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.

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

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.

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A Potentially Important Test Case

Local authorities in Minnesota have charged an ICE agent for brandishing his gun in a road-rage-style incident that could end up being an important test case for whether states can successfully prosecute federal agents for their misconduct in Trump’s mass deportation operation.

The two-count criminal complaint accuses Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., 35, of Maryland of second-degree assault for pointing his gun at the driver and passenger of a vehicle he was attempting to pass on the shoulder of the road as he and his partner made their way back to the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis at the end of their shift on Feb. 5. A warrant has been issued for Morgan’s arrest.

The complaint states: “During his interview, Defendant made no claim that he was conducting any law-enforcement operation or activity or responding to any emergency situation during the incident.”

Much will ride on whether Morgan was still on duty at the time of the incident and whether passing cars on the shoulder in an unmarked vehicle without lights or sirens, then flashing his gun, were part of his official duties. Those will be among the issues that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty will have to overcome to sidestep the defenses the officer is likely to raise, including immunity from state prosecution.

In that sense, the Morgan case may not be the optimal test case for Moriarty if she is exploring the waters for bringing state charges against the federal agents in the three major shootings during Operation Metro Surge. But unlike in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, where the feds have refused to cooperate in any way, the Morgan case played out differently.

“This is the only case that we actually know what the federal officers say,” Moriarty told the Star Tribune. “We have their statement. We have video. The difference is that it came to us just like any other case would have.”

Minnesota State Police responded to the scene after a 911 call from the passenger of the vehicle Morgan allegedly assaulted and were able to gather evidence unobstructed by federal law enforcement. The passenger in the vehicle had video of Morgan’s license plate, which state police were able to link to a rental vehicle leased by Morgan’s partner, according to the complaint. A license plate reader at the Whipple Building clocked the vehicle, and state police learned the next day that both agents were at the building, the complaint says.

Critically, Morgan and his partner agreed to voluntary interviews with state police, the complaint says, in which they confirmed key details of the incident, including Morgan having drawn his weapon. Morgan told state police he “feared for his safety and the safety of others.”

The Star Tribune reports it this way: “The trooper called his lieutenant, who was at Whipple, gave him the license plate and asked him to look for the SUV. It was in the parking lot. The trooper interviewed the ICE agents with his body camera recording.”

Notably, neither Morgan nor his partner reported the incident, Morgan’s supervisor told state police, according to the complaint.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, who has suffered from stress-related symptoms that have landed him in the hospital twice during his tenure overseeing Trump’s mass deportation operation, plans to resign next month.

• In a rare rebuke of Trump’s mass deportation policies, 11 GOP House members defected to help Democrats pass a bill to continue temporary protected status for 350,000 Haitians.

• The French foreign minister announced that an 85-year-old French widow of an American military veteran returned to France this morning after being held in ICE custody since April 1. The woman was apparently detained at the behest of one of her stepsons as part of an ugly inheritance battle, a probate judge in Alabama found.

Latest on the Middle East …

• A tentative 10-day ceasefire was reached between Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah was not a party to the agreement, but civilians began streaming back into southern Lebanon Friday morning after the ceasefire was announced.

• With European airlines facing looming fuel shortages within weeks, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz is now open for the duration of the ceasefire: “The passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open.”

• The Trump White House is considering a $20 billion cash-for-uranium deal with Iran, Axios reports, the irony of which is hard to overstate. For years, Trump has mischaracterized the cash component of President Obama JCPOA’s agreement with Iran and made it a recurring rhetorical set-piece, including as recently as last month.

The Christian Nationalist Project

Sarah Posner in TPM: “The Trump regime has a preferred religion — a bellicose, nationalist Christianity — but its expression, as we saw this week, can be very erratic and often theologically incomprehensible. But one thing is clear from all the chaos. The Trumpist establishment of religion is made up of various fiefdoms within the federal government, all aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.”

Quote of the Day

“Blessed are the peacemakers! But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”—Pope Leo XIV

Judge Scoffs at Trump’s New National Security Rationale for Ballroom

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C. has once again blocked above-ground construction of Trump’s vanity ballroom project on top of the ruins of the demolished East Wing of the White House. An appeals court shipped the case back to Leon for clarification on Trump’s spurious new claims in the case that the ballroom construction is driven by national security imperatives.

Leon was having none of it. “National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” he wrote, as he allowed below-ground construction of bunkers and other security measures to continue.

Impoundment? What Impoundment?

Russ Vought to Congress: Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

Trump DOJ Seizes on Swalwell Scandal

In an alternate universe, you would applaud the Justice Department investigating alleged serial sexual assaults by a member of Congress, but the Trump DOJ jumping in to investigate disgraced Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) smacks of retributive prosecution all the same, especially given the president’s own predilections.

Deep Dive on Presidential Records Act

Christopher Fonzone, who was the last head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel before Trump retook office, takes a close look at why the Presidential Records Act is constitutional, has been adhered to by every administration in the 50 years since it became law, and how the new OLC memo to the contrary is a shoddy piece of slapdash legal analysis.

For Your Radar …

It’s not precisely clear in the strictest scientific terms whether the National Weather Service belatedly recognized the tornado threat in the Kansas City area Monday night because of agency staffing shortages and budget cuts, but the evidence is striking that weather balloon launches upstream were delayed from the normal 7 a.m. to noon, too late to be ingested by the morning runs of some forecast models.

“It’s like we’re conducting a real-time experiment without any way to evaluate what the impacts of it are,” Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who retired last year as the director of analysis and understanding at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, told NBC News.

For its part, NOAA denied the change to weather balloon launch times adversely impacted forecast models. “NOAA’s weather model performance shows no evidence of degradation,” a spokesperson said.

ICYMI: Zeldin Doesn’t Talk Like an EPA Chief

NYT: “A New York Times analysis of thousands of public communications by E.P.A. administrators, including news releases, social media posts, television appearances and podcast interviews dating back three decades, shows that Mr. Zeldin has fundamentally shifted both the agency’s mission and the words he uses to describe it to reflect President Trump’s desire to maximize economic development and industrial activity while downplaying environmental consequences.”

See You Back Here Monday

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Compares Press to the Pharisees

A thin-skinned and prickly Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went off on journalists in his press conference this morning, resorting to the classic “attack the messenger” defense to a unpopular war going poorly.

It’s not the first time Hegseth has succumbed to blaming a lack of patriotism among reporters for unfavorable headlines and critical reporting on a Middle East conflict ignited by the Trump administration. But today’s screed was striking for how it mixed the old worn-out reflexive questioning of the loyalty of reporters with biblical references that reflect Hegseth’s personal Christian nationalism:

“Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on,” Hegseth said. “It’s incredibly unpatriotic.”

In the decades since the Vietnam War, the Pentagon had haltingly moved away from the defensive crouch it often took in the face of criticism toward a more transparent and self-reflective public response to bad news. It was not always consistent and the backsliding was dramatic during periods of sustained setbacks, like in Iraq during the aughts, but the general trajectory was away from the kind of knee-jerk circle-the-wagons approach that Hegseth rolled out this morning.

Questioning the loyalty of journalists — or any regime critics — harkens to earlier dark eras of America history and to authoritarian regimes worldwide. But Hegseth’s diatribe came with a strong Christian twist, as he compared journalists to the Pharisees who rejected Jesus in the Bible:

“The Pharisees, the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time, they were there to witness, to write everything down, to record, but their hearts were hardened, even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter,” Hegseth said.

“They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda. As the passage ends, the Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel against him, how to destroy him,” he continued.

“I sat there in church and I thought, our press are just like these Pharisees, not all of you, not all of you, but the legacy Trump-hating press, your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors,” he added.

Hegseth — callow, reactive, driven by a warped theology of nationalism, and poorly grounded in history — personally represents a dramatic break from decades of training, education, and refining of a professional officers corps. In 15 months in office, Hegseth has done more to politicize the military than any secretary of defense in at least the last half century.

Third Boat Strike in Three Days

The accelerated pace of unlawful strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats continued in the eastern Pacific, with the third such strike in the last three days. Three people were killed in the 51st strike of the U.S. campaign, bringing the death toll to at least 177 people.

What Trump Foreign Policy Looks Like

• USA Today: Pentagon ramps up planning for possible military ops in Cuba

• WSJ: Pentagon Approaches Automakers, Manufacturers to Boost Weapons Production

• WaPo: Trump administration pushes nations to sign ‘trade over aid’ declaration

SCOTUS Watch

• Justice Sonia Sotomayor apologized privately to Justice Brett Kavanaugh and followed up with a public apology released by the Supreme Court for remarks last week that, without naming him, attributed his defense of what have become known as “Kavanaugh stops” to his posh upbringing.

• In a public appearance at Yale Law School, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasted the Roberts Court’s handling of its emergency docket.

• In unusually pointed remarks carried live by CSPAN, Justice Clarence Thomas launched a broadside at progressivism.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

• Trump lawyer and coup plotter John Eastman was officially disbarred in California after the state Supreme Court declined to take up his appeal.

