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.
Three of the federal prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan who worked on the Eric Adams corruption case decided to resign rather than be forced by Trump’s allies in the Justice Department to concede, under threat of termination, that they erred in refusing to abandon the case.
A federal judge late Tuesday tore into the Trump administration for its “willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations” in the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
In a tersely worded order, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland rejected the vast majority of objections that the Trump administration had raised to discovery requests in the expedited two-week dash she had previously imposed in the face of its repeated defiance of her court orders.
The most glaring discovery objection from the Trump administration rejected the entire premise of the case by mischaracterizing the court orders it is currently under to facilitate the release of Abrego Garcia from confinement in El Salvador – even though Xinis has repeatedly rejected its interpretation of those orders.
“Defendants—and their counsel—well know that the falsehood lies not in any supposed ‘premise’ but in their continued mischaracterization of the Supreme Court’s Order,” Xinis wrote in overruling the administration’s objection and ordering it to comply with its discovery obligations.
Xinis found “equally specious” the administration’s wide-ranging and non-specific assertions of various privileges to avoid responding to the discovery requests. She again called out Trump DOJ lawyers for their role in asserting the privileges, calling it “a willful refusal to comply” with her orders.
“As Defendants and their counsel know, the proponent of a privilege must demonstrate the legal and factual bases to invoke the protections that such privilege affords,” Xinis wrote. “And yet, Defendants and counsel stubbornly refuse to provide any basis for the same.”
When Xinis ordered the expedited discovery last week, she had sternly told Trump DOJ lawyers that she would not tolerate any “grandstanding” and that she was going to move the discovery forward briskly. The blanket privilege assertions in particular raised her ire:
“Given that this Court expressly warned Defendants and their counsel to adhere strictly to their discovery obligations, their boilerplate, non-particularized objections are presumptively invalid and reflect a willful refusal to comply with this Court’s Discovery Order and governing rules.”
Xinis also found that a belated offer by Trump DOJ lawyers to meet and confer with plaintiffs counsel about their privilege assertions was “not made in good faith,” pointing to “their repeated refusals to meet and confer about much of anything else.”
The judge’s expressed consternation with Trump DOJ lawyers in the case is unusual. The Justice Department historically has gone to great lengths to establish itself as a reliable narrator in court. The gamesmanship and outright defiance in this case of a federal judge who has been mostly upheld by an appeals court (twice) and the Supreme Court is extraordinary.
In one of her few concessions to the administration in the order, Xinis gave it a new deadline of 6 p.m. ET Wednesday to assert privileges with proper specificity. But she wasn’t finished raking them over the coals for their vague assertions of privilege:
For weeks, Defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this Court’s orders. Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.
As for the remainder of the administration’s general discovery objections, Xinis overruled them. She refused to allow them to block discovery of events prior to April 4 or to exclude Abrego Garcia’s initial detention, removal, and incarceration in El Salvador from the scope of discovery.
When Xinis turned to specific objections raised by the administration, she once again chastised it for acting in bad faith. “Given the context of this case, Defendants have failed to respond in good faith, and their refusal to do so can only be viewed as willful and intentional noncompliance,” she wrote about one exceedingly abbreviated answer to a discovery request. Another answer she called “vague, evasive, and incomplete.”
Xinis did toss the administration a couple of meager bones when she ordered plaintiffs to immediately narrow the scope of a few discovery requests and struck another entirely. But the overall thrust of the order was clear: The administration’s dilatory tactics in discovery mirrored its earlier refusal to comply with her court orders and were leaving her no choice but to adjudge that the administration is acting in bad faith.
Given that Xinis had ordered the expedited discovery in order to determine whether to open a contempt of court proceeding and to create a record on appeal of the administration’s bad faith defiance of the federal courts, the clash over the discovery requests puts the Abrego Garcia case even more firmly at the nexus of the constitutional clash between President Trump and judicial branch.
Original story:
The Trump administration is at it again.
