A Slo-Mo Constitutional Clash Is Already Well Underway
INSIDE: Khalil ... Ozturk ... Bondi
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Stonewalling At The Highest Level
President Trump’s open defiance of the judicial branch isn’t happening with a thunderclap and banner headlines. It’s a slow, grinding, make-me-if-you-can refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the district court handling the mistaken deportation case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has been wrongly imprisoned in El Salvador since March 15.
I ventured out to suburban DC Friday for what was shaping up, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling the prior evening, to be an epic confrontation between the executive and judicial branches. It did not feel epic. It felt dreary and exasperating. Instead of a titanic constitutional clash, it was bureaucratic stonewalling by the president using the many layers between him and a willing stooge of a DOJ official to tell the court to pound sand.
Initially, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis seemed willing to push back hard against Trump’s recalcitrance. But over the course of a few minutes, she went from adamant to head-in-hand frustrated to asking opposing counsel to give her a way out of the impasse. I felt the air leave the room when Xinis shifted the burden from the government to comply with her order to the lawyers for Abrego Garcia to argue what should be done about the government’s failure to comply. “It’s your case,” she told them.
Xinis settled on a dissatisfying half measure: requiring daily status updates from the government providing answers to the three questions she had posed in her order the night before and which the Trump DOJ had refused to answer in writing or in person at the hearing. It will not surprise you that the status updates Saturday (which was late-filed after her deadline) and Sunday did not answer the judge’s questions.
The status updates came in the form of declarations from administration officials that were not forthcoming and continued to argue the legal merits of the case (even though she had asked for attestations based on personal knowledge). The only new news was the first U.S. government confirmation that Abrego Garcia is in fact alive and confined at El Salvador’s brutal CECOT facility.
In the meantime, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys filed a follow-up motion seizing on Trump’s comments about the case late Friday: “If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that,” the president said. “I respect the Supreme Court.” That forced Trump to do some hasty cleanup work in a social media post on Saturday, declaring that the detainees like Abrego Garcia “are now in the sole custody El Salvador,” suggesting the United States can’t get them back if it tried. More stonewalling.
Against this backdrop, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele visits President Trump in the Oval Office this morning. The Trump DOJ used the presidential visit in opposing Abrego Garcia’s request for specific concrete steps to facilitate his release and expedited discovery: “That request is particularly inappropriate given that such discovery could interfere with ongoing diplomatic discussions—particularly in the context of President Bukele’s ongoing trip to the United States.”
Heads we win, tails you lose.
Khalil Loses In Immigration Court
Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate whose green card was unilaterally revoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was declared eligible for deportation by an immigration judge in Louisiana. The Trump administration met the low standard for establish removability. Khalil’s claims are still alive in federal court in New Jersey, where a court order blocking his deportation remains in effect.
Exclusive
A State Department memo in March subsequently described to the WaPo determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.
Unreal
The North Carolina Supreme Court may have done just enough Friday to overturn the results of the 2024 election for one of its own seats. In narrowing a state appeals court decision that effectively threw out 60,000 already-cast ballots, the Supreme Court still put enough ballots in jeopardy to throw the close race from incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs to Republican Jefferson Griffin. Riggs imediately took the case to federal court, where a judge allowed the state Elections Board to proceed in accordance with the state court orders but barred it from certifying the results of the election while the federal case proceeds.
Five More Major Law Firms Reach Deals With Trump
The capitulators: Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.
Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that Boris Epshteyn – Trump’s private lawyer – has been the President’s point person on the shakedown of Big Law. Epshteyn doesn’t work for the White House or any other component of the federal government, so it’s unclear on whose behalf he is negotiating, other than Trump personally.
The Corruption: Trump DOJ Edition
The Trump DOJ is corruptly shifting the department’s approach to the case of the former FBI informant who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in a smear of the Biden family – a con that current FBI Director Kash Patel amplified while he was out of government. The Trump DOJ said in a court filing that it is reviewing the basis for the Special Counsel David Weiss’ prosecution of Alexander Smirnov and has asked for his release from custody while his appeal proceeds. Senior DOJ officials ordered the move, the NYT reports, and the prosecutors on the case withdrew on the day the motion was filed.
Trump DOJ Sinks Further Into The Abyss
In a highly inappropriate move, acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba of New Jersey went on Sean Hannity’s program late last week and publicly announced she was targeting two Democratic state officials: Gov. Philip D. Murphy and Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin over whether they’re providing sufficient assistance with President Trump’s mass deportations. Habba said the investigation is a “warning for everybody” that “I will come after them hard.”
“The Trump administration is retreating from some types of white-collar law enforcement, including cases involving foreign bribery, public corruption, money laundering and crypto markets,” the WSJ reports.
The FBI suspended analyst Brian Auten, who had appeared on Director Kash Patel’s so-called enemies list, the NYT reports. It’s not publicly known why Auten, who worked on the Trump Russia and Hunter Biden cases, was suspended.
ICYMI
I can’t think of any historical precedent for this: Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday used a cabinet meeting while TV cameras were present to engage in performative law enforcement in front of President Trump. The obsequious tone, the braggadocio, the politicization of prosecutions are precisely what nearly every other attorney general has assiduously avoided:
DOGE Watch
WaPo: Trump administration overrode Social Security staff to list immigrants as dead
Wired: Palantir Is Helping DOGE With a Massive IRS Data Project
Politico: Inside the DOGE immigration task force
WaPo: DOGE takes over federal grants website, wresting control of billions
The Destruction
The Trump administration is considering eliminating NOAA’s research arm, which has historically done critical work to improve weather forecasting.
The U.S. Department of Education is moving to cut off all federal funding for Maine public schools in retaliation for ignoring President Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports teams.
Just as important as which books were banned from the library at the U.S. Naval is which books were allowed to remain.
What Can You Do?
The New Yorker has an interesting piece on dissent in an era of rising “competitive authoritarianism”:
We analyzed the literature of protest and spoke to a range of people, including foreign dissidents and opposition leaders, movement strategists, domestic activists, and scholars of nonviolent movements. We asked them for their advice, in the nascent weeks of the Trump Administration, for those who want to oppose these dramatic changes but harbor considerable fear for their jobs, their freedom, their way of life, or all three. There are some proven lessons, operational and spiritual, to be learned from those who have challenged repressive regimes—a provisional guide for finding courage in Trump’s age of authoritarian fear.
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To be fair, Judge Xinis has to negotiate the tricky shoals of "deference to the Executive's rôle in directing foreign policy, yadda. - yadda", that the Supremes threw into the already constitutionally murky proceedings. That was a perfect delay-delay-delay peg upon which to further slow-walk the DOJ's cover for Mr Abrego Garcià's continued confinement.
And, btw, who really believes a State Dept. "assurance" that the man is "alive and in custody at CECOT"? Any proof presented? Nada.
David, aside from moving against the courts and Big Law, isn't it likely Trump will find the major accounting firms a tempting target? If he can suborn and weaponize firms like Ernst & Young. Baker Tilly, Deloitte, KPMG, PriceWaterhouseCooper, etc he will gain enormous power.