Trump Calls Judge ‘Crazed Lunatic’

Over the past week, the East Potomac Park case has morphed from another of President Trump’s personalist projects in D.C. to a burgeoning confrontation between the executive and judicial branches.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes had, by her own admission, bent over backwards to accommodate the Trump administration as it defended its supposedly nascent plan to remake a popular park in the heart of monumental D.C.

But then — in violation of her orders that the administration provide advanced notice and a chance for the court to intervene before undertaking any major projects in the park — the National Park Service removed hundreds of trees from the park’s golf course after providing scant notice just before 5:00 p.m. ET on a Friday before a holiday weekend.

That led to a fiery hearing in front of Reyes on Columbus Day in which she deplored the conduct of the administration and its DOJ attorneys. The hearing culminated with Reyes temporarily blocking any more tree removals at the park.

In the kind of self-defeating move that’s become common in cases where Trump has taken a close personal interest, the Trump DOJ responded to the courtroom woodshedding with a defiant motion on Friday evening calling on Judge Reyes to step aside from the case.

The motion to disqualify was over the top, accusing her of “histrionics,” “bias,” “disdain,” “open hostility,” and “animosity” toward the Trump administration in this and other cases.

The motion was signed by a single attorney: Stanley E. Woodward, Jr., the No. 3 official at DOJ.

Judge Reyes last night denied the motion to disqualify herself but not before eviscerating the Justice Department again: “That is a serious charge. The Court answers it. With the record.”

With that prelude, Judge Reyes spooled out pages of transcripts from prior proceedings in the case that rebutted the administration’s claims against her, before concluding:

It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion. But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record. By any objective measure, the Government fails to meet the standard for recusal.

But things didn’t stop there.

Trump announced over the weekend that he plans to begin work on remaking the park on Nov. 15, closing it for 15 months. So much for Trump’s plans being nascent, as the administration had insisted for months. Judge Reyes took judicial notice of Trump’s post on Sunday and asked if it changed the administration’s prior position in the case:

The Court ORDERS that the Government notify it, by 8:00 p.m. today, whether it continues to take the position that it took in its October 16, 2026, filing, that, “there is no final agency action” and that “at most [] the President has given preliminary thought to” the plan to rebuild East Potomac Golf Course.

In its response — signed again only by Associate Attorney General Woodward — the administration insisted nothing had changed.

Then came this morning’s pre-dawn tirade from President Trump in which he called Judge Reyes a “crazed lunatic.”

Another hearing in the case is underway this morning on whether to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s plan. In her Sunday order, Reyes upped the ante by requiring Woodward and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert N. Stander to appear in person at today’s hearing.

Stay tuned …

We Can Afford to Have Nice Things

Until the open clash between Trump and Judge Reyes, I’d hesitated to cover the East Potomac Park case for a national audience because in some ways it’s a parochial D.C. issue and not of the same import as, say, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, the blight of the Trump Triumphal Arch, the renamings of the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Peace, or the unspeakable painting of the intricate exterior of the grand Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

But there’s more going on here than a threat to one public golf course.

For those not familiar, it should be noted that while the public golf course within the historic park is at the center of the dispute, the identity, public use, and access to the park as a whole is at stake. The park features a heavily used paved waterfront loop for walkers, runners, and cyclists. It has a playground and picnic area. People fish, enjoy the views of the D.C. core and northern Virginia, and watch planes taking off and landing from DCA.

The park was created for the public by Congress in the late 19th century and then was built using fill on the tidal mud flats of the Potomac. The low-cost golf course, like two other public courses in D.C. on National Park Service land, has always catered to a broad clientele, trying to keep the sport accessible.

What makes this a national story beyond the clash with Judge Reyes is that the narrowing of public spaces is happening in parallel with the shrinkage of civic life under Trump. The concern is that Trump’s plan would make the golf course more exclusive and less accessible. It would alter the public nature of the park as it has existed for more than 100 years.

Must See

Let me join the chorus of reviewers urging you to go see Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything.” It’s among the smartest documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I came to it unfamiliar with Fielder’s previous work and with only passing Wikipedia-level familiarity with the Theranos scandal.

If you’re a Theranos obsessive, you may come away disappointed. It’s not a Theranos documentary. It’s a psychological profile of Elizabeth Homes and of her romantic partner Billy Evans. While it may be tempting to make a judgment on Holmes’ culpability in the Theranos scandal based on Fielder’s work — and audiences probably come out of theaters chatting about exactly that — it would be a mistake.

The Theranos fraud, while inextricably woven into the documentary, exists separate and apart from it. Trials and depositions and financial filings and good investigative reporting already explore the fraud itself in great detail. This isn’t that. (If you feel the strong need for a villain in the documentary, Billy more than fills that role on his own — even though he had nothing to do with Theranos and didn’t first meet Holmes until after the company’s collapse.)

What really sets Fielder’s documentary apart is its acute self-awareness. It grapples openly with the range of challenges that confront documentarians and storytellers: the limits of objectivity, the nature of truth, the intrusive role of the observer, the inevitability of bias, the constraints of narrative forms. I’m barely even getting started. There’s a lot going on.

Fielder inoculates himself against the most obvious criticisms by confronting them as part of the story he’s telling. It gets super meta at times, but it doesn’t lose the thread of the story. I can’t say much more than that without spoiling it for you.

If you’re comfortable with uncertainty, bask in nuance, enjoy the challenge of juggling competing explanations, and can tolerate not having everything reduced to a single “answer,” you’ll delight in this artwork.

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Trump DOJ Sues California

I’ve had my hair on fire the last three days on the Trump administration’s unprecedented new interference in the midterm elections because it represents a high water mark in its effort to intrude in state-run elections.

Sequestering and not counting already-cast ballots — on the dubious grounds that the Trump administration has identified alleged noncitizens who received mail-in ballots — is a dramatic escalation of its month-long attack on state-run federal elections. (It also fits perfectly into the thematics of a GOP campaign largely being run on racist and xenophobic themes in the absence of any affirmative arguments for more of the same.)

But we haven’t really talked about the administration’s end game here, which has now become a little more clear.