• Trump I White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is seeking reimbursement from the Trump DOJ of his legal fees incurred as a witness in both of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations.

Must Read

Heather Cox Richardson draws a straight line from Lincoln’s assassination to Jan. 6 and the events of this week.

Do as We Say Not as We Do

NBC News: “Anti-abortion advocates met with Justice Department officials Wednesday, just hours after the Trump administration fired prosecutors it accused of coordinating too closely with abortion-rights advocacy groups during the Biden administration.”

Election-Year Islamophobia

When all else fails and their election prospects look dire, Republicans fall back on various forms of racist appeals to solidify their base and wrong-foot Democrats. This year, top Texas Republicans have landed on Islamophobia as the racist appeal of choice. TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports on the ground from Grapevine, Texas, where he talks to right-wing activists who are back again to warning about Sharia law and portraying Muslims as an external threat to “real” Americans.

Too often, gullible national media outlets treat these racist effusions like an organic upwelling of nativism, rather than a calculated election year strategy. TPM, I’m proud to say, has never been suckered in.

Thread of the Day

The Corruption: Bitcoin Jesus Edition

ProPublica offers a casebook study in the erosion of white-collar crime prosecutions under Trump II that includes the intervention of DOJ political appointees and the retention of a former Trump criminal defense attorney to outright kill one of the largest-ever cryptocurrency tax fraud cases.

Creepy Text of the Day

“Hearing u/r in town. Wishing you would let me know. I could have made some excuses to get out and show u around. Please keep this private.”—Richard Chavez, father of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, in a text to a young female staff member working for his daughter

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A Near Worst-Case Scenario

The descent of the Justice Department into a crude weapon wielded by an erratic authoritarian is gathering speed and quickening the threat to America’s fraying democracy in ways that we all feared but hoped might be kept at bay for a bit longer.

The series of developments yesterday would have been, just two years ago, a near worst-case scenario:

• Rather than do its duty to defend the hard-won convictions of a dozen Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders for seditious conspiracy on Jan. 6., the Trump DOJ abandoned those convictions in a new filing at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

• The Trump DOJ prevailed at the D.C. Circuit in avoiding even an investigation by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg into the brazen contempt of court the DOJ enabled and has since defended in the original Alien Enemies Act case.

• Federal prosecutors under D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro made an unannounced site visit to Federal Reserve headquarters in what was both an audacious act of intimidation divorced from proper investigatory techniques and a way for Pirro to toss an ingratiating bouquet to President Trump, who has made targeting the Fed’s independence a top priority.

• The Trump DOJ released the first of its bogus “weaponization” reports, a propagandistic attack on the Justice Department under Joe Biden that is itself a political weapon.

Trump DOJ Abandons Seditious Conspiracy Convictions

The abandonment of the seditious conspiracy convictions stands foremost among yesterday’s parade of horribles. These were the most serious convictions to emerge from the Jan. 6 autocoup for which the Roberts Court spared Trump himself from facing criminal prosecution. We know — yet it bears repeating for ourselves and for history — that the seditionists sought to overturn the Constitution by installing Trump as president through violence despite his having lost the 2020 election. It was the first non-peaceful transfer of power in our our history and the most serious threat to the Republic other than the Civil War itself.

The abandonment of the convictions is clarifying in its own way and amounts to an admission by Trump. In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, Trump distanced himself from the seditionists, and in the years since had modulated his closeness to them, depending on what suited him politically in the moment. The Proud Boys always knew the truth and were never fooled. Not every one was as sophisticated. But now all pretenses are gone, and Trump is fully embracing the tip of the insurrectionist spear. Stand back and stand by, indeed.

A Contempt of Court Cover-up for the Ages

The second most egregious of yesterday’s indignities was the majority decision by two Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit to pull the rug out from under Judge Boasberg, who has been patiently and diligently pursuing a contempt of court inquiry into the Trump administration’s defiance of his orders blocking the Alien Enemies Act deportations.

The sneering tone toward Boasberg from Judge Neomi Rao in the majority opinion reinforced how much cover the Trump appointees have been giving the president as the administration seeks to cover up the details of its complicity in defying Boasberg’s orders.

The D.C. Circuit bogged Boasberg down for seven months last year while it slow-rolled the case before eventually letting him proceed. Now it has cut him off at the knees again. It is hard to overstate the level of abdication this represents of the judiciary’s own powers under the law and its authority to enforce its orders against a renegade executive like Trump.

Still, there emerged during last year’s consideration of the contempt inquiry a clear sign that a majority of the appeals court writ large backed Boasberg’s inquiry, so while the writing was on the wall as soon as this particular three-judge panel got the case back for a second bite at the apple, the real test will be whether the full circuit takes up the case and vindicates not just the beleaguered Boasberg but the the very notion that the judiciary is a co-equal branch.

After the ruling, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took an unseemly Boasberg-bashing victory lap: “Today’s decision by the DC Circuit should finally end Judge Boasberg’s year-long campaign against the hardworking Department attorneys doing their jobs fighting illegal immigration.”

Pirro’s Pirouettes for Trump

We step back from the existential and constitutional threats to the Republic for a taste of Trump II absurdism: Pirro’s two henchman made an unannounced visit to the Feds’ headquarters ostensibly to investigate its renovation project, which is the purported basis for what is really a retributive criminal investigation to further erode Fed independence and bring it to heel under Trump.

Like Ed Martin’s Columbo-style visit last year to a Brooklyn property owned by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the site visit by Pirro’s duo smacked of intimidation and taunting — and performative derring-do to curry favor with Trump.

Departing from DOJ policies of the past, Pirro gave up the game by releasing a statement after her underlings were turned away by the Fed: “Any construction project that has cost overruns of almost 80 percent over the original construction budget deserves some serious review. And these people are in charge of monetary policy in the United States?”

The Purges: Weaponization Edition

It’s barely worth your time or brain cells to try to get your head around the DOJ “weaponization” report on the FACE Act released yesterday. If you’re a glutton for punishment, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance takes a close look at and contextualizes the report. Just know that this is what the work by the DOJ’s “Weaponization Working Group” is going to look like.

The more important development than the report itself is that four career prosecutors involved in FACE Act prosecutions in the Biden era were unlawfully fired this week ahead of the report’s release, including two Detroit assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted abortion clinic protestors, one of whom is now speaking out.

Only the Best People Watch

• Harmeet Dhillon: The Atlantic has a fine profile of the head of the Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division who is jockeying for a promotion in the wake of Pam Bondi’s ouster as attorney general.

• Leonard Leo: The conservative legal major domo is rebranding.

• Sebastian Gorka: The right-wing Trump aide who is currently the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council is aiming to fill the slot of director of the National Counterterrorism Center that Joe Kent resigned in protest over the Iran conflict.

More Troops to Middle East

The Trump administration is sending thousands of additional troops to the Middle East in a deployment which seems timed to put additional pressure on the Iranians in three-way peace talks, the WaPo reports.

Pace of Lawless Boat Strikes Quickens

The Trump administration’s unlawful campaign of boat strikes appears to have picked up again since the Iran ceasefire. The second attack in two days (and third since Saturday) killed four people in the Eastern Pacific, bringing the campaign’s death toll to at least 174.

Swalwell Officially Out

Rep. Eric Swalwell’s resignation from Congress became effective at 2 p.m. Tuesday, less than two hours after another accuser came forward in an emotionally searing press conference.

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It’s the Corruption, Stupid

In the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, a typically shallow conventional wisdom has already emerged that unless President Trump gets the economy turned around, Republicans are going to have hell to pay in the 2026 and 2028 elections.

The NYT quotes the right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, who decamped to Hungary to work for an Orbán-funded think tank, as explaining the election result thusly: “When all boats aren’t rising, everybody looks at who’s on the yacht. In terms of MAGA, populism is great, but if you can’t deliver on the economy, none of it is going to matter.”

That is abundantly true and yet terribly misleading because the economic mess we’re in is entirely of Trump’s own doing. He’s not the usual American president held hostage to the vagaries and cycles of an economy largely beyond his control.

In historic fashion, Trump has torpedoed key pillars of the global economy by launching unprecedented trade wars and an unjustified elective war in the Middle East that has bottled up world oil supplies to such an extent that it threatens a recession. At home, he has dramatically throttled back the economic engine of immigration, targeted America’s world leading universities, and decimated its vibrant scientific and biomedical research base.

Except for the racist assault on immigrants, all of these moves are not driven by ideological imperatives but by corrupt impulses. The economic damage Trump has done was crafted purposely to create opportunities for self-enrichment for him and his allies. It generates its own currency which can be used to perpetuate his political power. What he dispenses he can take away.

The AP sums up the Trump family kleptocracy succinctly:

The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid.

Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favorable treatment in return.

The brothers have also joined or invested in a number of companies that aim to do business with the government their father runs. Last month, they struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.

It always sounds a bit earnest to deplore corruption, but one of the practical reasons for eschewing corruption is because at best it acts like an invisible tax on economic growth. At worst, it corrodes the economic engine to the point that it doesn’t properly function any longer. Before Trump, the United States was a world leader in combatting corporate and political corruption abroad for the unapologetically realpolitik reason that American companies could win on a level playing field. Under Trump II, the DOJ has explicitly stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and we’re now in a grubby race to the bottom.

