A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Pete Hegseth and Signal-gate part two, the Supreme Court’s extraordinary Alien Enemies Act order and the passing of Pope Francis.

I wanted to point your attention to this recent article from the Times on the battle between Trump and Harvard University. It captures the Times’ feature quality. It contains good factual detail, but it radiates what I can only describe as a Chernobyl-level condescension and contempt, not so much for anything “liberal” but anything not conservative, or not in line with what it terms the “rightward shift of the country” — anything that can be construed as a posture of opposition to Donald Trump. The Harvard board is portrayed as reflexively and out-of-touchedly liberal, repeatedly shocked in a weak-kneed sort of way and yet also, paradoxically, headstrong in its inability to resist outmoded Trump I-era “resistance” thinking. In a few words, weak, out-of-touch and contemptible.

Things are moving apace with the DOJ-in-Exile. A home in waiting for the project has been set up at DOJinExile.com. It even has a Bluesky and Twitter accounts. I introduced the concept here and I provided the key things it would need to do to be effective. I’ve been flooded by emails from people supporting the idea, wanting to contribute various kinds of expertise, wanting to work for it and even wanting to fund it. I’ve heard from a gratifyingly large number of DOJ alums or other former prosecutors who are very interested in being involved. If you’re in that category please do be in touch — both if you’d like to be directly involved or simply want to provide input or advice. I’d love both. I’m now turning my attention to that last question. I’m looking for people who might be interested in funding such a project. I’m not looking for actual money just yet, or even financial commitments. I’d like to hear from people who might seriously be interested in contributing significant sums of money to such a project.

This won’t be my project. I won’t be involved. I will try to bring together a group that will eventually run it and a group that will fund it. And when those two groups have come together sufficiently, I will hand it off to them.

If you’re in either of these groups and want to reach out, you can do so at our normal contact email or you can reach me on Signal at joshtpm.99 or encrypted email at joshtpm at protonmail dot com.

I wanted to share something with you. I was talking with TPM Reader LG (who in this case I will identify as Leo Gugerty, a professor at Clemson University) about the DOJ-in-Exile project and the conversation moved to something very different: the pace of border crossings at the southern U.S. border over the last 15 years. With his permission, I’m sharing with you here the graph he shared with me.

I’ve been gratified at just how much response and interest I’ve got to my proposal for a DOJ-in-Exile project. I’ve heard from so many people either wanting to volunteer their time or work for such a project or help get it off the ground that I haven’t even been able to respond to everyone yet. But I’m very encouraged by the interest. As I said yesterday, this isn’t something I am envisioning running. I don’t have the expertise and I’m already doing something. I’m trying to bring together interested people and potentially funders and thus hopefully play some role in bringing it into existence.

To help bring the idea into more focus, I thought I’d try to flesh out the concept.

I just learned that the Department of Justice has shelved its plan to essentially shutter the Department’s Tax Division. The plan had been to disperse the Division’s lawyers to U.S. Attorney’s Offices around the country and maintain a very small residual oversight office at Main Justice. This would satisfy, at least in the view of DOJ’s current political leadership, statutory requirements. But it would trigger big departures of lawyers unwilling to relocate around the country and dilute and dissipate institutional knowledge and organizational focus.

In my late 2024 post-election brainstorming, another idea of mine was to create a structure for pressing Republican Reps who threatened to cancel the green energy investments in their districts under the Inflation Reduction Act. It was a matter of some consternation for Democrats at the time, but those investments were overwhelmingly in Republican districts — like something like 75% of them. There were a few explanations of that at the time, one of which was that it was focused on those areas that were in whatever way “passed over” in the city-centric prosperity of the early 21st century. But we’re seeing another one of the benefits now and it’s precisely that dynamic I was keen mobilize: it makes these investments much harder to claw back by a future Republican administration.

NYT reports a second Hegseth Signal chat in which the secretary of defense shared Houthi attack plans. This one included his wife and brother.

Since January 20th, and actually back into November, I’ve had a series of projects I’ve desperately wanted to see done. My first was a simple but clean and easily shareable site to track core economic statistics from the end of the Biden administration through Trump’s presidency. Simple, objective, core economic data — here’s where Biden left off, here’s where Trump is. At the time I envisioned a different start to the administration. I figured it would be like 2017 where Trump took the quite good economy he inherited, mostly left it alone, maybe juiced it with tax cuts and rebranded it as his own. I was pretty confident this was a good bet since most of the Biden numbers were about as good as they could be. For employment, inflation, growth they would be pretty hard to top. So there wasn’t much chance Trump would end up looking much better than Biden. You simply can’t get unemployment much lower than 3%. I saw it as a way of deflating what I figured would be the standard Trumpian rebrand, where he talked constantly of the catastrophic Biden economy and his own era of prosperity with data that was actually marginally worse.

This is a two day old article. But with so much else going on I hadn’t seen it. If you haven’t, you really must read it. It’s one of growing number of examples that the U.S. government is at present essentially being held hostage by the clique surrounding Elon Musk.

Donald Trump got really jazzed up about Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Based on that, he decided that the U.S. should build one as well. But the U.S. is quite a bit larger than Israel. And because of that nothing like that is really feasible at all. So the plan quickly evolved into a new version of Reagan’s SDI. All of this was contained in a late January executive order in which Trump committed the country (purportedly) to building it. There are many reasons why this is a bad idea, both destabilizing but also unfeasible. But let’s set that aside for the moment.

It now emerges that Musk’s SpaceX, Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril have combined forces to build what Trump is calling “Golden Dome.” Needless to say, since Musk basically controls federal contracting, he’s essentially giving the contract to himself. Through the article, there are gently phrased characterizations of the situation like this (emphasis added).