At this stage, the administration doesn’t appear to be advancing a strategy to tilt the outcomes in particular elections by disqualifying a significant number of ballots or by suppressing the overall vote. Even if that was its goal, the numbers involved at this point just aren’t big enough.

We learned yesterday in the lawsuit that the Trump DOJ filed against California that its list of “likely noncitizen voters” contained in the vicinity of 20,000 names. I had assumed that the DOJ list was specific to Los Angeles County since acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent his list on an encrypted thumb drive (along with a sticky note containing the password). But the lawsuit says the 20,000 names is a statewide list — “with many addresses listed in Los Angeles County.” (That’s down a wee bit from the 190,000 noncitizen voters that the Trump administration previously claimed California had.)

Even if you account for the atmospherics of the DOJ suing to weed out alleged noncitizen voters having some dampening effect on minority voter turnout, the number of alleged noncitizen voters aren’t anywhere near big enough to have either a significant or predictably pro-GOP effect on election outcomes in California.

So what does that leave as plausible goals for the administration?

Goal #1: Get a federal court somewhere to rule that the law provides a role for the federal government in making sure noncitizens don’t vote

Given what the law says, including the Constitution, legal experts insist it’s a long-shot bid. But it’s a gambit with a high upside and not much political downside. You don’t make shots you don’t take, etc.

That being said, I’m struggling with why the Trump DOJ would pick California as the venue for this gambit versus a reliably red state in a federal circuit that is more obviously MAGA-tilted than the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California.

(For what it’s worth, the Trump DOJ is trying to get the California case in front of the Trump-appointed judge who presided over Hunter Biden’s tax fraud conviction, arguing that this case is related to an election case he’s already hearing. But there’s nothing about U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi that marks him as a radical MAGA-coded judge. Already fighting back, California wants the case assigned to a Clinton-appointed judge who is already hearing a election case that it claims is more related than Scarsi’s is.)

Ultimately prevailing in the California lawsuit — or in yet-to-be-filed cases in other states — would open the door wide to the Trump administration being able to intervene in the election in much more robust ways under the guise of policing the virtually nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting.

But with less than three weeks until voting ends, it might make more sense to view this as a long-term bid with bigger potential impacts coming after the 2026 election — except in one regard, which brings us to the next goal.

Goal #1A: Create election chaos

In the short term, with Republicans almost certain to lose the House and the Senate increasingly at risk, sowing chaos has mostly upside for the GOP. In that sense, the California lawsuit is less a legal strategy than a political one.

Noncitizen voting is the Big Lie of 2026, so think of this as a prelude to a post-election refusal to accept the results, fights over close individual races, and desperate attempts to salvage a majority in either chamber. Conflicting court rulings, emergency appeals, and a last-ditch bid to get the Supreme Court to decide the election somehow all gin up a crisis atmosphere that’s then used to justify extraordinary interventions of one form or another.

The point isn’t to fear-monger here, but just to note that chaos favors the sure loser desperate to do anything to avoid their fate.

Goal #2: Delegitimizing a Democratic win

Regardless of the outcome of the California lawsuit, the Big Lie of noncitizen voting will inevitably be sustained past the election into the new Congress — as a GOP hand-wave to minimize its own losses, dismiss the Democratic mandate, resist a post-election narrative of MAGA’s demise — and soothe the wounded ego of a certain former reality TV star.

The lawsuit in California helps to fortify that rhetorical argument, even if the Trump DOJ ultimately loses. Time and again, MAGA has seized on setbacks and losses as proof of is own victimhood.

One caveat to all of the above: California may not be the only place that the Trump DOJ decides to do battle on noncitizen voting while voting is underway. It laid the same groundwork in some two dozen states as it did in California by requesting voter information over the past several months in its pursuit of the mythic noncitizen voter, ultimately losing repeatedly in court. If you see evidence of this happening in other states, please let me know. My contact info is linked at the bottom of this post.

Quote of the Day

Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times:

And now the Trump administration is attempting to strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, of her citizenship so as to deport her. This is more than just another persecution of one of Trump’s political enemies. Rather, his government is tacitly declaring the citizenship of all foreign-born people provisional, their Americanness something that can be revoked. It’s a frontal attack on the idea of constitutional equality.

Uneven Playing Field Alert

Your occasional reminder that U.S. elections are, by law, tilted in favor of monied interests to a greater extent than at any point since at least the Gilded Age:

• NYT: Avalanche of G.O.P. Cash Keeps the Party Competitive Despite Its Problems
• Politico: Megadonors are powering Republicans’ spending advantage
• NYT: Most of Ken Paxton’s Money Can Be Traced to One Man: Elon Musk

See You Back Here Monday

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A Quick Heads Up

For transparency reasons, I like peeling back the curtain on any changes we make to Morning Memo — but doing so always runs the risk of creating some confusion. So let me be really clear upfront: The change I’m about to mention doesn’t require you to do anything differently on your end.

Beginning next week, we’re going to be using a new email provider to send out Morning Memo each day. If you already receive Morning Memo by email, it will still come to you the same as usual, but it will come directly from TPM instead of from Substack. It might look a tad different in your inbox — and the email itself will look more like TPM — so I wanted you to be aware in advance.

You’ll still be able to read Morning Memo in the email version or on Substack or at TPM. Your choice.

We’re making this change because in this deeply fractured media world, we’re trying to build out the TPM ecosystem and not be overly reliant on outside platforms. Better to live and die on our own merits than be subject to the vagaries of third parties.

OK, let’s get to today’s news.

A Hugely Important Distinction

As I feared, the developing story on the Trump DOJ targeting actual ballots in Los Angeles County is creating some confusion.

I tried in yesterday’s Morning Memo to make clear that this was different in kind and degree from the Trump administration’s previous efforts to purge voter rolls in advance of the election. But the reactions I’ve seen since, both to what I wrote and in the larger coverage, suggest that’s still not coming across entirely clearly.

Ironically, the Trump DOJ turns out to be helpful in this regard because it’s now admitted to NBC News that this is in fact different from a purge of voter rolls: “A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list.”