Any notion that Trump can get the economy “back on track” or dampen the economic shockwaves he has unleashed ignores the substance of what he’s done. Not only are Trump’s second term attacks on economic growth hard to reverse, let alone quickly, they’re deeply wired into who he is and what he’s about.

The Economic Warning Signs

• The Middle East conflict is causing oil scarcity and rising prices that are contributing to significant “demand destruction” which could lead to the steepest drop-off in demand for oil since the COVID slowdown, the International Energy Agency is forecasting in its latest outlook.

• The International Monetary Fund warns that the Middle East conflict will slow economic growth, fuel inflation and raises the possibility of a global recession.

Latest on the Middle East Conflict …

• Israeli and Lebanese officials gathered in D.C. for rare direct talks — the first in a decade — as the Netanyahu government has seized on the wider conflict to advance Israel’s position on the ground in Lebanon.

• Bitter irony alert: Talks between Iran and Trump administration are complicated by “the risk that any agreement that emerges may resemble the 2015 nuclear accord” that Trump abrogated in his first term, the NYT reports.

• House Republicans have again abdicated their oversight roles by pushing off until at least May testimony originally scheduled for next week from senior Pentagon officials on the war in Iran.

Lawless Boat Strike Death Toll: 170

The U.S. attacked an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific on Monday, bringing the campaign’s overall death toll to at least 170. In announcing the attack, the U.S. Southern Command introduced new Orwellian language: “Applying total systemic friction on the cartels.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is waging a pressure campaign against the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to squash a potential investigation into the boat strike campaign, The Intercept reports.

Must Read

TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports from Frisco, Texas, the country’s fastest growing city and a haven for South Asian immigrants, which far-right activists are seizing on as “proof” of the Great Replacement Theory.

Thread of the Day

IMPORTANT

Local authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota have launched a criminal investigation into the notorious ICE detention in January of Hmong American ChongLy “Scott” Thao. They’re investigating the warrantless raid on an American citizen’s home as a potential kidnapping, burglary, and false imprisonment.

Quote of the Day

Cheryl Kelley in The Hill:

American law is built on a simple rule: The government cannot get around legal limits by creating a new structure to do the same thing another way. The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that rule. It exists to prevent the federal government from using a large, armed force for general policing inside the U.S. But by tripling ICE’s size, giving it $75 billion in multi-year funding insulated from normal oversight, and deploying it far beyond immigration enforcement — from neighborhood operations to general airport security — the administration has achieved in practice what those restrictions were designed to prevent.

Swalwell and Gonzales Both Resign

In a rapid-fire combo of scandal-fueled resignations, Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) both announced last evening that they would resign their seats — though neither gave a date certain for their departures. Depending on the exact timing, the resignations should be a wash and not effect majority control of the House.

Two Big Wins

• In the lawsuit over the removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument, the Trump administration has reversed course and confirmed in a new filing that it will reinstate the flag and not remove it again.

• The American Library Association and a union of cultural workers have reached a settlement in their lawsuit against the Trump administration that saves the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NYT reports: “The Trump administration reaffirmed that it had reinstated all previously canceled grants, in keeping with a separate legal ruling last year, and reversed all staff reductions. It also promised not to take any further steps to reduce the agency.”

Good Read

Wired: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion

Pope Making Everyone Look Dumb

The senior senator from Ohio:

Unintentional Edginess From CSPAN

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The Weekend’s Biggest Losers

If you spent the weekend enjoying spring, you’ll be forgiven if you’re a tad disoriented this Monday morning.

Since we last convened Friday:

• Viktor Orbán conceded defeat in Hungarian elections.

• President Trump decided to shut down the Strait of Hormuz for Iran.

• Eric Swalwell’s political career abruptly flamed out after serious sexual misconduct allegations emerged.

• Trump openly beefed with the pope while portraying himself as an American Jesus.

And yet … stating things plainly like that doesn’t begin to capture the bonkers nature of the weekend’s news. Just ask JD Vance, who emerged as the biggest loser after an ignominious trip abroad that included a last-ditch campaign appearance for Orbán and the quick collapse of negotiations to end the Iran conflict he reportedly quietly opposed.

A Blow to Global Authoritarianism

If we’re lucky, Orbán’s defeat in Hungary will mark the beginning of the end of right-wing state capture. A few salient early reactions:

• Political theorist Jacob T. Levy: “It’s not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It’s that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he’s been operating as a headquarters and funding source for the international ideological movement.”

• Timothy Ash of Britain’s Chatham House: “People may go along with a kleptocracy for as long as an economy is doing well, but ultimately, if the economy starts failing, and they see all these guys lining their pockets, then you can expect a reaction.”

• Political scientist Gabriela Greilinger in TPM: “If anything, the Hungarian election shows that authoritarians don’t ‘just lose.’ Rather, Hungary presented the perfect storm to defeat an authoritarian: a weak economy, scandal after scandal from the governing party, and an emerging opposition figure who rose to the occasion with the skill to lead a movement, highlight the government’s numerous failings, and increase the salience of issues that are of interest to the majority of voters.”

Latest on the Blockade of the Strait of Hormuz

• Trump’s arc on the Strait of Hormuz goes something like: I will destroy Persian civilization if Iran doesn’t open the strait -> The strait will open automatically on its own after the ceasefire and we can all make money off of ships transiting through it. -> Fine, I’ll close the strait myself.

• Contrary to President Trump’s assertion that the U.S. will blockade the strait, the U.S. military says it’s only a blockade of Iranian ports.

• NATO allies are refusing to participate. It is not at all clear what the blockade is intended to accomplish or reasonably could achieve — or how it fits into Trump’s broader strategy, to the extent there is one.

Iran Damage Assessment

A trio of NYT articles:

• Iran Unable to Find Mines It Planted in Strait of Hormuz

• New Evidence Further Implicates U.S. Missiles in Strikes That Killed 21 Civilians in Iran

• Iran’s Schools and Hospitals in Ruins

Lawless U.S. Boat Strikes Continues

A U.S.. strike Saturday on two alleged drug-smuggling boats in the eastern Pacific killed five people, raising the death toll in the campaign to at least 168 people.

Swalwell Under Criminal Investigation

After stories Friday by the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN alleging that Rep. Eric Swalwell engaged in repeated instances of sexual misconduct, including sexual assault, the California Democrat suspended his campaign for governor. In response to one alleged incident in New York City, the Manhattan District Attorney launched a criminal investigation into Swalwell.

In unrelated Swalwell news, the Trump DHS appears to be pursuing a new vindictive investigation of Swalwell for allegedly illegally employing a Brazilian nanny several years ago.

Trump Targets Pope Leo

We’re still nowhere near the bottom of Trump II’s descent into madness:

Asked about the Truth Social post, Pope Leo offered a biting rejoinder: “It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

False Idols Watch: Messiah Complex Edition

Since the attack on the pope, Trump has posted this:

Authoritarian Iconography Alert

Some staff at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis were given the Operation Metro Surge challenge coin pictured above, TPM’s Hunter Walker reports.

The Purges: Immigration Judges

The Trump administration has fired two immigration judges who dismissed high-profile deportation cases against pro-Palestinian international students Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi, the NYT reports.

The Corruption: Mass Pardons Edition

President Trump has repeatedly promised to issue mass pardons to members of his administration before he leaves office, the WSJ reports.

Those staffers can believe him at their own risk.

Pirro Touted Fed Subpoenas to Trump

I would imagine we’ll hear about this in the appeal of Judge Boasberg’s decision quashing D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s subpoenas of the Federal Reserve, via the WSJ:

On a Friday evening in January, President Trump received a call from the federal prosecutor he refers to as “Judge Jeanine.” His U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, had a welcome update for the president: Her office had sent subpoenas to the Federal Reserve as part of an investigation into its chair, Jerome Powell.

Monumentalism Watch

• In a Saturday order, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sent Trump’s vanity ballroom case back to U.S. District Judge Richard Leon to sort out whether the project is ballroom or a bunker.

• Trump unveiled plans for the gargantuan monstrosity he wants to erect at the foot of Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial:

Quote of the Day

Peter Wayne Moe:

As screens fragment our attention, as AI pushes for speed and efficiency at the cost of our humanity, as the academy puts a pinch of incense on the altar of innovation, slowing down and revisiting a text again and again (whether sheet music, a book, a recording, a poem) is a revolutionary act. It turns you into a particular kind of reader, one attentive to the minute, to nuances, to how meaning can shift ever so slightly when this word is used rather than that.

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

So THIS Is What Seb Gorka’s Been Up To?

