Talk About Losing the Thread

In a social media post this morning, President Trump threw all of toys in the air and declared that he still thinks the “anti-weaponization” slush fund was the way to go after all.

While ostensibly calling for Todd Blanche to be confirmed as attorney general, Trump lost the thread and resumed defending his $1.776 billion slush fund, which would siphon money to Jan. 6 rioters and other supposed victims of the Deep State:

They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them. …

I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined!

The only arguable nod to the legal cases challenging the slush fund, which remain pending, is that Trump described how he “felt” and “will always feel” — not what he will do to revive the fund over which he would exert control and for which there would be no guardrails. The official Trump administration position before Congress and in court has been that the slush fund is “dead” and that no amount of public pining for it by the president should make anyone think that it’s coming back once public attention drifts elsewhere.

With Blanche’s nomination stalled not over the slush fund but over a separate provision in the same bogus “settlement agreement” that gives Trump immunity from the IRS — a giveaway potentially worth as much as $100 million from Trump in his official capacity to himself in his personal capacity — it was comical for the president to come to Blanche’s supposed rescue by reasserting the righteousness of the slush fund.

The real target of Trump’s scorn in the social media blast was Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who is the main hold up on the Blanche nomination even though the Senate Judiciary Committee Republican only asking for the barest fig leaf to camouflage the corrupt IRS immunity provision (see below). Trump’s impulsive reaction to Cornyn’s opposition is to mock him for having his political career ruined by Trump, which is amusing in its own right.

All of this came the day after Trump improbably threatened in another social media post to pull the Blanche nomination until Cornyn and fellow holdout Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) are out of office next year — a weak-handed threat that miscalculates the chances of the Senate being more friendly to Blanche after the midterms. No one is fooled.

The NYT Gets It! Cornyn’s Thin Red Line

The NYT has some real talk that ratifies yesterday’s Morning Memo on how Sen. Cornyn is actually seeking to entrench — not eliminate — the immunity President Trump got in his “settlement” with the IRS:

The red line that Mr. Cornyn has drawn is fairly thin. He and Mr. Tillis are not seeking to kill the deal that Mr. Blanche negotiated with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, which gave the president, his family and his businesses broad immunity, potentially saving them at least $100 million in penalties and drawing accusations from Democrats of self-dealing. They are merely demanding modifications — in writing. …

Mr. Cornyn’s request is fairly modest. He wants the Justice Department to guarantee what Mr. Blanche said under oath at his confirmation hearing: that the I.R.S. immunity would apply only to Mr. Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization, and that it would be limited only to audits of past tax returns.

“All we’re doing is asking them to put that in writing,” Mr. Cornyn said.

It’s telling, I suppose, that the White House refuses to make even this minor accommodation and instead attacks Cornyn.

“The fact that they’re balking at putting that in writing tells me that they were hoping to get by with this settlement agreement and his testimony, and then revitalize those provisions at a later date,” Cornyn told ABC News. “And that’s, I don’t think, good faith negotiations.” 

Still, the news coverage of this collective hoodwinking has been abysmal and has allowed Cornyn to strut around like a dragon-slayer while actually giving away $100 million in potential tax liability forgiveness to Trump.

First at TPM: Judge Finds Trump Admin in Contempt

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Baltimore this week held the Trump administration in contempt of court for violating two of her orders enforcing a settlement agreement in a long-running class action case over the rights of unaccompanied minors to seek asylum in the United States.

As TPM first reported, the administration has deported nearly 100 asylum seekers in violation of the court-approved settlement agreement in the case.

But Gallagher’s order gives the administration a chance to “purge” its contempt by refraining from any further unlawful deportations in violation of the agreement:

To do so, the administration will have to comply with a series of new requirements that Gallagher imposed in the same order intended to prevent more unlawful deportations of members of the settlement class, when numbers north of 70,000 people.

Mass Deportation Watch

• The 7th and 9th circuits became the latest U.S. Courts of Appeal to reject the Trump administration’s re-interpretation of a 30-year-old law and turn it into a tool of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond. The circuit courts are now split 6-2 against the Trump policy, and the Supreme Court is likely to take up the issue in its next term, Politico reports.
• A Cameroonian national with an expired visa who is a former Fulbright scholar and is now a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University was detained by ICE this week while boarding a domestic flight as the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement efforts at airports, The Banner reports.

Judge Declines to Recuse in USA Case

A quick update on the most significant legal challenge to Trump’s corrupt U.S. attorney scheme: The outside judge assigned to hear the lawsuit against the administration by fired U.S. Attorney Roger Rogoff of Seattle has denied the Trump DOJ’s motion to recuse himself.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee, is the chief judge of the Eastern District of Washington, based in Spokane, and is a frequent visiting judge in Seattle. The Trump DOJ took issue with (i) how Bastian was assigned the case, arguing that the chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals should appoint an outside judge rather than the case being assigned to the usual visiting judge; and (ii) Bastian’s impartiality given his frequent work in the district.

Bastian found no legal basis for his recusal.

Morning Memo Playlists

On a random Friday in March 2024, I first dropped into Morning Memo a musical segue into the weekend that began a semi-regular feature. It’s ebbed and flowed a bit, but your response has been remarkably gratifying, especially because am I very much a musical neophyte. In response to reader requests, I’ve put together a playlist of the songs that have appeared here. I’ll keep adding to it as we go along:

I did a parallel playlist on YouTube that’s nearly the same as the Spotify playlist above, but a few tracks are available only on one or the other of the two platforms, not both.

See you back here Monday.

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Let’s See the Actual Language

I harbor a growing suspicion that a collective hoodwinking is going on in the Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general.

It’s hard to argue that the delay of today’s crucial Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Blanche’s nomination isn’t a pretty big deal (even though he could still remain on as acting attorney general for the balance of Trump’s term).

But when you look closely at what Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), backed by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), is demanding for his vote, it’s not at all clear what the dispute is actually over — and there’s quite a bit of reporting that suggests Cornyn is not driving a hard bargain at all.

If it seems weird to you that the breathless coverage of the Blanche confirmation is happening without anyone publicly knowing exactly what Cornyn is demanding, I agree! It’s weird.

Going into this dustup, the common understanding was that senators like Cornyn and Tillis wanted more ironclad reassurances that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund was well and truly dead. So far so good.

Then came the somewhat surprising and even refreshing news that Cornyn was also targeting the legally dubious immunity that Trump had also been given in the settlement of his lawsuit against the IRS. Even better.

If Blanche could stick around as acting AG anyway, then extracting a concession on the insanely corrupt IRS immunity provision of the settlement agreement was arguably a shrewd, if narrow, win for Cornyn and those of us in the anti-corruption brigade. If estimates are correct, the value to Trump of securing immunity from past tax liabilities to the IRS was in the range of $100 million. That’s not nothing.

But over the past few days, news reports on what Cornyn is demanding have been very fuzzy and often gloss over the specifics, just saying generally that Cornyn is targeting the IRS immunity deal. But what Cornyn has said himself and what a few reporters have picked up on raise serious doubts that Cornyn is actually targeting the Trump IRS immunity everyone has been up at arms about.