Now, the Trump DOJ has its own reasons for making that distinction, among them trying to get around the federal statute that bars the mass purging of voter rolls in the 90 days before the election. But in this instance what the Trump DOJ is saying also happens to be true — and the truth is even more damning. Its election interference is no longer hypothetical; it’s happening now while real ballots are being cast.

Once you make the category distinction between voter rolls and actual ballots already cast or soon to be cast, the seriousness of the threat from the federal government becomes a lot more obvious. The Trump DOJ is demanding that a specific batch of ballots be sequestered and not counted until citizenship is confirmed — an additional step in the tabulation process not provided for by law and which experts say would lead to a rushed and sloppy process that likely to disenfranchise legal voters.

The threat is serious even if the Trump DOJ is unable to cite any lawful authority for its demand to California and even if there is no legal basis for it to order states to sequester ballots of people the Trump DOJ claims to have identified as “likely noncitizen voters.”

With that framework in mind, let’s run through the latest developments and the big questions still outstanding …

The Latest From California …

• READ: The Oct. 13 demand letter that acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter (the No. 2 official at DOJ!) sent to California Secretary ‌of State Shirley Weber.
• READ: McCotter sent a virtually identical letter to Dean Logan, the top election official in Los Angeles County.
• A “Sticky Note”!?! In a statement, Secretary ‌of State Weber revealed that the “password-protected thumb drive” containing the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” that McCotter references in his letters was accompanied by … wait for it … a sticky note with the password on it. Top notch information security going on there at the Trump DOJ.
• Say More About “Election Integrity”: Popping an unsecured thumb drive (see sticky note above) into a USB port in your election office is just not something election administrators not named Tina Peters would dream of doing. “We have not accessed the drive because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols,” Logan, the Los Angeles County election official, said in a statement. “We do not consider the device a secure medium.” This is not the first time that the “election integrity” crowd has revealed how little regard it has for actual secure processes and procedures.

JUST IN: Trump DOJ List Challenged in Court

This morning, the UCLA Voting Rights Project, on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and a Los Angeles resident, sought a temporary restraining order to preempt the Trump DOJ’s actions in California.

The requested TRO, filed in an existing case in D.C. against Attorney General Todd Blanche and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, seeks to block the Trump DOJ from coercing California officials into using its purported list of “likely noncitizen voters” to withhold ballots from voters or to segregate and not count ballots already cast.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan did not immediately scheduled a hearing on the TRO but set a deadline of 5 p.m. ET Friday for the parties to file a proposed briefing schedule.

What We Still Don’t Know

The big outstanding questions include:

• How many people are on the Trump DOJ list? Since McCotter doesn’t say in his letters and California officials haven’t even opened the file, we don’t know how long the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” actually is. A DOJ spokesperson allowed to the LA Times that the number is “in the thousands.” That’s a pretty big range.
• Did all or just some California counties receive a similar letter from the Trump DOJ? Similar letters were mailed out to other California counties, CBS News reports, but it’s not clear if it went to all or just some of them.
• Has the Trump DOJ targeted other states with similar demand letters? While the thrust of the Trump DOJ’s election-chaos has been aimed at blue states, there are tight House races in red states, too, where chaos might serve to delegitimize election results unfavorable to the GOP. Also worth noting that red state officials might be cooperative and not as quick to go public as California officials were.

If you know of similar efforts by the Trump DOJ in other states, please get in touch with me via the encrypted methods here.

‘Amateur Hour at the Department of Justice’

UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen, in a not-so-succinct headline: “DOJ’s Threat Letter to California Voting Officials with a 48-Hour Deadline is Amateurish Political Theater Aimed at Sowing Chaos, Not to Mention a Demand That Likely Violates Federal Law and Election Security Practices”

The Retribution: Ilhan Omar Edition

The one-two punch of retributive investigations of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by both the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice is looking worse the more that comes out:

• Denaturalization Is Trump’s Goal: The WSJ confirms that the investigation of Omar is “aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her.”
• Flashback: D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who touted her office’s role in the DOJ investigation of Omar during a Fox News appearance this week, was suspended by the same network in 2019, when she hosted a show there, for on-air comments about Omar: “Omar wears a hijab, which, according to the Quran 33:59, tells women to cover so they won’t get molested.” Pirro said at the time. “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”
• Speech or Debate Clause: U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh of D.C. did in fact limit the scope of the search warrant for Omar’s D.C. home after a protracted back and forth, CNN reports. In doing so, Sharbaugh reportedly cited precedent that preserves the protections for member of Congress contained in the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Nonetheless, Omar’s phone was among the items seized during the search of her home, NBC News reports.

Trump: Execute the Leakers

Trump: "In my opinion, leakers should be shot. In the old days we used to shoot leakers."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-10-14T21:35:22.772Z

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What Election Officials Have Long Feared

In a major escalation of its multi-prong attempts to interfere in the midterm elections, the Trump DOJ has given California 48 hours to take steps to prevent an unknown number of alleged noncitizen voters in Los Angeles County from voting — or face legal action, Reuters exclusively reports.

This new Trump DOJ initiative is different from its earlier, largely unsuccessful efforts to obtain voter information from various states. Instead, it is now demanding that Los Angeles County take affirmative steps to prevent the counting of ballots cast by people on a list provided by DOJ who it alleges are “likely noncitizen voters” who received mail-in ballots.

The Trump DOJ’s demands came in the form of a threat letter Tuesday to California Secretary ‌of State Shirley Weber from acting Deputy Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter — an extraordinary intervention by the department’s No. 2 official.

The existence of the letter was confirmed by the Justice Department. It’s not clear how DOJ came up with its list, which was provided to Los Angeles County on a “password-protected thumb drive.” Past attempts by the Trump administration to identify noncitizens who are allegedly registered to vote have been deeply flawed and wildly inaccurate.

In the letter, McCotter sets an arbitrary 48-hour deadline for California to review the DOJ list, but the more alarming development is what other steps McCotter demands that California take, according to Reuters:

• refuse to send ballots to people who appear on the DOJ list until their citizenship status has been confirmed;
• segregate the mail-in ballots already returned by people who appear on the DOJ list;
• don’t count the mail-in ballots of those on the DOJ list until their citizenship status has been confirmed.

