It’s no great insight to say Trump’s impulsive Iran War has been a big political loser for him. Even some of his and the war’s supporters would concede that point. “Katrinas” are also wildly overdetermined and over-diagnosed in political talk. How many “Obama’s Katrinas” were there? How many did Joe Biden allegedly have? But it did occur to me this morning that it is something like that for Trump but for a specifically Trumpian reason. Donald Trump’s great super power is changing the subject. He never sticks to one racket or con until its rung out of all its juice. He’s always on to some new thing because — long before we lived in the broken world of social media — Trump has always lived in the attention economy. Attention is the great commodity. It’s even more powerful for Trump as a defensive weapon. When something isn’t going great he’s always creating some new drama, some new thing to change the subject to. But what we’re seeing now is that Trump simply cannot change the subject. The whole Iran War story is devastatingly bad for him. And he simply has no way to stop it from being the big, dominating story. He can’t make any shiny object take its place. He’s stuck, not just militarily but politically as well.
Continue reading “Is Trump’s Iran War Like a Katrina Moment?”Michigan Officials Rebuff DOJ as Trump Admin Election Deniers Zero in on Wayne County
Two of Michigan’s top officials, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, both Democrats, fired back at the Justice Department after the DOJ expanded its baseless investigation of past elections into Michigan.
Continue reading “Michigan Officials Rebuff DOJ as Trump Admin Election Deniers Zero in on Wayne County”Kash Patel Quickly Sues Over Devastating Story
‘Conspicuous Inebriation’
Update: Kash Patel has filed this morning a defamation lawsuit against the Atlantic and staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick in federal court in D.C.
On Friday evening, The Atlantic published a devastating account of Kash Patel’s first year as FBI director.
The gist of the piece is this: “the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.”
Most of the piece focused on Patel’s alleged drinking on the job. The anecdotes were numerous … and astounding:
- “On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for ‘breaching equipment’—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.”
- “Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.”
- “FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk.”
Patel responded to the story pre-publication by threatening to sue The Atlantic: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.” Post-publication, he threatened to sue as soon as today and posted this quite memorable, though legally inaccurate, statement on X regarding defamation law: “actual malice standard is now what some would call a legal lay up.”
As has become a pattern among on-the-outs officials during Trump II, Patel tried to save his own neck by redoubling his efforts to go after Trump’s political foes during a round of appearances on the Sunday morning TV shows:
DiGenova Helms ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case
After a bunch of rapid-fire reporting from multiple news outlets from Friday afternoon into Saturday, the shuffling of the deck chairs in the mother of all Trump vindictive prosecutions in south Florida looks like this:
- Career DOJer Maria Medetis Long is out as the lead prosecutor in the case “after she resisted pressure to quickly bring charges” against former CIA director John Brennan, CNN reports. Her boss, Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, had told DOJ “officials that charges could still be months away, sources say, which top Justice officials told him was not acceptable.”
- Former D.C. U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, 81, who represented Trump’s 2020 campaign and Trump during the earlier Russia investigation, is now leading the “grand conspiracy” investigation, with the title of counselor to the attorney general. DiGenova starts today.
- Also assigned to the case: Christopher-James DeLorenz, a former clerk to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon during the Mar-a-Lago investigation who was transferred to south Florida from Main Justice, where he’d been an aide to then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The south Florida case, some of which is happening in Ft. Pierce, where Cannon is the only judge, is supposedly pursuing a grand-unifying conspiracy theory that the federal government was out to get Trump across multiple investigations that spanned nearly a decade.
Trump DOJ Watch
- In a letter last week signed by Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump DOJ demanded that Detroit-area ballots from the 2024 federal election be turned over, escalating its bogus scrutiny of spurious election fraud claims, which judges continue to reject en masse.
- HuffPo: “As legal claims against the Trump administration stack up, several federal lawyers defending the U.S. government — and its repeated failures to follow court orders — have regularly fallen back on the same argument: They simply have no idea what’s going on.”
