The Long Tail of Operation Metro Surge

The mostly below-the-radar effort to block Minnesota’s effort to prosecute federal agents for alleged crimes committed during Operation Metro Surge finally burst into public view yesterday.

On behalf of Minnesota, state Attorney General Keith Ellison sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who has refused to extradite ICE agent Christian Castro to face states charges arising from his pursuit of an undocumented immigrant that ended with him allegedly shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis through the front door of a home in Minneapolis. Castro allegedly lied about the incident, claiming Sosa-Celis and another man attacked an ICE agent with a snow shovel and broom. Surveillance video later undermined that account, and the ICE agents involved have been under internal investigation by DHS.

The Jan. 14 non-fatal shooting of Sosa-Celis was sandwiched between the fatal ICE shootings that month of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. No one has been charged yet in those killings, but Minnesota continues to investigate and has succeeded in breaking through the Trump administration’s long-standing refusal to turn over evidence it gathered in those two shootings.

Castro was arrested in May in Texas on a nationwide warrant for the Minnesota charges. The new three-count lawsuit (which names as a co-defendant the sheriff of Cameron County, Texas, who has Castro in custody) filed in federal court in Brownsville seeks Castro’s extradition under the Constitution’s Extradition Clause, the federal Extradition Act, and the Texas Uniform Criminal Extradition Act.

Minnesota has been working since early June to secure Abbott’s sign-off on Castro’s extradition, according to the lawsuit. Repeated efforts to move the extradition paperwork off the governor’s desk have been slow rolled for more than two months now, Minnesota alleges. Meanwhile, extraditions of other defendants from Texas to Minnesota have proceeded as normal while the Castro extradition has languished.

But there’s more …

Trump DOJ Jumps In …

Meanwhile, in a separate case in which Minnesota is attempting to prosecute a federal agent for alleged misconduct, the Trump DOJ has leaped in to muddy the waters on behalf of ICE agent Gregory Morgan, Jr. of Maryland.

Morgan, who was charged in April with brandishing his service weapon in a road-rage-style incident, has sought to move the case against him from Minnesota state court to federal court. Under certain circumstances, federal law entitles federal officers to have their state criminal cases heard in federal court, though state prosecutors would still handle the case and it would be tried under Minnesota law.

The removal fight in the Morgan case has been bubbling for several weeks. There is a hot dispute between Morgan and Minnesota prosecutors over whether he is entitled to removal to federal court, mostly centered on whether Morgan was acting under color of his office at the time of the Feb. 5 incident in which he was driving in an unmarked rental vehicle back to the Whipple Federal Building with his partner at the end of their shift.

Into the middle of this dispute jumped the Trump DOJ last month, filing a Statement of Interest of the United States that weighed in on Morgan’s side to urge the removal of his case to federal court. But what really set things on a different course was that in its filing, the Trump DOJ alleged that the driver at whom Morgan brandished his weapon may have been guilty of criminal conduct for allegedly swerving to prevent Morgan from passing him illegally on the right shoulder of the roadway:

Given the probable cause to believe the driver committed a federal crime and may well have intended to do so again, Officer Morgan was justified in making a show of force.

The prospect of federal criminal prosecution of the driver prompted him and his passenger to assert their Fifth Amendment rights not to testify at the removal hearing without a grant of immunity. That has raised the prospect that the two victims won’t testify at trial either, which would undermine Minnesota’s ability to make its case.

Minnesota sought immunity for the victims to overcome their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves, but the Trump DOJ declined to provide them with immunity. Minnesota is now asking the federal court to grant use immunity. It’s a complicated legal dispute over whose immunity it is to give: Minnesota’s or the federal government’s. The underlying removal question is arguable, too. The removal hearing has been cancelled twice. It has not yet been rescheduled.

The complexity of the legal questions and the slow pace of the proceedings makes this hard to capture with banner headlines and 24/7 coverage. But if you’re looking for accountability for the worst abuses during Operation Metro Surge, this below-the-radar fight to prevent it is where to focus.

The Deportation-Surveillance Complex

Greg Sargent:

It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive, covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict.

Midterms Watch

Florida-Senate: A stunning win in the Democratic primary by longshot state Rep. Angie Nixon, a newly converted Democratic Socialist who was outspent 16-1 by Alex Vindman and did not run a single TV ad in the state, but still prevailed 56%-44%. Nixon will seek to unseat appointed Sen. Ashley Moody (R) in the special general election to finish Marco Rubio’s term.

Florida-07: Rep. Cory Mills was too sleazy even for Republicans, losing 47%-34% to former local TV news anchor Ryan Elijah in the GOP primary.

Alaska-Senate: In the unusual top-four-advance primary, former Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK) outdrew incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) 48%-43% in a preview of the general election. The other Dan Sullivan drew 2%.

2 Dan Sullivans Prompts Criminal Probe?

With the news that federal grand jury subpoenas have been issued over the campaign of the other Dan Sullivan to unseat incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) in the Alaska Senate race, election law expert Rick Hasen cautions about the First Amendment implications of criminalizing this kind of election finagling which, as he notes, happens all the time:

I don’t see how the government could criminalize his running for office for having impure motives. And if it could do so, then it could be a crime every time that the Republican Party backs a Green Party candidate, or Democrats support a MAGA candidate in a primary in the hopes that the candidate would be weaker against a Democrat in the general election. This stuff happens all the time.

To put a blunter point on all of this: The Alaska Senate seat is key to Democrats’ difficult quest to win the Senate. Sen. Sullivan losing votes to the other Sullivan imperils that seat and puts President Trump at greater risk of facing a Democratic-controlled Congress for the rest of his term. Trump controls the DOJ with an iron fist. The DOJ is now investigating the matter.

Ipso Facto Collusion

Elaborating on many of themes from last Thursday’s Morning Memo, Harry Litman explains the inanity of the Trump DOJ suddenly parachuting into the anti-weaponization slush fund/IRS immunity case:

The best way for the Department to support Trump while being nominally opposed was to stay out of the fray. It worked for a time, until its very absence became a factor in the determination that the case was a collusive fraud on the court. Now it has to execute an impossible two-step: supporting Trump in every particular while feigning opposition to him.

DOJ Whistleblower Calls Out Ivy League Attack

Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, is blowing the whistle on what everyone already knew: The Trump administration’s Title VI investigation into alleged antisemitism on Ivy League campuses was pretextual.

Van Erem’s allegations are detailed in a letter that her attorneys sent to Congress while seeking whistleblower protection.

As the WaPo notes:

Her disclosures Tuesday could bolster concerns raised by critics that the administration’s self-proclaimed push to combat antisemitism on campus was in fact an effort to punish schools it deemed ideologically opposed to its agenda. Van Erem’s account raised questions about past settlements the administration has struck with universities under investigation as well as pending probes that have yet to be resolved.

Van Erem says she resigned from the Justice Department in May 2025 rather than participate in politically motivated investigations.

Face Palm of the Day

The head of the once-famed DOJ Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, is openly galavanting in DC with Tina Peters, the convicted election denier from Colorado:

Colorado’s Tina Peters and I had a lovely lunch and discussion on Capitol Hill! She is an inspiring lady! @realtinapeters pic.twitter.com/h3Mkq42XVE

— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) August 18, 2026

Quote of the Day

“I’m just going to be honest here. I’m not that informed on national security.”—Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC), during a TV debate ahead of next week’s runoff in the GOP primary to fill her late brother’s seat

The video:

Darlene Graham just bumbled through one of the worst responses to a question during a political debate you'll ever see

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-19T03:05:31.905Z

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

It’s All Part of Retribution on Blue States

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that disqualified Sigal Chattah as the purported top prosecutor in the Nevada United States Attorney’s Office.

The ruling deals a blow to the Trump scheme of bypassing Senate confirmation to install poorly qualified loyalists as top federal prosecutors in blue states — a key element of Trump’s campaign of retribution.

The particular element of the broader scheme at issue here was whether the attorney general can dole out the “first assistant U.S. attorney” designation to just anyone and install acting U.S. attorneys of its choosing in already-vacant positions.

Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the first assistant U.S. attorney automatically assumes the role of acting U.S. attorney when that post becomes vacant. The Trump DOJ took that provision and ran with it, using the first assistant designation on people like Chattah to circumvent both Senate confirmation and the law allowing federal judges to name interim U.S. attorneys.

What the the three-judge 9th Circuit panel (two Trump appointees and a Clinton appointee) unanimously decided is that the first assistant must have been serving in that role at the time of the vacancy in the U.S. attorney position in order to automatically ascend. Someone like Chattah, who was designated first assistant after the fact of the vacancy, is not eligible to serve as acting U.S. attorney on the basis of that designation.

The “rule of automatic succession applies only to a first assistant who held that position at the time the vacancy arose; it does not apply to a first assistant who never served under a validly appointed official,” the appeal court decided.

The appeals court also rejected the attempts by Trump attorneys general to “create a de facto Acting U.S. Attorney by delegating all of the functions and duties of the U.S. Attorney to someone else.”

Chattah’s case is instructive because of how many elements of manipulation and scheming are involved. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi properly named Chattah to the statutorily mandated 120-day term as acting U.S. attorney on April 1, 2025. Then things got weird.

Chattah is a Trump loyalist with no prior prosecutorial experience who has reportedly abused the office for personal and political gain. The federal judges in Nevada did not move to retain her in the role, which they have the power to do under statute.

Just before Chattah’s 120-day term ended, she resigned and Bond designated her as first assistant U.S. attorney. Bondi’s order declared that by law Chattah automatically ascended back into the acting role she had just resigned. In a belt-and-suspenders move, Bondi also made Chattah a special U.S. attorney and purported to delegate all the powers of the Nevada U.S. attorney to her.

