The story of National Security Adviser Mike Walz’s unbelievable SNAFU in adding an Atlantic journalist to a Signal group chat where top government officials spelled out their live-action war plans actually seems to be breaking through.
Continue reading “Democrats Caught A Break—Will They Do Anything With It? “We are coming to the end of our Annual TPM March Membership Drive. And we are incredibly, incredibly grateful that it has been a big success. We set a mammoth goal of signing up 2,500 new members, to go with the 25th anniversary of the organization. And you helped us do it. We are currently at 2,777 new members for the drive, which is well beyond what we, or at least I, thought was possible. Let me especially thank all the new members reading this. Every additional member adds to the resources we hope to have to expand our reach and reporting resources in this critical year, and going forward. So if you’re considering becoming a member, I hope you will do so today. We’re continuing our 25% discount through the last day of the month. If we can get to 3,000 that will be amazing. And if you’re already a member and you’re really feeling in a TPM mood, please consider what a fellow member suggested at our TPM Happy Hour on Wednesday in New York: Email five friends who might not be members or might not know about TPM and tell them what we’re about.
Again, this isn’t a “lights are going out” plea. We met our goal. TPM is strong. Our finances are solid. But we’d like to get stronger and extend our reach (you’ll be hearing more on this front soon). And every additional member adds to that. If you’d like to join, click right here. And thank you from all of us.
To hear DC Circuit Court Judge Justin Walker tell it, the Supreme Court basically already axed the last vestige of independent executive branch agency protections — it just did so very quietly.
Continue reading “DC Circuit Decides Supreme Court Already Overturned Its Own Precedent And Just Didn’t Tell Anyone”This post is a second part of a post from March 11th of the same name placing Elon Musk in the tradition of the “over-mighty subjects,” a more common phenomenon a half millennium ago. The historical analogues to Musk were those magnates that were so powerful, both in wealth and the capacity to make war, that they threatened the sovereignty of the king. In America we have no king, whatever a lawless president might think, but we do have a sovereign: the American people. The analogy applies. Musk has so much power that he threatens the sovereignty of the American people, not only their right to their sovereignty but their right to be free, both collectively and individually.
Continue reading “Elon Musk and the the Threat of the Over-Mighty Subject, Part II”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Autocracy is on the move worldwide and becoming more resilient.
One of the driving forces behind this phenomenon is something scholars call “authoritarian learning,” a process by which autocratic leaders study each other and adapt tactics based on what appears to work, and how to proceed when they encounter resistance.
Take Georgia. The ruling Georgian Dream party has steered the Caucasus nation from a path toward democracy back to autocracy — and it has done so by learning from Russia. In particular, it adopted a “foreign agent” law in May 2024 — legislation that came straight from Vladimir Putin’s playbook.
Sold to the public as increasing transparency, the legislation has been utilized to persecute Georgia’s opposition and arrest dissidents with impunity.
As researchers examining the structure and effects of autocratic regimes, we view Georgia’s first year of its foreign agent law as an example of how politicians are not only learning the tactics of Russian authoritarianism but improving on them in a shorter time frame.
Georgia’s current ruling party came to power after then-President Mikheil Saakashvili enacted a major series of reforms in the 2000s. Saakashvili, who was jailed in 2021 under highly contested charges, inherited a Georgia seen as a failing and corrupt state tethered to Russia.
The reform-minded politicians of Saakashvili’s government set the country on a pro-Western path. But after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, a socially conservative coalition under the banner Georgian Dream won the parliamentary elections in 2012.
Georgian Dream was buoyed by the fortune of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Russian citizen until 2011. The party capitalized on the public’s fatigue after a decade of Saakashvili’s necessary but intense reforms. The new coalition married a promise for continuing the pro-Western reforms, but with a more traditional, conservative approach to social issues.
This appeal to traditional Georgian values won support in rural communities and carried the coalition to an absolute majority in Parliament in 2016. Since then, Georgian Dream has adopted pro-Russian rhetoric, accusing a “global war party” of running the West. Increasing attacks on the European Union, in particular, have been a part of a broader strategy to bring Georgia back into Russia’s orbit.
The Georgian Dream progression in power has mirrored that of Putin in Russia. In 2012, Putin signed a “foreign agents” law that originally targeted NGOs receiving foreign funding and alleged to be engaged in political activity.
The Kremlin equated this law to the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, in the United States, and justified it as a means to increase transparency around foreign involvement in Russia’s internal affairs.
Unlike FARA, however, Russia’s version of the law neither required establishing a connection between foreign funding and political activity nor provided a clear definition of political activity.
This vagueness allowed for a wide range of NGOs deemed undesirable by the Kremlin to be labeled as “foreign agents.” The result was the suppression of NGO activities through financial, administrative and legal burdens that led to their liquidation or departure from the country.
Over the years, this law has reduced Russian civil society’s ability to independently voice and address issues that its population faces.
Georgian Dream passed a very similar foreign agent law on May 28, 2024, after overcoming a presidential veto. It forced NGOs receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register with the Ministry of Justice as “serving the interests of a foreign power.”
Activists opposing the law have been physically assaulted, and the law has been utilized against what the ruling party has described as “LGBT propaganda.”
The law fits a wider political landscape in which the ruling party has moved to restrict freedom of the press, prosecuted political opponents and postponed Georgia’s European Union candidate status despite the overwhelming majority of Georgians being pro-EU.