- WSJ: In a letter that uses highly politicized language, the Trump DOJ is refusing to cooperate with the French investigation into Elon Musk’s X.
Todd Blanche Auditions for AG Post
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman: “In Todd Blanche’s three weeks as Acting AG, he has taken screws that seemed fully turned and tightened them another notch. His initial moves suggest that, hard as it is to conceive, he will be even more vicious, more slavish toward Trump, and more willing to jettison the public interest and the rule of law than was his consummately servile predecessor.”
Extraordinary Glimpse Inside SCOTUS
In a well-packaged blockbuster, the NYT obtained a tranche of internal Supreme Court memos from the 2016 case that ushered in the shadow docket as we know it today:
- The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court
- VIDEO: The Origins of the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket
- A Breakdown of Five Days of Secret Supreme Court Memos
- Takeaways From the Supreme Court’s Shadow Papers
- Read the Supreme Court’s Shadow Papers
Shadow docket expert Steve Vladeck has a very accessible column this morning on the upshot of the NYT’s remarkable reporting.
No SCOTUS Retirements This Year
Contrary to all the speculation, Justice Samuel Alito doesn’t plan to retire this year, Fox News reports. Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t going anywhere either, according to CBS News’ Jan Crawford.
Sorry, Aileen Cannon, Neomi Rao, James Ho, et al.
Good Read
Madiba K. Dennie: Neomi Rao Understands What It Means to Be a Trump Judge
Latest From the Middle East …
- After declaring on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was open to navigation, Iran quickly moved to shut it down again on Saturday until, it said, the United States lifts its blockade of Iranian ports. Two India-flagged ships were fired on after the new Iranian announcement and forced to turn around.
- On Sunday, the U.S. Navy disabled then boarded an Iranian-flagged cargo ship that allegedly tried to run the U.S. blockade.
- Vice President J.D. Vance is leading the U.S. delegation in expected talks this week with Iran in Pakistan, though Iran is making noises about not participating following the weekend’s events in the Strait of Hormuz.
Thread of the Day
A recap of the unusual maneuvering over FISA Section 702 late last week on the Hill:
Boat Strike Campaign Death Toll: 180
Three people were killed Sunday in the Caribbean Sea in the 52nd lawless U.S. strike against suspected drug-smuggling boats, bringing the campaign’s death toll to at least 180 people.
Mass Deportation Watch
- Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, the pro-Palestinian Tufts University student whose detention by masked federal agents for her political views was caught on camera, completed her Ph.D. in February and returned home to Turkey as part of a settlement agreement with the Trump administration.
- Marcy Wheeler: Minnesota Still Cleaning Up after Pam Bondi’s Trophy Stunt
- Politico: They’ve been detained by ICE and ordered deported. Judges are releasing them from custody.
The Corruption: Bogus Settlements
A new court filing confirmed that — how else to put it? — the Trump administration is in settlement talks with President Trump and his family about their $10 billion lawsuit over the leak of their tax information to news organizations.
In related news: Lawfare obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit a copy of the $1.25 million settlement agreement between the Trump administration and former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn to settle his bogus malicious prosecution claims.
The Corruption: Trump Library Edition
As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent reports, Democrats have been chasing down what happened to the corporate donations to Trump’s presidential library that were part of corrupt lawsuit settlement agreements with him — especially since the fund created to receive donations was dissolved last year.
ABC, Paramount, Meta, and X have now all confirmed they made the settlement payments, but it’s not clear where the monies ended up going.
“Not one of these companies can say with any clarity where their multi-million-dollar donations to Donald Trump’s library slush fund are, or where they will go,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told TNR.
