A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
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:
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.”
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MOrning!