Old TPM fave Sebastian Gorka has been pretty under-the-radar as the senior counterterrorism director on President Trump’s second term National Security Council, but now he pops up in this important New York Times story as a leader of what you might call the internationalization of the administration’s effort to criminalize left-wing opposition:

[Gorka] has pushed to designate more far-left groups abroad as terrorist organizations, to pressure foreign allies to investigate the groups and to search for connections between them and Americans. …

For months, Mr. Gorka has led a regular counterterrorism meeting with dozens of officials from U.S. security agencies. In those meetings, he has pushed for more attention on antifa, as well as other groups, like transgender activists and undocumented migrants.

Trump’s criminalization of left-wing politics, which TPM’s Josh Kovensky has covered closely in our series Creating the Enemy Within, traces back to Trump I, where it really took off during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. Authoritarians like Trump practically need a shadowy, cohesive, violent opposition — at least rhetorically — and if they don’t have one, they’ll set about inventing it.

The beauty, from the MAGA perspective, of the amorphous nature of antifa is that it can be a vessel into which every right-wing fear, conspiracy theory, and fever dream can be poured. What emerges from the NYT story is that Gorka is pushing the myth of an all-encompassing global antifa with purported ties back to American leftists:

Mr. Gorka has repeatedly told U.S. officials that “there are no lone wolves,” according to two officials who have witnessed the comments, in urging them to find links between left-wing extremists abroad and Americans, which could create a legal avenue to investigate U.S. citizens.

That possibility has alarmed current and former U.S. officials who worry the Trump administration is politicizing counterterrorism efforts, with the ultimate aim of punishing Mr. Trump’s opponents at home, potentially with charges of supporting terrorism. The unusually expansive way in which the administration has defined far-left extremism, they warned, could allow investigators to use slender connections to people overseas to go after Americans who have no real history of violence.

Gorka has an ally at the State Department in Thomas G. DiNanno, the undersecretary for arms control and international security. (Gorka called the NYT story “wrong.” DiNanno did not respond to the NYT.) The State Department issued a statement to the NYT confirming it is working with international partners to counter “antifa-aligned terrorism.” It’s offering a $10 million reward for information that disrupts the finances of violent leftist groups.

The whole thing is well worth a read.

Pentagon Denies Pope Threat

After initially issuing a non-denial denial, the Pentagon broadly denied as “grossly false” reports that a top Trump official had dressed down the Vatican ambassador in January for the Pope not being on the administration’s side, including making an ominous reference to the Avignon papacy.

Still, the Pentagon did not address the specifics of the reports. Instead, the U.S. embassy in the Vatican posted a rather odd rebuttal in which the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See purports to quote strained denials of a sort from the Vatican ambassador who was in the January meeting with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby:

The Cardinal emphatically denied the media’s portrayal of his meeting with Colby. He described the meeting as “frank, but very cordial” and a “normal encounter.” He confirmed that the reporting “does not reflect what happened” and was “just invented to make a story.”

Here’s the full thread:

Judge: Pentagon Defied My Order

Unlike the slow-motion confrontations in many of the other case where the Trump administration has defied court orders, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman quickly called out the misconduct and moved to put a stop it.

It took Friedman less than three weeks to rule that the Defense Department had violated his March 20 order to restore press access to the Pentagon. In the case brought by the NYT, Friedman issued a scathing rebuke of the administration’s conduct in the case:

Latest From the Middle East …

• How It’s Going: Trump Demands Reopening of Hormuz Ahead of US-Iran Peace Talks

• Israel: There’s growing evidence that Israel’s operation in Lebanon was understood by the parties to covered by the ceasefire with Iran, but instead Israel ramped up attacks against Hezbollah, complicating diplomatic efforts to such an extent that President Trump gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “stern message” in a brief phone call to “scale back attacks,” according to the WSJ.

• ‘Squirter’: Army survivors of the deadly attack in Kuwait dispute Pentagon’s account, saying the unit “was unprepared” to defend itself, CBS News reports.

The Corruption: In All Its Glory Edition

• DoD: A Pentagon official who oversees the Defense Department’s artificial intelligence efforts made a cool profit of as much as $24 million earlier this year when he sold a private investment in Elon Musk’s AI company, The Guardian reports.

• White House: “The day after President Trump announced a sudden pause of strikes against Iran last month, the White House warned staff against improperly leveraging their positions to place well-timed bets in futures markets,” the WSJ reports.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Bloomberg: Under Trump, DOJ Has Been Making Errors in Court, Testing Judges’ Patience

• The Trump DOJ is putting the finishing touches on a politicized report that will accuse the Biden Justice Department of being anti-Christian in how it enforced Covid regulations and laws protecting abortion clinics.

Thread of the Day

Mass Deportation Watch

• Lawyers for man shot multiple times by ICE during a traffic stop this week in California say their client has already been shot before he tried to flee the scene.

• San Francisco Chronicle: Medical delays and misdiagnoses drive rising death toll in ICE custody

• A California philosophy professor was acquitted by a federal jury after some two hours of deliberation on charges of assaulting federal agents by throwing back a tear gas canister they had deployed against protesters.

Nothing to be Concerned About …

The Trump administration is quietly seeking unprecedented access to personally identifiable medical information in the insurance records of millions of federal workers and retirees, and their families, KFF Health News reports.

Enjoy Your Spring Weekend

See ya back here Monday.

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Avignon, Antipopes, and WTAF

In January, a senior Pentagon official summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States and issued a stunning threat, The Free Press reported this week: “The United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby proceeded to raise with then-ambassador Cardinal Christophe Pierre the Avignon papacy of the 14th century, a protracted period of French royal interference in the Roman Catholic Church that resulted for a time in dueling popes sitting in Rome and Avignon, France (I’m condensing more than a century of papal history into a single clause).

Christopher Hale, who is the editor of the Letters from Leo newsletter, independently confirmed the Free Press report and adds these two morsels to the schism between the American pope and American president:

• “[S]ome Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year.”

• “Other officials in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

Too many layers of hubris, ignorance, and ahistoricism to unpack entirely here. More narrowly, there’s deep provincialism at play here, too, as conservative Catholics in America — especially those with the fervor of adult conversions to Catholicism — are especially rankled by internationalist popes like Leo XIV and Francis before him who have decidedly more moderate theologies and emphasize Catholic social teaching.

The White House and Pentagon each took issue with how the Free Press characterized the meeting, but neither denied its account.

Going G-R-E-A-T!

A sampling of headlines from leading U.S. news outlets on the tenuous ceasefire with Iran:

• Trump’s ceasefire already under strain

• White House struggles to prop up truce marked by confusion, contradictions

• Why Iran Thinks It Won the War Despite Huge Military Losses

• After Trump pauses war, Iranians fly flags of victory, not surrender

• ‘Seems like losing’: What the US hasn’t won in Iran

• Gulf States Fear an Emboldened Iran after Trump’s Cease-Fire

• New Deadline Looms for U.S. and Iran as Truce Wavers

• ‘We lose the midterms’: Republicans worry Iran might have already cost them Congress

Absurdist Headline of the Day

This would have been surreal in the 10 days before the ceasefire, but now it’s an absurdist comedy headline: US Asks Allies for Quick Plans to Secure Hormuz After Ceasefire

It’s especially absurd because at the same time the Trump administration is asking allies for help to fix what it broke, it’s also doing this: Trump Team Explores Punishment for NATO Countries That Didn’t Support Iran War

Latest on the Middle East …

• Iranian counterattacks against its Persian Gulf neighbors now appear to have paused.

• At least 203 people were killed and more than 1,000 wounded by Israeli strikes in Lebanon on Wednesday in the deadliest day of the conflict there.

• The Strait of Hormuz remains throttled by Iran:

Four ships were allowed to pass Wednesday, the fewest so far in April, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, down from more than 100 a day before the war. Iran is requiring ships to work out toll arrangements ahead of time and then pay the fees in cryptocurrency or Chinese yuan, mediators and shipbrokers said.

Quotes of the Day

• Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief executive of Abu Dhabi’s state oil company:

This moment requires clarity. So let’s be clear: the Strait of Hormuz is not open. Access is being restricted, conditioned and controlled.

Iran has made clear — through both its statements and actions — that passage is subject to permission, conditions and political leverage. That is not freedom of navigation. That is coercion.

• Mohammed Baharoon, director-general of the B’huth Dubai Public Policy Research Center, a think tank in the UAE:

Iran is the only one that is happy with the outcome. They have now been re-established as the policeman of the Gulf. We woke up to a deal that doesn’t reduce the risk, but instead replaces it with a bigger risk.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Ed Martin is seeking to move his DC bar disciplinary proceeding to federal court.

• Subpoenaed former Attorney General Pam Bondi is trying to get out of testifying before the House Oversight Committee next week about the Jeffrey Epstein files.

• Lawfare’s Molly Roberts goes deep on why the Trump DOJ’s prosecution of Smartmatic under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is so suspicious.

The Purges: Immigration Judges

More than 100 immigration judges (out of some 750 total) have been dismissed by the Trump administration in an unprecedented purge that threatens to strip any semblance of due process from immigration proceedings.

The Corruption: DHS Contracts Edition

Following on reporting last month from the WSJ and CNN, the WaPo takes its stab at the burgeoning investigation of how DHS contracts were handled under Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski, and a little-known contractor named Kara Voorhies.