Appeals Court Lets Ballroom Continue
The D.C. Circuit is playing with fire by allowing construction of President Trump’s vanity ballroom to continue until at least June while it hears his appeal of a lower court order halting the project. The administrative stay sets the stage for Trump to rush construction along so that he can present courts with a fait accompli they’ll be more reluctant to order torn down. This was the exact scenario U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C. warned the administration about in the very first hearing in the case, but the panel of Judges Patricia Millett (Obama), Neomi Rao (Trump), and Brad Garcia (Biden) are opening the barn door at least until oral arguments on June 5.
Headline of the Day
I didn’t expect to see this headline in my lifetime: “Germany Is Reinventing Itself as a Weapons Factory.”
Thanks, President Trump.
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Pete Hegseth Nailed It. No Really.
You’ve probably seen the story about how, at a DOD presentation, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quoted what he apparently thought was a bible verse but was in fact the faux biblicalism delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Jules Winnfield, in Pulp Fiction. There’s a lot here. Yes, the faux godly Hegseth should really be a bit more versed in the bible. But it’s really perfectly apt that he’s not. If you remember, Winnfield is a hitman, a killer, a man of meaningless violence. He wraps his murders in stylized bible verse imitations to give them some mix of giving them retributional ooomph and just for kicks. Is there any better description of Pete Hegseth? I can’t think of one. Hegseth’s brand of Christian nationalism is a permission structure for domination and violence. The biblical text is a source of handy quotes to the extent it advances those aims. But he’s neither smart enough nor serious enough to mine the text in any serious way. He’s just a different version of Jules Winnfield.
Pete Hegseth’s Art of War
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
“Discipline means organization, chain of command, and logistics.”
— Master Sun Tzu
In “The Art of War,” his famed treatise on military strategy from the 6th Century B.C.E., the legendary Chinese strategist Sun Tzu spends much of his time on the need to keep armies well fed and supplied. It appears America’s self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth skipped over those parts of the ancient manuscript.
Continue reading “Pete Hegseth’s Art of War “Thoughts on a New Civic Contract
Yesterday I noted G. Elliott Morris’s argument that extremely poor consumer sentiment in the U.S. is no mystery once you look properly at what Americans mean when they talk about prices and inflation. In short, just because prices stopped going up in the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency didn’t mean the public stopped being mad about them going up (and staying up) in the first half of his term. I’m pretty certain that this explains a lot about what sank Biden’s presidency and the dynamics of the 2024 election. But does it explain what’s happening now? When I wrote yesterday’s post, TPM Reader SB agreed, but argued that it went beyond that — that the still-declining consumer sentiment, the extremely sour public mood goes beyond the post-COVID inflation shock. It’s also about extreme wealth inequality, SB argued. Then, this morning, Paul Krugman began what he says will be a series of posts on his Substack in which he argues that while he agrees with the “excess price” framework, he’s not sure it’s a sufficient explanation.
Krugman didn’t really get into what exactly he thinks it is. As I said, he said he’ll address it in a series of posts. But the gist is that there’s a larger politico-economic explanation that goes beyond how long people stay mad about prices. Krugman says he thinks the deepening sense of economic gloom is driven by the fact that the public was upset about inflation, voted to move in a direction and then had the new guy do basically everything he could to stoke more inflation into the economy and generally whipsaw the economy in 20 different directions for a series of bizarre and obscure ideological fascinations.
Continue reading “Thoughts on a New Civic Contract”DOJ Wants a Redo in Floundering Campaign to Seize Voter Data From the States
After facing a series of setbacks and outright dismissals in its legal battle to try to seize sensitive voter data from multiple states throughout the country, the Justice Department is asking courts in 13 states for permission for a redo.