The appeals court rejected both moves as unlawful.

It’s important to note that these challenges to the unlawful appointments of U.S. attorneys — like the similarly successful challenges of Alina Habba’s appointment in New Jersey — are coming from criminal defendants seeking to have their indictments thrown out. (The lower court in the consolidated cases brought by multiple criminal defendants had declined to dismiss the indictments, and the appeals court yesterday said it lacked jurisdiction at this stage to consider whether dismissal of the indictments was an appropriate remedy).

So not only is the Trump DOJ engaged in squirrelly workarounds to install loyalists in blue states and bypass the Senate, but it’s risking having legitimate criminal prosecutions thrown out in order to do so.

Keep an Eye on This

I know this seems even more in the weeds, but the precise mechanism has been finalized for running one portion of the Justice Department directly out of the White House to target what it euphemistically calls “fraud” but really means elected Democrats in blue states.

The move — reported by Bloomberg’s Ben Penn — shifts bureaucratic power from Main Justice’s Criminal Division to the new National Fraud Enforcement Division, which is being closely overseen at the White House by Vice President JD Vance and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

“The regulation also creates leeway for the new operation to take on a vast array of unspecified other cases,” Penn notes.

All indications are that this will be a new tool of retribution even more directly wielded by the White House than Attorney General Todd Blanche is. Also, as I mentioned yesterday, these White House-driven investigations don’t have to yield prosecutions in order to be beneficial to Trump and damaging to his targets. Wide-ranging subpoenas on spurious claims of fraud gives the White House access to documents, communications, personal information, and other potentially useful fodder to use against Democrats and other Trump foes.

A Match Made in MAGA Heaven?

Shasta County, California — which has been a hotbed (or petri dish, as we once called it) of Big Lie boosterism — may be hiring Tina Peters, the convicted former Colorado county elections official newly freed from prison, to help run its elections.

Clint Curtis, the outgoing Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, said in an interview with a conservative radio host that he’s bringing Peters on next month as the new assistant registrar of voters. “She has experience,” he said. “And she’s able to take the rocks and arrows.”

Some words of caution about the absurdity of all this, from the New York Times:

It was unclear how real Mr. Curtis’s job offer actually was or whether Ms. Peters would accept it. Ms. Peters’s prison sentence was commuted, but the terms of her parole limit her ability to leave Colorado. And Mr. Curtis will only be in office until January, after losing the June election to a former elections official whom he had fired.

So to summarize, Curtis was just voted out of office and he’s now claiming that for his last hurrah he will bring in Peters to help him run the midterms, but she might violate her parole by going to California. Got it.

The 9th Circuit Giveth and Taketh

In a 2-1 opinion, a 9th Circuit panel last week upheld one of the controversial administrative subpoenas targeting providers of transgender care and seeking invasive patient information, Chris Geidner reports in Law Dork. The majority consisted of a Bush II and Trump appointee; a Clinton appointee dissented.

Quote of the Day: Doth Protest Too Loudly

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”—the Trump White House, in a post on X, attacking CNN reporter Kristen Holmes for asking the president an anodyne question about Natalie Harp

E. Jean Carroll Gets to Keep Trump’s $5M

The Supreme Court rejected for the second time President Trump’s bid to challenge E. Jean Carroll’s $5 million judgment against him for defamation and sexual abuse.

Construction Work Halted in Big Bend

Amid rising opposition, including from Republican elected officials in Texas, the head of Customs and Border Protection announced Monday a pause in the controversial construction underway in Big Bend National Park to deter illegal immigration.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Family Values Party

We know that Donald Trump’s campaign of retribution against anyone he perceives to have wronged him — political foes, investigators, prosecutors, and judges — has no bounds. He abuses his office. He coopts government departments and agencies into his retributive schemes. He seeks vengeance without regard to the facts, the law, or common decency.

But in addition to that unprecedented malfeasance, Trump regularly subjects the family members of his targets to the same array of abuses.

Spouses have been a Trump rhetorical target since his first administration, when former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife was a frequent target of Trump abuse. While out of office, he attacked the wife of state Judge Arthur Engoron in the New York civil fraud case. In this term, he’s attacked the wife of U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of D.C., the judge in the Kennedy Center case.

Children are not above the fray either. Trump’s DoJ fired Maurene Comey, a well-respected federal prosecutor whose only transgression was being the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey.

Now comes new reporting from the NYT that the Trump DOJ opened an investigation last August into the fund-raising firm that had been co-owned by the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the Stormy Daniels hush money case against Trump. Loren Merchan, already a subject of Trump rhetorical attacks, was a VP at the firm, Authentic Campaigns, Inc., as recently as 2024, the same year Trump was convicted in the hush money case.

The year-long investigation is being run by Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros, whose mishandling of the Broadview Six case has prompted extraordinary judicial scrutiny of his office’s conduct in front of grand juries. The same two prosecutors who signed a grand jury subpoena targeting Merchan’s daughter were later involved in key aspects of the Broadview Six case.

In a grand jury subpoena reviewed by the NYT, Boutros sought the firm’s internal communications with a list of Democratic clients that includes former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), and the Democratic National Committee:

Prosecutors eventually modified the subpoena, narrowing it to focus on a $468 payment from Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, and emails between Ms. Merchan and her father, according to people with knowledge of the inquiry who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing legal matter.

In a now-familiar pattern, the politicized investigation was ostensibly spawned by a “criminal referral” targeting the Merchans from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. The current status of the DOJ investigation is not clear.

Beyond the obvious abuse of power involved in targeting the daughter of the judge who presided over Trump’s conviction, there’s the added abuse of the Justice Department using grand jury subpoenas to sift through the communications between a political firm and its Democratic clients.

At this point, it seems like only a matter of time before we learn that evidence gathered in Trump’s vindictive investigations — even if they never result in prosecutions — is being funneled back to the White House for use as political fodder, payback, pressure, and blackmail, similar to the notorious files kept by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The Retribution: Colorado Edition

It was already abundantly clear that the Trump administration had targeted Colorado for retribution for imprisoning Big Lie proponent Tina Peters and for its use of mail-in ballots. A federal judge had already determined that the pattern of retribution was real. But now a smoking gun email, first reported by the Denver Post, shows the Trump White House held a “brainstorm call” over how exactly to punish Colorado.

The email hasn’t yet been made public, but was read in open court last week during a hearing and the NYT reviewed the court transcript:

The goal, outlined in an email sent to officials at five federal agencies, was to “prioritize Colorado for the purposes of ensuring grants and federal support are in line with administration priorities,” the assistant, Emily Underwood, wrote on Dec. 15.

“Please come prepared to discuss immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado,” Ms. Underwood added.

The next day, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, whose representatives were invited to the brainstorm, announced they were canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.

After the revelation in court, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson ordered the administration to turn over additional Trump White House communications and offered this real-time reaction:

The executive office of the president and the president himself are elected to serve all the people and all the states, not just the states that voted for one side or the other, not just the states that line up perfectly with priorities, but all the people. In fact, there’s an oath that’s taken to that effect.

In a related case in June, Jackson had already found strong evidence of retaliation by the Trump White House, writing: “The inference that retaliation played at least some role … is considerably strengthened by the fact that the federal government simultaneously undertook several other actions adverse to Colorado.”

The smoking-gun email moved the dial from strong inference to proof.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Just days before trial was set to begin, the Trump DOJ quietly dropped charges against a California man accused of sending threatening texts to federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, conceding that it lacked conclusive evidence that the man had committed a crime.
• Attorney General Todd Blanche — who refused this weekend to pledge that the DOJ would always act independently of the White House — and FBI Director Kash Patel openly campaigned for Republican candidates in New York at a rally with President Trump:

Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche is speaking at a Trump rally to endorse Bruce Blakeman

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-14T18:55:58.325Z

RIP Posse Comitatus Act

In a new memo, the Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel purports to expand the military’s power to arrest undocumented immigrants even outside of the designated “National Defense Areas” that it was already using along the border as way of expanding the military’s domestic police powers.

An Extremely Unsatisfying Outcome

I confess that it had not occurred to me that the Alien Enemies Act litigation may be at an end point after the 5th Circuit last week dismissed the appeal in the leading case challenging President Trump’s invocation of the wartime statute. But Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck suggests that the administration may have permanently succeeded in avoiding a substantive ruling against it:

And yet, for as unsatisfying as the AEA litigation has been substantively, it’s worth coming back to the practical bottom line: procedurally, it has been wildly successful from the perspective of the countless non-citizens who might otherwise have been subject to AEA removals.

It is significant that no AEA deportations (that we know of) have been carried out since March 2025, but the administration’s success in deporting the original AEA detainees to CECOT in El Salvador in violation of court orders and the lack of any meaningful consequence for that lawlessness — either in the contempt proceedings before Judge Boasberg or in legal recourse for the wrongfully deported Venezuelan nationals sent to the Salvadoran gulag — does make this result extremely unsatisfying.

Trump’s Ballroom Bait and Switch

The WSJ has a nice rundown of how Trump has longed for a White House ballroom for more than a decade — but only recently, after being sued over it, began to couch the project as a “military complex” in order to avoid court scrutiny. It was a critical distinction in Trump’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on Friday to allow construction of the ballroom to continue.

Reflections on Musk and X/Twitter

• Vincent Bevins: “He destroyed a part of the public sphere where his enemies used to thrive. Along the way, he made racist and reactionary positions feel more normal to journalists.”
• John Ganz: “The X-ing of Twitter made the Trump administration and right-wingers more broadly think they had a mandate for their most extreme ideas because they only saw a world of chuds staring back at them. The opposition also risks becoming demoralized because they also see this world of total idiocy.”