Instead, Cornyn seems to be aiming to keep the immunity deal intact but to limit it to the retroactive immunity everyone already understood to be part of the deal, not prospective immunity, which an expansive interpretation of the loose language of the agreement might have allowed. Cornyn also apparently wants to make sure no one else gets the benefit of the immunity deal other than the parties to the lawsuit — Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Org.

At this point, you should be saying WTF?

Again, I agree!

Here’s the most comprehensive statement of Cornyn’s position, from his own mouth on Monday (emphasis mine):

What I want is the written document to say the same thing [Blanche] did in his sworn testimony in front of the Judiciary Committee, and, as you recall, what he said is the weaponization fund is dead. He said the audit immunity basically doesn’t extend to parties beyond the lawsuit, and it doesn’t also extend to future actions by federal agencies other than the IRS.

I’m not sure how else to read that other than it locks in the retroactive immunity and applies it only to the Trumps and their company.

That’s still the line Cornyn was taking yesterday, not long before the committee vote was pushed off, as paraphrased by the WSJ (emphasis mine):

To earn his vote, Cornyn said, the simplest fix would be for the parties to the settlement—the Justice Department, IRS and Trump—to revise it to conform to Blanche’s testimony at his confirmation hearing: The weaponization fund is dead, the audit protection doesn’t apply to people beyond the parties to the lawsuit, and it only applies to the IRS, not other agencies.

Here’s how the NYT obliquely puts it: Cornyn “said he had received no written assurances from Mr. Blanche that the audit shield would not apply to future tax liabilities or be extended to a wider circle of people.”

Cornyn and the DOJ have reportedly traded draft language back and forth but none of that has been made public, so it’s impossible to know precisely what they’re haggling over — or if Cornyn is indeed giving away the whole store, as it has started to seem this week.

If the reporting on Cornyn’s demands is correct, then Trump, Don Jr., Eric, and their company still get the $100 million gift from the President’s own administration to himself. And locking that in has the political (though not legal) effect of Senate Republicans publicly ratifying the corrupt bargain by voting to confirm Blanche.

In another worrying sign that Cornyn isn’t really asking for much, both sides seem perplexed that things haven’t gotten worked out yet and confident that they can iron out whatever differences remain over the precise language.

“It’s not a big ask,” Cornyn said yesterday, in what may be the understatement of the week.

Quote of the Day

“This is so dangerous. I’m living proof of the danger. My son isn’t here because someone disagreed with the way I was handling a case in court.”—U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed and husband wounded in 2020 attack at her New Jersey home by a disgruntled attorney, on DHS General Counsel James Percival attacking district judges by name on X

TPM in the World

I talked with Greg Sargent yesterday about the blast of new filings in the James Comey “86 47” case — and about Trump bumping up against the limits of his powers in several different realms:

We Need You

Our goal is to raise $500,000 in this year’s fundraising drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. As I write this morning, we’re sitting at $395,000. It’s a great start, but we’re going to need a great finish to get there.

If you value Morning Memo or the work that the rest of the TPM team does (or both!), please consider making a contribution to support our independent journalism. You are essential. Without you, TPM doesn’t exist.

If you’ve already contributed, thank you! If you haven’t yet, do it now!

RIP Glen Hansard

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Comey Offers Judge an Easy Way Out

In new court filings last evening, James Comey unloaded a triple shotgun blast at the bogus “86 47” seashells prosecution against him.

I’ll get into the trio of filings — which include a cameo by Sammy the Bull Gravano and juicy details about President Trump’s intense personal interest in the case as relayed through internal Secret Service communications — in a moment. I promise.

But first let me orient you briefly to what I suspect is Comey’s strategy here.

As we discussed here yesterday, Comey had already filed another motion to dismiss the indictment on Monday before last evening’s flurry. That motion is the most straightforward, direct, least messy way for the judge to end this case, arguing (quite reasonably) that posting to Instagram a photo of an arrangement of seashells that spells out “86 47” is in no way a true threat to President Trump and in any event is constitutionally protected free speech.

Still, it’s a big step for a judge to dismiss an indictment — especially in a high-profile case like this — based solely on the indictment being facially insufficient. But the choice Comey is giving the judge makes that option seem like the easy way out compared to donning hip waders and venturing into the muck of a vindictive prosecution analysis, which involves peeling back the curtain on the rotten Trump DOJ, the over-involved Trump White House, and now the role of the Secret Service in this whole mess.

While Comey is clearly exalting in exposing some of the depredations of the Trump II presidency and its corrupt misuse of the Justice Department, he first and foremost wants to get out from under this indictment and spare himself and his family the risks of a conviction. And so the sequencing of the filings makes the judge’s hard lift of straight-up dismissing the indictment for failure to allege an actual crime seem a whole lot less heavy considering the alternative path this case could go down.

In one sense, this strategy could produce a disappointing result in a civics and democracy sense. Trump’s pursuit of Comey is a classic case of vindictive prosecution without precedent in American history. Yet, the corrupt and bumbling efforts are so inept that Comey may prevail in getting a prosecution thrown out for a second time without a judge even getting to the vindictive prosecution allegations.

In the Virginia case against him, Comey successfully disqualified Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney, which meant the indictment she obtained was no good. In this case, the indictment itself may also be so flawed that the case goes no farther. But probably the better way to view this is that corruptly predicated prosecutions produce corrupt investigations and shoddy lawyering. It’s all part of the same package of retributive conduct.

The New Filings

With the above framework in mind, here are the three new filings (for diehards, I’m linking to the substantive legal memoranda rather than the barebones motions themselves):

• Motion to Dismiss Indictment for Vindictive and Selective Prosecution: This motion covers a lot of familiar ground regarding Trump’s crusade of retribution against Comey, including the first failed prosecution in Virginia.
• Motion for Disclosure of Grand Jury Proceedings: This motion takes the known grand jury irregularities that judges found in the Virginia case and combines them with irregularities in the North Carolina case (including public statements by FBI Director Kash Patel and other acts and omissions revealed in discovery) to urge the judge to suspend the presumption of regularity and allow Comey access to the grand jury transcripts.
• Motion to Suppress and for Franks Hearing: Comey alleges that the FBI case agent made false statements and omitted material facts in the applications for two digital search warrants — one before the indictment to Apple and one after the indictment to Google — about the evidence gathered in the case, including exculpatory evidence.

There is a key fourth filing: a 21-page affidavit from Comey attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (the former Chicago U.S. attorney) with a whopping 43 attached exhibits that is filed in support of all three motions and offers a narration of the discovery Comey has obtained from the government thus far that is relevant to the three motions.

Rather than analyze each motion separately, I’m pulling out some of the key themes from all three motions, which are also separately narrated by Fitzgerald, who provides specific citations to the supporting documents obtained in discovery.

If you’re still with me, this is where we get into the good stuff.

Trump’s Keen Interest in the Case

Some of the juiciest details from the discovery in the case offer a glimpse of President Trump tracking the Secret Service investigation in real time from Air Force One.

Internal Secret Service communications describe the head of Trump’s protective detail, Special Agent in Charge John Bush, “expecting to have to brief POTUS. He has since briefed the Chief of Staff on the below updates….”

Later, Bush emailed from Air Force One seeking a “readout” of the Secret Service’s imminent interview of Comey at headquarters: “As I am getting LOTS of questions, is it possible for me to get an immediate readout (call) of the interview?”