Continue reading “DOJ Wants a Redo in Floundering Campaign to Seize Voter Data From the States”Seeing the Hormuz Breakthrough in Its Full Light
The U.S. and Iran both announced this morning that the Strait of Hormuz is now fully open for the duration of the current ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. While the news is positive on the surface for global commerce and the global energy-economic crisis, few developments better illustrate the situation Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have gotten the U.S., the global economy and Israel into. What we see now is that the health of the global economy is, going forward, subject to fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. In a way Iran has always had a tacit or latent hold on the Strait of Hormuz. Simple geography tells you that. But it was only when Trump forced the matter that Iran learned how comparatively easy a lever that was to pull. They didn’t have to sink any oil tankers and even seriously damage one. They just had to issue threats and do some drone harassment. Maritime insurance markets would take care of the rest. There’s no way not to see this as a massive strategic win for Iran.
ICE Agent Faces State Charges in Minnesota
A Potentially Important Test Case
Local authorities in Minnesota have charged an ICE agent for brandishing his gun in a road-rage-style incident that could end up being an important test case for whether states can successfully prosecute federal agents for their misconduct in Trump’s mass deportation operation.
The two-count criminal complaint accuses Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., 35, of Maryland of second-degree assault for pointing his gun at the driver and passenger of a vehicle he was attempting to pass on the shoulder of the road as he and his partner made their way back to the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis at the end of their shift on Feb. 5. A warrant has been issued for Morgan’s arrest.
The complaint states: “During his interview, Defendant made no claim that he was conducting any law-enforcement operation or activity or responding to any emergency situation during the incident.”
Much will ride on whether Morgan was still on duty at the time of the incident and whether passing cars on the shoulder in an unmarked vehicle without lights or sirens, then flashing his gun, were part of his official duties. Those will be among the issues that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty will have to overcome to sidestep the defenses the officer is likely to raise, including immunity from state prosecution.
In that sense, the Morgan case may not be the optimal test case for Moriarty if she is exploring the waters for bringing state charges against the federal agents in the three major shootings during Operation Metro Surge. But unlike in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, where the feds have refused to cooperate in any way, the Morgan case played out differently.
“This is the only case that we actually know what the federal officers say,” Moriarty told the Star Tribune. “We have their statement. We have video. The difference is that it came to us just like any other case would have.”
Minnesota State Police responded to the scene after a 911 call from the passenger of the vehicle Morgan allegedly assaulted and were able to gather evidence unobstructed by federal law enforcement. The passenger in the vehicle had video of Morgan’s license plate, which state police were able to link to a rental vehicle leased by Morgan’s partner, according to the complaint. A license plate reader at the Whipple Building clocked the vehicle, and state police learned the next day that both agents were at the building, the complaint says.
Critically, Morgan and his partner agreed to voluntary interviews with state police, the complaint says, in which they confirmed key details of the incident, including Morgan having drawn his weapon. Morgan told state police he “feared for his safety and the safety of others.”
The Star Tribune reports it this way: “The trooper called his lieutenant, who was at Whipple, gave him the license plate and asked him to look for the SUV. It was in the parking lot. The trooper interviewed the ICE agents with his body camera recording.”
Notably, neither Morgan nor his partner reported the incident, Morgan’s supervisor told state police, according to the complaint.
Mass Deportation Watch
- Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, who has suffered from stress-related symptoms that have landed him in the hospital twice during his tenure overseeing Trump’s mass deportation operation, plans to resign next month.
- In a rare rebuke of Trump’s mass deportation policies, 11 GOP House members defected to help Democrats pass a bill to continue temporary protected status for 350,000 Haitians.
- The French foreign minister announced that an 85-year-old French widow of an American military veteran returned to France this morning after being held in ICE custody since April 1. The woman was apparently detained at the behest of one of her stepsons as part of an ugly inheritance battle, a probate judge in Alabama found.
Latest on the Middle East …
- A tentative 10-day ceasefire was reached between Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah was not a party to the agreement, but civilians began streaming back into southern Lebanon Friday morning after the ceasefire was announced.
- With European airlines facing looming fuel shortages within weeks, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz is now open for the duration of the ceasefire: “The passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open.”
