Trump Targets Seize on Abrego Garcia’s Vindictive Prosecution Win

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

Friday’s ruling that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Justice Department has already been cited by two other Trump targets under criminal prosecution.

In a new motion to dismiss the indictment against it on vindictive prosecution grounds, the Southern Poverty Law Center extensively cited from the U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr.’s ruling in the Abrego Garcia case in Nashville.

In a second much-less-covered case in Miami, Smartmatic, the voting machine company, cited yesterday the Abrego Garcia ruling in a new motion to compel discovery into the Trump DOJ’s decision to add it as a defendant in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prosecution of its former employees who were initially indicted in August 2024.

As Smartmatic is quick to note, it is the first company to be prosecuted under the FCPA in 15 years and at a time when the Trump administration has explicitly and publicly de-emphasized enforcement of the anti-bribery act. Smartmatic was added to the existing indictment last fall after, it says, cooperating with the investigation and after the Biden DOJ had declined to indict the company.

Smartmatic alleges that the Trump DOJ “refuses to engage in meaningful conversations regarding discovery” even after the judge in the case on May 11 ordered the parties to meet and confer about the scope of potential discovery into Smartmatic’s vindictive prosecution claim. As evidence of the Trump DOJ’s bad faith, Smartmatic says it emailed prosecutors its proposed discovery requests the same day the judge ordered the meet and confer, but they did not provide a response until the afternoon of May 20, the day the judge had set as a deadline for the parties to confer, and it was “half-baked.”

It’s no surprise that defendants would cite to a favorable vindictive prosecution ruling in another case. I would expect Judge Crenshaw’s ruling — cited some two dozen times in the SPLC motion and seven times in the Smartmatic motion — to pop up in the motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution that former FBI Director James Comey is planning to file in the “86” case in North Carolina, where he is preposterously accused of threatening President Trump’s life.

But for individual defendants seeking to blunt the corrupt acts of the Trump DOJ, each successful vindictive prosecution claim builds a foundation for subsequent claims. Especially because vindictive prosecution claims so rarely succeed, each win may also increase federal courts’ willingness to see these retributive prosecutions for what they are. At least up to a point …

Vindictive prosecution claims are particularly fact-dependent, which makes each case different. For instance, Abrego Garcia benefitted greatly from ill-advised but remarkably candid public comments from then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche about the administration’s motive in prosecuting him. Judge Crenshaw leaned heavily on those comment first in finding that Abrego Garcia had established a rebuttable presumption of vindictive prosecution and then in finding that the government had failed to rebut the presumption, leading him to dismiss the case.

Trying to follow a similar path, Smartmatic filed an appendix to its motion for vindictive prosecution that provides a timeline of relevant events in the Alabama case, including a series of Truth Social posts by President Trump pushing the Big Lie about the 2020 election, some of which explicitly refer to Smartmatic.

In the Alabama case, SPLC’s motion is similarly replete with post-indictment public comments about the civil rights group from Trump and Blanche, plus Deputy Associate Attorney General Aakash Singh (who also figured prominently in the Abrego Garcia case), FBI Director Kash Patel, and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon.

It is a defining feature of the Trump II DOJ’s vindictive prosecutions that the line prosecutors themselves are rarely if ever the source of problematic public statements that undermine their cases. The performative retribution is coming from Main Justice and the White House.

In the new the Smartmatic motion, there was a tell in prosecutor’s “half-baked response.”

Smartmatic, which claims that Fox News is leveraging the indictment to defend against Smartmatic’s separate defamation lawsuit arising from the network’s 2020 election coverage, had asked for all communications between Fox Corporation and DOJ relating to Smartmatic.

DOJ objected that the request was too broad, but allowed that “case prosecutors … have no communications responsive to this request.” The implication was clear: Other components of DOJ may very well have had communications with Fox Corporation or its lawyers about Smartmatic. Cue the dramatic music.

This Is Plain Weird

In Maurene Comey’s wrongful termination lawsuit against the Trump DOJ, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche yesterday filed a memorandum dated May 26, 2026 that purports to “ratify and affirm” Comey’s July 16, 2025 firing.

The filing is reminiscent of the flailing efforts by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to ratify after the fact the appointment of Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia in an unsuccessful effort to prevent her from being disqualified and the vindictive prosecutions against Maurene’s father James Comey and New Attorney General Letitia Games dismissed.

2026 Midterms: Texas Edition

Senate: State Attorney General Ken Paxton didn’t just beat incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary runoff. He smoked him 64%-36%, with most of the votes counted. Cornyn led the initial three-way March primary, where considerably more votes were cast. But yesterday Paxton narrowly exceeded his vote total from March, while Cornyn won only a fraction of his previous total. I’m not sure Trump’s endorsement, while helpful to Paxton, was the difference-maker here, which tells you more about Texas GOP primary voters than about Trump.

18th District: Rep. Christian Menefee defeated Rep. Al Green in the Democratic primary runoff after the two sitting congressmen were redistricted into the same heavily Democratic district.

35th District: Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist prone to making anti-semitic comments, lost in the Democratic primary runoff to Johnny Garcia.

Attorney General: Rep. Chip Roy lost in the GOP runoff to the more MAGA-fied state Sen. Mayes Middleton.

Railroad Commission: Votes are still being counted in a close GOP primary runoff, but the uber-right-wing Bo French is leading incumbent commission chair Jim Wright.

Good Read

Mother Jones: Oligarchs are robbing America blind, and the IRS is powerless to stop them.

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