These are the most aggressive steps the Trump administration has taken in its jihad against mythical noncitizen voting, which it greatly exaggerates as a pretext for the federal takeover of elections, the delegitimization of free and fair elections, and the disregard of election results that it disfavors.

“Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” McCotter wrote in the letter, echoing one element of the Trump administration’s long-running disinformation campaign. McCotter threatened to seek emergency relief in court if California does not comply with his demands.

The latest move — challenging entire batches of ballots and threatening to go to court unless Los Angeles County undertakes specific steps in its handling of the election — comes as the election in California is already underway. Mail-in ballots were sent out to every voter in the state beginning on Oct. 5, the same day that ballot drop-off centers opened statewide.

This is the kind of Trump administration interference that election officials nationwide have been dreading and planning for this entire election cycle. The executive branch has no constitutional role in the conduct of federal elections, which is delegated to the states.

It’s not yet clear if the Trump DOJ sent similar demand letters to election officials in other states.

Essayli Likely to be Booted As LA USA

In another blow to President Trump’s U.S. attorneys scheme in blue states, a federal judge appears poised to disqualify Bill Essayli as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bloomberg reports.

Essayli was already disqualified by the court from serving as acting U.S. attorney, but the Trump DOJ tried to sidestep that ruling by making Essayli the first assistant U.S. attorney — with all the powers to run the office.

But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a similar case in Nevada, ruled that first assistants assume the power of the U.S. attorney only if they were already installed when the office was vacated.

Not Just DHS — DOJ Targets Rep. Omar, Too

D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is stumbling all over herself to get in on the targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by the Trump administration.

The day after DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant on Omar’s D.C. home in a what appears to be a bogus investigation into how her late father obtained naturalized U.S. citizenship, Pirro went on Fox News to declare that Omar is under separate DOJ investigation over her financial disclosure forms.

The public announcement of a criminal investigation by Pirro would be highly irregular at any time, but especially coming just three weeks before the election, further cementing the politicized nature of the Trump administration’s targeting of Omar … as if there was any doubt.

In the immigration investigation, family members of Omar have been issued grand jury subpoenas, the NYT reports.

DOJ Stiffed Minnesota Over ICE Shootings

You can be forgiven for thinking that the Trump DOJ had relented after six months and began sharing evidence with Minnesota in the three ICE shootings during Operation Metro Surge. Hennepin County prosecutor Mary Moriarty held a press conference in July announcing the evidence-sharing agreement that had been reached with DOJ.

But in new court filings yesterday, Minnesota officials, including Moriarty, revealed that the Trump DOJ ceased cooperating again after her press conference. And the impression they leave is that the agreement, which was struck with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis and led to an initial round of evidence sharing, was quickly scotched by Main Justice after news of it broke.

In her declaration, Moriarty says that she spoke with U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen on Sept. 10, “who told me, in sum and substance, that evidence sharing from the USAO as agreed to in the June 26 letter would be on pause indefinitely ‘in light of challenges with D.C.’”

The new revelations come in a federal lawsuit that Minnesota filed in D.C. seeking to obtain evidence gathered by DHS and DOJ in the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Minnesota has already charged ICE agent Christian Castro in the Sosa-Celis shooting.

Texas Considers Charges Against ICE Agent

In Houston, the district attorney is considering charging an ICE agent who allegedly ran his vehicle over a Mexican national Saturday with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. ICE’s claim that the man ran in front of the ICE agent’s vehicle is undermined by security camera footage showing the car veering toward the fleeing man. One of his legs was broken, not both, as previously reported.

Thread of the Day

WOW. Kristi Noem and Elon Musk, among others, "chose to turn the power of the federal government against a singular employee with an impeccable record of public service. … The attacks against Ms. Comans were based entirely on false information" and many officials "knew [they] were untrue."

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) 2026-10-13T18:24:07.535Z

Pete Hegseth Watch

• After firing the publisher and editor of Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon has installed one of its own public affairs officials to run the once-independent military newspaper — and he will keep his Pentagon job while doing it, Military.com reports.
• In “The Dawn Of The Self-Funding Pentagon,” Spencer Ackerman warns of the dangers of the “deal” that the Trump administration has stuck to give the Pentagon an equity position in Venezuela’s oil fields outside of the congressional appropriations process: “This is a step in the direction of the U.S. military holding a revenue-generating stake in sectors of another country’s civilian economy.”

AI Did Me In: The Kim Guilfoyle Story

All the credit to the WSJ for the devastating series of stories that led to the forced resignation of Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece. In surveying the aftermath of its work, the newspaper had a few more gems to drop about Guilfoyle’s final days:

Bad self portraits (the lyrics from the Lake Street Dive song are unbelievably on point): Guilfoyle decorated the official ambassadorial residence with large self-portraits.

AI did it: After the second major WSJ story, which relied on text messages showing her soliciting a major GOP donor to pay off her $100,000 Amex bill, Guilfoyle told White House officials that the text messages were AI-generated. “The officials didn’t believe her claims,” according to the WSJ.

Did she find out at the same time we did? This account raises the possibility that Guilfoyle found out that she was being asked to resign when it was announced by the White House, although that is not the only plausible interpretation:

During a Tuesday-morning prep session for his new press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first briefing at the White House, the president instructed Zacharia to tell the world that he was asking Guilfoyle to resign, people familiar with the matter said. Trump didn’t speak directly to Guilfoyle before making the decision, one of the people said.

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The Retribution: Ilhan Omar Edition

It’s easy to get tripped up by the sheer volume of Trump II depredations — the corruption, the retribution, the destruction, and the absurdity of it all. Add in the proximity of the midterm elections, and there’s a risk of falling into the pedantry of category distinctions.

What’s an election interference gambit versus an appeal to racism? What’s a fit of retribution versus an attack on the constitutional order? What’s an abuse of power versus conspiracizing? One easy framing adjustment is simply to use “and” or “all of the above.”

The unparalleled early holiday morning search by federal agents of the D.C. home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) three weeks before the election perfectly captures the importance of allowing for an “all of the above” category. Otherwise, you can’t truly make sense of it all.