THANK YOU!

Over the weekend, we hit our $500,000 goal for the TPM Journalism Fund annual drive. Thanks to all who contributed! We are all deeply grateful for your willingness to contribute in this way. We don’t take it for granted. It fires us up and propels us to dig a little faster and a little better.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

FENIX 701

It took chipping away at it by the The Guardian, the New York Times, and others before the Washington Post blew the story wide open yesterday: “The mysterious strikes targeting multiple Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands this year were carried out as part of a covert CIA program.”

According to the WaPo, citing a source with knowledge, “the strikes were part of a ‘covert action’ program, a type of secret operation overseas that is approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged.”

With the Pentagon denying any knowledge of or involvement with the strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats — one of which remains missing, with its crew presumed lost at sea — suspicion had focused on covert ops, private military contractors, or other Latin American governments as the likely culprits. The WaPo notes that the CIA involvement doesn’t rule out the other potential culprits: “It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.”

The crews of the two boats that survived the mystery attacks ended up in El Salvador before being repatriated to Ecuador, the WaPo reports. Both crews reported being “rescued” by a blue boat that may have been involved in the attacks. Most of the men aboard the blue boat spoke English, and wore uniforms with American flag patches, the NYT previously reported.

The program of covert strikes is separate and apart from the Pentagon’s lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats: “It is unclear why, as the Trump administration touts its military attacks against alleged drug boats, it would engage in a separate clandestine effort targeting vessels, said former U.S. officials who previously worked in the region.”

The WaPo covers similar ground as the NYT piece earlier this week, but adds additional details about the strikes on the Ecuadorian fishing boats and about a mystery aircraft flying out of El Salvador that it identifies as a Cessna Citation Longitude using the call sign “FENIX 701.” (Given its sordid history, the CIA’s use of “Phoenix” in a covert op today is either tone deaf or a deliberate middle finger.)

The plane flew from Tennessee to El Salvador in November, was photographed from the ground and via satellite at El Salvador’s Ilopango International Airport, was tracked in the vicinity of the Ecuadorian fishing boat strikes, and was last detected landing in San Antonio, Texas, in April.

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

The revelation that the CIA is behind the mystery boat strikes reminds of the conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his podcast The Daily Blast:

I am really cognizant that we only know what we know, and that this administration has done myriad things to reduce transparency and accountability and ready access into what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

I’m thinking about things like the high-seas strikes on [alleged] drug smuggling boats. … I’m thinking special operations activities around the globe. I’m thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I’m not suggesting some dark, hidden conspiracy, I just mean we don’t know. … I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades unearthing things that happened during this period that we just didn’t know about.

COINTELPRO II?

It’s going to take some time to expose the full scope and scale of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation into protesters of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. But we got the first glimpse yesterday in a court filing that included internal DHS documents among some of the discovery provided by the government to a group of protesters facing criminal charges.

As TPM’s Josh Kovensky details, the invasiveness of the investigation is striking. In addition to making extensive use of undercover informants, it targeted labor unions and left-leaning groups, including using administrative summons and/or subpoenas to access records of financial transactions by labor unions, in some instances stretching back years before the protests.

As the NYT put it: “As part of their inquiry, the documents show, homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Houston: U.S. attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed that FBI tests didn’t find meth in the van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was fatally shot by ICE last month. The Trump DOJ made public its suspicion that the substance was meth before running any tests in what appeared to be a smear job to come up with an ex post facto political justification for the wrongful shooting.
• Tacoma: U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright awarded $5,498 in compensatory sanctions and $11,455 in attorney’s fees to an undocumented immigrant who was wrongfully transferred by ICE outside of her jurisdiction without notice twice, in what she found to be two willful violations of her court orders.
• Alien Enemies Act: The full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the leading challenge to President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act after the administration deported the three Venezuelan men who originally filed the lawsuit using a different law. That left the case without plaintiffs, and the appeals court refused the request to substitute new plaintiffs who had been targeted under the AEA.

Good Read

TPM’s Emine Yücel: The new OLC memo purporting to expand executive privilege to private advisers to the president is a “devious tactic” to cover up Trump administration corruption ahead of a potential midterm victory for congressional Democrats.

What Happened in the Wisconsin Gov Race?

G. Elliott Morris goes under the hood on a poll that missed big on the results of the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor and concludes that it was the largely result of (i) assuming the electorate would be younger and more progressive than it turned out to be; and (ii) a late move by David Crowley that continued after the last polls were in the field.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

A state judge in Nevada threw out criminal charges over the 2020 fake electors scheme, ruling that Attorney General Aaron Ford “failed to present sufficient evidence from which a reasonable grand jury could infer the requisite intent to defraud.” Ford vowed to appeal.

The New Cold War

• WSJ: An Italian fighter jet under NATO auspices shot down a foreign drone that entered Latvian airspace early Friday. Latvia hadn’t determined the drone’s origin but suggested it may have been a Ukrainian drone deflected off course by Russian counter-drone measures.
• WaPo: Poland says it thwarted a Russian assassination attempt in Warsaw on an unidentified U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin.
• NYT: Inside Russia’s big push to destabilize the Western-leaning government of Moldova.

Just the Pettiest Shit Imaginable

The Trump-appointed board of the beleaguered Kennedy Center voted yesterday to sidestep a federal court order blocking it from renaming the performing arts institution for Donald Trump by:

• closing the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations and carving this inscription into the building’s white marble facade, just beneath the marquee with JFK Jr’s name: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump”;
• adding another line if an endowment fund named for Trump reaches $100 million: “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”
• renaming the physical site on which the center stands to “The President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

See Ya Monday

This is the last weekend of summer for a lot of folks. Make it memorable.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Trump DOJ Colludes on Trump Appeal

All of a sudden the Justice Department wants to be involved in President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — and it’s gunning to get the judge who imposed sanctions on Trump’s attorneys removed from the case.

After sitting out the IRS case in any official way at the trial court, the Trump DOJ overnight jumped into the appeal of the case by Trump and his co-plaintiffs that challenges the sanctions imposed by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams as punishment for the collusive lawsuit.

The Trump DOJ’s failure to defend the lawsuit — unlike it had in other similar lawsuits for illegal IRS leaks of taxpayer information — was the centerpiece of Judge Williams’ concerns that there was no true adversity between the parties. It’s why she appointed distinguished outside counsel to serve as friends of the court so that she would be able to hear something approximating “the other side” in the case. It was a major factor in her ultimate conclusion that the Trump plaintiffs and Trump administration defendants were all on the same side.

The new DOJ filing at the 11th Circuit was signed only by Trent McCotter, a political appointee only just installed as acting deputy attorney general this week after Todd Blanche was confirmed as attorney general. It was McCotter who earlier this week was upbraided by a federal judge in Brooklyn for his conduct in dropping a criminal fraud prosecution of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani.

While it’s been perfectly clear all along whose side the Trump DOJ has been on in the IRS lawsuit, the Justice Department was careful to keep some distance from the case in court. No government lawyer entered an appearance in the case. No responsive pleading to the Trump complaint was ever filed. No defense to the Trump lawsuit was ever mounted.

Judge Williams noted all of these irregularities in her order finding that the lawsuit was collusive and imposing sanctions on Trump’s personal lawyers, while referring top DOJ officials Blanche and Stanley Woodward for potential attorney discipline at the state level. It was one of her critical findings in her conclusion that the Trump lawsuit and the resulting “settlement” that created the “anti-weaponization” slush fund and unlawfully granted IRS immunity to the Trumps was bogus:

For the 109 days that this case was pending, no attorney representing the United States filed a notice of appearance or any document indicating the government’s position, interest, or awareness of this matter.

As recently as Aug. 1, Judge Williams threw another dart at the Trump DOJ for failing to defend the case. When Trump and his lawyers asked her to pause her sanctions order while they appealed, Williams asked the court-appointed amici to weigh in on the motion “in light of the fact that Defendants do not intend to appear or file a response.”

Now the Trump DOJ is actively colluding with Trump at the appeals court, but doing so even more openly and brazenly that it did in Judge Williams’ court.

McCotter has leaped in on the side of the Trump plaintiffs’ side in supporting their motion to pause the sanctions while their appeal proceeds. McCotter urges the appeals court to stay Judge Williams’ sanction order, argues that the Trump plaintiffs are “exceedingly likely” to win their appeal, and then rehashes many of the Trump team’s arguments for why Williams overreached.

But McCotter doesn’t stop there. He mounts a more aggressive attack on Judge Williams that the Trump plaintiffs did by seeking to have the appeals court reassign the case from Williams to a new judge, accusing her of “improper political motivation”; suggesting she timed her sanctions order to derail Blanche’s nomination as attorney general; and improbably accusing her of intentionally keeping Blanche and the DOJ from participating in the case (even though they had gone out of their way to avoid appearing in the case).

In arguing for Williams’ removal from the case, McCotter writes:

This Court need not conclude that the District Court’s actions were improperly motivated, but rather only that reasonable members of the public would view them that way. That standard has certainly been satisfied. This Court should order reassignment. To be sure, no remaining proceedings are needed or appropriate in the District Court: the Order should be stayed and ultimately vacated, and the District Court lost jurisdiction months ago. The District Court is the only one insistent on trying to keep the lower-court proceedings going, on the flimsiest of bases. But for precisely that reason, this Court should order reassignment.