Another document obtained by Comey noted that “POTUS was requesting a copy of the interview notes to use in his 6 pm press conference.”

Bush responded: “It is a hot topic on the plane and [redacted code name for President Trump] is very interested.”

At one point, Bush asked about any further updates noting “the COS just asked me.”

Another document relays that a Secret Service official was told by the Protective Intelligence Operations Center “that they received a request from SAIC Bush who received a direct request from [Secret Service code name for the President] for a summary of the interview when available.”

Ultimately, an executive summary of the Comey interview was sent to Bush on Air Force One, according to the filings.

Illegal Surveillance of Comey

After Comey arranged to talk to the Secret Service in person when he returned from the beach in North Carolina to his home in Virginia, the Secret Service tracked his cell phone despite doubts revealed in internal communications that they had the proper legal justification to do so, according to the filings.

When a senior Secret Service official said it was a “bad idea” to ping Comey’s cellphone, Bush agreed it was “legally questionable” but indicated “we might anyway.”

The Secret Service agent who signed the emergency request to Verizon to ping Comey’s cellphone said he did so “with hesitation.” Another senior Secret Service official said that “the # 3 guy at DOJ ‘wanted to ping the cellphone via an exigency request.’” It’s not clear to whom at DOJ he was referring because there was not a No. 3 official in place at that time.

Once the Secret Service pinged Comey’s cellphone, they tracked him electronically and in person on his return trip from North Carolina to Virginia, although the agents surveilling him physically lost track of him when Comey and his wife stopped at the gravesite of their infant son. The electronic surveillance continued during the cemetery visit. In a striking parenthetical, Fitzgerald writes: “(The Government later seized—pursuant to the challenged March 2026 search warrant—a photo Mr. Comey took of the flowers at his son’s grave that day.)”

A Rudy Giuliani Cameo

A recurring character in the filings identified only as Person-1 apparently knew the Comeys but had come to hold Comey in low regard. Person-1 texted Comey’s wife shortly after the Instagram post went up warning that “86” could be construed a violent term, according to the filings.

Person-1 said they initially thought “86” was a benign reference to the restaurant term but then heard a Rudy Giuliani media appearance and became convinced that Comey’s use of the term was nefarious and told the Secret Service as much when interviewed the day after hearing Giuliani.

Giuliani seems to have improbably kicked off an entire absurdist thread of the investigation when he claimed publicly that Comey had worked on organized crime cases where the term “86” was used to mean “kill.”

Trying Desperately to Find Mob Usage of ’86’ … and Failing

The most vivid scene that emerges from the slew of new filings, is a May 13, 2026, trip by the first assistant U.S. attorney and an FBI agent to the home of the notorious former mobster Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to try to establish that the mob regularly used “86” in a violent sense.

Gravano is the former Gambino underboss who famously testified against John Gotti, admitted to participating in 19 murders, entered then left the witness protection program, and was subsequently convicted again. “He is now a podcaster,” Fitzgerald dryly observes in a footnote.

Gravano said he was convinced Comey had to know the violent connotation for “86,” but Gravano had no memory of talking about it with Comey, who as a young prosecutor was involved in the Gambino case. While mobsters did use the term “86,” Gravano told investigators, they were careful not to use it in the presence of law enforcement.

That set off an astounding search by Comey investigators for references to “86” in decades of FBI files. After searching the entirety of the FBI’s Sentinel database, an agent reported:

These searches produced inconclusive results regarding the use of “86” or “eighty-six” as a slang term. Additionally, the searcher was unable to determine if the subject would have had access or been exposed to any potential files meeting the search parameters.

Investigators did a separate search of the Gambino case file: The case file contained no references to the term “86.” Same with the trial transcript: nada. They also talked to two former FBI agents who investigated the mob who had never heard “86” used to mean “kill.”

Secret Service Seemed Satisfied There Was No Crime

The discovery in the case leaves the strong impression that after its initial investigation into Comey’s Instagram post, the Secret Service — which has a unit dedicated to the nonstop stream of threats directed towards its protectees — was satisfied there was no crime here.

After leading the May 2025 interview of Comey in person at Secret Service headquarters, a senior official emailed a group of other Secret Service personnel, suggesting that the case was “resolved,” as so many initial threat investigations are: “You all contributed, some in non-traditional ways, to this issue being resolved in a professional and efficient manner.”

Discovery shows the Secret Service treated the Comey investigation as a “non-referred” matter meaning under internal policy “the determination can be made based upon initial investigation that there is no risk of an unwanted outcome and there is no judicial outcome.”

The Secret Service investigation, after the initial flurry, went nowhere and by the fall of 2025 it seemed like it had died. But in October, it was revived by the FBI out of its Charlotte office.

Comey Attorney-Client Privilege Violated AGAIN

The violation of Comey’s attorney-client privilege had already been an issue in the Virginia case and spawned an entire separate case involving Daniel Richman, the Comey attorney who is also a Columbia University law professor, who prevailed against the Justice Department.

But stunningly it happened again in the “86” investigation, Comey claims.

In the search warrant for Apple, “the government made no provision whatsoever to screen Mr. Richman’s communications,” Fitzgerald alleged. In addition, investigators only filtered for office landline numbers of another Comey attorney, and not his cellphone number.

Last month, prosecutors agreed to “quarantine” two text conversations Comey had with the second lawyer, according to Fitzgerald, but only after those communications had already been reviewed by the first assistant U.S. attorney, two other assistant U.S. attorneys, the FBI case agent and an FBI supervisor. They told Fitzgerald last month they had looked at the text thread only after they had obtained the indictment against Comey.

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One of Dozens of Failed Prosecutions

More than a year after arresting him, the Trump Justice Department moved Monday to drop the criminal case against California labor leader David Huerta arising from his June 2025 protest of an ICE raid in Los Angeles.

Huerta, who suffered a head injury during his arrest, was engaged in protest at the peak of tensions in the city over ICE raids. The next day, President Trump federalized the California National Guard and deployed it to the city.

Prosecutors had already downgraded the case against Huerta from a felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction, resistance, or opposition of a federal officer. Now the remaining charge will be dismissed.

Huerta’s case is just one of dozens of prosecutions of ICE protestors in Los Angeles to fall apart in recent months.

To try to save face in the Huerta case, prosecutors yesterday framed the dismissal as an “agreement of the parties” by which Huerta would continue to abide by the terms of his release for another 30 days, at which point the case would be dismissed.

“This is not where he’s been absolved of wrongdoing,” Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., told Politico. “He’s accepted responsibility.” (For those keeping track, Essayli is not the U.S. attorney, but is installed as the first assistant in the office as a way of avoiding Senate confirmation.)

For his part, Huerta hailed the outcome as complete vindication of him and his constitutional rights.

DHS Watch

• In an extraordinary attack on the federal judiciary, James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, posted a screed on X last week vilifying by name four federal judges who had ruled against DHS in high-profile cases, including Paula Xinis, who has overseen the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case in Maryland.
• A longtime immigration policy wonk who most recently served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics has resigned from the Department of Homeland security, saying in a LinkedIn post over the weekend:

[I]t will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.