An Attack on Elections

An overt investigatory step against a sitting member of Congress up for election in three weeks is an astonishingly brazen abuse of power. The DOJ norm to refrain from such actions within 60 days of an election doesn’t quite do justice to how out of the ordinary this search was.

The DOJ norm was put in place before the widespread use of mail-in ballots stretched out Election Day from a single date to a rolling two-month election, which would caution restraint even farther out. And in fact even in the old days, notable developments in investigations, in my experience, tended to slow by the summer, after the primaries had locked in the candidates for the general election.

This is precisely the kind of pre-election ugliness we talked about Friday.

An Attack on Naturalized Citizens

The purported basis for the investigation of Omar is immigration fraud — based on a persistent but baseless far-right conspiracy that decades ago, when she was 12, her now-deceased father schemed his way into the country illegally.

The search warrant, as described to the New York Times, lists “potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge.”

The underlying theory of the case, such as it is, is that Omar should be denaturalized. It makes the citizenship of all naturalized citizens contingent and dependent on who is holding power at any given time.

An Attack on Somalis

Black women — see, e.g., Lisa Cook, Fani Willis, Letitia James — are a favorite target of Trump. Omar is Black and Somali and from Minnesota, a trifecta of Trump race-baiting, smearing, and dehumanizing. The search of her home came just a few days after Trump tried to instigate Minnesotans into a race war against Somalis. The message is so rancid: Omar doesn’t belong here, conned her way in (as a child), defrauded her way to financial prosperity, and has no right to be here, let alone in Congress.

An Attack on Congress

The executive branch enforcing the law against members of the legislative branch has always required a delicate balance of constitutional imperatives. There is nothing delicate or well-balanced about Trump’s ongoing attacks on Congress’ constitutional role. The Omar investigation is another in a series of threats against all members of Congress and against the legislative branch’s constitutional role.

An Attack on Elected Democrats

The Omar search is made worse because it comes after President Trump targeted her for years and publicly announced in January that a criminal investigation of her was underway. He has made the retribution element abundantly clear. It’s part of his broader attack on elected Dems — not merely a rhetorical attack but an abuse of his office to unleash the power of the federal government against his political foes.

It is all of the above — and more.

One other notable element of this retributive investigation: It is being helmed by Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of DHS, not DOJ. HSI has been in the lead on some of the most glaring retributive investigations in recent months. With a bloated budget, DHS, across its many component agencies, has police and investigatory powers that lets the Trump White House bypass or sideline DOJ. The FBI and DOJ aren’t sidelined completely. HSI can’t prosecute cases without DOJ, and DOJ had a role in obtaining the search warrant for Omar’s home (which, dismayingly, a D.C. federal judge signed off on). But this adds to the evidence that DHS is Trump’s favored tool of authoritarianism.

If there was any doubt that the Omar case is being run out of the White House, the administration did little to hide it. A senior Trump administration official told the Washington Post that in addition to Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow, the investigation involved White House deputy homeland security adviser Anthony Salisbury. I can’t emphasize enough how far over the cliff’s edge we are with White House-directed investigations.

The worst predictions of what a second Trump term would be like are coming true right before our eyes.

Thread of the Day

There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.

— Andy Craig (@andycraig.bsky.social) 2026-10-12T12:48:26.501Z

The Retribution: Full Court Press Edition

It’s not just Ilhan Omar. You can feel the ramping up of retribution from President Trump as the midterm election draws closer:

• Free press: In another in a series of targeted attacks on the press by the Trump administration, the Trump DOJ has purported to launch an antitrust investigation against ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC over their pool coverage of the White House. The move comes after the networks banded together to boycott President Trump’s ban of CNN from the White House.
• Federal Reserve: President Trump renewed his effort to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board, establishing a committee to “investigate” the bogus mortgage fraud charges the administration has ginned up against her.
• ICC: The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the ​International Criminal Court on Friday within hours of one of its former judges winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Lawlessness: Defiance of Judges Edition

D.C.: U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of D.C. damned near lost her mind in an emergency hearing over the Trump administration’s holiday weekend removal of more than 400 trees from a National Park Service golf course in the nation’s capital that President Trump wants to redesign unilaterally. Reyes had previously ordered that the Trump administration provide notice to the plaintiffs before any major changes were made to the course — and time for the court to address them. Instead, the administration provided notice at 5 p.m. on the Friday of a three-day weekend and removed the trees on Saturday. Reyes became the latest federal judge to rue having trusted the administration and given it the benefit of the doubt. “I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done,” she said.

New York: The Trump DOJ apologized to a federal judge in Manhattan after pro-Trump TV ads paid for by the federal government continued to air after the court ordered an immediate halt to the ads on Sunday evening. The DOJ lawyer told the judge that he emailed her temporary restraining order blocking the ads to DHS counsel 72 minutes after it was issued, but DHS counsel didn’t see the email until the next morning. Notably, the Trump DOJ had stopped short of defending the legality of the ads in court, arguing instead that the ads were already scheduled to stop running so the case was moot.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Florida/D.C.: After losing its last two chief prosecutors, the “grand conspiracy” investigation in south Florida is now being run out of Main Justice, the Wall Street Journal reports: “Lawyers in the deputy attorney general’s office are now directly overseeing the Florida-based investigation from Washington, officials said.”
• Nationwide: “[M]ore than 60 people charged in the past few months as part of a surge by the Justice Department to prosecute as many noncitizen voters as possible before November’s midterm elections,” the WSJ reports.
• Arizona: A federal judge sanctioned a DOJ attorney in an immigration case for making a “factually baseless” accusation against the immigrant’s attorney. The DOJ lawyer was ordered to undergo at least one hour each of continuing legal education on (i) the special role of U.S. attorneys; and (ii) the need for evidentiary support for all factual contentions.

Midterms Watch

• Texas-Senate: To celebrate the arrival of 2025, Ken Paxton partied in Dubai with his girlfriend and two fugitives from the U.S., the WSJ reports.
• Nebraska-Senate: The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC for the Senate GOP leadership, is pouring in another $8 million to save Sen. Pete Ricketts (R- NE), bringing its total spend in the race to $15 million.
• NYT: Inside Elon Musk’s $276 Million Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans

Trump Mocks Protester Assaulted at His Rally

holy shit — a protester at the Trump rally gets physically assaulted after they interrupt the rally by a man who punches her in the face. Trump smears the protester as a "fat guy"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-12T23:46:07.086Z

Mass Deportation Watch

Surveillance video captured an ICE agent appearing to strike a fleeing immigrant Saturday morning near Houston. The man, who was apparently not the initial target of ICE, reportedly suffered two broken legs in the incident.