In its ongoing stonewalling of the district courtjudge overseeing the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump DOJ is now slow-rolling discovery by insisting on a tortured reading of court orders in the case, including from the Supreme Court.
The right-wing justices, sensing an easy win in their grasp for parents seeking to opt their children out from LGBTQ-inclusive content at public school, couldn’t stop themselves from taking a victory lap before Tuesday’s arguments even concluded.
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.
Way back in early February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was laying the groundwork for the Trump administration to ship migrants — and American citizens and legal residents — to Salvadoran jails.
Rubio’s trip was widely reported at the time, and he publicly hailed the agreement that he reached with Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele as “the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world.”
But somehow between the chaotic early days of the Trump administration when Rubio was on his five-nation Central American tour and the presidential proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act in mid-March, the agreement that Rubio struck with Bukele has become isolated from the main court action over deportation flights, mistaken removals, and Trump’s constitutional clash with the judicial branch.
As TPM’s Josh Kovensky has reported, the preparation for the deportations under the Alien Enemies Act began soon after Inauguration Day and continued under the radar right up until the flights from Texas to El Salvador on March 15. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has chastised the administration for engaging in an end-run around judicial review and has found probable cause that still-unknown officials engaged in criminal contempt of court for not abiding by his order blocking the Alien Enemies Act deportations.
But the plan to use El Salvador prisons as a dumping ground for deported migrants wasn’t secret or under the radar initially at all. Here is a portion of Rubio’s Feb 3. press conference in El Salvador:
Two weeks ago, President Trump’s favorable response to the suggestion from Bukele that he could house convicted U.S. citizens and legal residents in his notorious prisons set off a firestorm. But two months earlier, Rubio had touted that offer publicly as part of announcing his agreement with Bukele. “And, he’s also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentences in the United States even though they’re U.S. citizens or legal residents,” Rubio said at the time.
The precise terms of the agreement between the Trump administration and El Salvador remains publicly unknown. The AP obtained a memo that seemed to memorialize at least some aspects of the agreement, and the judge in Abrego Garcia’s case noted that memo in one of her opinions. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have asked the Trump administration for that memo in discovery along with copies of any “agreement, arrangement, or understanding between the governments of the United States and El Salvador to confine in El Salvador individuals of any nationality who were removed or deported from the United States.”
The Trump DOJ in a filing today objected in part to that discovery request, citing among other things the state secrets privilege. It is not clear what, if any, documents the Trump administration has provided in response to that request.
In general, the descriptions I’ve seen in court of the extensive planning to invoke the AEA don’t stretch as far back as Rubio’s personal trip to the region the first week of February. It’s a key marker in the ongoing saga which has now reached the Supreme Court. I don’t know how the high court considers the AEA and Abrego Garcia cases without reckoning with the fact that America’s top diplomat struck a deal with El Salvador that included an offer to accept rendered U.S. citizens and legal residents into Salvadoran detention facilities. Such a deal would be in clear violation of U.S. law, but it was part and parcel of the arrangement that set us down the road to the current constitutional clash.
Convicted Felon Declares Due Process Impossible
"We cannot give everyone a trial," says the president of these United States.
A Rush To File In All 94 Federal Judicial Districts
Among the many unfortunate consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision to take the Alien Enemies Act case away from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. was that it ended the nationwide injunction against AEA deportations and has forced the ACLU to contend with filing cases in all 94 federal judicial districts to make sure all detainees under the act are covered.
Quote Of The Day
“I would call it a grinding machine. We are in this machine, and it doesn’t care if you have a visa, a green card, or any particular story. … It just keeps going.”–Russian-born Harvard scientist Kseniia Petrova,who remains detained at ICE’s Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, after being arrested at Boston’s Logan airport in mid-February while trying to re-enter the country
Targeting The Investigators: Ed Martin Edition
Acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin has targeted a former DOJ prosecutor who worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team with one of his notorious “letters of inquiry after request.”