Comey: 86 My Prosecution

Former FBI Director James Comey has filed his first of at least two motions to dismiss the federal indictment of him in North Carolina for posting to Instagram an image of seashells arranged on a beach to spell out “86 47,” arguing that it’s preposterous to treat his actions as a true threat to President Trump and that, even if they were construed to be a threat, they amounted to constitutionally protected political hyperbole.

The Corruption: Crypto Edition

The Trump DOJ filed a motion to dismiss the fraud case against the alleged mastermind of a $722 million crypto Ponzi scheme, Bloomberg reports.

What Is Cornyn Bargaining for Exactly?

With the critical Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general set for Thursday, new comments from Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) suggest he may not be driving as hard of a bargain for his vote as initially reported.

Last week, Cornyn said he wasn’t just interested in making sure the bogus anti-weaponization fund was dead, but also nixing the tax immunity Trump received when he settled his lawsuit against the IRS. To do this, Cornyn wants the settlement documents amended because by their own terms only the parties can modify the documents. But yesterday in remarks to reporters, Cornyn’s own description of what he was after seemed more narrow than at first appeared (emphasis added):

We just need for the documents to conform to what [Blanche’s] testimony was at the hearing, where he said the weaponization fund was dead [and] he said that the immunity from future audits does not extend to people beyond the parties to the lawsuit.

That sure sounds like the parties to the lawsuit — who include Trump personally, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization — would still receive the immunity contemplated in the settlement agreement.

Politico uses ambiguous language language on this point, reporting that the changes to the settlement agreement Cornyn wants include “restricting the scope of tax audit immunity granted to the president and his family.” It’s not clear whether that means limiting the scope of the immunity the Trumps are getting or limiting who gets immunity to only the Trump family.

Stay tuned …

Trump IRS Lawsuit Miscellany

• Attorney Fees: After the judge in Trump’s lawsuit ruled that she would consider awarding attorney fees to the amici who filed briefs in the case — to be paid by Trump, the other plaintiffs, and his lawyers as sanctions for their misconduct in the case — the amici submitted their attorney fee requests yesterday. The Democracy Forward Foundation, which represented one set of amici, is seeking $39,000. The four law firms representing 35 former judges said their fees exceeded $100,000 but they are seeking only a symbolic $1 per law firm plus modest out-of-pocket expenses of less than $5,000.
• Law School Deanship: Daniel Epstein, Trump’s lawyer in the IRS case who was sanctioned by the judge with the monetary penalties above plus a one-year ban on practicing pro hac vice in the Southern District of Florida, is the incoming interim dean of the Florida International University law school. Epstein didn’t even make the law school search committee’s list of top 20 candidates for the permanent position, but was named interim dean anyway after the search for a permanent dean failed, the Miami Herald reports.

Trump Takes Elections EO to SCOTUS

After losing at the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals last week, the Trump administration quickly went to the Supreme Court to try to revive the president’s executive order purporting to revamp mail voting ahead in time for the midterms.

Chilling Headline of the Day

WSJ: Two Wars Converge in the Caspian Sea as Ukraine Hits Iranian Supply Line to Russia

Let’s See How AI Is Going … WUT!?!

• Futurism: AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale
• Futurism: A Whole Bunch of People’s Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There’s Some Wildly Private Stuff in There

Who’s Your REAL Daddy?

Trump: "I've done more for you than your parents, okay? Your parents are okay. I'm not gonna knock to your parents, but I have been better to you than your parents."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-07-27T19:19:06.280Z

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Now Lost in Salvadoran Prison System

A new court order Friday in federal court in south Texas, first flagged by Politico’s Kyle Cheney, reveals that another Salvadoran national has been unlawfully deported twice by the Trump administration in the past eight months in violation of separate orders by a federal judge and an immigration judge.

In an under-the-radar case reminiscent of the brutalization of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Nelson Ariel Umanzor Chavez was deported to Mexico in November despite a federal court’s temporary restraining order barring the administration from removing him from the United States. As in the Abrego Garcia case, the court ordered the administration to facilitate his return from Mexico and he was in fact returned to the U.S. by the end of November.

But then in January — despite a 2019 immigration court order barring his removal to his native country because he was “more likely than not to be tortured” there — the administration deported him to El Salvador anyway, where he was immediately imprisoned.

His condition and the exact location of his detention remain unknown.

“Salvadoran authorities have transferred Petitioner between prisons and his family has not been provided information regarding his current location, his condition, or whether he is alive,” according to the latest court order, citing a declaration filed in the case.

Umanzor Chavez unlawfully entered the United States in 2015 but was released as an unaccompanied minor. His asylum claim was rejected in 2019, but he was granted withholding of removal to El Salvador under the Convention Against Torture. He appears from the court order to have remained free for a decade, until he was detained in May 2025 in Baltimore during an ICE check-in.

In his order Friday laying out the circumstances of the case, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. (a Trump appointee) denied the relief Umanzor Chavez was seeking because his request was based on his earlier deportation to Mexico, not his more recent deportation to El Salvador. The judge gave him until next month to amend his pleadings to challenge the second deportation.

Houston ICE Shooting: No Drugs in Van

The substance that the FBI found in the work van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was shot and killed by an ICE agent tested negative for narcotics or illicit drugs, the House district attorney announced Friday. The fact that the news came not from the FBI but from the local prosecutor reinforced suspicions that the Trump administration had tried to sully the victim’s reputation. For reasons which remain unclear, the search warrant for the van which revealed the FBI’s suspicion of meth was unsealed unusually early in the case amidst outrage over the shooting.

ICE Plans to Target Haitians

With the Supreme Court ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protection for more than 300,000 Haitians, ICE is planning for a potential arrest and deportation blitz, CBS News reports.

Boat Strike Watch: Grisly Stats Edition

A new report from the Washington Office on Latin America says the death toll from President Trump’s lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats is 221.

But despite the illegal carnage, the campaign is failing to achieve its own stated objective of strangling drug trafficking by sea, the WaPo reports:

The Trump administration’s deadly military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States, but they’re prompting criminal organizations to develop new strategies and tactics and undermining traditional investigative methods, according to a previously unreported assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a closed-door congressional briefing and interviews with current and former U.S. and foreign officials.

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon

• NYT: An Admiral’s Rise Reveals the Politics Driving Hegseth’s Pentagon
• WaPo: After Trump’s order, West Point curbed faculty speech. One professor said no.

NYT Still Crushing It on Air Force One

Undaunted by the Trump DOJ’s unlawful subpoenaing of five of its reporters, the New York Times continues to crank out new stories on President Trump’s scandalous new Air Force One boondoggle:

• Inside the Rushed Effort to Get Trump His New Air Force One
• Iranian Threat to Air Force One Prompted Plane Swap During NATO Summit
• VIDEO: How Trump’s New Air Force One Poses Potential Security Risks
• In Rush to Track Down Leaks, Justice Dept. Reversed Its Own Process

Exporting the MAGA Vision Abroad

Over the weekend, Brazil announced that it denied visas to two senior State Department officials — assistant secretary Riley M. Barnes and deputy assistant secretary Samuel Samson — who were being dispatched by the Trump administration “on a mission to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the country’s electoral system” ahead of the Oct. 4 presidential election, the WaPo reports.

Trump Loses on Election Meddling Gambit

The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals handed the administration an important loss Friday when it declined to pause a lower court order that blocked the administration from moving ahead on President Trump’s executive order purporting to revamp mail voting ahead of the midterm elections.