No More Kimberly Guilfoyle to Kick Around

Even as President Trump was publicly dangling the possibility of firing Kimberly Guilfoyle, the WSJ was cranking out another in its series of wtf stories on the U.S. ambassador to Greece: “At Davos, Kimberly Guilfoyle Boasted of Private Jet Trips, Luxury Stays.”

The WSJ didn’t just have witnesses to Guilfoyle’s grasping at Davos in January. It had a recording of her, too. Some of these quotes, y’all:

• To an American businessman whose help she wanted getting into a dinner thrown by Greek House Davos for Eric Trump: “You know, I can deliver the world to you. Which you deserve. …  “I’m going to make you a lot of f—ing money.”
• Furious that she wasn’t invited to the dinner: “You don’t have the f—ing U.S., you know, ambassador to Greece not come. She should be kissing my f—ing ass.”
• Bragging on her ties to Greek shipping tycoon Nikolas Tsakos: “I see Nikos every f—ing day. … I’m flying with him to Paris. I’m with him for a f—ing week. … He loves me. Honey, I spent Christmas with him. New Years. OK? Gstaad. Like, everywhere.”

Alas, we learned this morning from the White House press secretary that President Trump has asked Guilfoyle to resign. It was fun while it lasted.

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One Dark Damn Day

We’ve endured some very dark days in Trump II, but yesterday was particularly grim — and a possible taste of what’s to come between now and Election Day.

President Trump launched a race war against Somalians and Somali-Americans in Minnesota.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exuberantly announced that the holiday season execution by firing squad of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan for the Ft. Hood shooting will be live-streamed.

In New York City, an ICE agent shot and wounded a Dominican national who was in his car with his 5-year-old child in the backseat.

In a televised debate in the Michigan Senate race, GOP nominee Mike Rogers used Islamophobic smears to baselessly associate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed with terrorism — after which President Trump called El-Sayed a “Terrorist Sympathizer” in a social media post.

Somehow, the Michigan Senate debate was worse than the Georgia Senate debate, where GOP nominee Rep. Mike Collins has so many ties to neo-Nazis that it’s hard to keep count, prompting Sen. Jon Ossoff to scoff that Collins had “hired half the Third Reich” in his congressional office.

Against that backdrop, the Trump DOJ is actively seeking to vindictively prosecute former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for allegedly lying to Congress as the star witness in the Jan. 6 committee hearings.

While the chaos of Trump II is often erratic and unpredictable, yesterday’s events are all tied to the upcoming election one way or the other. Even the ICE shooting came only two days after ICE increased its daily quota back to 3,000 arrests a day ahead of the midterms. The collective desperation of Trump and the GOP to avert a disastrous electoral defeat is likely to produce some even darker days over the next three and half weeks.

Reaction of the Day

Sen. Chris Murphy stunned as he hears for the first time that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to livestream a firing squad execution, describing the decision as “disgusting” and “medieval.” pic.twitter.com/SR0E6hS67k

— Erin Burnett OutFront (@OutFrontCNN) October 9, 2026

The Persecution of Cassidy Hutchinson

The vindictive prosecution of Cassidy Hutchinson is being improbably spearheaded by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. It would normally have absolutely no role in pursuing this kind of case, but the division is led by the ambitious Harmeet Dhillon, who is eager to audition for a promotion.

Dhillon’s team began presenting purported evidence against Hutchinson to a D.C. federal grand jury this week. While most of the reports cast it as investigation into whether Hutchison lied to Congress, the Washington Post, citing an unnamed source, suggests there maybe a twist: “[P]rosecutors have been exploring charging Hutchinson with a civil rights violation, potentially bringing a more unusual case than a simple charge of lying to Congress, one of the people familiar said.”

In Other Vindictive Prosecution News …

A federal judge has cleared the way for Kseniia Petrova to conduct discovery into whether she was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump administration. Petrova is the Harvard researcher who was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport in February 2025 and later charged with smuggling for bringing frog embryo samples into the country for her research.

New Info on Kurt Olsen’s Failed Polygraph

The exact circumstances of the failed polygraph of Trump DOJ official Kurt Olsen keep dribbling out. The latest, from the New York Times (emphasis mine):

It turned out he had failed a polygraph test about his contacts with foreigners, which imperiled his security clearance, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Olsen said he complied with all requirements regarding foreign contacts and had not resigned over his clearance, but declined to say more.

Kimpossibly Dumb

With everything else going on, the Kimberly Guilfoyle scandal is almost a welcome relief — a Molière comedy of the Trump era.

The official responses to the Wall Street Journal blockbuster were quite unimpressive.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio spewed a lot of bluster in refusing to answer any questions about his ambassador to Greece — but he also offered no defense of Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Vice President JD Vance was similarly unenthusiastic about rushing to Guilfoyle’s defense:

JD Vance dodges a question on Kimberly Guilfoyle asking a donor for $100k in exchange for political access:"Well, so… with, with that hypothetical, obviously I don't love that. But, you know, I don't know exactly who you're talking about. I don't know the full details."

— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2026-10-08T18:24:15.109558991Z

Bad News for Kim: Loose Cannon Is Talking

If there’s one thing to know about the latest Guilfoyle scandal, it’s that her accuser doesn’t exactly fit the profile of the most reliable narrator. So the WSJ really had to bring the receipts, as it describes here.

Making matters worse for her is that her accuser seems to love the spotlight and spent the day talking to damn near any TV news outlet that would listen.

ABC:

CBS:

CNN:

'There was no question it was a quid pro quo. She knew she was nominated. She tried to cover it up.' MAGA Donor Eric Deters talks with @jaketapper about Amb. Kim Guilfoyle asking him for $100K. pic.twitter.com/q8Wz6GSxP5

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) October 8, 2026

MSNow:

Late Night Fun

With so few Trump scandals truly breaking through into the broader cultural zeitgeist, Guilfoyle’s brazenness, shamelessness, and sloppiness have combined to potentially make her the rare exception.