Because of the way this case has proceeded, it’s not even clear that the government is a party to the appeal since it never participated in the case. The appeals court has styled the case as Donald Trump, et al v. Thirty-Five Former Federal Judges, with no mention of the original federal government defendants (the IRS and the Treasury Department). Reinforcing the weirdness, McCotter’s unusual filing is styled as “Defendants’ Response to Appellant’s Time-Sensitive Motion for a Stay,” but it’s docketed as an “Amicus Brief as of right or by consent of the parties filed by R. Trent McCotter for Internal Revenue Service and Department of Treasury.”

But the precise legal permutations aren’t the point here. It’s the No. 2 political appointee at DOJ, with no backing from career attorneys, aggressively jumping to President Trump’s defense in a case whose central dispute is the finding of collusion between the Justice Department and the president — and doing so after carefully sitting out the early rounds of the case at the trial court to make the travesty look slightly less obviously bad. Now the Trump DOJ has dropped any pretense.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Illinois: An ICE agent pleaded guilty to a state misdemeanor battery charge for throwing a protestor to the ground while off duty during Operation Midway Blitz. He was sentenced to a year of court supervision.
• Worldwide: Trump’s detention archipelago spans 35 countries, including far-flung places like Eswatini, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Ghana, Palau, Uzbekistan and Moldova

Ukraine Beats US in Military Exercise

Having mastered modern drone warfare, Ukraine has run circles around the U.S., U.K., and Sweden in recent military training exercises in Europe, the WSJ reports.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Letters of Marque???

Back in June, The Guardian had a confounding story about drone attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats for which the Trump administration disclaimed any responsibility. Given the administration’s eagerness to distribute and promote snuff films of its strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, its denial can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Now comes the NYT with a follow-up story with quite a few tantalizing new details and the suggestion — though unproven — that private military contractors, perhaps operating under letters of marque from the administration, may be carrying out the strikes.

In its main advance of the Guardian story, the NYT tracks the movement of a maritime patrol plane based at a military base in El Salvador and registered to a company that lists its address as a private mailbox in a UPS store in Richmond, Virginia. Flight data reviewed by the newspaper showed the plane “flew in the direction of” three Ecuadorian fishing boats in the days before they were attacked . One boat was lost at sea in January, with eight crew still missing and presumed dead.

Air traffic control recordings captured the pilots speaking English with American accents. Fisherman who survived one of the two strikes in March recount being targeted by English-speaking “gringos” wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches who rescued (or captured, depending on your perspective) them and eventually turned them over to Salvadoran authorities.

Unlike the sophisticated drones used in the well-publicized strikes by the Pentagon, the weapons used to attack the Ecuadorian fishing boats have been crude drones fitted with explosives, according to survivors’ accounts.

The real eye-opener in the story is the NYT seriously entertaining the notion that the Trump administration may have issued letters of marque to modern-day privateers who are responsible for the strikes:

The letters, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, were circulated among various agencies for their input in May and were supposed to complement the Pentagon’s boat strike campaign in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Discussions around letters of marque seemed to stall around June, and the Pentagon would not say whether any have been issued. When asked about the attacks on the fishing boats, it said, “We have no knowledge of, nor were U.S. Southern Command forces involved in, the incidents described.”

On this basis, the NYT sought comment about the Ecuadorian strikes from Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame. “[N]either Erik Prince nor any entities affiliated with him have any relation to these events,” a Prince spokesperson said.

First at TPM: Abrego Garcia Wins a Point on Appeal

This is a small development, but it’s not been previously reported. Yesterday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss one aspect of the Trump DOJ’s appeal of his case.

The reason it’s worth noting is because of what the Trump DOJ had tried to do: impose its own deadline on U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis for her to rule on two of its pending motions in the case. If she didn’t rule by the DOJ’s own deadline, it would deem the motions constructively denied and appealed this. Xinis took umbrage at the Trump DOJ trying to set her court’s schedule, but DOJ appealed anyway on the basis her not ruling fast enough for its liking.

With minimal comment, the appeals court granted Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss this part of the DOJ appeal because it lacked jurisdiction since there was no final order from Xinis to be appealed.

In a period when appeals court judges have not always had the back of district judges confronting Trump administration lawlessness, this is one exception.

Mass Deportation Watch

• ICE plans to outfit officers with special gloves called Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (G.L.O.V.E.) that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals, the AP reports.
• Virginia: An ICE agent brandished a weapon at a U.S. citizen while falsely claiming she had tried to run over federal agents in her vehicle, the woman’s videos show. In response, DHS fell back on its usual refrain, claiming she “attempted to harm officers by weaponizing her vehicle against them—all in an attempt to help illegal aliens get away.”
• Texas: Bulldozing underway within Big Bend National Park for border wall construction.
• Illinois: A batch of 10 criminal complaints against federal agents stemming from Operation Midway Blitz were filed this week with Chicago police.

MUST READ: Trump’s New Census Scheme

TPM’s Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky: A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated

TL;DR: John Light has the key takeaways from the TPM exclusive.

2026 Midterms: Generational Change

Rep. John Larson (D-CT), 78, who has served in the House since 1999, lost his re-election bid in the Democratic primary to former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, 47.

“Bronin’s win makes Larson the seventh Democratic House incumbent to lose reelection this year; six lost to younger challengers,” the WaPo notes.

Trump DOJ Watch: Jeanine Pirro Edition

• Reflecting Pool: The White House is pressing the Justice Department to bring a new misdemeanor case against David Hearn on bogus charges of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, the WSJ reports, even though D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro already dismissed the original case against Hearn and told a court that it wasn’t vandalism but a botched job by the pool-lining contractor.
• D.C. Special Grand Jury: In an unusual move, Pirro has empaneled a special grand jury to be overseen by one of her own loyalists, Steven Vandervelden, the WaPo reports. It is unclear what the new special grand jury will be investigating, but the ability of a special grand jury (unlike a regular grand jury) to issue a report at the conclusion of its investigation means it could be used as a tool to “name and shame” Trump foes, offering a way to placate the president in instances where there’s insufficient evidence to bring a criminal case.

Trump Contests Sanctions in IRS Case

President Trump, two of his sons, his business, and his lawyers have asked the 11th Circuit to block the sanctions imposed by the judge who oversaw his collusive lawsuit against the IRS, which spawned the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund and the unlawful grant of IRS immunity.

In a scathing overnight filing, the Trump-related parties savaged U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami for sloppiness, haste, legal error, and exceeding her sanctions power:

The Sanctions Order was riddled with multiple errors. It materially misquoted Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., misidentified both the court and dissenting judge in Keepseagle v. Perdue, used the wrong docket number for Jackson v. United States, gave the wrong citation for Trump v. Clinton, cited the syllabus rather than the majority opinion in Seila Law, misidentified a Wall Street Journal author and URL, and repeatedly mangled case names, government titles, and source attributions.

They are seeking to put the sanctions order on hold while their appeal proceeds.

$900 Million and Counting

WaPo:

The Trump administration plans to spend at least $900 million for construction projects on the White House grounds, a significantly larger price tag than has been previously reported and one that would be covered primarily by taxpayers, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.

Instead of securing money directly from Congress, the records show, the administration has pieced together funding from other agencies and private donors and directed it to a little-known account that typically holds a few million dollars for routine maintenance of the executive mansion.

Unpacking the Air Force One Debacle

Garrett Graff, the preeminent reporter on continuity of government, calls Trump’s secret flight out of Turkey “a Russian nesting doll of scandal, one that exposes at least five levels of scandal, ranging from foreign influence to corruption to national security compromises to inappropriate geopolitical gambles.”

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Air Force None

By now, you’ve likely ingested many of the details from the bombshell Washinton Post report on the elaborate security operation and public misinformation campaign to spirit President Trump out of Ankara, Turkey, following last month’s NATO summit in order to avoid a credible threat to his life from Iran.

The entire ruse is remarkable by the historic standards of security theater and continuity of government protocols that have hovered over our political consciousness since the peak tensions of the Cold War nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.

Especially striking is that White House staff and the press pool who remained on the older model Air Force One that everyone thought Trump was aboard ended up serving as decoys — sitting ducks for whatever scheme Iran had conjured up but ultimately failed in or decided not to execute.

The image we conjure in our minds of Trump boarding Air Force One on one side of the plane before secretly exiting the other side into a waiting catering truck is indelible. But I’m just as taken by what happened after Trump’s secret flight landed in the U.K.

Once on the ground, Trump had to be secretly returned to the older Air Force One, then make a show of disembarking from it before boarding the new Qatari Force One that he took across the Atlantic to Joint Base Andrews. As you may know, the Air Force One call sign only applies when the president is aboard the aircraft, but I’m taking some liberties with the term here for the sake of clarity.

“It’s not clear how Trump moved from the C-32A to the legacy Air Force One after landing,” the WaPo noted.

The NYT has a more robust account of this part of the operation: “Before that, unbeknown to reporters, Mr. Trump was brought by vehicle from the third plane that he had arrived on to the older Air Force One, boarded it through a different entrance and strode down the step from the upper left-side door as he would typically do, according to the U.S. official.”

Here is he pretending to have just flown in on the older Air Force One:

Here he is walking between the old and new Air Force One aircraft:

This entire episode would be notable in its own right, but the NYT’s subsequent reporting on the ostensible version of what happened — the old Air Force One was used because the new Qatari-gifted one lacked sufficient defense capabilities given the Iranian threat — gave rise to a leak investigation and highly controversial subpoenas to NYT reporters.

