I wanted to flag your attention to this Dave Weigel piece in Semafor. It’s about an event (“WelcomeFest”) put on by a centrist PAC called WelcomePAC, which is presenting itself as a kind of latter-day Democratic Leadership Council or punchy and centrist group focused on picking fights with the party’s left wing. It’s a kind of set piece for a lot of stuff that’s going on among Democrats right now. The big push is to defang the power of “the groups” and then, on a secondary level, get the party away from various litmus tests and speech policing. Then there’s a secondary push for “abundance” politics. They brought together several centristy members of Congress — Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY), Rep. Jake Auchincloss (MA), Sen. Elissa Slotkin (MI) — and then commentator Matt Yglesias, data influencer David Schor and former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson, among others.
As Weigel reports, moments after Torres starts his remarks, this happens …
The predicate for the investigation is comical, alleging that “former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority.”
But from that launching point, the executive order is quite serious. It calls for two open-ended areas of inquiry that could, if a DOJ investigation follows, keep former Biden staffers tied up in defending themselves for months or years:
(i) whether Biden White House aides conspired to cover up “Biden’s mental and physical health”; and
(ii) “the circumstances surrounding Biden’s supposed execution of numerous executive actions during his final years in office.”
On one level this is all laughable, but it is also an unprecedented targeting of a former president by a subsequent White House with the clear intention of delegitimizing his predecessors official acts – like presidential pardons – to clear the way for declaring them invalid and supplanting them with his own prerogatives.
Trump Administration Returns Improperly Deported Man
In a first, the Trump administration has complied with a court order to return to the United States an improperly deported foreign national.
The gay Guatemalan man, identified in court filings by his initials O.C.G., feared persecution in his home country. The Trump administration abruptly deported him instead to Mexico, where he claimed to have already been raped and targeted for being gay. He ultimately wound up back in Guatemala.
After the Trump administration retracted its initial assertions about O.C.G. in court, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy of Massachusetts ordered the administration to facilitate his return in a case challenging the legality of third party removals done without notice or hearing. O.C.G. returned aboard a commercial flight and was taken into custody, his lawyer said.
The Trump administration’s compliance with Murphy’s order has implications in the handful of other cases where the executive branch is defying, stonewalling, and rejecting court orders to “facilitate” wrongfully deported foreign nationals. Unlike the other deportees, O.C.G. was not in a foreign prison at the time of his return to the U.S.
Boasberg Weighs In On Fate Of AEA Detainees At CECOT
In a significant ruling, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. granted a preliminary injunction, finding that the Venezuelan nationals removed to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act were denied the due process to which they were entitled when they were abruptly flown to the CECOT prison on March 15. Boasberg gave the Trump administration one week to propose a plan for how to “facilitate” giving the detainees a chance to pursue their habeas corpus claims.
Boasberg’s written opinion was complex and somewhat circular; and while it compared their fates to a scene from a Kafka novel, it was not a total victory for the detainees. He ruled that they are not entitled to file habeas claims now because he was not convinced that they are in the “constructive custody” of the United States. But he concluded that their removals without due process violated the Fifth Amendment and that the remedy for that violation is to let them file habeas claims.
It doesn’t appear that the detainees will be freed anytime soon, as Boasberg had previously pondered aloud in court and left the door open in his order for the detainees’ legal challenges to proceed while they remain in custody in El Salvador.
The Trump administration is likely to appeal the preliminary injunction; and this case, which is the primary vehicle for the CECOT AEA detainees, is likely headed ultimately to the Supreme Court.
Trump II Travel Ban: Still Heavily Muslim
President Trump ordered a full travel ban on citizens from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Five of the seven countries from Trump’s original 2017 Muslim ban are on the new list. He imposed new lesser travel restrictions on citizens from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
Trump’s Attack On Higher Ed: Ivy League Edition
Harvard: President Trump purported to suspend Harvard University from participating in the student visa program, effectively prohibiting foreign nationals from attending the nation’s most prominent university.
Columbia: The Trump administration claimed Columbia University failed to meet its accreditation standard for allegedly tolerating harassment of Jewish students on campus.
Collusive Lawlessness In Texas
In the course of six hours yesterday, the Trump DOJ and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton colluded with U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor to vitiate a two-decade-old state law that offered undocumented residents discounted in-state college tuition.
In rapid succession, the Trump DOJ filed a suit challenging the law, Paxton filed a joint motion asking the judge to permanently block the law, and the judge issued the order. O’Conner, sits in Wichita Falls, one of the most notorious single-judge divisions, meaning the lawsuit was assured of going to him.
The collusive lawsuit came after the Texas legislature failed to repeal or otherwise amend the in-state tuition law at its recent session. Steve Vladeck has more on the legal hijinks in Texas and what he calls “a stain on the federal courts.”