Kimmel:

The Daily Show:

Have a Good Holiday Weekend

See you back here Tuesday.

Check out Morning Memo playlists on Spotify and YouTube.

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The Tip of the Politicization Spear

Since the dawn of Trump II, Stephen Miller has been the barely hidden hand running the Justice Department from the White House. Now a new report from CBS News adds quite a bit more detail to the level of influence and control that Miller exerts over the Trump DOJ.

The story is framed around an apparent conflict of interest. Miller attended an counterterrorism training session at FBI headquarters on Sept. 29 that was focused on President Trump’s notorious NSPM-7 on domestic terrorism and political violence. Miller urged the federal agents in attendance to be more aggressive in pursuing threats against government officials and their families — at the same time he was an alleged victim and potential witness in a case of alleged threats to his wife, Katie. Miller was reportedly frustrated by the pace of the criminal investigation into the allegedly threatening communications.

“In his comments, Miller spoke about the need for federal law enforcement agents to be more proactive in investigating threat cases and told them that no case is too small, whether the threats are directed toward a congressman, a spouse, friends, loved ones or a speaker at a college campus, the senior FBI official said,” according to CBS News.

The top two FBI agents in the counterterrorism division of the FBI Washington Field Office were demoted last month over “frustration shared by the Miller family” that the Katie Miller case was moving too slowly. Their demotions reportedly factored into the resignation of FBI co-deputy director Andrew Bailey, although the FBI publicly dimissed that reporting as “fake news.”

Two days after Miller spoke to federal agents at the training session, a Massachusetts man was indicted for cyberstalking on Oct. 1 — despite reported concerns from career prosecutors in Boston that his communications to Katie Miller didn’t amount to a federal crime. He was charged with using interstate communications with the intent to harass and intimidate by sending her at least 40 calls, voicemails, and text messages in August and September, some of them crude and profane.

But a glaring conflict of interest is just one element of this story, and probably not the most important one.

Notably, this episode appears to be a subset of the Trump administration’s broader push to lump all threats together with legitimate political opposition and brand them as domestic terrorism. The criminalization of political opposition to Trump is one of the darkest through-lines of his second term.

In this episode, two things jump out: (i) Miller picked a counterterrorism training session to urge more aggressive action in cases involving threats and harassment, citing the assassination of Charlie Kirk; and (ii) Katie Miller’s alleged cyberstalker was “arrested by members of the F.B.I.’s joint terrorism task force, an unusual show of force for a cyberstalking case,” the NYT noted last week.

In other words, what might have normally been a local law enforcement matter is now federalized and turned into a counterterrorism investigation. The Trump White House went so far as to defend Miller’s presence at the training session on domestic terrorism grounds, telling CBS News that Miller is tasked with carrying out the NSPM-7 mandate to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle all stages of organized political violence and domestic terrorism.”

The other big picture issue is the one Morning Memo keeps coming back to: the mind-blowing fact of an unabashedly political White House aide addressing federal agents at FBI headquarters. The DOJ, including the FBI, being run out of the White House remains the defining corrupt act of the Trump II presidency.

The CBS News story — co-bylined by Sarah N. Lynch, a superb reporter on the DOJ beat — goes quite a bit further in revealing how involved Miller is in the running of the Justice Department:

• In an earlier episode, Miller pressured the DOJ to take action against a Virginia political activist who protested outside of the Millers’ Arlington home and distributed their address on flyers. A federal magistrate judge twice rejected search warrant applications in the case, CBS News previously reported.
• In the Virginia case, Miller asked FBI counterterrorism agents to go undercover in his neighborhood’s political activist group and regularly called the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the the Eastern District of Virginia for updates.
• Miller has been holding monthly meetings with the heads of federal law enforcement agencies about the deployments of the National Guard and federal agents to D.C. and Memphis in Trump’s “violent crime crackdown.”
• “Miller is also in touch multiple times a week with the Deputy Attorney General’s office to discuss fraud and immigration cases, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter,” according to CBS News. The DAG is essentially the chief operations officer at DOJ and runs the department day to day.

Miller’s meddling (which may be too weak of word) at DOJ is truly unprecedented. He is the tip of Trump’s spear aimed at politicizing the Justice Department.

Kurt Olsen Reportedly Failed a Polygraph

Kurt Olsen — the Big Lie proponent who stepped down as the lead prosecutor in the bogus investigation into a “grand conspiracy” by the Deep State to deprive Donald Trump of his civil rights — had his DOJ security clearance terminated last month after failing a polygraph test, Reuters reports.

‘I Can Do Whatever I Want, If I Want’

Trump: "I could've done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could've done very very bad things to Joe Biden. I could've done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama … I can do whatever I want, if I want."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-07T17:44:12.919Z

Mass Deportation Watch

• The American Prospect: In an important development, U.S. District Judge John C. Hinderaker, a Trump appointee in Arizona, has ordered DHS to “facilitate” the return to the United States of an Egyptian man that it deported to Equatorial Guinea, a country where he has no ties. As reporter Gillian Brockell notes, the ruling “could have far-reaching implications for thousands of others subjected to the Trump administration’s third-country removal scheme.”
• Washington Sun: In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Gary R. Brown, a Trump appointee in Brooklyn, condemned ICE agents for falsifying records to cover up a pair of bad arrests. “The evidence suggests that ICE attempted to support their unsupported misidentification argument through false or misleading documentation and testimony,” Brown concluded.
• CNN: ICE told agents nationwide on Tuesday to increase immigration arrests by 1,000 people per day, returning to a previous goal of 3,000 daily arrests.

Quote of the Day

“On Monday night, it was our understanding that Christa was brain dead and that life support would be removed the next day. But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team, including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking.”—Randy Spivey, a lawyer for Christa Pike, on her recovery from Tennessee’s attempted execution

The Corruption: Kimberly Guilfoyle Edition

The WSJ manages to outdo its remarkable story last month on Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece and former fiancée of Don Jr., with a follow-up bombshell.