Those subpoenas have since been withdrawn, but it’s a bit of a mindfuck to try to piece together that related saga in light of this new information. Was the administration, for instance, agitated not just that the new Air Force One was being denigrated by the NYT’s reporting but that the NYT was onto the secret mission to extricate Trump from Turkey? We don’t know if the NYT had additional information on the ruse that it didn’t publish, though its followup to yesterday’s WaPo exclusive didn’t betray any previous unpublished knowledge of the operation.

The Corruption: Trump DOJ Edition

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis sharply criticized principal associate deputy attorney general Trent McCotter in dropping criminal fraud charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and several of his co-defendants.

Judge Garaufis largely (but not entirely) granted the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, but, in a withering 47-page order, he shellacked political appointee McCotter for pushing the dismissal through without consultation with investigators:

On the current record, McCotter appears to have eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment. The fact that McCotter came to this decision largely in collaboration with defense counsel, and seemingly without input from the FBI and SEC agents who investigated the alleged misconduct, or the attorneys from the Department, SEC, and U.S. Attorney’s Office who brought the case, appears to be highly unusual.

Garaufis also flamed McCotter for claiming the indictment was the handiwork of a politicized Biden DOJ:

McCotter appears to be accusing officials across four different government offices of bringing a detailed 54-page, 5-count indictment out of spite. However, he has not provided a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the timing of the unsealing of the indictment, or the charging decisions, in this case was politically motivated. McCotter’s baseless assertion is unbecoming of his office.

The dismissal of the case against Adani, essentially a foreign bribery case of the kind that the Trump DOJ has de-emphasized pursuing, came after Adani retained Bob Giuffra and Jamie McDonald (who Trump later nominated as Manhattan U.S. attorney) of Sullivan & Cromwell (which is representing Trump personally in other matters). In a presentation to McCotter at the Justice Department, Giuffra reportedly said that Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy if the charges were dropped, according to CBS News.

Trump DOJ Watch

• ICYMI: The Southern Poverty Law Center’s motion for vindictive prosecution was denied Friday by the trial judge, who declined to look past federal prosecutors in Alabama to Main Justice or to the White House in assessing improper motives for bringing the politicized case.
• Reflecting Pool: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) will make an effort to extract information from the Trump DOJ about the charging decision in the since-dismissed Reflecting Pool case against David Hearn, Greg Sargent reports.
• OLC Dramatically Expands Claimed Scope of Executive Privilege: The president can assert executive privilege over communications with “private advisers … so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential,” the Office of Legal Counsel asserts in a new memo flagged by Punchbowl.

Photo of the Day

Former Trump lawyer Emil Bove swears in former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general in front of President Trump in the Oval Office, Aug. 10, 2026:

🇺🇸 @AGToddBlanche has officially been sworn in as the United States Attorney General today in the Oval Office. pic.twitter.com/0PfeWYLDqT

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 10, 2026

Painful Flashback Alert

NYT: How a Counterintelligence Inquiry Into Trump’s Russia Ties Was Derailed by Rod Rosenstein’s Appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel

Mass Deportation Watch

• Politico: Families, lawyers and judges describe a year of frantic emergency cases after a Trump administration memo reversed decades of interpretation of federal law and allowed ICE to begin detaining without bond hearings people who have lived in the U.S. for years. Federal judges have since ruled against the Trump detention policy more than 16,000 times.
• Arizona Daily Star: “Conditions are deteriorating to dangerous levels at a decommissioned hotel in Equatorial Guinea, where dozens of immigrants have been imprisoned since the U.S. deported them to the African nation, without warning or due process, the immigrants and their attorneys say.”
• The American Prospect: An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned in 2023 after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a $244 million no-bid federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody.
• NYT: New Evidence Shows Agents Using Slurs, Bolstering Profiling Claims

Quote of the Day

Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, writing about President Trump’s new birthright citizenship executive orders:

The Citizenship Clause was indeed written to repudiate Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black people could never be citizens. But the Reconstruction Congress did not swap one caste rule for a narrower one; it extended the promise to “every free-born person in this land.” The idea wasn’t just to retroactively protect “the babies of slaves”; it was to prospectively forestall all future efforts to deny citizenship based on whatever other non-sovereignty-based criteria might be politically popular in any given moment. 

The Pyrocene Keeps Pyrocening

July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, nudging past July 2012 and July 1936. The average temperature of 76.9F was more than three degrees above the 20th century average.

In completely unrelated news, the Swiss Re Institute warned today that wildfire risk is the fastest-growing weather peril globally. 

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Bureaucratic Hellscape of Trump Authoritarianism

This morning I want to focus your attention on another especially Kafkaesque example of the worst of the Trump mass deportation operation combined with — and this is critical — the administration’s lawless behavior in federal courts.

Across numerous cases — the Alien Enemies Act, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, “Cristian“, Nelson Ariel Umanzor Chavez, and others — I have been focused not just on the brutalities of the immigration system (many of which pre-dated Trump), but on the new layers of barbarism plus the administration’s direct challenge to the constitutional role of the federal judiciary in policing the mass deportation operation.

In the case of Guatemalan national Faustino Pablo Pablo, we have both in spades.

In a new ruling Friday, which has not been previously reported, U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama of El Paso ordered Pablo released from ICE detention after a surreal nine-month journey through the worst of the Trumpian immigration system compounded by highly misleading representations — if not outright lies — by the administration in court. Because of the limited public remote access to habeas corpus cases in federal court, we are largely reliant on Judge Guaderrama’s publicly available orders for the narrative of what befell Pablo.

Pablo arrived in the United States in 2012 after fleeing Guatemala. While Pablo would come to have an order of removal against him, an immigration judge in 2013 issued a withholding of removal to his native Guatemala under the Convention Against Torture, finding that Pablo had “shown it is more likely than not that he will be tortured by, or with the consent or acquiescence of, the Guatemalan government.”

As a result, Pablo was released under an order of supervision and had been living his life freely in the United States for more than decade until Nov. 5, 2025, when he showed up for a routine ICE check-in appointment in California and was detained without notice or explanation.

On Nov. 17, Pablo was transferred to Camp East Montana, the brutal tent encampment on Ft. Bliss in El Paso. The following day, Pablo filed a writ of habeas corpus in federal court in the Western District of Texas. On Nov. 20, he sought an injunction prohibiting the administration from removing him from the court’s jurisdiction while his habeas case was pending. By the time the Judge Guaderrama issued the injunction later that day, Pablo had already been unlawfully deported to Guatemala.

In an admission that it resisted making in other similar cases, the Trump administration conceded that the violation of the immigration judge’s order barring Pablo’s removal to Guatemala had been “unlawful” and began the process of returning him to the United States.

It wasn’t without, shall we say, hiccups.

When Pablo wasn’t returned as promised on a Dec. 4 flight, Judge Guaderrama decried the “blatant lawlessness” of Pablo’s removal and set a deadline for the administration to return him. As TPM first reported, the administration finally returned him to the United States on Dec. 11.

But the saga was not nearly over for Pablo, a Mayan whose native language is Mam, a fact which will become relevant in a moment. What ensued, as outlined in Judge Guaderrama’s order Friday, is the sort of mind-bending behavior from the administration that is part Trumpian authoritarianism and part bureaucratic hellscape.

Even before Pablo’s return, DHS was threatening him with removal to a third country: “One thing is certain: he is not going to be able to remain in the U.S.,” the bombastic then-DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. “We will deport him to another country.”

After his return, the administration spent the next several months purporting to be preparing to deport Pablo to Mexico, its stated choice as a third-country destination for him.

As he had successfully done for Guatemala, Pablo applied for withholding of removal to Mexico under the Convention Against Torture, but an asylum officer denied his claim of fear of removal in December, clearing the way for his deportation to Mexico.

At that point, the administration repeatedly told Judge Guaderrama that it was prepared to deport Pablo to Mexico and that his injunction barring Pablo’s removal was the only remaining impediment. In his order Friday, Judge Guaderrama documented the administration’s representations to the court:

January 20, 2026: If the Court lifts the stay of removal, ICE will proceed with removing Petitioner to Mexico . . . . The only impediment to removal is this Court’s Order staying removal.

April 6, 2026: If this Court vacated his stay of removal, ERO does not foresee additional procedural hurdles to removing Petitioner to Mexico. Absent any unforeseen circumstances, ERO believes they could effect removal to Mexico within a week of this Court lifting the stay of removal.

July 15, 2026: But for the judicial stay of removal entered in this case, third country removal to Mexico is significantly likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.

In response, Judge Guaderrama lifted his injunction barring Pablo’s removal but in a subsequent order required that an immigration judge review the denial of Pablo’s application for withholding from removal to Mexico. “As far as the Court could tell, the aforementioned IJ review was the Government’s only ‘impediment to removal,'” Guaderrama wrote in his newest order.

But Pablo remained trapped in a bureaucratic maze.

Pablo was scheduled for a hearing in front of an immigration judge on July 27, but his claim of fear of removal to Mexico was not reviewed at the hearing. In addition, the administration did not provide a Mam interpreter so Pablo was unable to understand the proceedings, and Pablo’s attorney wasn’t admitted to the virtual hearing until after it had ended. When Pablo’s attorney was eventually brought in, the immigration judge’s legal assistant informed the attorney that “[t]he judge did not think it was important for [her] to be [t]here,” the attorney later told Judge Guaderrama.

Getting fed up, Judge Guaderrama held an evidentiary hearing of his own on July 29. At issue was whether Pablo’s continued detention was lawful. Even with an order of removal, a detainee cannot be held indefinitely. The Supreme Court has declared detentions lasting up to six months to be presumptively reasonable. Continued detention past that point is lawful only if there is a “significant likelihood” that the detainee will be deported in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

Guaderrama required the administration to make the still-detained Pablo available for the hearing. Also present for the hearing: two ICE officers with personal knowledge of Pablo’s removal process.