Big Beautiful Bill: By The Numbers
10.9 million: the number of people it would rob of health insurance coverage
$2.4 trillion: how much it would add to the federal budget deficit over the next 10 years
18,000: the estimated number of preventable deaths among dual Medicare/Medicaid enrollees who would lose their prescription drug subsidy
All The Best People
Meet the 22-year-old Trump’s Team picked to lead the DHS terrorism prevention program.
Hanging Tough
Kim Sajet, director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. (photo by Andre Chung for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Since President Trump purported to fire her last week, Kim Sajet, the director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, has continued to report to work and carry out her duties, the WaPo reports.
This article first appeared at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space.
The White House finally sent over a rescissions package request — a move the administration has been dragging its feet on for months — asking Republicans in Congress to swallow a chunk of the sweeping cuts that Elon Musk has enacted with his DOGE destruction so far this year.
If you’ll remember, back in March we ran a number of stories on the DOGE takeover of the U.S. Institute for Peace. The USIP is a unique entity, publicly funded but not part of the government. Certainly not part of the executive branch. That contention was the centerpiece of the legal case that unfolded. DOGE tried to take it over on orders of the President. It was rebuffed. It eventually threatened the Institute’s private security contractor into switching sides, threatened criminal investigations out of Ed Martin’s corrupt rule of the DC U.S. Attorney’s office, and, on March 17th, succeeded in taking control of the Institute by force. This involved the still-not-fully-explained involvement of the DC police force, the MPD. So DOGE won.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Eventually, the expelled leadership of the USIP won in court. And it wasn’t one of these small-bore incremental wins we’ve seen so many of over the course of the Spring. They completely won — though their victory is still on appeal. But they fully won in the sense that a judge ruled the entire takeover was unlawful and undid all of it. They retook control of the Institute and the building it owns and what’s left of its budget. And they’re now in the process of trying, at various levels, to clean up the mess DOGE created, literal and figurative, and get the Institute back on its feet.
Yesterday, I talked to George Foote, longtime lawyer for the Institute and, as luck would have it, a longtime TPM Reader as well. He walked me through some of what has happened since all the fireworks earlier this spring.
Two months ago, 25-year-old Ilia Chernov beat long odds and convinced an immigration judge to grant him political asylum in the U.S.
Normally, that finding would have been enough for Chernov to obtain legal status and live freely in the U.S. Chernov’s judge told him that he would soon be released.
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has refused to free Chernov, stranding him in detention.
It’s always the same with Trump. His attacks on his foes usually telegraph not what they’re doing, but what he plans to do himself. So it is with the Deep State.
You have probably seen by now the Trump OPM’s new hiring policy which was unveiled last week. It is a road map for creating a politicized federal workforce – a Deep State, if you will. It is a marked departure from decades of efforts to professionalize federal workers and protect them from raw partisan politics. But it is also a logical next step following the mass purges of federal workers: replace them with loyalists.
Most glaringly problematic in the new policy is the essay-writing requirement for applications for positions at GS-05 and above. One of the four required essays comes with this prompt: “How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?”
It is a green light for hiring to be done on a politicized basis, as political scientist Don Moynihan notes:
I cannot think of anything like this level of politicization being formally introduced into the hiring process. Under the George W. Bush administration, it was a scandal when appointees in the Justice Department were caught scanning candidate CVs for civil servant positions to try to discern their political leanings. Now they will just ask them to explain how they can serve President Trump’s agenda. Within the space of a generation, backdoor politicization practices went from being a source of shame to a formal policy.
What makes the Trump version of politicization arguably worse is that it’s not pinned to ideology or partisan leanings but to personal loyalty and fealty to him. In that, it is arbitrary, ever changing, and subject to constant re-evaluation.
All of this comes against the backdrop of Trump, with the Roberts Court’s blessing, having already neutered the Merit Systems Protection Board and other mechanisms for protecting federal workers. As Moynihan suggests, Trump in breaking the existing merit system is unleashing vast consequences that will take generations to fix.
The Corruption: The New Gilded Age Edition
NBC News: “In four months, the Trump administration has dismantled key parts of that law enforcement infrastructure, creating what experts say is the ripest environment for corruption by public officials and business executives in a generation.”
The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos wanders through the New Gilded Age America like a man in a foreign country: “In a matter of weeks, the flood of cash swirling around the White House swamped whatever bulwarks against corruption remained in American law and culture.”
NBC News: Trump pardons drive a big, burgeoning business for lobbyists.
Quote Of The Day
“He’s dismantling not just the means of prosecuting public corruption, but he’s also dismantling all the means of oversight of public corruption. The law is only for his enemies now.”–Paul Rosenzweig, a George Washington University law professor who was a senior homeland security official in the Bush II administration, on President Trump
Peter Navarro Successfully Runs Out The Clock
The Trump DOJ has abruptly dropped the civil lawsuit to force Trump White House official Peter Navarro to turn over to the National Archives his Proton emails from the Trump I presidency.
