Dobbs fallout may have dropped out of the headlines, but existential state-level battles that will decide the fate of women nationwide continue to rage.
This cycle, there’s one anti-abortion amendment and three pro. Two of them could upend the abortion landscape in their states.
Josh Marshall has been chronicling the many ways that Trump world is descending into petty feuding ahead of the midterms — and how, in the midst of that, Trump is starting to cut loose those hangers-on who look too much like dead weight. Josh has dubbed stories in this vein “‘Layla’-coda updates” which, TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo eventually explained to me, is a reference to the scene in Goodfellas when Robert De Niro’s character has his crew members killed off, one by one, to avoid sharing the cash from a successful heist. The coda of Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” plays in the background as the bodies are discovered.
Anyway.
This dynamic of escalating intra-MAGA feuds and score settling has now come to involve Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has usually managed to hover above it all, studiously going about the work of prosecuting Trump’s enemies. Dragging Blanche into the muck is Laura Loomer.
The dispute between the two improbably involves the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, a 2022 law that allows members of the military, their family members, and others who were exposed to contaminated water on the North Carolina military base to seek compensation from the federal government. Wells on the base are believed to have been contaminated with toxic chemicals, a problem that went on for more than three decades; residents developed a wide range of conditions including cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
Loomer has, for some reason, turned up advocating for these military families, and on X accused associate attorney general Stanley Woodward of “sending these veterans insulting lowball offers designed to insult and belittle their suffering.” She described Woodward as “a lifelong Democrat at the DOJ” and suggested he was plotting to hand North Carolina to the Democrats in the midterms. “He has got to be one of the WORST hires of the second Trump administration,” she said. “But, I tried to warn people.” The message seemed intended to capture Trump’s attention.
Blanche shot back last night. “Laura, you should be transparent with your followers, and you are dead wrong about Stanley,” he wrote on X. “He is a patriot who is fighting for POTUS and the American people every day.”
Blanche went on to take personal responsibility for the Camp Lejeune cases, saying that the DOJ has been “consulting with and keeping the White House counsel’s office and DOW updated along the way.”
“Find a different obsession other than going after one of DOJ’s best fighters,” he concluded.
This dispute does appear to be on Trump’s radar. At a rally in North Carolina last night, Trump cast any DOJ offers that victims found unsatisfactory as part of an effort to keep the money from going to “trial lawyers.” “We want it to go to the families, not to the lawyers,” he said, per a local NPR station.
Trump then grotesquely told the crowd they better vote Republican if they wanted to see the veterans get their money.
“If we don’t win, there’s no money,” he said. “If we do win, you’re getting it.”
It’s not yet clear whether it’s time to cue the “Layla” coda in this story, but it does appear to be yet another example of the brutal midterm environment — Democrats are favored to win up and down the ballot in North Carolina — causing accusations to fly among the president’s allies.
No one ever found the “Joe Rogan of the Left,” and maybe it doesn’t matter.
It’s Alina Habba, already locked in a damaging feud with fellow Trump world operator Ric Grenell, and now the subject of a New York Times investigation that finds a Venezuelan billionaire set her up with a gig through which she’ll make $50 million. In exchange, the billionaire, Julio Herrera Velutini, finally got the pardon from Trump he had long been seeking.
The Trump administration’s Justice Department has escalated its pre-midterm crusade against California, using the myth of widespread noncitizen voting as its justification for novel and bizarre adventures to try to undercut trust in elections ahead of the midterms.
Just last week, the DOJ sent a letter to election officials in Los Angeles demanding election administrators take a series of actions after claiming it found thousands of noncitizens who were registered to vote in the state. DOJ officials laid out a list of steps they wanted local election administrators to take to ensure that these people, who it alleged were “likely noncitizen voters,” didn’t receive mail-in ballots or have their votes counted.
Since then, the Justice Department has also sued the state of California and threatened investigations and the potential prosecution of any election worker in the state who might knowingly process ballots from noncitizen voters. The DOJ has previously issued similar warnings to election officials across the nation.
Noncitizens voting in federal election is vanishingly rare and there is no evidence to show that it has impacted the outcome of any federal election. But President Trump and his allies roll out the conspiracy theory that it is widespread anytime he loses, or thinks he’s about to lose, an election, as TPM has reported for years.
On Monday, federal law enforcement arrested 11 people and charged 28 people residing in California, accusing them of making false statements and submitting fraudulent voter registrations. Each of the people charged have legal status in the U.S. but are not U.S. citizens, the DOJ said. The Justice Department is calling the sweep of arrests “Operation Protect the Vote.” The DOJ in an online statement accused California election officials of not properly maintaining the state’s voter rolls and ignoring its wild claims that there are some 20,000 noncitizens registered in the state.