What emerged at the evidentiary hearing was shocking, given the trajectory of Pablo’s case and the many assurances (listed above) from the administration to Judge Guaderrama.

“At that hearing, the Government revealed that Mexico was not (and had never been) a viable option for third-country removal,” Judge Guaderrama recounted in his order.

It turns out that back in December, Pablo had opted out of the only program which would have allowed the administration to deport him to Mexico. So Mexico was never an option, and in the intervening months the administration had not identified any another third country options.

But it gets worse (emphasis Guaderrama’s): “The Government has not taken any steps since December 2025 to identify another country that would accept Petitioner’s removal.”

In a cynically ironic moment at the hearing, an administration lawyer asked Guaderrama, after all this time, for “the opportunity to be able to determine if there’s another third country” to which to deport Pablo.

The developments were eerily similar to those in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The administration had likewise unlawfully deported Abrego Garcia in violation of an order of withholding. After dragging its feet for months, it reluctantly returned him to the United States to face what was eventually ruled a vindictive prosecution, but in the meantime purported to be preparing to deport him to various African third countries. Ultimately U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland rejected repeated claims by the Trump administration to the court that Abrego Garcia’s third-country deportation was imminent, finding no evidence that the administration had actually taken steps to arrange a third country that would accept him.

In both cases, the claimed plans for third-country deportations ended up looking like a pretext created to justify the punitive continued detention of an immigrant whose wrongful deportations had embarrassed the administration.

In what may have been among the final straws for Guaderrama, the immigration court held another hearing in Pablo’s case on Aug. 5. Again, no Mam interpreter was present for Pablo, and the immigration judge has not reviewed the asylum officer’s denial of Pablo’s fear claim. Pablo was scheduled for another immigration court hearing to be held on Aug. 31.

In a court filing the next day, the administration managed to make things worse by conceding that it has no plan to move on from Mexico as its country of choice for Pablo, Judge Guaderrama recounted:

The Government does not plan to start looking in the near future, either. One day after Petitioner confirmed that he still does “not accept removal to Mexico,” the Government explained that it will wait to look into “an alternative third country for removal” in case Petitioner has a sudden change of heart.

Guaderrama had had enough.

In his 19-page opinion Friday, Guaderrama said that no matter how he applied the law, even when interpreting it least favorably for Pablo, the continued detention of Pablo was a violation of the Constitution and statute.

Guaderrama ordered the administration to release Pablo no later than today and to confirm his release to the court by COB tomorrow. Stay tuned.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Good Riddance

It takes a lot to be among the most odious Republican members of this Congress. Let me reacquaint you with Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN).

What makes Ogles special is that he managed to be a virulent Islamophobe, Christian nationalist, and fabulist — really the trifecta of qualifications for current House GOPers — and still alienate his fellow Republicans.

Ogles went down to a stinging defeat in the GOP primary in Tennessee last night, losing 53%-47% to former state agriculture commish Charlie Hatcher.

While Ogles maintained an endorsement from President Trump, many state Republicans were done with him. Gov. Bill Lee (R) and former Gov. Bill Haslam (R) had endorsed Hatcher.

Ogles was a piece of work in so many ways.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” he tweeted in March.

“America and Islam are incompatible. Time for a muslim (sic) ban,” he posted in another tweet around the same time.

He posted AI-generated images of himself and senior Trump administration officials in front of the Capitol dressed as Crusaders.

He had campaign finance issues and resume-inflation issues.

Ogles’ nemesis back home was the relentless investigative reporter Phil Williams, of Nashville, who unearthed much of what we’ve come to know about Ogles and to whom I defer on cataloging Ogles’ sins:

• Ogles had claimed to be an economist; he was not.
• He had boasted about being trained in investigating international sex crimes; he had not.
• He had claimed to have done graduate work at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth; that was a lie.
• His resume showed he had served on the board of directors for the city of Franklin, Tennessee; Franklin does not have a board of directors.
• He claimed to have personally loaned his campaign $320,000 in his first run for Congress in 2022; he did not have that kind of money to lend.
• The FBI opened a criminal investigation into those fraudulent campaign disclosures, but that investigation was canned by the Trump administration.

In a fitting end to his losing campaign, Ogles banned Williams and select other news outlets from an Election Day event — and Williams got ahold of the blacklist.

What gives Ogles’ primary defeat a little extra boost of schadenfreude is that he was running in a pretty dramatically re-drawn district thanks to state Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting. Call it a small (but inadequate) consolation prize for the elimination of the state’s only majority-Black district in Memphis.

BREAKING … Court Halts Trump Ballroom

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals halted Trump’s vanity ballroom project in a ruling just out:

We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for. Until now.

The ruling was 2-1, with Judges Patricia Millett (Obama) and Bradley Garcia (Biden) in the majority and Neomi Rao (Trump) in dissent.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Blanche nomination: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announced early this morning that she’s a “No” on Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general: “The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration. I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.” I want to very careful not to pump this up into a suspense-filled drama because the GOP conference is usually very strategic about parceling out the “No” votes to vulnerable or marginal members without jeopardizing the final vote — but Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is thought to be the only remaining holdout and the final vote Blanche needs to win confirmation. Late Update: Cassidy just announced his support for Blanche’s nomination on the Senate floor.
• IRS immunity: A revised legal challenge to the unprecedentedly corrupt “settlement” of Trump’s IRS lawsuit — which is what’s nearly sunk the Blanche nomination — is now also targeting the gift of IRS immunity that Blanche gave Trump. The case in the Eastern District of Virginia spearheaded by the Democracy Forward Foundation had already succeeded in winning a preliminary injunction in June blocking the “anti-weaponization” slush fund. Yesterday, DFF filed an amended complaint seeking to block Blanche’s order granting Trump immunity from the IRS.
• Reflecting Pool: The bogus vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn was officially dismissed by the judge yesterday, but he punted on the question of whether the dismissal should be with or without prejudice until he receives additional briefing from the parties and holds a hearing. He also held off ruling on Hearn’s alternative request for access to the grand jury materials that could potentially make D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro squirm even more than she already is. Stay tuned on this one.

Headline of the Day

Politico: Hellbent on putting Fauci in jail, Rand Paul wants to skip a Senate vote

Paul Threatens Nom Over ICE Shootings

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is threatening to hold up the confirmation of Lance Schroyer to lead ICE unless he gets more information about the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Worth noting that Paul has multiple interests here. Schroyer, an Oklahoman who led the security detail of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin when he was a senator, is Mullin’s pick for the job. Mullin is a well-known Paul nemesis.

Trump Orders New Leak Probe

Embarrassed by news reports of U.S. munitions shortages, President Trump has ordered another leak investigation, the WSJ reports. His previous reactive leak probes have immediately focused on journalists and pushed the bounds of the law and the First Amendment. Stay tuned …

Trump Avoids Giving Financial Info to BBC

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Miami granted the president’s emergency motion to delay having to turn over his financial information to the BBC in his defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster. To avoid implicating his own finances, Trump wants to amend his lawsuit, and the judge found it to be a “compelling argument” that the new lawsuit may moot the BBC’s need for the financial information.

New Lawless Birthright Citizenship EOs

Despite losing on birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court less than six weeks ago, President Trump rolled out two new executive orders that, taken together, run afoul of the high court’s recent decision.

U.S. Intel: Putin Could Provoke NATO

The steady drumbeat of warnings like this from Europe and from here at home continues, according the WSJ:

The U.S. had previously assessed that Putin wouldn’t provoke a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country while he is still fighting in Ukraine. But that assessment changed earlier this year, the U.S. officials said, as Putin is squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home to secure a victory.

If Putin is going to do this, I don’t see why the optimum timing for him would not be between now and the end of Trump’s term, when official U.S. resistance will be at its lowest ebb since NATO was formed — and that’s roughly the same period U.S. intel is most concerned about: “The time frame for any move by Russia is estimated to happen between this fall and 2029, according to the U.S. intelligence assessments.”

Help Us Wrap Up the Journo Fund Drive!

With a big final push, we can hit the $500,000 mark in our annual drive for the TPM Journalism Fund — and I won’t have to keep pitching you into next week. Let’s get ‘er done!

See Ya Monday

Before Elvis … before Willie … before the Pet Shop Boys … Gwen McCrae was the first to release “Always on My Mind“:

In case you missed it last week, I created a couple of Morning Memo playlists of the music I’ve shared: Spotify and Youtube.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Trump Retribution Feedback Loop

The targeting of Anthony Fauci stands as a textbook case of retribution by the Trump administration using, in tandem with Republicans on Capitol Hill, what has become a well-worn and ruthless feedback loop that has ensnared other former officials and targets of the president’s ire.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted this morning to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for having invoked his 5th Amendment rights not to testify at last week’s witch hunt of a hearing.

At least two Senate committees are actively going after Fauci.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chair of the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, revealed last night that he had obtained Fauci’s COVID-era phone from the Department of Health and Human Services, Fauci’s former government employer, which left Republicans salivating that they had another motherlode of fodder to stoke the fires against Fauci.

HHS has previously released Fauci’s diary to Congress, without having notified him. If you needed reminding, HHS is led by chronic Fauci critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote the 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”

But all of that is clearly not enough piling on Fauci in the current environment.

Attorneys general in Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia seized on the Fauci diary as a pretext to launch their own investigations of him. The three red-state AGs announced yesterday that they had subpoenaed Fauci for a wide range of records tied to grant money, awards and book deals, and other evidence of what they alleged was potential self-dealing by Fauci. It was primarily an opportunity to further smear Fauci by press release and jump on the bandwagon with Republicans in Washington.