The Retribution: Blue State Edition

In a little-noticed court filing, the Trump administration admitted that it canceled $7.5 billion in federal clean energy grants “based solely” on the projects being in states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

MAHA: Measles Cases Soar

NYT: “More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined.”

Sad Trombone

The White House Correspondents Dinner — interrupted in the spring by a gunman’s assassination attempt — finished up over the weekend. It was … something:

Think of the saddest thing that happened in your childhood, multiply it by 100, and see how it compares to these 36 seconds

— Bill Grueskin (@bgrueskin.bsky.social) 2026-07-25T04:19:51.965Z

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Blanche and Clayton Own This Mess

The responsibility for the Trump DOJ’s unlawful use of subpoenas as a tool of retribution against NYT reporters — for writing about the deficiencies of President Trump’s beloved new Air Force One — falls most heavily on two men: acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, both of whom are awaiting Senate confirmation for promotion to higher offices.

In the alternate world of normal politics that we used to inhabit, the NYT subpoena debacle — especially what happened in court yesterday — would be the cherry on top of the myriad reasons that neither man could win Senate confirmation even with a Republican majority. Instead, we slouch onward, with Clayton expected to be confirmed as DNI and with Blanche making accommodations to a few remaining GOP holdouts who need a fig lead to camouflage his historically awful 18 months at DOJ.

The Justice Department withdrew the NYT subpoenas yesterday rather than endure the greater humiliation of U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian ordering them quashed, which he made clear he was prepared to do. But prosecutors, most notably Clayton’s hand-picked deputy U.S. attorney Sean Buckley, still faced a public rebuke from the judge over their multiple errors and missteps in the case — although that may be too generous of a characterization.

“It seems like the inadvertent errors and ‘we should’ve done things differently’ are piling up,” Subramanian said.

To say that prosecutors merely mishandled the case is to presume a level of good faith that is not warranted. The errors and missteps flowed directly from the retributive abuse of the powers of the federal government to retaliate against unflattering news coverage. The rush to subpoena reporters at the earliest stages of the investigation was itself unlawful, but the haste also produced predictable errors, like not thoroughly researching the law, providing misinformation to the court, and mistakenly subpoenaing the phone records of reporters’ family members.

Judge Subramanian isn’t done with prosecutors yet. He asked during the hearing why he shouldn’t consider sanctions against prosecutors. In an order following the hearing, he demanded that the administration provide him with any internal communications it had about the non-disclosure order it sought regarding the subpoenas to the phone service providers of the reporters:

Subramanian seems to be zeroing in on this discrete part of the case for potential sanctions because prosecutors admittedly mislead the magistrate judge that issued the non-disclosure order, failing to tell him that the phone subpoenas involved journalists and misrepresenting that the investigation wasn’t public when prosecutors were already engaged with NYT counsel in the case.

While the NYT won a resounding victory in court in the narrow confines of this case, the Trump DOJ remains an enormous, unprecedented, and unchecked threat to civil liberties, including freedom of the press. And the people most responsible for this travesty of justice are the president’s picks to be attorney general and DNI.

Attack on Higher Ed: Penn Wins

After the University of Pennsylvania put up an extended fight, the Trump administration withdrew its subpoena for the names and personal information of Jewish people on campus as part of a purported investigation into antisemitism.

Border Patrol Agent Indicted

A Border Patrol agent was indicted in Texas last month on state charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after he allegedly ran over an undocumented immigrant with his vehicle during an enforcement operation in January 2025.

Quote of the Day

“I got carried away, frankly.”—Elon Musk

Is Kagan Playing A Kind of Long Game?

The accounts of Justice Elena Kagan remarks yesterday about the Roberts Court make her sound tone deaf, naive, and perhaps not up to meeting the current moment:

• “You just have to deal with the fact that there’s a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do, and I can really dislike that. But it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration.”
• “[I]s this court kind of a puppet for the current administration? I think definitely not.”
• “I think that is a bad rap.”

A perhaps more generous interpretation is that Kagan is approaching the challenge of being in what is likely to be a permanent minority for the rest of her career with a very granular sense of what counts as wins and losses.

Not only does she see herself as a bridge between the three liberal justices (herself included) and the six-justice conservative majority (in particular the Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who can, on occasion, either side with the liberals or moderate the conservatives), but she keeps a very fine-grained score of the game being played — collecting wins that are almost imperceptible and trying to stack those on top of each other over time in a way that starts to count for something.

Or … her approach may simply be too precious and self-regarding to meet the moment. The jury is still out for me on which it is.

The Age of Fire

 David Wallace-Wells, on the Pyrocene:

[P]erhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the years of warnings that climate change might not inspire global solidarity, but the opposite — an intensifying, zero-sum competition over a world pinched by perceived resource scarcity and pockmarked by more and more frequent extreme weather. If you insist on believing climate change isn’t real, or that its effects must be trivial, then whenever you find yourself overwhelmed by those effects, you have to place the blame somewhere.

See Ya Back Here Monday

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Only Loyalists Need Apply

A new and ironic development in the first-of-its-kind legal challenge to President Trump’s U.S. attorney scheme gives me a chance to pull back the lens a bit to show the full scope of the corruption involved and why it matters.

The lawsuit by fired U.S. Attorney Roger Rogoff of Seattle that I wrote about at length yesterday has been re-assigned to Judge Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee from outside the district, since the federal judges who appointed Rogoff have a stake in the case.

One irony of Bastian hearing the case is that he is chief judge in the Eastern District of Washington, which has had its own recent U.S. attorney issues. The Trump administration has used one of its patented blue-state workarounds in Bastian’s district to install a U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation or allowing federal judges to appoint an interim U.S. attorney.

It started when acting U.S. Attorney Richard R. Barker, a career prosecutor, resigned last July from the Justice Department rather than sign off on an indictment of ICE protesters. (Barker’s successor scaled the case against the protestors way back, dropping most of the felony charges to misdemeanors if the defendants stayed out of trouble for 18 months, the New York Times reported.)

“I knew there was no place for me in the Justice Department if I was being asked to bring felony charges against these protesters in a way that would compromise my integrity,” Barker later told the NYT. “This was not an organized conspiracy. It was a protest where people were exercising their free-speech rights.”

Barker was succeeded as acting U.S. attorney by another career prosecutor, Stephanie Van Marter, who lasted only a month. She was succeeded in August by Pete Serrano, the mayor of Pasco who had no apparent prior experience as a prosecutor.

That is when things started to get even more squirrelly.

Serrano’s statutory 120-day term ended in December. By statute, the judges of the district could have appointed Serrano to remain on past the 120 days. They did not. Whether that was an affirmative decision by the judges reflecting a lack of confidence in Serrano or simply a failure to act isn’t clear, but I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between those two scenarios.

At that point, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi engineered a workaround that as of March she had used in at least nine other districts around the country, mostly in blue states, including in high-profile postings like the Los Angeles U.S attorney’s Office: Bondi named Serrano a special attorney and made him the first assistant U.S. attorney, which without an acting or interim U.S. attorney in place effectively means he has remained the top prosecutor in the district without Senate or judge approval.