My colleague David Kurtz got into the DOJ’s potentially unfounded accusations in Morning Memo a bit more last week, which you can catch up on here. There are plenty of reason to be suspicious of the DOJ’s claim that it has found tens of thousands of noncitizens on California’s voter rolls. The DOJ has been trying to force states to hand over their voter lists and/or to run their voter rolls through a faulty federal database that has a poor track record with finding eligible voters to be ineligible. Courts across the nation have blocked the DOJ’s campaign to seize voting records from states.
California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta told reporters on Monday that there is not a widespread issue with voter fraud in California and described the DOJ’s arrests as “a drop in the bucket” of the state’s 23 million registered voters.
“They provided no — no basis, fact, evidence, substantiation, backing for that allegation, all they provided was a list of people and nothing about why they’re purportedly ineligible,” Bonta said, referencing the DOJ’s claims that it’s identified 20,000 noncitizens on California’s voter rolls.
“If they have such information we would be happy to review it, but they’ve provided none. And what words they’re using are very important,” Bonta continued. “They’re not saying that ‘we have conclusive proof,’ they’re not saying ‘we know,’ they’re not even saying ‘we think we know.’ They’re saying ‘we believe it’s likely.'”
Bonta then brought up the last time that the Justice Department claimed to have found tens of thousands of noncitizen voters in Nevada earlier this year. Those claims fizzled out entirely.
“We are not impressed by their case, we are not impressed by their position. Our north start is the law and the facts and they have neither on their side,” he said. “We believe their case is meritless and we’ll make our position very clear in court.”
Under the pretext of an ethics complaint against all but one of the active federal judges in Minnesota, Attorney General Todd Blanche signaled yesterday that not only will the Trump administration continue to run roughshod over the judicial branch but that judges had better shut up about it.
The complaint filed by second and third highest ranking DOJ officials with the uber-right-wing 8th Circuit Court of Appeals is ostensibly about an admittedly unusual decision by the federal judges who bore the brunt of Operation Metro Surge to sit for an interview with the New York Times for a story that ran Sept. 17.
In the interview, the judges — including Patrick Schiltz who was the chief judge during the peak of the flood of mass deportation cases swamping the Minnesota federal court — defended the rule of law, provided a civics lesson on the role of the courts, and described the structural and institutional challenges they had faced. They refrained from talking about individual cases, but they did speak in broad terms about the habeas cases in general, Operation Metro Surge and the conduct of the Trump DOJ.
The complaint — signed by acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter and Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward — accused the judges of pandering to the press and engaging in unethical behavior that “flagrantly violated” the canons of judicial ethics. It specifically called out Judge Schiltz and Judge John R. Tunheim — who were both quoted by name in the NYT article — for what it called “particularly egregious” misconduct.
The Trump DOJ asked the 8th Circuit to appoint a special committee to conduct an investigation of the judges for their allegedly improper behavior and to order Judges Schiltz and Tunheim to recuse themselves from any cases involving DHS.
Blanche: "Today, we're also announcing that just a few minutes ago the DOJ filed a judicial misconduct complaint with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals against all but one district court judge in the District of Minnesota for violating various judicial canons."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-30T15:40:45.087Z
The Trump DOJ getting on its high horse about legal ethics is a lot to take on its own. But it’s also striking that the complaint leans into what DOJ officials see as a friendly audience on the 8th Circuit. It emphasizes, for instance, the appeals court’s own decision upholding the Trump administration’s mass detention policy without bond — one of only two appeals courts to do so — in which it overruled the Minnesota judges.
Traditionally, Article III judges have been free to speak publicly on matters of judicial administration, the Constitution, democracy — civics, if you will. They have been free to lobby for more funding, better security protection, restructuring of the judiciary, and reform measures without running afoul of ethics requirements.
But the Trump DOJ — which has defied orders left and right, hidden its worst conduct behind unprepared junior lawyers, botched cases, fired huge numbers of experienced attorneys, and made a hash of the distinguished department — now wants to clamp down on the ability of judges to stand up against what may be the most sustained assault on the judiciary in the nation’s history.
As expected, the Supreme Court will take up the Trump administration’s policy of mass detention without bond that the circuit courts have split on, but which dozens of judges in thousands of cases have found to be unlawful.
The family of Renee Good who was shot and killed by ICE in January during Operation Metro Surge has filed two civil lawsuits against the Trump administration arising from her death.
A federal judge in Chicago this afternoon will hear arguments over whether to conduct a further inqury into alleged misconduct into Trump’s DOJ’s handling of the grand jury in the Broadview Six case and the aftermath of that now-abandoned prosecution of ICE protesters.