This particular pattern of retribution is chillingly familiar: The Trump administration releases government documents (and diaries and phones) to Republican allies on the Hill who in turn often leak the information to the right-wing media apparatus. The resulting MAGA firestorm leads to GOP-run hearings on the Hill, which serve as opportunities to entrap witnesses and prompt criminal referrals to the Trump DOJ.

It was puzzling to see otherwise smart and respected people dumping on Fauci last week for taking the 5th when this pattern had just played out in the House with former Special Counsel Jack Smith less than a week before. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan dragged Smith in to testify about his two historic investigations of Trump and then ginned up a bogus claim of perjury that he referred to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution. James Comey and John Brennan have had their turns in the grinder, too, under similar though not identical circumstances.

Fauci has the advantage of a preemptive pardon from President Biden, which should in theory at least shield him from Trump DOJ persecution for alleged acts that predate the pardon. But testifying in a perjury trap set by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who chairs HSGAC, would have been post-pardon conduct and left him potentially exposed in the same way Smith is. Still, his refusal to testify sets him up for a potential contempt of Congress prosecution. No way out. Tails I win, heads you lose.

If you don’t see the broad pattern of persecution and the mechanics of the retribution feedback loop — and deeply cynical bad faith fueling it all — you can fall into precious arguments over the limits of 5th Amendment rights or the bounds of congressional power or other curiosities while entirely missing the forest for the trees.

We are witnessing a stunning abuse of power by the executive branch and a pliant legislative branch that they have together refined and systematized into a grinder that chews up and spits out Trump foes as a means of retribution and for the sheer spectacle of it. That is the real story here. Not the Wuhan lab or COVID policy or whatever other ostensible underlying issue is the pretext for feeding Trump foes into his vengeance machine.

Neutering the Watchdogs at DOJ

Within the Trump DOJ, the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of Inspector General have lost significant percentages of their staffs and seen investigations plummet under Trump II, Reuters reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

• ICE has threatened to seek criminal witness tampering charges against the elected county sheriffs in Minneapolis and Chicago for refusing to hand over inmates.
• Airlines are pushing back against ICE enforcement operations on airplanes and jet bridges.
• DOJ cites the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision to shield DOJ official Aakash Singh from scrutiny in the Broadview 6 case.

The Destruction: EPA Edition

Remember the $20 billion in grants that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin froze and tried to claw back in the early days of Trump II — with help from acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, who tried to turn it into a criminal case, prompting the resignation of a senior career prosecutor?

I know. It was a long time ago, and these things are hard to keep track of. Which is partly the point. The grant recipients have been in limbo ever since, forced in some cases to lay off workers because the EPA funds were not available, which is also part of the point.

After winning a preliminary injunction at the district court level in April 2025, the grant recipients have finally won on appeal to the full D.C. Circuit and will now be able to access the funds. The appeals court divided 6-4 in a convoluted per curiam decision that upheld the preliminary injunction.

The Corruption: WTF? Edition

Jennifer Mascott, a Trump appointee to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, continued to run the D.C. public relations firm she inherited from her late husband for at least six months after she was confirmed as a judge in October 2025, Politico reports.

Hoisted on His Own Petard

The BBC seems only too happy to use President Trump’s defamation suit against it to explore his finances — and Trump is now scrambling to avoid a court-ordered deadline of today to turn over details on his business empire to the broadcaster.

In a related move, Trump is seeking to amend his lawsuit — over how the broadcaster spliced together portions of his Jan. 6 speech on The Ellipse — to remove the language that put his finances in play in discovery in the first place.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Saga Not Over Yet

While most of the reflecting pool coverage focuses on the reality TV-style palace intrigue among the ridiculous personas of Donald Trump, Jeanine Pirro, and Doug Burgum, pay attention to how hard the former criminal defendants in the now-dismissed “vandalism” cases push for court-ordered consequences for the misbegotten prosecutions.

As a first step, attorneys for David Hearn are asking a judge to dismiss the case with prejudice, which would keep Pirro from recharging him later. Pirro has sought to dismiss the charges without prejudice and keep her options open.

They take particular exception to Pirro’s claims that prosecutors were not aware of the fatal flaws in their case until shortly before they moved to dismiss the case. They provide a timeline of what prosecutors learned as the case unfolded that challenges the sequence of events Pirro provided the court in her motion to dismiss.

As Empty Wheel’s Marcy Wheeler notes, Hearn’s counsel also suggested to the judge in the latest filing that the court could still revisit their pending request for the grand jury materials — or review them in chambers.

There are also three other similar cases Pirro is trying to dismiss, as she tries to point the finger at Burgum and the Interior Department, save her job, and avoid court-ordered sanctions or ethics reviews.

And yet … I realize the palace intrigue has some appeal, so here you go:

• NYT: Inside the Oval Office Showdown Between Trump and Jeanine Pirro
• Politico: Jeanine Pirro struggles to give Trump the wins he craves the most
• WSJ: Pirro’s About-Face in Pool Case Followed Prosecutors’ Private Concerns

The Toll on the Federal Judiciary

U.S. District Judge John McConnell, the chief judge in Rhode Island, goes on the record about the numerous threats he’s faced after issuing several important rulings adverse to the Trump administration.

McConnell was among the judges to have received unrequested pizza deliveries, as a way a warning “We know where you live.” In his case, the name on the pizza order was Daniel Anderl, the slain son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, who was killed by a disgruntled lawyer in an attack at the judge’s New Jersey home.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, reluctantly granting the Trump DOJ’s motion to dismiss the seditious conspiracy indictment against eight members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, including Stewart Rhodes, all of whom were convicted but later had their sentences commuted by President Trump:

This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed. Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle. The court cannot write a different ending.

Profile in Courage Ducking for Cover

Facing a tough re-election in a key Senate race, Maine Sen. Susan Collins is being given cover by Senate Republicans to vote against the nomination of Todd Blanche for attorney general. She didn’t announce her opposition until after Blanche cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. With two senators still officially undecided, there remains some faux drama around the confirmation, but Collins getting a get-out-of-jail-free card confirms where this is headed.

2026 Midterms Watch

• Michigan-Senate: In a nail-biter that pre-election polling did a poor job of picking up on, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed eked past Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary. The race was too close to call for much of the night, but the AP has now declared the race for El-Sayed, who hold a 49-48 lead with 99% of the votes counted.
• Missouri-01: In a rematch of the 2024 Democratic primary, Rep. Wesley Bell defeated former Rep. Cori Bush.
• Virginia-05: Former Rep. Tom Perriello (D) won the Democratic primary to challenge incumbent Rep. John McGuire (R).

House GOP Scandal Update

• Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) has dropped his re-election bid in the aftermath of a cringey-as-hell House Ethics Committee report with excruciating details about his awkward and uncomfortable behavior toward two young women staffers in his office.

• Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), who has been accused of abusive behavior by multiple women, including his ex-wife, the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), went on CNN to defend himself in an extended interview with Jake Tapper and, oh boy:

🤯 Rep. Max Miller's interview with Jake Tapper was one of the most self-destructive things I've ever witnessed on cable news. Here's the whole thing:

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-04T21:42:31.941Z

The Antisemitism Is Ubiquitous

TPM’s Hunter Walker: Colorado Republicans Attack Jewish Gov Candidate With AI ‘Cartoon Devil Horns’ Graphic 

Make America Wipe Again

From a NYT Mag profile of Dr. Sean O’Mara, whose dietary recommendations have been embraced by Vice President JD Vance, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy:

“When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

I just can’t with this.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

ICE’s Round-the-Clock Digital Dragnet

About a month ago, it emerged from upstate New York that the Department of Homeland Security was targeting online critics of ICE by trying to force them to sign a heretofore unheard of “Warning Notice” admitting that their criticisms were unlawful.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that those cases are just the tip of the iceberg of a larger DHS surveillance program targeting social media users nationwide. As with the previously reported cases, the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility is taking the lead — a dramatic departure from its previous role as internal affairs bureau investigating wrongdoing by ICE agents.

DHS has used, with varying degrees of success, administrative subpoenas and grand jury subpoenas to unmask social media posters, according to the new report.

There are, of course, some actually concerning threats online — and some subsequent convictions — but the scope of DHS surveillance program seems to go well beyond true threats. The WSJ attempts to put some numbers to it (emphases added):

• “To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE ‘may’ be a crime.”
• “The notice for OPR’s new threat initiative calls for the monitoring of nearly 20 social sites, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and the use of public documents such as DMV records and police reports to identify and map key relationships of users who have been flagged as a ‘threat originator.'”
• “OPR has investigated at least 131 incidents of doxxing and threats towards agency personnel between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a court declaration …”
• “DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted ‘content critical of federal actions.’ … Reddit determined that these users were engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment and objected to each, the person said, and DHS eventually withdrew the requests.”
• “The Wall Street Journal identified 10 people—nine Americans and one Canadian—who pushed back against DHS’s attempts to unmask them through the two types of subpoenas. Of those, judges have upheld four grand jury subpoenas. No charges have yet been filed in these cases. The agency abandoned three cases, while three more are pending.”

Funding is another tell.

A WSJ analysis found that ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants surged by 57% year over year to $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in office.

Lawyers told the newspaper that the spike in subpoenas for information on online critics began to spike in September, which coincided with when a new $8 million contract took effect between OPR and a software development firm called Amivero, which subcontracted the work to the global consulting firm Guidehouse.