Jan. 6 Prosecutor Resigns From DOJ
Greg Rosen, who was the chief of the Capitol Siege Section of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, resigned from the Justice Department last week after being demoted by former interim D.C. U.S. attorney Ed Martin.
Good Point
Lisa Rubin, on Trump’s one-two punch against the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society:
[I]n an era where fidelity to the whims of Trump is far more important than allegiance to any conservative legal agenda, much less the rule of law, Trump aims to be the sole arbiter of who’s qualified and fit forfederal judgeships.
If Trump can reduce or even eliminate both the ABA’s and the Federalist Society’s impact on the judicial selection process, he’ll become the only judge of judges who matters — which is exactly, I would posit, how he wants it.
It Fooled Kristi Noem
A Milwaukee man allegedly tried to get a witness in the armed robbery case against him deported so he wouldn’t be able to testify. Seizing on anti-immigrant fervor, the man sent letters in the name of the witness threatening to assassinate President Trump. The witness was arrested, but law enforcement eventually figured out the scheme and have filed new charges against the imposter, but not before DHS Secretary Kristi Noem trumpeted the initial arrest.
Federal Judge Enforces Trans Care In Prisons
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of D.C., an 81-year-old Reagan appointee, issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from ending hormone therapy and social accommodations for transgender inmates in federal prisons, while the lawsuit proceeds.
Gratuitous
In a decision reportedly timed to coincide with Pride month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to strip Harvey Milk’s name from an eponymous naval vessel. The assassinated gay icon was a Navy veteran.
“The Harvey Milk is a John Lewis-class oiler, a group of ships that are to be named after prominent civil rights leaders and activists,” Military.com reports.
Other ships in that class are also being targeted by Hegseth for renaming, CBS News reports. They include the:
USNS Thurgood Marshall
USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg
USNS Harriet Tubman
USNS Dolores Huerta
USNS Lucy Stone
USNS Cesar Chavez
USNS Medgar Evers
Clarification
Yesterday’s Morning Memo said the National Park Service’s decision to close D.C.’s Dupont Circle event for an upcoming Pride event this month was made on “what is clearly a pretextual basis,” but it’s subsequently been confirmed that the request for the closure came from the D.C. police chief, who reversed her position yesterday. It remains up to the U.S. Park Police, which has jurisdiction over the space, to decide whether to keep it open for the Pride event.
Happens In A Flash
The first eruption from Yellowstone’s Black Diamond Pool captured on video since last summer’s much larger hydrothermal explosion:
Small eruption from Black Diamond Pool, site of a hydrothermal explosion on July 23, 2024, captured by new webcam on May 31 at 8:39 pm MDT!
Reported as part of the YVO monthly update (June 2, 2025, 11:04 a.m. MDT): https://t.co/wjXrFVaqdX
A few quick thoughts on the apparent falling out between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
I don’t have more than speculation on what these two guys are thinking or feeling. But the White House took a big swipe at Musk by canning Musk’s handpicked NASA chief the day after his cringey departure ceremony. That action both took something valuable away from Musk and treated him with a very public disrespect. So while Musk is clearly trying to undo the ocean of brand damage he brought on himself and his companies, I don’t think the White House is playing along and trying to help with that project. I think they’re really trying to show him who’s boss, a classic example of Trumpian dominance politics.
But here’s the thing. Both of these guys have very big weapons each can use against the other. Musk can invest money against the GOP budget bill or GOP incumbents. Meanwhile, Trump can start canceling all those contracts Musk handed out to himself and his friends while he was running DOGE. Neither of those things has happened. Until it does, none of this really seems in earnest. Musk can whine. And it will get some headlines. But I don’t think they really care about his whining.
One additional note apart from this purported feud. Musk isn’t shifting sides here. He’s complaining that the cuts to social programs in the GOP budget aren’t deep enough. He claims this is about growing deficits. But he’s not said anything about the centerpiece high income tax cuts which are the drivers of those deficits. So while it’s probably obvious to most of you reading this, it’s important to note that Musk isn’t in any way switching sides. He’s endorsing a sort of Freedom Caucus position. Musk could create problems for Trump and the bill on that front. But there are limits to how much running room he has there. There’s certainly Republican appetite for more cuts. But I suspect that most Republicans, even those who want more savage spending cuts, know how hard it was to put this together and don’t want to upset this apple cart. The bigger the fight, the better for Democrats. If it happens … But I’m skeptical.
It’s not quite clear what is happening with former Missouri Congressman Billy Long and his associates at the federal Office of Personnel Management, where he has been a senior advisor to the director since March.
Black-eyed and officially, allegedly on the outskirts of the Trump administration, Elon Musk is saying more about his recently discovered objections to the reconciliation package that passed the House last month and will make sweeping cuts to Medicaid if it makes its way through the Senate.