The Supreme Court’s prior handling of the third-country removal case was already the most troublesome emergency docket case, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck argues, then came this week’s unexplained decision in the case:
“There have certainly been rulings on the emergency docket that I believe to be more clearly and obviously wrong on the merits. And there have been rulings on the emergency docket that have produced even more harmful effects domestically and/or to the separation of powers. But there’s something profoundly ugly about the D.V.D. case that, unfortunately, was on display again on Tuesday.”
Give her credit: Judge Aileen Cannon has gotten out of the pickle she was in on Volume II of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report. She struck a motion from FBI agents who investigated the Mar-a-Lago documents case and are now being targeted by the Trump DOJ seeking clarification on her order sealing Volume II. Her reason: The lawyers had failed to confer with the co-defendants in the underlying criminal case about their motion before filing it.
808 | PAPERLESS ORDER striking for lack of conferral 806 Motion to Intervene and Seek Clarification of Court Order. S.D. Fla. L.R. 88.9(a). Signed by Judge Aileen M. Cannon on 10/1/2026. (sm1) (Entered: 10/01/2026) |
In the Volume II case which is on appeal, the 11th Circuit the appeals court rescheduled oral arguments yet again but moved them earlier for the first time after months of kicking the can down the road. Instead of January of next year they’re now scheduled for the first week of November. Nothing much going on that week.
Ruling that “no crime occurred,” a DC judge has ruled that the already-dismissed Reflecting Pool case against David Hearn should be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the Trump DOJ can’t bring the case against him again in the future.
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era. There is no precedent.”—Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, on last night’s horrific attempted execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee.
Pike remains hospitalized this morning. Gov. Bill Lee (R) has halted executions through the end of the year.
Earlier this week, one of our TPM reporters let me know he was tuning into the White House’s press conference. I was surprised when he told me who the fill-in press secretary would be that day: Attorney General Todd Blanche.
I probably shouldn’t have been. Blanche, since winning Senate confirmation, has set about fully demolishing yet another norm: that the attorney general stay out of politics. Not only has he given a White House press briefing — in recent weeks, he’s hit the campaign trail.
The press conference this week saw Blanche affirming that Trump and his family were right on all the issues of the day.
Last week, Blanche spoke at the Republican midterms convention, an effort (however questionably successful) to get the base hyped to vote. On Wednesday, he campaign for former RNC head Michael Whatley, who is running for Senate in North Carolina and badly trailing former governor Roy Cooper (D). Blanche’s political campaigning pales in importance compared with the department’s aggressive prosecution of the president’s enemies — from random protesters and social media shit-stirrers to former FBI directors. But it is all of a piece.
The norm of the attorney general remaining apolitical dates back to the ’70s, Charlie Savage writes in the New York Times, when Nixon’s first attorney general, John Mitchell, ran Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns and, in between, played a central role in multiple aspects of Watergate.
Amid everything going on — Watergate would be a “12-hour news story” today, as JD Vance so memorably put it — it can feel like weak tea to talk about the vagaries of the Hatch Act, or norms of Justice Department independence. It can feel quaint to remember how Merrick Garland launched an investigation into Biden just a few short years ago. Remember the freakout that ensued when Bill Clinton and Obama attorney general Loretta Lynch chatted for 30 minutes on an airport tarmac while Hillary Clinton was under investigation? It may have set off a chain of events that brought us Trump in the first place.
Still, it’s worth keeping sight of how quickly things have changed, just to keep perspective.
When Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) voted to confirm Blanche, he asserted that if Blanche wasn’t the Senate-confirmed attorney general, Trump would likely go find an acting attorney general who was worse. Because Blanche had been Trump’s personal lawyer, he had developed the ability to talk the president out of his worst ideas, Cassidy reasoned. “I am realistic that President Trump can be unrelenting,” he sighed. He, therefore, had not choice but to confirm Blanche, he decided.
That whole line of reasoning may be pathetic, but there’s something to it. And it’s a striking statement on where we’re at.
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On Monday, TPM reporter Chris Mathias revealed that Republicans’ nominee for a Florida legislature seat attended the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, part of years of activism alongside a neo-Confederate group called League of the South. Marshall Rawson’s candidacy, we found, had seemingly become a kind of cause célèbre among the furthest-right activists in American politics, who donated at least $15,000 to his campaign. Rawson had personally made it “very clear” to one former Klan lawyer “that he’s taking a stand against discrimination against white people,” the lawyer told us.
The story was covered by The Washington Post, The New York Times, MS NOW, The New Republic, Politico, The Independent, The Guardian, and local outlets including Charlottesville Weekly, the Tampa Bay Times, and the ABC affiliate for northcentral Florida.
So, is the GOP standing by Rawson?
Yes.
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