Both of the previously reported upstate New York cases are apparently products of OPR’s new surveillance program. As Morning Memo noted last month, one of the targets in those two cases, David Streever, filed a lawsuit in D.C. with help from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression alleging that ICE’s OPR violated his First Amendment rights when it went to his home in June and then tracked him down while he was traveling to issue him a “Warning Notice” for a non-threatening but critical email opposing Operation Metro Surge that he sent to then-acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons.

Streever refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Ohio: With their Temporary Protected Status withdrawn, Haitians immigrants are being outfitted with ankle monitors by DHS, the WaPo reports.
• New York: U.S. District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino of Albany struck down the state’s law banning federal officers from wearing masks as a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
• D.C.: Democratic officials from 24 states and D.C. sued to block DHS from viewing personal details about millions of people receiving anti-poverty aid, Politico reports.

Senate Judiciary to Vote on Blanche

After a few days of delay, Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general looks likely to make it through the Senate Judiciary Committee today, which will stand for all time as a ratification by Senate Republicans of President Trump’s evisceration of the Justice Department and of Blanche’s lawless award of IRS immunity to Trump personally.

One more footnote on the IRS immunity, via the NYT: While the retroactive immunity is limited to the parties to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — himself, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization — the lawsuit defines the Trump Organization as the Trump Organization, LLC, and 418 other entities that are not specifically identified. Let that sink in.

More Reflecting Pool Cases Dropped

D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose job is in jeopardy for dismissing the highest profile of the bogus Reflecting Pool “vandalism” cases, has also moved to dismiss three other similar cases related to the peeling liner from what she now admits was a  “hasty and botched” renovation job.

MAGA’s Crony Capitalism Comes With A Socialist Twist

The Trump administration has now taken ownership stakes in at least 30 corporations, according to the libertarian CATO Institute, which is closely tracking the new practice:

What is remarkable is that federal corporate ownership is becoming routine under a Republican administration, while a Republican-controlled Congress is not just letting it happen but may even enshrine the practice in statute. 

Republicans warning that communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.

As CATO notes, the Biden administration awarded funds to private companies under the same CHIPS and Science Act provisions that the Trump administration is using but without taking equity interests in the companies.

Just $85,000 To Go

We are entering the stretch run of our drive to raise $500,000 for the TPM Journalism Fund. As of this morning, we have about $85,000 to go to hit the mark. Thank you for your generosity to get us to this point!

If you haven’t contributed yet — and you value independent journalism, Morning Memo, the TPM sensibility, or some combination thereof! — please take a moment now to pitch in. We would love to sprint through the finish line on this and turn 100% of our focus back to the work we do. Thanks again!

Ethereal Phenomenon

I‘ll stop posting timelapses of the aurora from the @Space_Station when I’m tired of looking at them . . . so basically never! Another unforgettable display of this ethereal phenomenon as it danced beneath us last night, this one even more special as it was shared with… pic.twitter.com/zwVRUHAYzq

— Jessica Meir (@Astro_Jessica) August 3, 2026

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Wet Noodle Award: Cornyn and Tillis

Trump is Lucy. GOP senators are the football. D.C. political reporters are Charlie Brown.

For a decade now, the illusion that Republican senators in whole or in part would rise up against the outrages of the Trump presidencies has animated political reporting even as the Senate GOP conference has chronically failed to rise to the occasion.

The farcical effort required to sustain the illusion has required a willing disbelief and feigned innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So while the urge to pile on Senate Republicans like John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina for not driving a hard bargain with Trump over the nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general is warranted, it must also be acknowledged, as painful as it is, that their pretend resistance actually works at yielding the headlines and reputational burnishing they’re looking for.

Most of this morning’s coverage of the overnight development bears this out.

After weeks of resistance, Blanche finally put in writing, in documents he posted to X, that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund is dead and that the IRS immunity for Trump is retroactive only. It was a limited concession, but it was enough for the two Senate holdouts, Tillis just confirmed on X.

The news coverage hailed this as a “formal” act by Blanche of rescinding the “anti-weaponization” fund. Some managed to cover the development without reference to Blanche’s disastrous anti-democratic run at a DOJ used as tool of retribution for the Trump White House.

This came after President Trump over the weekend continued to escalate his insistence that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund should still move forward. We’re supposed to belief Trump’s former personal lawyer and underling, not the president himself.

Just look at what Blanche did and did not do because it reinforces what a parody of a negotiation with the two senators this has been.

• Cornyn has rightly insisted that by the terms of the “settlement agreement” in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, only the parties to it, including Trump, can amend it. Only Blanche signed his “order” on the “anti-weaponization” fund. No amendment to the settlement agreement, if one exists, has been released.
• Blanche’s “order” purports to be the final word on the “anti-weaponization” fund but it’s not at all clear what, if any, legal authority it carries. Remember that Blanche has refused in one of the what he calls “frivolous” lawsuits challenging the slush fund to declare it dead under penalty of perjury. Nothing filed in court so far suggests a change in that position.
• Blanche’s “order” makes no mention of the IRS immunity for Trump. Instead, a separate statement from his office — unsigned and under no one’s name — stipulates that the IRS deal is only retroactive. This statement appears to be a sop to Cornyn who wanted Blanche to put his Senate testimony to this effect in writing; the statement reaffirms Blanche’s testimony. How this bald statement is legally binding on anyone is a mystery.

These vague assurances with no legal obligation are consistent with the weak demands Cornyn was making for his vote. For his part, Tillis gave away the game Saturday before Blanche’s written assurances, lamenting that Trump’s doubling down on the slush fund was hobbling Blanche’s confirmation (emphasis added): “It’s unfortunate that Todd Blanche, who I consider qualified for the job, will not be confirmed because of this reversal.”

Trump Appeals Sanctions in IRS Case

In related news, Trump and his lawyers are appealing U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ finding last month that he engaged in a collusive lawsuit against the IRS. They’re also asking for Williams to pause the sanctions while their appeal plays out.

Rather than immediately ruling on that request, Williams has asked the outside lawyers she previously appointed as friends of the court — since there were no adverse parties in the case by the president against his own administration — to brief her on the request.

In what would normally be a dry procedural order, Williams got in one more jab at the lack of adverseness between the Trump plaintiffs and the Trump administration defendants, noting that the outside lawyers were needed “in light of the fact that Defendants do not intend to appear or file a response to the Motion.”

Pass the Popcorn for Trump v. Pirro

The Reflecting Pool liner prosecution spectacularly imploded Friday with an embarrassing motion to dismiss by D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro that deserves a hallowed spot in the annals of the depredations of the Trump DOJ

The two most notable aspects of the implosion:

• Despite her “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to prosecutions like this one, Pirro publicly pointed fingers at the Interior Department for failing to provide at the outset crucial information that undermined the prosecution: “It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI.” That she didn’t seek that and other information before bringing charges is one of the glaring problems here.
• Pirro’s finger-pointing provoked a backlash from President Trump himself, who lashed out at her in a social media post Saturday: “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM …”

For his part, erstwhile defendant David Hearn was just a pawn in this sordid affair, first when Pirro rushed to placate the president over the embarrassment caused by his crappy pool liner and now as she tries to extricate herself and her prosecutors from of the mess she created without getting hit with heavy sanctions or a civil lawsuit for the baseless prosecution.

As Chris Geidner notes, there’s a lot more to come in this case: “Friday’s motion to dismiss the David Hearn case is more likely an opening — rather than the closing — salvo in this matter.”

MN Church Protesters Offered Plea Deals

In another in a series of crumbling cases against ICE protesters, the Trump DOJ has offered plea deals to 29 of the 38 people charged in the January anti-ICE demonstration in a St. Paul, Minnesota, church that would reduce their charges from felonies to misdemeanors. Apparently, none of them has accepted the offer.

2026 Midterms Ephemera

• Ohio: In a social media post Sunday, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R) said his former son-in-law, Rep. Max Miller (R), lacks the “basic standards of character” to serve in Congress. Moreno’s daughter Emily has accused Miller of abuse towards her and their young daughter; Miller has denied her accusations in the bitter custody battle.
• Virginia: Reversing the actions of former Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger announced Friday that she is restoring voting rights for some 66,000 people in the state with past felony convictions.
• Nationwide: FiftyPlusOne has a new midterms forecast out this morning that gives Democrats an 85% chance of winning the House and 55% chance of winning Senate control.

Previous NYT Subpoena Disclosed

A previously undisclosed grand jury subpoena was served on a NYT freelancer way back in February over a story he co-wrote for the newspaper last fall about a failed 2019 Seal Team 6 operation in North Korea, the NYT revealed over the weekend:

The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.

Freelance reporter Matthew Cole has been quietly fighting the subpoena from a grand jury in Newport News, Va., using the same attorney as the NYT, which separately fought subpoenas of its reporters over their Air Force One reporting. Cole’s co-author of the piece, NYT staff reporter Dave Philipps, was reportedly not subpoenaed.

Santos Fined for Alleged SOTU Scheme

Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has settled a claim — without admitting wrongdoing — by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that he manipulated prediction market Kalshi over whether he would attend President Trump’s State of the Union address.

His alleged manipulation included instances like this one, via the NYT:

For example, on Feb. 22, Mr. Santos posted on X asking his followers whether he should “wear a muted serious suit to the SOTU or a bedazzled one?”

That query caused the value of betting on Mr. Santos’s attendance to shoot up. The next day, regulators said, Mr. Santos exited his position and made about $3,400 in profits.

Under the terms of the settlement, Santos will return $17,570 in ill-gotten gains and pay a $17,500 penalty.

Meanwhile, in the Real World …

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850. pic.twitter.com/uU5EYVXfZ2

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) August 2, 2026

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

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.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

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

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

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.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

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

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

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

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

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

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

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

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.