The workaround has been used mostly in cases where the interim U.S. attorney has exceeded their statutory term and judges have ruled that they’re unlawfully serving in the post, Politico noted. In Serrano’s case, Bondi acted before he had overstayed his 120 days. President Trump has not nominated anyone for the permanent position in Spokane. The plan seems to be to keep Serrano, like other similarly entrenched top prosecutors, in place indefinitely.

The underlying motive for the scheme goes back to Trump’s frustration with the Senate’s blue-slip tradition, which essentiallygives senators veto power over U.S. attorney nominations in their own states. When you’re turning the Justice Department into a tool of your White House, non-loyalist U.S. attorneys simply won’t do.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has been public in her opposition to Serrano and to the workaround to entrench him in place: “The Trump administration is attempting a transparent end run around the Constitution and Congress by appointing Pete Serrano to a position he is not qualified to hold after the Eastern District declined to extend his tenure as U.S. Attorney.”

It’s against this backdrop that Judge Bastian will be hearing Rogoff’s legal challenge to Trump’s scheme. In Rogoff’s case, the district judges acted and unanimously appointed him as interim U.S. attorney, but Trump fired him in less than an hour, the fourth such termination of judge-appointed interim U.S. attorneys around the country.

Trump’s scheme in all it various forms is intended to keep blue-state U.S. attorneys from being too independent, too autonomous, and too un-beholden to the Trump White House. There is great utility in having loyal and compliant U.S. attorneys in blue states as Trump targets Democratic elected officials and other political foes for retribution. See, for example, the next two items below.

The Retribution: Midterms Edition

The Trump White House has come up with an inventive new way to sic the Justice Department on Democratic elected officials ahead of the midterm elections, Bloomberg reports: “DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, which Vice President JD Vance established in January, is building out a team exploring how politicians and state officials facilitate the misuse of taxpayer dollars — either by actively participating in or failing to prevent schemes under their watch, said three people familiar with the effort.”

The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition

House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a criminal referral against former Special Counsel Jack Smith to the Trump DOJ yesterday, accusing him of perjury in testimony to Congress in December, the NYT reports.

Smith’s lawyers immediately rejected the allegation that Smith committed perjury and accused Jordan of making a “spurious claim.”

The pattern here is now tediously obvious and has gone on since at least the Benghazi investigation more than a decade ago: House Republicans launch politicized investigations against civil servants, Democrats and other foes of President Trump and march their targets into a perjury trap on the Hill. At the same time, they use their investigations to gin up fodder in the form of documents, emails, and other communications that they leak to right-wing media.

What’s new is that House GOPers now have a Justice Department run out of the Trump White House that is eager to play along.

Must Read: AF1 Leak Probe Edition

Like orcas pulverizing a sunfish, the NYT has eviscerated the Trump DOJ for subpoenaing its reporters in a new filing that comes ahead of an important hearing scheduled for this afternoon in federal court in Manhattan.

The unusual and unprecedented use of subpoenas to reporters as an early (rather that last ditch) investigative step in the Air Force One leak investigation has come under intense scrutiny as a threat to a free press and civil liberties.

As I explained earlier this week, the Trump DOJ conceded to the judge that it made major legal missteps in how it handled the case. In the new filing, the NYT seizes on those admissions, with a level of aggressiveness and urgency rarely seen in a such a major case, and urges U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian not to let the Trump DOJ get away with just putting the subpoenas on hold for two weeks, as prosecutors had suggested, but rather quash them today at the hearing.

The filing takes the form of a letter, which makes it an easier read. It’s worth your time.

Blanche Lavishes Alaska for Murk’s Vote

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is pulling out the stops in lavishing Alaska with goodies in an effort to win undecided Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote for his confirmation to the permanent position, Politico reports.

The 5th Circuit Pulls a Wild Move

In an important new development in the legal fight over the Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond hearings, it wasn’t just what the 5th Circuit did but how it did it, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck writes: “[T]he Fifth Circuit went out of its way to grant the federal government an unprecedented form of unexplained emergency relief without deigning to explain why such relief was remotely appropriate.”

On a Slow Boat to Venezuela

For those keeping track, the slow-rolling contempt of court inquiry against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case is still crawling along. The full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is re-hearing the case after a three-judge panel cut U.S. District Judge James Boasberg off at the knees. The Trump DOJ filed its appellate brief yesterday. Oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 29.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Financial Times: “The Trump administration has collected more than $13bn in revenues from Venezuelan oil sales this year, according to FT calculations, but has said almost nothing about what has happened to the money.”

The Latest Trump Attack on Higher Ed

The Trump administration’s ongoing attack on colleges and universities is now merging with its corrupt tendencies to create an alarming new scheme to divert the pipeline of government funding for “life sciences” research into the private sector, with an ostensible focus on AI, robotics, and nuclear energy.

The scheme combines weakening higher ed with the politicization of scientific research while opening new pathways for corruption and self-dealing. What’s not to like?

Graphic of the Day

NYT: How Trump Is Getting Richer in Office

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A Low-Key U.S. Attorneys Scandal

Eighteen months in, President Trump’s strategy to circumvent the Senate on the appointment of U.S. attorneys does not yet seem to have sunken in as one of the defining elements of bringing the Justice Department to heel under the White House.

While Trump’s appointments of charlatans like Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan to temporary gigs as U.S. attorneys have been headline-grabbers, they are only part of of a larger Trump scheme to seize control of the appointment of U.S. attorneys in blue states despite what the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and federal statutes say.

Trump’s play is basically this: With blue state senators essentially having a veto over U.S. attorneys in their states (thanks to the Senate’s blue-slip tradition), Trump has used a variety of different workarounds to get his preferred people into those U.S. attorney slots. Those workarounds have avoided the constitutionally required Senate confirmation and in some instances have violated the law on acting or interim appointments. In a third use case, where district judges have appointed an interim U.S. attorney, Trump has promptly fired their appointee, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has promised to fire future judge-appointed U.S. attorneys unless they are approved by the administration.

Trump’s scheme is about to be put the test by a carefully planned, first-of-its-kind legal challenge from the judge-appointed U.S. attorney in Seattle, Roger Rogoff, who was fired last week by the president within an hour of his appointment.

In his new lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington state yesterday, Rogoff — whose legal team includes former Obama Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. — places his firing in the broader context of Trump’s strategy to circumvent the Senate and the law:

By disregarding the carefully calibrated statutory framework that Congress enacted to address U.S. Attorney vacancies, Defendants ignore Congress’s exercise of its authority under the Appointments Clause to determine how inferior officers are appointed, and they claim the power to install and remove U.S. Attorneys at will in this district—and elsewhere—without Senate confirmation and outside the bounds of federal law. As illustrated in districts across the country, those actions threaten the very harms that the Appointments Clause was intended to prevent, leaving the President (and all future Presidents) free to appoint whomever he chooses as de facto U.S. Attorney indefinitely, regardless of their qualifications for the role.

Rogoff is the fourth judge-appointed U.S. attorneys to be fired, following similar terminations in the Northern District of New York, New Jersey (Habba’s former position), and the Eastern District of Virginia (Halligan’s former position). In New Jersey, the judges and DOJ eventually reached an agreement on a judge-appointed interim U.S. attorney.

Rogoff’s lawsuit points to three other jurisdictions — the Central District of California, New Mexico, and Nevada — where Trump’s workarounds violated the law but district judges have not stepped in to appoint U.S. attorneys.

