Shutdown Deal Lets GOP Senators Personally Sue Over Jack Smith Probe

INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Kash Patel ... Ghislaine Maxwell

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

$500K For Election Subversion

Tucked into a spending bill that is part of the deal to end the government shutdown is a provision that would allow GOP senators to personally sue the federal government for as much as $500,000 over Special Counsel Jack Smith’s lawful search of their phone records, according to the NYT.

As part of his Jan. 6 investigation, Smith properly subpoenaed the toll records of some GOP members of Congress. In recent weeks, Republicans on the Hill have resurfaced this fact and morphed it into a Deep State conspiracy theory, exaggerating what Smith obtained and trying to turn it into a constitutional clash.

District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. approved measures that barred phone providers from notifying lawmakers that their data from around Jan. 6 was requested as part of the investigation, Politico notes. The provision in the bill imposes new restrictions that would require senators to receive notice of their records being sought and bars judges from preventing that notice unless the senator is under criminal investigation.

Most controversially, the provision in the bill retroactively allows senators targeted by Smith to sue the federal government, the NYT reports: “Because the provision is retroactive to 2022, it would appear to make eligible the eight lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed by investigators for Mr. Smith as he examined efforts by Donald J. Trump to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

The Republican senators in question are Lindsey Graham (SC), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Bill Hagerty (TN), Josh Hawley (MO), Dan Sullivan (AK), Tommy Tuberville (AL), Ron Johnson (WI), and Cynthia Lummis (WI).

The language in the bill came directly from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Politico reports.

Jan 6. Pardons Are Trump’s Bat Signal

A good piece by Politico’s legal reporting duo on the implications of President Trump’s latest pardons in the 2020 Big Lie scheme:

(1) It’s a precursor for election denialism in the future:

The mass pardon — the first in history to cover people accused of criminally conspiring with the president who issued it — comes as Trump continues to stoke false claims about rampant cheating by Democrats and sow doubts about the integrity of future elections. And his opponents see the pardon as a permission slip for similar efforts in 2026 and 2028.

(2) It’s extremely broad:

But the language in the pardon also underscores that Trump’s clemency is not limited to people named in the document. Rather, it applies to anyone who helped devise or advocate for Trump’s strategy to use fraudulent slates of presidential electors as a prong of his strategy to remain in power, as well as others who worked to “expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities” in the 2020 election.

The Corruption: Pardonpalooza Edition

In addition to the latest round of Jan. 6 pardons, President Trump continues to give special treatment to a combination of the politically connected and the publicly corrupt:

• Former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada and his former chief of staff Cade Cothren were pardoned even though they’d only been convicted in May on fraud, money laundering and conspiracy charges tied to a scheme involving constituent mailer services, Politico reports. Casada had been sentenced in September to 36 months in prison.

• Without making a public announcement, President Trump pardoned Robert Harshbarger Jr., the husband of Rep. Diana Harshbarger (TN), who pleaded guilty to health care fraud in 2013, the NYT reports.

Blanche: Trump DOJ ‘At War’ With Judges

With the Trump DOJ struggling to retain lawyers and staff, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche made a pitch to young conservative lawyers Friday at a Federalist Society event in D.C. to join the war against “activist judges.”

“We need you, because it is a war, and it’s something we will not win unless we keep on fighting,” the DOJ’s No. 2 said.

Blanche was specifically referring to legal setbacks the Trump administration has suffered in court at the district level.

It’s hard to get the media, it’s hard to get the American people to focus on what a travesty it is when you have an individual judge be able to stop an entire operation or an entire administrative policy that’s constitutional and allowed just because he or she chooses to do so. So, it’s a war.

Blanche’s remarks came the day after former Trump DOJ official told the same conference that Congress should start impeaching judges who have blocked Trump policies.

“What’s going to force the Supreme Court to do something is fundamentally political pressure. It’s going to be when Congress starts impeaching judges and saying … ‘You are now encroaching into our territory,’” said Mizelle, whose wife is a federal district judge.

SCOTUS Takes Mail-In Ballot Case

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case challenging a Mississippi law that allows the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. The case had nationwide implications, with some 30 states allowing the counting of mail-in ballots after Election Day.

Mass Deportation Watch

• The Trump administration took steps in court late last week to deport the repeatedly brutalized Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia, a country with which he no ties.

• The NYT interviewed 40 of the Venezuelan men who were unlawfully imprisoned at CECOT earlier this yeat after being deported by the Trump administration under the Alien Enemies Act.

• The Trump administration made a $7.5 million payment to the government of Equatorial Guinea as it seeks to deport people to the West African country, according to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

• Since April, DHS has stopped automatically capturing communications between officials and instead requires them to take screenshots of their messages in a bizarre work flow, the NYT reports: “The policy expects officials to first take screenshots of the text messages on their work phones, send it to their work email, download it on their work computers and then run a program that would recognize the text to store it in searchable formats, according to the department’s guidance submitted to the court.”

Trump’s Murderous Misadventure

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been busy purging at least two dozen flag officers and sidelining military lawyers precisely to allow the kind of unsanctioned war the Trump administration is engaged in against drug cartels and the Maduro regime in Venezuela:

• The number of lawless U.S. strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific has risen to 19, with a death toll of 76 … that we know of.

• The Trump administration has created a secret list of 24 of Latin American cartels and criminal organizations that are now “designated terrorist organizations,” The Intercept reports.

• Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, a retired Air Force judge advocate, calls the U.S. strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats “murder.”

Kash Patel Leaves MI5 Hanging

FBI Director Kash Patel reassured the head of MI5 that he’d preserve the job of an FBI agent in London who helps with counterintelligence surveillance – then reneged on the promise, the NYT reports.

Trump Goes After BBC

President Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1 billion over how it edited a clip of his Jan. 6, 2021 speech on The Ellipse for a documentary last year. The disputed edit has already lead to the resignations of BBC Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News Chief Executive Deborah Turness. BBC Chairman Samir Shah issued an apology yesterday for the controversy.

Quote of the Day

“The deference and servility to Ms. Maxwell have reached such preposterous levels that one of the top officials at the facility has complained that he is ‘sick of having to be Maxwell’s bitch.’”–Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), describing preferential treatment allegedly being given to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell since her arrival at a minimum security prison camp

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