The Corruption: Ballroom Steel Edition

A European steelmaker is donating tens of millions of dollars worth of structural steel to President Trump’s vanity ballroom project, the NYT reports.

Court Steps In On California Ballot Seizure

The California Supreme Court halted the investigation by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco that led to the seizure of 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election. The court’s intervention came the same day that newly released documents show the investigation was spurred by a conservative “election watchdog” group.

An Inconvenient Truth for RFK Jr.?

WaPo: “The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed publication of a CDC report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists familiar with the decision.”

Zeldin Keynotes Climate Denier Confab

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin was the keynote speaker at a climate change deniers conference in D.C. organized by the Heartland Institute.

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A Ceasefire … or a Fig Leaf?

Despite some initial reports that a tenuous two-week ceasefire is holding in the Middle East, Kuwait, the UAE, and Qatar all claimed to have subsequently received incoming missile fire. For its part, Iran claimed that one of its oil refinery on a island in the Persian Gulf had come under attack since the ceasefire by unnamed “enemies.”

The ceasefire did not include Israel’s ongoing offensive in southern Lebanon, where it carried out the largest wave of strikes since the war began.

The real focus of the highly contingent ceasefire agreement was the Strait of Hormuz, which was free and open before President Trump’s elective war and is now throttled by Iran. Trump is declaring the strait open for his own political purposes, but the terms of the ceasefire give Iran more control over the vital waterway than it had before the war started:

• Iran and Oman will jointly charge newly imposed fees for passage through the strait. “The strait is in the territorial waters of both Oman and Iran,” the AP reports. “The world had considered the passage an international waterway and never paid tolls before.”

• The new fee is “roughly $2 million per ship,” the NYT reports.

• The White House and Trump reposted a statement from the Iranian foreign minister that showed the highly contingent nature of the agreement on the strait:

On the water, there were few signs that the ceasefire had created sufficient conditions for safe passage through the strait. While it was still early, Lloyd’s of London issued a statement that cautioned about the continuing peril: “Moving before new protocols are clarified could expose crews, ships and cargoes to heightened risk.”

The strategic catastrophe for the United States appears to extend beyond the narrow confines of the strait. Trump called Iran’s 10-point peace plan “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” Any long-term agreement along those lines would be a remarkable coup for the Iranians to have pulled off in the face of withering American firepower:

Yep

The New York Times’ Charlie Savage: Trump’s Iran Threats Look Like Self-Incrimination for Potential War Crimes

Quote of the Day

“Better TACO Tuesday than World War III.”—an unnamed European official told Politico

Abrego Garcia Case Goes Off the Rails Yet Again

Another bizarre development in the Trump administration’s never-ending brutalization of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

In what should have been a placid conference call to set a briefing schedule for the administration’s renewed effort to deport him to Liberia, a career DOJ attorney took the puzzling position that Abrego Garcia could self-deport to Costa Rica on his own at any time. That ignores entirely the pending criminal prosecution of him in Tennessee by the same Justice Department.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland was confounded by the DOJ attorney’s position, and after scolding him at length that Abrego Garcia was legally barred in the criminal case from voluntarily leaving the country, he mostly retreated. “This is chimerical,” Xinis spit out at one point with such vigor that it sounded like a curse word. My full write up is here.

Mass Deportation Watch

• New ICE shooting: A man is in critical condition after being shot by ICE officers during a targeted traffic stop in California. Video of the incident shows a chaotic scene with agents surrounding the man’s car as he attempts to flee.

• Kseniia Petrova, the Russian-born Harvard researcher who allegedly smuggled frog embryos through Boston’s Logan Airport won a victory in court when U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss of Vermont ruled that her visa had been unlawfully cancelled.

• Annie Ramos, the undocumented wife of an Army sergeant who was detained by ICE at Ft. Polk as they were moving into base housing has been released from detention after five days.

The Retribution: Cassidy Hutchinson

In double whammy of abuse of power and corrupt retributive prosecutions, the Trump II DOJ is targeting Trump I White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson and bizarrely using its Civil Rights Division to do so, the NYT reports:

The move was a highly unusual one by Justice Department leadership, directing a criminal case that appears to involve accusations of lying to Congress to a specialized unit that normally focuses on systemic civil rights abuses like police misconduct and racial discrimination.

The new focus on Hutchinson, a star witness before the House Jan. 6 committee, appears to have been a last-gasp effort by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce results in targeting President Trump’s political foes. Instead of being run by D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, as would be normal, the case was assigned to Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the Civil Rights Division. It’s another way for Dhillon, who is reportedly in line for a promotion to the No. 3 slot at DOJ, to burnish her reputation as a Trump loyalist.

The Retribution: Todd Blanche Edition

In his first press conference since Bondi was fired, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defended President Trump’s retributive prosecutions against his political foes: “That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that.”

The Corruption: Mile High Edition

The White House has purchased — without congressional authorization — and taken control of the controversial $70 million luxury jet that then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was leasing for her own use, the WSJ reports. First lady Melania Trump and select cabinet secretaries will have access to the jet.

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Go Big or Go TACO

I long ago moved away from leading Morning Memo with crazy shit Trump says, but over the last 48 hours he’s become so unhinged, erratic, and cartoonishly bombastic about an ongoing regional war in one of the cradles of civilization that it feels worth noting for posterity’s sake.

This morning’s social media effusion has all the elements of the late-stage Trump: violent, over the top, ignorant, wishful … while still leaving himself plenty of room to TACO:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

The arbitrary deadline of tonight to reach some kind of deal that let’s him stand down on Iran, which doesn’t seem particularly interested in a deal, is a set-piece of Trump’s own making. Most of his rhetoric over the past new days has been puffery to make the risk of failing to bail him out look intolerable to the Iranians. But if Americans can see through the smokescreen, surely the Iranians know what’s up.

It’s hard to get past the civilization-destroying threats by an imperial superpower, but once you do, most of the rest of the social media post reads like the tongue-in-cheek cliffhangers at the end of Rocky and Bullwinkle, which were themselves spoofs of older forms of broadcast entertainment. Ever the narcissist, Trump is the announcer and would-be hero: “Tune in tonight to see if I will destroy the world … or NOT!”

Tilting at Windmills

During his press conference yesterday, President Trump threatened jail for the unnamed reporter who leaked news of the missing U.S. airman downed over Iran unless they divulge the source of the leak — except that no one quite seems to know what Trump was talking about. The news of the downed aircraft that carries a crew of two was widely reported, as was the rescue of the pilot. The inference that the second airman remained missing wasn’t hard to make. The White House did not respond to a New York Times question about which news outlet Trump was referring to.

The Hubris

I am as susceptible as anyone to a good rescue story, especially of the leave-no-one-behind variety, but when the Christian nationalist defense secretary explicitly turns a downed airman’s Easter weekend rescue into the passion play, it’s gross:

Good Read

TPM contributing writer Sarah Posner: Trump’s Evangelical Leaders Are Working Overtime to Spin the Iran War

Quote of the Day

“The United States is unpredictable. It’s not a reliable partner anymore for the Western world.”—Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of the Bundestag from Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union party

ICYMI

Trump DOJ Watch: Only the Best People

• NY Mag traces the mind-blowing path of former FBI agent Jared Wise from Jan. 6 defendant still on trial when Trump re-took office to working as a senior adviser in the office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and assigned to the so-called Weaponization Working Group.

• A WSJ profile skewers Robert Keenan, 60, as “one of the longest-tenured and least-productive federal prosecutors” in Orange County, California, who was repeatedly passed over for promotions and “still handling low-level cases typically reserved for first-year federal prosecutors” when suddenly the Trump DOJ elevated him into a “key courtroom warrior” and “go-to guy.”

Big Oops …

The Blaze has fired reporter Steve Baker, the author of the story it had to retract that falsely identified a former Capitol Police officer as the Jan. 6 pipe-bomber.

A Thankless Task

A deserving profile of the indefatigable Aaron Rupar, whose 24/7 work clipping Trump’s public comments is an invaluable public service.

Dugan Conviction Upheld

The trial judge in the federal criminal case against Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan — convicted of obstructing a DHS proceeding by interfering in the courthouse arrest of an undocumented immigrant — denied her post-conviction motions for acquittal.

2026 Ephemera

Senate Republicans’ main super PAC — the Senate Leadership Fund — revealed its view of the midterms map, as it unveiled a $350 million plan to hold its majority. It’s focused on:

• defending five seats: Alaska, Iowa Maine, North Carolina*, and Ohio

• targeting three Democratic seats: Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire*

*open seats

Gonzalez’s Pattern of Preying on Staff

Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX) has already decided not to seek re-election after being exposed for having an affair with a former staffer who later took her own life. Now hundreds of text messages obtained by the San Antonio Express-News show him allegedly propositioning a campaign staffer four years earlier, during his 2020 campaign.

“He obviously pursued, pursued, pursued her like he did with me,” the former campaign staffer told the Express-News, referring to the later affair. “I never took him serious. … It wasn’t until this poor girl died that I thought, ‘No, this guy is pure evil.’”

