A Funhouse Mirror of Corruption
Let’s end the week with an intriguing — and even amusing — new development in the bogus investigation out of south Florida into the “grand conspiracy” against Donald Trump.
As part of the probe, we learned yesterday, DOJ has subpoenaed a group of current and former FBI agents from the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation to provide grand jury testimony.
In a very savvy move, lawyers for the agents went to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon yesterday asking for clarification about whether their clients can testify about the details of Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, which covers the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
Cannon, you’ll recall, has bottled up the release of Volume II for years and enjoined DOJ from discussing its contents with anyone outside of DOJ. Anyone outside of DOJ would presumably include grand jurors and the FBI agents own defense counsel.
On its face, the filing is a legitimate effort to protect the FBI agents from jeopardy for either refusing to testify or violating Cannon’s order by testifying (or from having to take the 5th).
But it’s really doing a whole lot more work than that.
It mainly puts Cannon and DOJ in an awkward spot because they’ve taken the position that even Smith couldn’t even testify to Congress about Volume II. But now going along with Trump’s retributive “investigate the investigators” scheme requires that the FBI agents testify.
What to do?
DOJ has already reversed course and said it’s fine for the agents to testify about it, according to the agents’ lawyers, who include Abbe Lowell, Mark Zaid, and Margaret Donovan. Now we’ll see what Cannon comes up with to wriggle out of this apparent bind.
But there are many more layers to it. The filing revealed new information about the status of the “grand conspiracy” probe; it gave the agents a public forum to assert their innocence and the righteousness of the Mar-a-Lago investigation; it lays some groundwork for a future claim of vindictive prosecution if the agents were to ever get charged; and it begins to unspool a counter-narrative for other judges, including the 11th Circuit, where this is all going to land eventually.
The FBI agents’ lawyers are basically using the filing to expose the funhouse mirror of misconduct here at every level.
That’s the short version. If you want more on this:
the new filing;
the tl;dr from the New York Times; and
the deep dive by Marcy Wheeler.
Meanwhile, a separate long-running effort to force the public release of Volume II has been stalled for months at the 11th Circuit, where oral arguments have been scheduled and then rescheduled a half a dozen times. This week they were tentatively rescheduled yet again, for January.
The 2026 Big Lie: Noncitizen Voting
It’s not just the disinformation and the abuse of power in service of delegitimizing elections generally — it’s the timing, which is intended to subvert this particular election. The Trump administration and its state-level allies are ramping up false claims, announcements, rule changes, and prosecutions in the heat of the stretch run for a reason. It’s a choice:
After widely publicizing its claim last month that it had found massive noncitizen voting in Nevada — to the tune of nearly 16,000 noncitizens — DHS whittled down the actual number of suspected noncitizen voters to 185 and sent that list to the state, which has now confirmed that every single person on the list is a U.S. citizen.
ICYMI: In an echo of the 2006-07 U.S. attorneys scandal, top Trump DOJ official Aakash Singh warned managers in a recent conference call that federal prosecutors could be fired if they decline to investigate and pursue cases of reported election fraud, MS NOW reported.
The State Department is moving to give state and local officials — and potentially some nonprofit organizations — access to passport records to verify voters’ citizenship, Bloomberg reports. It’s not clear which nonprofit groups would have access to passport records.
Florida state officials held a press conference yesterday to announce that 20 people have been charged with voting illegally, most of whom are apparently noncitizens who registered to vote.
The Corruption: Love Me Edition
Claiming it was a public service announcement — not a political ad in the final weeks of the midterms elections — the Trump White House won’t disclose the funding source for a pro-Trump 30-second TV ad that began running on cable news Wednesday night with the label “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
The background music the TV spot is “Love Me” by JMSN, who did not authorize use of the song.
“I am looking for a lawyer now in order to see what our options are and how to proceed,” JMSN told Politico. “I have never been in this situation before, so need help in navigating something of this magnitude.”
Trump’s Media Ban Lifted … Mostly
After a chaotic morning yesterday when it appeared the Trump White House was flouting an overnight court order lifting the president’s ban on CNN, Politico, and MS NOW, reporters from the three outlets did eventually get their hard passes back and were allowed to access the White House.
However, a boycott of the TV pool by major networks continues until the White House confirms that CNN will be allowed to resume pool duties.
For Your Radar …
In a troubling attack on a free press, the state of Florida and a conservative think tank have filed a shareholder derivative suit against the parent company of the NYT, claiming the board of directors is exercising insufficient oversight of the newsroom leading to anti-Israel bias in the paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
“Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment,” a NYT spokesperson said of the lawsuit in state court in New York.
3rd Country Removals Back at SCOTUS
The Trump administration scrambled to halt third-country deportations yesterday after a late night appeals court ruling blocked its brutal policy while it also immediately sought relief from the ruling at the Supreme Court.
According to the NYT: “On Thursday, as news of the ruling spread inside the U.S. government, officials quickly moved to take deportees off flights to third countries such as Costa Rica, Honduras, and the Central African Republic, according to documents obtained by The Times.”
The Trump DOJ tried to do an end run around Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is the circuit justice for the 1st Circuit, which blocked the third-country removal policy. But that effort didn’t seem immediately successful. She didn’t issue the administrative stay the administration sought, and gave lawyers representing the deportees until Monday at 4 p.m. ET to respond to the DOJ filing.
Mass Deportation Watch
In the run-up to the midterm elections, the Trump DOJ is enlisting military attorneys as temporary federal prosecutors in support of immigration enforcement surges in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, according to a Defense Department email reviewed by Bloomberg Law.
Trump’s mass deportation operation has taken on a lower profile since the federal occupations of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, but it is no less sweeping. As arrests rose through the summer, the NYT tried to capture the scale of the intrusion:
Federal agents appeared in nearly every corner of daily life, carrying out operations at hospitals and airports, outside suburban schools and along rural construction sites and truck stops. They fanned out from coastal cities in Maine to desert towns in Arizona, across the open plains of Wyoming and down through the southern borderlands.
Courthouse News Service: In a final ruling against ICE, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan blasted the “dreadful” and “squalid” conditions at 26 Federal Plaza, the controversial immigrant detention center in New York City.
Broadview 6 Prosecutor Resigns
Ahead of a pivotal contempt of court hearing next week, Sheri Mecklenburg, the federal prosecutor at the center of the Broadview 6 scandal, abruptly resigned yesterday while pointing the finger at embattled U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros.
Mecklenburg, who said she resigned because the Trump DOJ would not let her file a response in her own defense for the upcoming hearing, promptly submitted a filing in the case claiming she had followed instructions from Boutros and kept him fully apprised of her handling of the case before the grand jury.
The federal case against ICE protesters was already shaky but it collapsed and was dismissed after revelations of alleged misconduct in how the case was presented to the grand jury.
A Delightful Weekend Read
Almost anything I say about this piece will be a spoiler, so I’m going to refrain from characterizing it except to say it’s a lovely treatment of a wonderful story with great pacing and a commendable narrative structure. Enjoy!
Scientific American: How apple detectives solved the mystery of an ancient tree—and rewrote the history of fruit
Enjoy the First Weekend of Fall
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Eye-catching! "Don’t You Just Hate Seeing Aileen Cannon in a Pickle?" I haven't even started reading it! Fabulous title!!! Kudos!
Thanks for the great article about the heirloom apple. It made my day.