.

Sorry, Aileen Cannon, Neomi Rao, James Ho, et al.

Good Read

Madiba K. Dennie: Neomi Rao Understands What It Means to Be a Trump Judge

Latest From the Middle East …

• After declaring on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was open to navigation, Iran quickly moved to shut it down again on Saturday until, it said, the United States lifts its blockade of Iranian ports. Two India-flagged ships were fired on after the new Iranian announcement and forced to turn around.

• On Sunday, the U.S. Navy disabled then boarded an Iranian-flagged cargo ship that allegedly tried to run the U.S. blockade.

• Vice President J.D. Vance is leading the U.S. delegation in expected talks this week with Iran in Pakistan, though Iran is making noises about not participating following the weekend’s events in the Strait of Hormuz.

Thread of the Day

A recap of the unusual maneuvering over FISA Section 702 late last week on the Hill:

Boat Strike Campaign Death Toll: 180

Three people were killed Sunday in the Caribbean Sea in the 52nd lawless U.S. strike against suspected drug-smuggling boats, bringing the campaign’s death toll to at least 180 people.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, the pro-Palestinian Tufts University student whose detention by masked federal agents for her political views was caught on camera, completed her Ph.D. in February and returned home to Turkey as part of a settlement agreement with the Trump administration.

• Marcy Wheeler: Minnesota Still Cleaning Up after Pam Bondi’s Trophy Stunt

• Politico: They’ve been detained by ICE and ordered deported. Judges are releasing them from custody.

The Corruption: Bogus Settlements

A new court filing confirmed that — how else to put it? — the Trump administration is in settlement talks with President Trump and his family about their $10 billion lawsuit over the leak of their tax information to news organizations.

In related news: Lawfare obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit a copy of the $1.25 million settlement agreement between the Trump administration and former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn to settle his bogus malicious prosecution claims.

The Corruption: Trump Library Edition

As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent reports, Democrats have been chasing down what happened to the corporate donations to Trump’s presidential library that were part of corrupt lawsuit settlement agreements with him — especially since the fund created to receive donations was dissolved last year.

ABC, Paramount, Meta, and X have now all confirmed they made the settlement payments, but it’s not clear where the monies ended up going.

“Not one of these companies can say with any clarity where their multi-million-dollar donations to Donald Trump’s library slush fund are, or where they will go,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told TNR.

Appeals Court Lets Ballroom Continue

The D.C. Circuit is playing with fire by allowing construction of President Trump’s vanity ballroom to continue until at least June while it hears his appeal of a lower court order halting the project. The administrative stay sets the stage for Trump to rush construction along so that he can present courts with a fait accompli they’ll be more reluctant to order torn down. This was the exact scenario U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C. warned the administration about in the very first hearing in the case, but the panel of Judges Patricia Millett (Obama), Neomi Rao (Trump), and Brad Garcia (Biden) are opening the barn door at least until oral arguments on June 5.

Headline of the Day

I didn’t expect to see this headline in my lifetime: “Germany Is Reinventing Itself as a Weapons Factory.”

Thanks, President Trump.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.