As the NYT notes, the newly revealed texts create a new bind for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), “who is dangerously close to losing what is left of his tiny majority and cannot afford the resignation of another Republican.”

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In a wide-ranging conversation, David and Brian discussed Trump’s propaganda campaign around his war in Iran; how the Democrats could act as a true opposition party; and what the U.S. could look like come Jan. 2027 or 2029 depending on how the next two rounds of federal elections shake out.

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Charges Were Eventually Dropped

The New York Times has obtained fleeting video footage of the Jan. 14 incident in Minneapolis during which an ICE agent shot a fleeing Venezuelan immigrant and then claimed he had been attacked.

The newly surfaced video, acquired via a public records request for a city-owned camera at a intersection half a block away, offers a limited view of the incident but some of what it shows further undermines elements of the original account by the federal agents involved:

The video contradicts the agent’s claim that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes before he opened fire. Instead, the confrontation depicted in the video lasts about 12 seconds and shows two men struggling with the agent. It shows no sustained attack with a shovel.

The incident led to felony charges against Julio C. Sosa-Celis, the fleeing man who was shot, and one of his housemates, Alfredo A. Aljorna. But within weeks, the Trump DOJ dropped the criminal case, the two ICE officers were suspended, and a perjury investigation was launched against them. DHS did not answer the NYT’s written question about the video.

The NYT report questions why it took so long for the Trump DOJ to drop the case. The federal government had access to the video within hours of the incident, the Minneapolis police chief said. Prosecutors did not watch the footage for nearly three weeks, a DOJ official told the NYT. Instead, for purposes of filing criminal charges, they relied on the ICE agent’s statement and an FBI agent’s affidavit describing the footage. Later, when dismissing the case, a DOJ prosecutor would refer to the video as “newly discovered evidence.”

“It sounds like an unarmed person got shot running away,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said after reviewing the video and other evidence.

Punishment for Political Views

The arrest of pro-Palestinian mosque leader in Wisconsin came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio found him to be a threat to the U.S. foreign policy interest of combating antisemitism, the NYT reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

• El Paso Times: ICE inspectors have found 49 standards violations at Camp East Montana, the largest detention center in the country.

• Habeas tracker: Lawfare has compiled a database of the Trump administration’s non-compliance with court orders in some 300 habeas cases around the country.

• Third Country Deportation Watch: A handy tracker of the Trump administration’s dramatic increase in the use of third country deportations

ICE v. US Military

Keeping in mind the recent outcry over the Marine Corps reportedly allowing ICE to check the immigration status of the family members of new recruits attending graduation ceremonies at the end of basic training, here are other recent developments along the same lines:

• NYT: ICE entered Ft. Polk in Louisiana to detain the new wife of an Army staff sergeant as they settled into base housing.

• AJC: Georgia Army veteran deported by ICE after 50 years in U.S.

ICYMI

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military,” NBC News reports.

Latest on the Middle East …

• To the extent there was any “logic” to President Trump’s crazy-ass Easter Sunday tweet threatening to commit war crimes in Iran, it appears to be another example of his simplistic negotiating style of shooting for the moon, this time in back-channel ceasefire negotiations.

• Advisers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are reportedly telling Trump that civilian targets like power plants and bridges are fair game in Iran, despite legal and ethical restrictions that considerably narrow the circumstances in which such infrastructure can be legitimately targeted, the WSJ reports.

• President Trump will hold a White House press conference today at 1 p.m. ET to tout the weekend rescue of a downed U.S. airman.

Quote of the Day

Timothy Snyder on Substack:

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.

Say It Ain’t So, Holocaust Museum

The Holocaust Museum in D.C. quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy,” Politico reports, in what two former employees said was a preemptive attempt to avoid Trump administration scrutiny. The museum issued a denial of the article’s claims: “The allegations made by the two former employees that we have retreated from this content are false.”

Down the Memory Hole!

The preposterous Office of Legal Counsel memo that declared the half-century-old Presidential Records Act unconstitutional is always posing real-world problems at the National Archives, according to Politico:

Archives personnel rely on the records law daily to review, redact and make public the documents and digital records of every president since Ronald Reagan. Since Office of Legal Counsel opinions are typically treated as binding throughout the executive branch, the legal framework archivists have followed for decades is now in doubt. …

The impact of the Justice Department opinion could be felt quickly by historians, scholars and journalists who regularly access presidential records and make requests for their release.

Trump DOJ Watch

In the chaos of the Trump era, thing can always get worse and often do.

It looks like Harmeet Dhillon, the utterly unqualified Trump loyalist who oversees the DOJ Civil Rights Division, is going to get bumped up to the No. 3 slot in the shakeup that cost Pam Bondi her job. That’s bad news for the current No. 3, Stan Woodward, the MAGA lawyer who repped a bunch of Jan. 6 defendants.

Substack LIVE!

Join me and my former TPM colleague Brian Beutler, now the proprietor of the newsletter Off Message, at 2 p.m. ET today for a Substack Live where we’ll chat about the news of the day and jump into some deeper questions about how we got to this point.

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Cry Me a River for Pam Bondi

The parallels between President Trump’s firings of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are so striking that I was tempted to copy and paste the March 6 Morning Memo, and merely swap the names.

It’s not that there’s no news value in reporting Bondi’s ouster. It’s that the old journalistic tropes for cabinet shuffles not only don’t work when every department is being run directly out of the White House; instead, they actively mislead, blur, and obscure the truth of Trump’s iron (if erratic) grip on the Justice Department. What difference does it make, really, who runs these departments if they are at the beck and call of Stephen Miller all day. Said one former DOJ prosecutor:

The traditional journalistic approach to a sacking also hyper-personalizes the emotional experience and career prospects of the ousted official in a way that feels gross in the current moment. Bondi has decimated the historic foundations of the Justice Department, served as a willing cipher for President Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes, overseen the purging of career prosecutors and investigators, put hapless line attorneys in impossible positions in court, and defied court orders to the point that the government’s hard-earned presumption of regularity evaporated during her tenure.

But tell us more about how hard this all is on her:

• NYT: Bondi “grew emotional … in conversations with friends and colleagues after she realized she was out.”

• WSJ: “While Bondi has been stung by the dismissal she has been heartened by the support she has received and a flood of job offers …”

“It’s ALL so positive,” Bondi herself texted the WSJ.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where palace intrigue entirely misses the point, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s own criminal defense attorney who operationalized all of what Bondi presided over, was elevated to acting attorney general.

A lot of ink will be spilled on who will replace Bondi permanently, but so long as the DOJ is run out of the Trump White House, the attorney general is just window-dressing. And one thing remains depressingly true: Across two terms, each Trump attorney general has been worse than the last one.

Trump Wants a MAL Docs Redo?

In a lazy, sloppy, predetermined memo, the deeply compromised Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that the 1978 post-Watergate Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and that Congress cannot force the president to surrender his records to the National Archives at the end of his administration.

The memo was written by the OLC head: 36-year-old T. Elliot Gaiser, a former law clerk to the 5th Circuit’s Edith Jones, D.C. Circuit’s Neomi Rao, and Justice Samuel Alito.

Violations of the Presidential Records Act were at the core of the Mar-a-Lago criminal case against the president, though the charges related the sensitivity of the documents in question and Trump’s alleged obstruction of the investigation.

Tina Peters Will Be Resentenced

A Colorado appeals court threw out the nine-year prison sentence — but not the conviction of election denier Tina Peters — and ordered her to be resentenced, ruling that the trial judge has improperly taken into account her improperly her repeated false claims about elections in violation of her First Amendment rights.

The Purges: Pentagon Edition

In his ongoing crusade to stack the Pentagon with white, male loyalists, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:

• fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, whose term typically wouldn’t have ended until 2027. The new acting chief of staff will be Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was Hegseth’s military aide before being named the vice chief of staff, in a move seen as a prelude to canning George. In his year in office, Hegseth has now removed the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

• forced out two other Army generals: Gen. David Hodne, who became the head of the service’s Training and Transformation Command in October, and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the chief of Army chaplains.

George had attempted to stand up to Hegseth over his decision to block the promotions of one-star general of two Black officers and two women officers, the NYT reports:

Two weeks ago, General George asked Mr. Hegseth to meet with him to discuss the removal of the four officers from the one-star list, as well as the general’s view that Mr. Hegseth was interfering unnecessarily in Army personnel decisions overall, the officials said. Mr. Hegseth refused to meet with General George about the matter, they said.

In other Pentagon news: Hegseth directed military commanders to allow troops to carry personal firearms on base.

Must Read

A truly insightful analysis by Garrett Graff on how DEI has become the stabbed-in-the-back excuse in the post-Global War on Terror era that left-behind POWs were in the post-Vietnam era (and before that Jews were in the German post-World War I era) — and how Pete Hegseth wholly subscribes to this mythos.