The existence of the April 14 letter to Aaron Zelinsky – who prosecuted Roger Stone, among others, before leaving the Justice Department in January – first emerged in right-wing media, so it hasn’t gotten as much attention as some of Martin’s other missives. But, as Mother Jones has reported, it’s a particularly unhinged letter even for Martin that lifts a paragraph in its entirety from a 2020 article in John Solomon’s right-wing Just The News.
It’s difficult to overstate how far outside the bounds of normal DOJ practice Martin’s missives have been. This one is especially egregious because it targets a former DOJ prosecutor and contains an additional twist: It cc’d the managing partner and chair of the law firm where Zelinsky now works. Ed Martin is going to let your employer know he’s coming after you.
Harvard Sues To Block Trump’s Attacks
Unlike Columbia University, Harvard has come out swinging against the Trump administration’s freeze of its federal funding and related attacks on its independence. The nearly 400-year-old university filed a wide-ranging six-count lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration in federal court in Massachusetts, alleging multiple violations of the First Amendment and other constitutional and statutory provisions. The university isn’t seeking money damages but rather declaratory judgment and injunctive relief to block the Trump administration’s funding freeze and other intrusions on the university.
Trump’s Next Civil Society Target: NGOs
Non-governmental organizations have already been decimated by moves like the dismantling of USAID, but President Trump’s threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of NGOs based on viewpoints he deems unacceptable represents the crossing of a new threshold. A new round of executive orders pegged to today’s Earth Day are reportedly in the works that would target environmental nonprofits.
America, You Are Running Out Of Time
The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance talks to people who have experienced the descent into authoritarianism:
The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it’s understandable that they’d have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.
What You Can Do
It’s the question I’ve gotten more than any other since Jan. 20: What can I do?
Six men have been charged criminally in the February incident in which a woman was dragged from a Republican town hall in Idaho.
Going Great For Hegseth
A sampling of the morning’s headlines after the revelation that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spilled the tea on the Yemen attack in a second group chat on Signal:
WSJ: Trump Stands by Hegseth After Phone Call About Newly Revealed Signal Chat
Politico: Hegseth could ‘implode on his own’ even as Trump sticks by him
WaPo: Pete Hegseth, isolated and defiant, has Trump’s backing for now
NYT: Under Hegseth, Chaos Prevails at the Pentagon
A Circular Maze From Which There Is No Escape
After federal courts upheld President Trump’s firing of the U.S. special counsel, he installed an acting official in the watchdog role who has now rejected the complaints of some 2,000 probationary workers claiming they were improperly fired, breaking the enforcement mechanism created by Congress. The upshot is that if the President fires the person charged with holding him accountable for improper terminations, then there’s no recourse for improperly fired federal workers in this realm.
Obamacare Under Threat Again
Strange bedfellows: The Trump administration defended the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court yesterday, as TPM’s Kate Riga reports, and a majority of the justices seemed inclined to preserve Obamacare’s coverage mandates.
A million here, a million there: The invaluable Jonathan Cohn on the GOP’s effort to eliminate Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion:
And it’s not like [Mike] Johnson or his supporters are proposing an alternative way of covering all these people. Some would find their way to other forms of coverage, but the rest would end up uninsured. And while it’s tough to predict these sorts of things accurately, the number of newly uninsured would likely reach well into the millions and could easily exceed 10 million.
‘Seek It Till You Find’
Morning Memo is a little groggy this morning after seeing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at The Anthem in DC last night. A great show with a heavy dose of their newest album:
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.
Three months into the beginning of Trump II, one prominent House Democrat is issuing a warning to El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and other authoritarian leaders around the globe who may, in cozying up to President Trump, help facilitate America’s own decline into autocracy: this won’t last forever.
The week before last, veteran GOP operative Michael Caputo was hired by one of President Trump’s most controversial nominees to advise him ahead of what is expected to be a tough confirmation fight. It was a surprising pick, in part because Caputo has a history of his own that includes years of conspiratorial rants on social media. And, even in the days since he joined the Trump administration, Caputo has made multiple posts online continuing a long-running bit in which he muses about “antifa” coming to his home to threaten him, and instead being eaten by wild animals.