I started to summarize the highlights, but I really can’t do it justice. Just go read it.

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Worse Than 2006?

Republican political consultants are practically falling over each other to make the most dire pronouncements about the GOP’s fate in the midterms.

“If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006,” one national Republican strategist tells Politico. Democrats picked up 31 seats that year and ended 12 years of GOP control of the House.

I’m deeply skeptical of poll-driven narratives in election coverage — which the past few cycles have only reinforced — but there’s quite a bit more to go on than just public opinion surveys in assessing the state of the midterms. Between now and Election Day, I’ll be frequently including in Morning Memo a sampling of those additional data points: which races are being newly contested and which aren’t, where the spending is going and where it’s not, and other markers on the state of the race — including President Trump’s unscripted intemperate outbursts.

The Cook Political Report on Tuesday moved three Senate races in Democrats’ favor:

• Kansas from Lean Republican to Toss Up
• North Carolina from Lean Democrat to Likely Democrat
• New Hampshire from Toss Up to Lean Democrat

In deep-red South Carolina, appointed Sen. Darline Graham (R) is struggling to hold on to her late brother’s seat, forcing the Senate Leadership Fund to dump $5 million into her race against Dr. Annie Andrews. In a sign of the brewing trouble for the GOP, Trump went on a “crazed, manic tirade” this week against Andrews, using an anti-trans slur among other attacks.

On the House side, in a sign of increasing desperation, Republicans have quietly resumed backing Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) despite earlier calls from within the party for him to drop out of the race amidst allegations against him of domestic abuse.

Election Ratfuckery Alert

The Trump administration continues to pull levers and push buttons to try to abuse the power of the federal government to swing the election its way:

• The Department of Homeland Security has investigated more than 150 voter registration groups in search of evidence that they’re helping noncitizens illegally register to vote, according to internal documents obtained via FOIA and provided to the New York Times. The DHS effort has been most heavily focused on groups in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. DHS has considered using undercover agents in its investigations, the documents reveal. Also of note:

The documents also reveal that Heather Honey, a prominent 2020 election denier who now serves as the department’s point person on “election integrity,” provided 48.4 million records of unknown provenance to federal investigators who are trying to find noncitizens on the voter rolls.

• The Trump DOJ dispatched federal prosecutors and an FBI agent to monitor polls in Maricopa and Pima counties in Arizona during its July primary election — a dramatic departure from past DOJ practice of using Civil Rights Division personnel as poll monitors to avoid intimidating voters and local election officials, Democracy Docket reports. The Trump DOJ is apparently planning to continue using prosecutors as poll monitors in the general election, telling Democracy Docket that “department attorneys, including prosecutors, will serve as election monitors.”
• In the run-up to election, ICE has begun asking detainees if they have ever voted illegally and, if so, whether in person or by mail, the WaPo reports. “ICE reviews credible allegations of potential criminal activity within its jurisdiction, including allegations related to election integrity,” an ICE spokesperson told the newspaper.

The Big Lie Crazies Still Big Lie-ing

Big Lie purveyor Tina Peters met with President Trump in the Oval Office this week to discuss “election integrity.” Meanwhile, election denier Cleta Mitchell is “pushing a scheme to have Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seize voting machines,” Democracy Docket reports. Former Trump DOJ official Ed Martin helpfully ties all of this together:

Ed Martin says that Tina Peters met with Trump in the Oval Office today to discuss election integrity and “the plans” for the upcoming midterms elections.

— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) 2026-10-06T01:22:18.693Z

A footnote: All of this comes as the Trump DOJ continues to fight to enforce a grand jury subpoena of Fulton County, Georgia, for the names and personal information of the hundreds of staffers, contractors, and volunteers who worked on the 2020 election. Jan. 6 never ends.

How Trump Can Still Subvert the Election

Election law expert Rick Hasen gives a fairly glowing assessment of how well the guardrails have held so far against Trump’s assault on free and fair midterm elections — and assesses where the greatest risks remain.

Another Classic Trump Con

Trump’s claim that he and his super PAC will start paying for the pro-Trump TV ads that the taxpayer funds have been used to air during the stretch run of the midterms does not mean that he will reimburse the government for the expenses it already incurred.

“White House officials clarified on Tuesday to Politico that the president’s post did not mean the PAC would pay for the spots that had already aired,” Politico reports.

More than $10 million of a $20 million DHS contract has already been spent on the ads, the NYT calculates.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Emil Bove: Last year, when he was acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove pressed the FBI to illegally investigate ICE protesters in Los Angeles in violation of their constitutional rights and bureau policy, an FBI whistleblower alleges. The allegations emerged in a whistleblower complaint to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee by Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s LA field office. Fields also claims that FBI Director Kash Patel succumbed to pressure from the White House to investigate another group of ICE protesters after President Trump saw them in TikTok post.
• Harmeet Dhillon: After purging career lawyers, the Trump DOJ’s once-prestigous Civil Rights Division — led by Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon — is turning to partisans and conspiracists to fill its depleted ranks, the NYT reports.
• David Hearn: Lawyers for David Hearn, the man wrongly accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, sent a letter to the inspectors general of DOJ and DOI asking for an investigation of the circumstances of his arrest and subsequently dismissed prosecution. Among his lawyers is Michael R. Bromwich, a former DOJ IG.

EU Preps for Mass Casualty Russian Attack

In a restricted, closed-door meeting last Wednesday, EU ambassadors discussed how to respond collectively to a hybrid Russian attack that results in mass casualties, a risk they fear looks increasingly likely, Politico reports.

Quote of the Day

“[W]hen a majority of the justices on our highest court show themselves to be consistently indifferent to the growing chasm between law and justice, it is not ‘public rhetoric’ that causes Americans to distrust the Court. It is the Court that surrenders its own legitimacy in the eyes of the public.”—civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill

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Good mix of ages. Mostly guys, as expected.Audiophiles in Vancouver know that there are a few pretty good-sized stores with decent sound rooms locally. I suspect the largest one is HiFi Centre just outside Chinatown. Not the nicest/safest locale in Vancouver and close to some of the open drug use in the city so you'll probably need to be buzzed in if coming for a visit. This location