Mass Deportation Watch

• NYT: ICE Arrests the Head of Wisconsin’s Largest Islamic Group

• WaPo: Despite signaling change, ICE still arrests many immigrants with no record

• NYT: Lawsuit Challenges Warrantless Searches and Forced Entries by ICE

• WaPo: First group of 12 deportees from the US dumped in Uganda

Quote of the Day

Former senior State Department official Vali Nasr, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University:

To the Iranians, the Strait of Hormuz now matters more than the nuclear program. The nuclear program was symbolic, but didn’t provide them with any deterrence. Now, the only reason why they are surviving this war is because of the strait. The Iranian thinking is that, at the end, the strait must remain under their control because it is their only deterrence and only source of revenue.

Latest From the Middle East …

• Politico: ‘Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!’ Trump threatens Iran’s civilian infrastructure

• WSJ: Control Over Strait of Hormuz Will Determine Who Wins the War

• NYT: How Israel Is Taking Control of Southern Lebanon

Good Read

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post: The Trump presidential library would be a giant tower of grift

A Special Ask

I’m hoping to catch you in a quiet moment on your Friday and make a special ask for you to take a minute to join TPM.

None of us here loves promoting our own stories let alone hawking the annual membership drive or touting the Journalism Fund. We’d all rather just be doing the work you’ve come to expect from us. Refining our craft, getting closer to the truth, moving the national conversation toward what really matters is infinitely rewarding.

But we have to attend to the business of the business, and practical realities force us a couple of times a year to make a concerted effort to pitch readers who aren’t members yet on joining TPM. If you’re a lurker — a regular Morning Memo reader who hasn’t take the plunge yet — make today the day.

Artemis II in Super Slo-Mo

National Geographic used it special high-resolution, slow-motion camera—the Ember s2.5k by Freefly Systems—to record Wednesday’s launch at 2,000 frames per second:

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The Racism Is Front and Center

Every single day of the Trump II presidency is another display of performative racism, but today’s news — punctuated by last night’s address on the Iran War — is especially saturated with the casual white nationalism that has come to define the Trump era.

In his nonsensical, bellicose, we’re-almost-winning primetime appearance from the White House, Trump did notorious Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay one better. We’re not just going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age — a threat that roiled financial and commodities markets overnight — but the Stone Age is “where they belong,” Trump declared, saying loudly what has been the mostly quiet part of the last century plus of U.S. intervention abroad.

In a separate, under-the-radar foreign intervention, the U.S. has conducted 49 airstrikes on Islamic militant al-Shabab fighters in Somalia so far this year, a faster pace than last year’s record-setting 125 air strikes. Yesterday, Trump re-upped his viciously racist smears on Somalia and Somali-Americans:

SCOTUS Has Its Limits With Trump

Trump’s racist threat against Iran came on the same day he became the first U.S. president to sit in on Supreme Court oral arguments, where he hoped to bully the conservative justices on the birthright citizenship case, itself a sour stew of xenophobia, racism, and white supremacy.

Recapping TPM’s coverage:

• LIVEBLOG: The Supreme Court Decides Who Is Really American In Blockbuster Arguments

• Josh Kovensky: Nativists Loom Over SCOTUS Birthright Citizenship Arguments

• Kate Riga: Justices Express Skepticism Over Birthright Citizenship Case They Never Should Have Taken in the First Place

Quote of the Day

“Don’t get me wrong: I’m relieved that this case is shaping up as either 8-1 or 7-2 against the Trump executive order. But the case is a gift to the Supreme Court. By rejecting an outlandish position, it will earn credibility as apolitical, even as the Overton window moves far to the right.”—Cornell law professor Michael C. Dorf, on the birthright citizenship case

Mass Deportation Watch

Birthright citizenship is the brass ring of Trump’s mass deportation operation, which licenses the racist targeting of people of color, with appalling violations of civil rights, human rights, and basic decency:

• The Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death of nearly blind Rohingya refugee Nurul Amin Shah Alam, who was dumped by Border Patrol officers outside a closed Tim Hortons in Buffalo in freezing February weather, a homicide.

• U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston of Fresno, California, ruled that a Customs and Border Protetion operation last year in a Home Depot parking lot in Sacramento violated her ban against random immigration sweeps, which she had found were based on racial profiling.

The Corruption: DHS Edition

The virulent racism of Trump’s mass deportation operation is an opportunity to cash in, for everyone from detention center contractors to big tech to, allegedly, officials themselves.

The DHS inspector general has reportedly undertaken an “expansive inquiry” into Corey Lewandowski’s handling of contracts while serving as a special government employee under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the NYT reports. Elements of the investigation have been previously reported.

New DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin yesterday rescinded the Noem-era policy that every contract of more than $100,000 had to be approved by the secretary — which created a chokepoint for Lewandowski, according to various reports. The new threshold for secretary review is $25 million, according to CBS News.

DHS Shutdown Nears End

Earlier the morning, the Senate re-sent its DHS funding bill to the House, which is now expected to pass it eventually after a deal was struck between Senate Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson and the White House under which the House GOP and President Trump will pass the Senate version it rejected only a few days ago.

Dems Sue Over New Trump Election EO

Democrats — including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), the DNC, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Governors Association — sued to block Trump’s latest executive order on elections, which is both about seizing the election administration apparatus from states and throwing up inane new procedural hurdles to voting that will disproportionately impact people of color.

Mahmoud Khalil Seeks Bove Recusal

Pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, targeted by the Trump administration for removal because of his political views, is seeking the recusal of appeals court Judge Emil Bove, the former Trump DOJ official who now sits on the Third Circuit.

“Judge Bove wrote memoranda about and directed immigration enforcement investigations and decisions against student protesters on college campuses — particularly at Columbia University, where Mr. Khalil was enrolled,” Khalil’s attorneys argued in a new filing.

Trump DOJ Watch: Bondi on the Outs?

President Trump has openly talked about firing Attorney General Pam Bondi and replacing her with Lee Zeldin, the former congressman who is now the EPA administrator.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

• Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman on the Trump DOJ’s settlement with Mike Flynn: “It’s a rigged carny game, in which the marks are the American people. And Flynn won’t be the last to try his hand at it.”

• In a flurry of filings — sealed and unsealed — attorneys for accused Capitol Hill pipe bomber Brian J. Cole Jr., signaled that their defense will include a counter-narrative that a former Capitol Police officer who was briefly investigated by the F.B.I. was the real culprit.

Support Indy Journalism: Join TPM

We’re deep into our annual membership drive so if you have’t taken the plunge yet, please consider doing so today!

I don’t have to persuade you of the critical necessity of independent journalism at the present moment. It’s not a quaint throwback that needs to be preserved for the sake of preservation. It is a vital and indispensable redoubt right now against Trump’s authoritarian push to cow corporate media, silence dissent, bury facts, distort data, and undermine knowledge itself.

Morning Memo is just one part of TPM’s commitment to chronicling the depredations of the Trump II presidency: We bear witness, we uncover new facts, we speak truth to power, we refuse to be cowed or to distort or to retreat. You support makes it all possible, including bringing in new regular contributors with keen insights on the American far right, like Sarah Posner and Mike Rothschild.

Take a moment to join, please, so the we can get back to doing the essential work of journalism in this perilous time.

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‘Carry On, Patriots’

It is one of the burdens of the Trump era that the silliest, most absurd things often implicate grave matters of historic import.

The Republic will not rise or fall on Army helicopter pilots joyriding over the Tennessee mansion of Kid Rock, but the civilian secretary of defense intervening for political purposes in the military’s investigation and discipline process for the misconduct erodes command and control and good order and discipline.

Hegseth’s “it’s all good here” tweet came after the Army suspended the pilots of the two Apache helicopters and initiated an investigation. Given past incidents, it would likely have led to discipline of the pilots, in accordance with longstanding military policies against these kinds of stunts.

There’s a long history here of cowboying that the military has sought to rein in, and it’s unconnected to the midair collision last year in D.C. between a civilian airliner and an Army helicopter. In 1998, for example, 20 people were killed in Italy when their cable car plunged to the ground after a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft flying too low and too fast sheared the car’s cable. No one in the cable car survived.

The two Apaches, based at Ft. Campbell along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, also buzzed the No Kings rally in Nashville before the close approach to Kid Rock’s swimming pool. Army officials said before Hegseth’s intervention that it wasn’t clear yet if the flight path over the protest was coincidental or another unapproved deviation, the WaPo reported:

Within about two hours on Saturday, one of the helicopters flew by demonstrators six times at McGregor Park in Clarksville, Tennessee, dipping as low as 625 feet, according to publicly available flight data. At one point, the aircraft briefly circled an area where protesters were gathered.

Kid Rock is a MAGA diehard, as high-profile a pro-Trump celebrity as you’ll find. Hegseth is letting the pilots off the hook — and undermining their chain of command and the rules and regs that all military pilots must adhere to — with a bro-to-bro thumbs up that it’s all good because of the naked political affiliations involved.

Latest on the Middle East …

• WSJ: U.A.E. Wants to Force Hormuz Open and Is Willing to Join the Fight

• BBC: Jet fuel and diesel shortages to hit Europe hard in April, warns energy agency chief

• WSJ: Trump to Address Nation Wednesday on Iran

Trump Issues Wild New EO on Voting

In his latest effort to seize extralegal control over the state-run midterm elections, President Trump issued a new executive order that purports to direct:

1. DHS to create a “State Citizenship List” of “individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.”

2. the U.S. Postal Service not to mail ballots to anyone not already on a separate approved list it keeps called the “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.”