This case is ultimately about whether the president can install U.S. attorneys indefinitely no matter how unqualified or corrupt or beholden to him they are, and in the process sideline the Senate and judges, to whom the law gives roles in checking the president’s powers in this regard.

What’s next?

Shortly after filing his lawsuit, Rogoff filed a motion for preliminary injunction seeking to invalidate his removal and to restore him to his position as interim U.S. attorney until the Senate confirms a permanent U.S. attorney. That puts the case on what should be a faster track to resolution, perhaps within weeks. That will largely depend on whichever judge ends up taking the case. It won’t be a local judge since they have an interest in the matter. Expect the 9th Circuit, which covers Washington state, to name an outside judge to hear the case.

But there’s one more wrinkle to this unprecedented case to bear in mind.

The federal judges in Seattle appear to have decided this is a fight they wanted to fight. They asked applicants for the interim position whether they would contest their anticipated firing by the president. Rogoff indicated he would, and they named him to the position. The speed with which Rogoff filed his lawsuit and motion for preliminary injunction, the quality of the complaint, and the caliber of the lawyers representing him all suggests this is going to be a hard fought, fully engaged case that ends up before the 9th Circuit and perhaps the Supreme Court.

The Retribution: Blue State Edition

The Trump administration is withholding an additional $1 billion in Medicaid funds from California and Minnesota based on spurious allegations of fraud.

Mahdawi Loses on Appeal

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a district court lacked jurisdiction when it ordered the release of pro-Palestinian advocate Mohsen Mahdawi from immigration detention, a decision could pave the way for him to be detained again, Reuters reports.

BBC Puts the Screws to Trump

In President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the BBC, a magistrate judge ruled that Trump must turn over to the broadcaster detailed financial information.

The Corruption: Pardons Edition

In an unprecedented expansion of White House clemency power, President Trump has issued pardons for companies, not just people, Bloomberg reports.

A Virtually Infinite Enemies List

At The Bulwark, Matt McManus chronicles the far-right’s ever-growing enemies list, with its special focus on racial minorities, feminists, and intellectuals.

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A Huge Clusterf***

The Trump administration’s Air Force One leak investigation targeting the New York Times is encountering severe turbulence already.

In an overnight filing, the Trump DOJ admitted to serious errors in how it has handled the case so far — and in a huge concession that it attempts to mask as reasonableness it has put on hold for two weeks all of the subpoenas aimed at NYT reporters.

The major errors by federal prosecutors in Manhattan are largely of their own making, a result of a rushed investigation intended to appease an outraged President Trump, embarrassed that the NYT exposed his Qatari-gifted 747 as having subpar missile defense capabilities compared to the existing fleet of Air Force One aircraft.

Now that the case has been unsealed, we have a much clearer picture of what happened. Let’s break it down:

New Subpoenas Revealed

This all kicked off when a total of five grand jury subpoenas were issued to NYT reporters. The feds successfully served three of them on reporters Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton and Eric Schmitt. They were unable to serve subpoenas on reporters Tyler Pager and Adam Goldman.

But we learned yesterday that in addition to the grand jury subpoenas, the feds had also subpoenaed the phone records of the reporters from their phone providers. Or to put it more precisely, they sought toll records and subscriber
data for the phone numbers they believed to be associated with the reporters.

Feds Go After Reporters’ Families

The feds turned out to be at least partially mistaken about the reporters’ phone numbers, the NYT told the federal judge overseeing the case, because they actually targeted phone numbers of family members of the reporters, including:

• the mother of a reporter who is “a mental health professional with confidential client relationships.”
• the spouse of a reporter who is “the general counsel of a major law firm.”
• another spouse of a reporter.

In response, prosecutors vaguely waved at a “law enforcement database”:

Any subpoenas served for a phone number not used by one of the movants was a result of information in a law enforcement database indicating that the phone number was associated with the movant. If the Government determines that these phone numbers were not used by the movants, the Government will not pursue the corresponding subpoena(s).

More on the phone records subpoenas below.

Big Screwup #1

Second Circuit Court of Appeals precedent, which covers New York, establishes a reporter’s privilege and requires the government to meet certain elements to overcome that privilege, one of which is to show that the information it seeks from the reporter cannot be obtained from any other source.

The government appears to have not considered that precedent in this case, the NYT alleges, citing correspondence from the government:

The Government’s letter itself confirms that the Government did not even consider this Second Circuit precedent when it should have done so: before it issued the subpoenas. Instead, the Government apparently began evaluating the legality of the subpoenas after it began preparing its response to the Motion to Quash.

But don’t take the NYT’s word for it. Prosecutors essentially conceded the point last night when they told the judge that they’re going to hold off enforcing any of the subpoenas for two weeks. It’s a remarkable concession, given the stakes of the case:

[T]here are particular investigative steps that the Government is seeking to take in the near term that the Government anticipates will be material to this Court’s assessment of application of any qualified reporter’s privilege here.

Translation: Judge, we’re going to go do some more investigating to see if we can obtain elsewhere the information that we had hoped to obtain from the reporters because you’re going to ask us about whether we tried to get it elsewhere and we don’t have a good answer for you on that.

It would be a mistake, however, to read this as merely incompetence. This kind of rushed investigation, without even basic research on the legal terrain prosecutors are venturing into, reinforces what was obvious from the get-go: This isn’t about nabbing leakers (or not solely about that); it’s about retaliating against the NYT.

Big Screwup #2

The NYT alleges that prosecutors misled it and the court by failing to disclose the existence of the phone record subpoenas even as the litigation over the testimonial subpoenas was getting underway. Prosecutors deny that allegation and contest the timeline of events that the NYT offers. But regardless of the tussle over the exact timing and who knew what when, prosecutors now essentially concede that they erred on the law (emphasis mine):

Although Department policy authorized non-disclosure of the subpoenas, in light of additional caselaw that the Government identified after the issuance of the subpoenas, the Government determined on July 17 that it was appropriate to alert counsel to those subpoenas so that counsel could advance any arguments—regardless of merit—in furtherance of their motion.

As you can see, it’s a total clusterfuck. Marcy Wheeler aptly headlined her post on this mess: “SDNY Asks for Two Weeks to Unfuck the Leak Investigation It Fucked Up in Rush to Please Trump”

Where Does That Leave Us?

While there’s a schadenfreude in the Trump DOJ being exposed in public for having botched the case, this isn’t simply a matter of making errors or bumbling or being in over their heads. Rather, these kinds of errors, mistakes, irregularities, overreaches, improprieties, and abuses are a prerequisite for President Trump to be able to use the Justice Department as a sword against the disfavored and shield for the favored.

Following the law, abiding by precedent, adhering to internal procedures, demonstrating candor to the court, conducting oneself with professionalism — all of those things get in the way when you’re using DOJ for your retribution.

That is what has been exposed here.

For Your Radar …

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) appears to be hinging his decision on whether to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general out of the Judiciary Committee not just on the ending the anti-weaponization slush fund but also on the IRS immunity given to President Trump.

Cornyn brought up both elements of the bogus settlement agreement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, Politico reports. “Those are the issues we’re continuing to discuss with the administration to see whether we can get a modification of the settlement agreement,” said Cornyn.