- The Trump White House is considering a $20 billion cash-for-uranium deal with Iran, Axios reports, the irony of which is hard to overstate. For years, Trump has mischaracterized the cash component of President Obama JCPOA’s agreement with Iran and made it a recurring rhetorical set-piece, including as recently as last month.
The Christian Nationalist Project
Sarah Posner in TPM: “The Trump regime has a preferred religion — a bellicose, nationalist Christianity — but its expression, as we saw this week, can be very erratic and often theologically incomprehensible. But one thing is clear from all the chaos. The Trumpist establishment of religion is made up of various fiefdoms within the federal government, all aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.”
Quote of the Day
“Blessed are the peacemakers! But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”—Pope Leo XIV
Judge Scoffs at Trump’s New National Security Rationale for Ballroom
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C. has once again blocked above-ground construction of Trump’s vanity ballroom project on top of the ruins of the demolished East Wing of the White House. An appeals court shipped the case back to Leon for clarification on Trump’s spurious new claims in the case that the ballroom construction is driven by national security imperatives.
Leon was having none of it. “National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” he wrote, as he allowed below-ground construction of bunkers and other security measures to continue.
Impoundment? What Impoundment?
Russ Vought to Congress: Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
Trump DOJ Seizes on Swalwell Scandal
In an alternate universe, you would applaud the Justice Department investigating alleged serial sexual assaults by a member of Congress, but the Trump DOJ jumping in to investigate disgraced Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) smacks of retributive prosecution all the same, especially given the president’s own predilections.
Deep Dive on Presidential Records Act
Christopher Fonzone, who was the last head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel before Trump retook office, takes a close look at why the Presidential Records Act is constitutional, has been adhered to by every administration in the 50 years since it became law, and how the new OLC memo to the contrary is a shoddy piece of slapdash legal analysis.
For Your Radar …
It’s not precisely clear in the strictest scientific terms whether the National Weather Service belatedly recognized the tornado threat in the Kansas City area Monday night because of agency staffing shortages and budget cuts, but the evidence is striking that weather balloon launches upstream were delayed from the normal 7 a.m. to noon, too late to be ingested by the morning runs of some forecast models.
“It’s like we’re conducting a real-time experiment without any way to evaluate what the impacts of it are,” Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who retired last year as the director of analysis and understanding at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, told NBC News.
For its part, NOAA denied the change to weather balloon launch times adversely impacted forecast models. “NOAA’s weather model performance shows no evidence of degradation,” a spokesperson said.
ICYMI: Zeldin Doesn’t Talk Like an EPA Chief
NYT: “A New York Times analysis of thousands of public communications by E.P.A. administrators, including news releases, social media posts, television appearances and podcast interviews dating back three decades, shows that Mr. Zeldin has fundamentally shifted both the agency’s mission and the words he uses to describe it to reflect President Trump’s desire to maximize economic development and industrial activity while downplaying environmental consequences.”
See You Back Here Monday
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Neomi Rao Understands What It Means to Be a Trump Judge
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
For a full year, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has been trying to hold the Trump administration accountable for violating a court order that prohibited the government from arbitrarily sending immigration detainees to be imprisoned in El Salvador. Trump-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals have spent that year preventing him from doing so. On Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit issued its fourth order halting Boasberg’s contempt inquiry, which Judge Neomi Rao, a first-term Trump appointee, characterized in her majority opinion as “improper,” “unnecessary,” and “a clear abuse of discretion.”
The D.C. Circuit’s latest order directs Boasberg to “terminate” his criminal contempt proceedings. But the contempt inquiry is not likely to end here. Rao, a rumored candidate on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, was writing for a divided three-judge panel and joined by fellow Trump appointee Justin Walker. The attorneys for the wrongfully removed people plan to petition the full D.C. Circuit to review the panel’s decision. And six of the court’s 11 judges are already on record saying that Boasberg properly exercised his contempt authority, and that an earlier panel was wrong to cut off the district court’s investigative process.
Continue reading “Neomi Rao Understands What It Means to Be a Trump Judge”