Election law expert Rick Hasen tries to make sense of this structure, which is odd and convoluted in addition to plainly unlawful:

To put this in plain terms: the order would use the USPS, which is not under the direct control of the President, to interfere with a state’s lawful transmission of ballots. If the state does not comply with these rules, federal law would purport to interfere with a state’s conduct of its own elections.

The EO is unlawful in numerous respects and will face immediate legal challenges.

Birthright Citizenship at SCOTUS

Detect a theme?

• Madiba K. Dennie: The Supreme Court Has Never Heard a Case As Easy As This One

• Pema Levy: The Nonsense Case Against Birthright Citizenship

• TPM’s Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky: The Supreme Court will consider President Trump’s far-right fever dream that perverts what the Constitution already says about who gets to be an American citizen.

TPM’s live coverage of this morning’s oral arguments, which President Trump is attending in person, is already underway right here.

Mass Deportation Watch

• TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Inside the Bizarre Feedback Loop Between DHS and MAGA Influencers

• Chicago Tribune: The final numbers are in on Operation Midway Blitz: 3,800 people detained, 2,500 deported, most without criminal records.

Trump DOJ Watch

• ProPublica: Trump DOJ Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration

• Politico: Trump tactics leave federal prosecutors’ offices rudderless

• NYT: DOJ “Struggles” to Respond to Trump’s $10B Suit Against I.R.S

Jan. 6 Never Ends

In the long-running lawsuit by police officers and Democratic lawmakers against President Trump for the Jan. 6 attack, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta of D.C. ruled that Trump’s speech at the Ellipse was political and not covered by the official acts immunity lavished upon him by the Supreme Court.

The Purges

• FBI: Three fired FBI agents who worked on Trump investigations have filed a class action lawsuit in what is the most comprehensive effort to challenge the unlawful retributive terminations.

• VOA: The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals paused a lower court ruling that had ordered the reinstatement of about 1,000 Voice of America reporters and support staff, meaning the agency will continue to be crippled while the Trump administration’s appeal plays out.

Trump’s PBS/NPR EO Unconstitutional

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss of D.C. issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from implementing or enforcing the May 2025 executive order that purported to end federal funding for public broadcasting. Since the lawsuit was filed, Congress rescinded a billion dollars in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has since dissolved.

Ominous Headline of the Day

“Federal Judge Approves Trump Effort to Obtain List of Jews From Penn“

Notable

U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker of Tyler, Texas, rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to allow religious leaders to endorse candidates from the pulpit.

Judge (!) Blocks Trump Ballroom

Exclamation-point-happy Judge Richard Leon of D.C. issued a preliminary
injunction blocking the continued construction of the vanity ballroom project over the ruins of the East Wing of the White House “until Congress authorizes its completion.”

“No statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have,” Leon ruled.

President Trump reacted predictably to the adverse ruling, shifting his argument to the need for a renovated bunker under the old East Wing and hardened security for the White House.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!”

The White House quickly appealed the ruling.

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

Dan Bishop Is on the Case

New reporting out this morning from the WSJ adds to the emerging picture of how the revisionist history of Trump’s 2020 election loss is merging with the effort to exert more federal control over the midterm elections.

Let me dive right into what is new and then unpack this a bit:

That effort is now unfolding on multiple fronts. Attorney General Pam Bondi last week quietly authorized Dan Bishop, a U.S. attorney in North Carolina, to pursue election-related probes across the country, according to a copy of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Bishop, a former congressman who voted against certifying Biden’s 2020 win, will also examine voter-roll data the Justice Department has been collecting from states in an effort to determine whether noncitizens have illegally registered or cast ballots, a department official said.

The WSJ story situates the news on Bishop, the former congressman tapped as interim U.S attorney, next to the FBI seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico, and the subpoena of 2020 Maricopa county voting materials from the Arizona Senate. (All of this is by way of introducing the story’s main characters: the “unlikely duo” of former CIA agent Gary Berntsen and Venezuelan fixer Martín Rodil who beat the drum early and often on the cockamamie conspiracy theory that Venezuela altered the U.S. vote count in 2020.)

At first I was a little perplexed by how the WSJ piece blurs the story of ongoing 2020 election revisionism with the newer Trump DOJ scheme to obtain voting rolls nationwide in what can only be interpreted as an effort to monkey with the 2026 midterms. But that seems to be the point: They are connected, both in spirit and intent.

As we set here at the end of Q1, the two most likely paths for this scheme are:

(1) It continues at a low burn for the rest of Trump term, serving all sorts of useful functions without really ever leading to anything: It provides anti-immigrant and voter fraud rhetorical fodder for campaign season; it’s a MAGA currency that administration officials and GOP electeds can traffic in; it’s an opportunity for up-and-comers to show their Trump loyalty ostentatiously; and it keeps election administrators on their heels.

(2) It quickly metastasizes into a deeper, darker threat to the midterm elections and democracy itself, ginning up unjust prosecutions, serving as a justification for throwing monkeywrenches into the gears of 2026 election machinery, and laying the conceptual foundation for why the 2026 election was stolen just like in 2020.

We’re only seven months from Election Day, so we’re going to know in fairly short order whether the Trump administration is going to take the second path. The clock is ticking.

For More Background on the Scheme…

Eric Columbus in Lawfare: The Trump Administration Comes for State Voter Rolls

Another MAGA Raid on the Treasury?

Politico’s Kyle Cheney has more details on the new class action lawsuit by members of the Jan. 6 mob, which is clearly seeking to take advantage of a friendly Justice Department, which just settled Mike Flynn’s bogus wrongful prosecution claims for a cool $1.2 million.

Speaking of Mike Flynn …

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman rolls out the first installment of his two-part series on DOJ’s settlement with Flynn, examining the history of the Flynn prosecution and why it was 100% legit.

DOJ IG Goes AWOL

Fired DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni, who turned into a major whistleblower when he pulled back the curtain on the Alien Enemies Act and Kilmar Abrego Garcia cases that he was involved in, is now turning his considerable fire against the DOJ inspector general for not doing its job.

In a new letter, Reuveni’s attorneys allege that they provided 20 instances of possible wrongdoing by the Trump administration that were ignored by the inspector general. The IG’s office twice rejected Reuveni’s own complaints, first on the day after he submitted a complaint last summer and then in January after he had asked the IG to take another look at his complaint.

Swalwell to Patel: Cease-and-Desist

Sean Hecker and Norman L. Eisen, attorneys for Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), sent FBI Director Kash Patel a cease-and-desist letter not to release a decade-old investigative file involving the congressman and a suspected Chinese agent. The letter threatening legal action came after the WaPo reported over the weekend that Patel was pressing for the release of the file and that FBI agents in San Francisco had been tasked with making redactions in preparation for the file’s release.

John Eastman and Birthright Citizenship

With the Supreme Court scheduled to hear arguments Wednesday on President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, Politico revisits the prominent role of 2020 coup plotter John Eastman in advancing the radical theory that the Constitution doesn’t automatically confer citizenship on those born in the U.S.

Ironically, there are some indications that the California Supreme Court will consider Eastman’s appeal of his disbarment on Wednesday, too.

Mass Deportation Watch

• An unlawfully deported DACA recipient was returned to the United States from Mexico on Monday after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” her return.

• ICE agents will be stationed outside basic training graduation events for new Marines at Parris Island to identify whether any of their family members are undocumented, but the Marine Corps denies that ICE will be making any arrests.

• Parker Molloy offers a case study in how anti-immigrant right-wing propaganda is developed and weaponized against Democrats.

The Latest on the Middle East …

• WSJ: Trump Tells Aides He’s Willing to End War Without Reopening Hormuz

• New York Mag: All of the Iran Attack Plans Are Bad. This One Is the Worst.

• WSJ: UAE Suffers One of Its Most Intense Barrages in Weeks

• WaPo: Gas hits $4 a gallon for first time since 2022.

Hmmm …

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is demanding “an immediate retraction” of a Financial Times report that his broker “attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran.”

FT reported:

Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley contacted BlackRock in February about making a multimillion-dollar investment in the asset manager’s Defense Industrials Active ETF, the people said, shortly before the US launched military action against Tehran.

The inquiry on behalf of the high-profile potential client was flagged internally at BlackRock, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the allegation “entirely false and fabricated” while demanding a retraction: “Neither Secretary Hegseth nor any of his representatives approached BlackRock about any such investment.”

Notable

Washington state, which doesn’t have a traditional personal income tax, has enacted a new 9.9% tax on income over $1 million to fund child care programs, free school meals, tax credits for working families, and tax breaks for small businesses.

Behold the 1980s Tackiness

A video partially generated by AI shows the predictably ostentatious plan for a Trump Presidential Library tower in downtown Miami, replete with two gold statues of himself:

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