That’s a bigger demand than Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) wanting Congress to ban the slush fund in return for his vote to advance Blanche out of committee. It also requires a lump of flesh from Trump himself, even if he never deserved the immunity in the first place.

Cornyn doesn’t seem to be messing around: “Well, does he want to get confirmed or not?” the senator said when asked if he expected concessions from the White House.

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Retribution, Destruction, and Corruption

President Trump’s mass deportation operation continues to embody all of the worst elements of his second presidency: the retribution, the destruction, and the corruption, a lawless trifecta that subjugates immigrants while eroding the rights of American citizens.

The first handful of items in today’s Morning Memo captures different aspects of the lawlessness as manifested in developments from just the past few days. It comes as DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s supposedly “kinder and gentler” ICE is proving to be a short-lived election-year feint, not a real retrenchment. Two fatal ICE shootings within a week have a way of ripping away the mask.

While immigrants have borne the brunt of the Trump brutality, the administration has been eager to systematically use the powers of the state against protesters. The viciousness of the mass deportation operation has created its own feedback loop: spurring more protests which create more opportunities for the administration to crack down on dissenters. As you’ll see below, that has proven to be a very bad strategy once it gets to federal court.

Be sure to make it at least as far as the final item in the series, which is about the never-before-used Alien Terrorist Removal Court that the Trump administration tried to breathe life into last week.

Cases Against ICE Protesters Collapse

In a comprehensive review of hundreds of criminal cases against ICE protesters, the New York Times found that an extraordinary number of those cases have crumbled, especially when compared to the Justice Department’s typical 90% conviction rate:

The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them. …

The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.

FBI Called Off of ICE Probes

The FBI issued guidance to managers nationwide on Thursday that the bureau would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — although DOJ and DHS denied in a joint statement the change in policy, the NYT reports.

What’s the upshot? It’s not entirely clear.

The NYT casts the change as making it less likely that the FBI will turn up damaging evidence against immigration agents involved in confrontations with protesters, but FBI agents have been seriously constrained in their investigations since Trump’s mass deportation operation began, a point the NYT also makes: “Under the Trump administration, when ICE agents have shot and killed people, the F.B.I. has been assigned to scrutinize a narrow question: whether the agents were assaulted before the gunfire.”

So it seems at least possible that this policy shift gets the FBI out of the business of pursuing protesters at the behest of the White House — though its hard to imagine FBI Director Kash Patel having the spine to resist that kind of pressure in the future.

Stay tuned …

Protester Allegedly Shot by ICE Contractor

An employee of the contractor that runs the ICE Processing Center in Aurora, Colorado, was arrested in connection with the Thursday evening shooting of a protester outside of the detention facility.

Brandon Booth, 42, faces charges of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, attempted first-degree assault, felony menacing, and unlawful carrying of a concealed weapon in the shooting of the protester, who suffered non-fatal injuries to her lower body.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Houston: Video of ICE agents pursuing the van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo before they shot and killed him doesn’t readily show them using lights or sirens on their vehicles. White House border czar Tom Homan wasn’t ready to concede the point in an interview Sunday, but did allow: “If they didn’t activate the lights, then it — then there’s an issue there.”
• Florida: The Mexican national hit and killed by a semi truck while fleeing an encounter with ICE was legally in the country on a tourist visa and had planned to return to his home country on Saturday, according to an account given by his wife that has not been independently confirmed.
• Maine: DHS still continues to refuse to release the name of the ICE agent involved in the fatal shooting of Colombian national Johan Guerrero last week, part of a pattern of concealing the identities of officers involved in shootings. In a ironic twist, DHS provided a statement to the NYT on this practice — but “would not identify the person who sent the statement.”

Sign of the Times

Politico crashed a boozy yacht party thrown in D.C. by the Mass Deportation Coalition that drew former GOP Reps. Steve King (IA) and Tom Tancredo (CO) and former officials from ICE and DOJ, including the pardoned coup plotter Jeffrey Clark.

Medicaid -> ICE -> Palantir

ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn’t supposed to have with Palantir, according to new court filings reviewed by NPR.

Meet the Alien Terrorist Removal Court

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court has existed since 1996, but it was never used until last week.

Seamus Hughes of Court Watch broke the news Saturday of its first use — and the creation of a bare-bones court website.

In its first order, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court rejected for now the Trump administration’s application to remove an unidentified individual but gave it a chance to supplement the record, noting that “the Government could benefit from the opportunity for more thoughtful consideration.”

The best reporting and analysis on this new development:

• Politico: Trump administration activates never-before-used ‘alien terrorist’ deportation court
• Chris Geidner: The Trump admin DOJ went to a secretive deportation court this week
• Steve Vladeck:  Here’s what we know, and why we should (and shouldn’t) be worried.

Judge: Firing of FEMA CFO Was Unlawful

In a very important decision on the scope of the president’s powers to fire civil servants, U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff of Alexandria, Virginia, ruled from the bench Friday that the termination of FEMA’s chief financial officer Mary Comans last year without a hearing or the chance to transfer to another job was unlawful, Politico reports.

The Corruption: In All Its Dimensions

• IRS: Kenneth Kies, the Treasury Department’s top tax policy official who was appointed by President Trump, “was forced out of his job after he warned that the White House was at risk of violating a federal law prohibiting senior officials’ involvement in IRS audits,” the WSJ reported.
• DOJ: The Trump administration continues to pull back across the board on prosecuting corporate crime, the WSJ reports.

Quote of the Day

“Well, it has — it has a lot, and you know it has a lot of capability, but as I understand it, in about a month or so, they’re going to send it to have it be maxed out. So they’re going to be sending it, and they’ll have it be maxed out.”—President Trump, apparently conceding that his beloved Qatari Force One doesn’t have all the capabilities of its predecessors (a fact reported by the NYT that led to its reporters being subpoenaed in a leak investigation)

Mullin Threatens to Jail Election Officials

Following up on President Trump’s inane speech on election security, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials Friday with jail time if they don’t comply with the administration’s demands to change election policies.

2026 Ephemera

• Maine-Senate: In the race to replace Graham Platner, Troy Jackson has all but locked up the Democratic nomination after dominating county-level meetings this weekend, which prompted his top rivals — Dr. Nirav Shah, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and Dan Kleban — to drop out of the race.
• Nebraska-Senate: After independent Dan Osborn qualified for the ballot on Thursday, Democratic nominee Cindy Burbank withdrew from the race on Friday, clearing the way for Osborn to have a clean shot at unseating Sen. Pete Ricketts (R).
• Minnesota-Governor: Far-right conspiracist Mike Lindell, President Trump’s pick in next month’s GOP primary for governor, is registered to vote in Texas, not Minnesota, the Star Tribune reported.

DoD Withheld Iran War Casualty Figures

The Friday attack by Iran in Jordan that killed two U.S. service members and left a third missing and presumed dead was not the first attack in the country during the Iran War. At least three other Iranian attacks in Jordan in the week before the Friday attack injured dozens of American service members and damaged helicopters — but the Pentagon did not disclose those attacks or the casualties and damage they caused, the NYT reports.

New World Record in the Mile

Perhaps overshadowed by the final weekend of the World Cup (congrats, Spain), Britain’s Josh Kerr broke the 27-year old world record for the mile:

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