Three critical factors played a role in allowing for the foreign agent law in Russia to expand its reach: the power imbalance between the Russian government and NGOs, limited action by international authorities, and delayed media attention to the issue.
At the time the law was passed, civil society inside Russia itself was split. Some foresaw the dangers of the law and engaged in collective action to oppose it, while others chose to wait and see.
As it happened, the law and the accompanying repressive apparatus spread to a broader range of targets. In 2015, Putin signed a law that designated an “undesirable” status to foreign organizations “on national security grounds”; in 2017, an amendment expanded the targets of the law from NGOs to mass media outlets; and at the end of 2019, the law allowed the classification of individuals and unregistered public associations — that is, groups of individuals — as mass media acting as foreign agents. By July 2022, the foreign funding criterion was excluded and a status of a foreign agent could be designated to anyone whom the Russian authorities deemed to be “under foreign influence.”
Russia’s experience highlights the process of early stages of authoritarian consolidation, when state power quashes independent sources of power, and political groups and citizens either rally around the government or go silent. The foreign agent law in Russia was passed only after the protests that accompanied the 2012 elections, which returned Putin to the presidency for the third term.
In Georgia, the ruling government borrowed from Russia’s lead — after backing down from its first attempt to pass a foreign agent law in the face of massive protests, it pushed it through before the elections.
The law was then used to raid NGOs sympathetic to the opposition days before the October 2024 parliamentary election. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said before the elections that in the event of Georgian Dream’s victory, it would look to outlaw the pro-Western opposition, naming them “criminal political forces.”
In the wake of President Donald Trump’s suspension of USAID assistance in February 2025, Georgian Dream has seized the opportunity to expand its war on civil society, echoing Russian, Chinese and American far-right conspiracy rhetoric that foreign-funded NGOs were fomenting revolution. To combat such phantoms, Georgian Dream has passed new legislation that criminalizes assembly and protest.
The foreign agent law has been a springboard for repressive activities in both Russia and Georgia, but while it took Russia a decade to effectively use the law to crush any opposition, Georgian Dream is working on an expedited timetable.
Although the EU has suspended direct assistance and closed off visa-free travel for Georgian officials as a result of the law, Trump’s turn toward pro-Russian policies has made it more difficult to obtain Western consensus in dislodging the Georgian government from its authoritarian drift.
Georgia’s experience, following the Russian playbook, illustrates how authoritarians are learning from each other, utilizing the rule of law itself against democracy.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on elections is more than just another overstep of presidential power — it’s an example of the ways in which Trump’s Justice Department has become an extension of the White House and is involving itself in all of the President’s grievances.
Continue reading “Trump Order Includes Provision That Could Punish States For Not Ceding Authority Over Election Admin To DOJ”A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the war plans group chat fiasco and the administration’s even darker turn on immigration.
Continue reading “Listen To This: Signal Noise”The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court block on its deportations of Venezuelan detainees Friday, taking unusually gratuitous shots in its application at the district and appellate-level judges who had already ruled in the case.
Continue reading “Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court To Let It Continue Alien Enemies Act Deportations”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
In highly unusual public statements about an unprecedented breach of national security at the highest levels of the U.S. government, Attorney General Pam Bondi not only shut the door on investigating whether criminal laws were broken in the Signal group chat fiasco but actively engaged in political attacks and rhetorical spin to defend the Trump administration and assail its critics.
The attorney general, who wears dual hats as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and as a member of the intelligence community, categorically dismissed the prospect of even investigating the matter during public remarks Thursday morning. Bondi quickly pivoted to regurgitating right-wing talking points about the prior mishandling of classified information by Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton:
REPORTER: The Signal chat controversy — is DOJ involved? If so, why? If not, why not? BONDI: It was sensitive info, not classified. What we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission… if you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 27, 2025 at 12:33 PM
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By last evening, in a friendly appearance on Fox News, Bondi was lambasting U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is overseeing a civil lawsuit seeking to preserve the Signal chat as official government records. In an extraordinary move, Bondi attacked three DC federal judges by name as unable to be impartial or objective before singling out Boasberg for his role in the Signal case:
Bondi has now made public statements assessing the facts and the law of the Signal case while resisting calls for an investigation. These are simply astounding actions by a sitting attorney general.
“The Justice Department’s approach thus far stands in contrast with its customary role of examining serious national-security breaches,” the WSJ reported in the most understated possible way.
The abiding concern all along has been that Trump would place loyalists at the Justice Department in part to protect himself and his administration from legal consequences for their wrongdoing – a permanent coverup mechanism to ignore, bury, and disregard executive branch lawlessness. Pam Bondi is eagerly filling the role of a loyalist attorney general. This is what it looks like.
The original version of yesterday’s Morning Memo incorrectly described the prisoners who appeared behind DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in her propaganda video as Venezuelan detainees deported under the Alien Enemies Act. They were in fact El Salvadoran prisoners held in the same prison. The mistake was mine.
Marco Rubio on Rumeysa Ozturk: "We revoked her visa … once you've lost your visa, you're no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don't want it. We don't want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 27, 2025 at 1:29 PM
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President Trump’s retribution spree continued with an executive order targeting law firm WilmerHale, which at one point employed former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who led the investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia in the 2016 campaign and its aftermath. In a statement, WilmerHale indicated it will challenge the executive order, which is similar in form and substance to the other Trump executive orders targeting the legal profession.
In other developments:
Paul Weiss disregarded the lawlessness of Trump’s actions, which is lawlessness of a particularly pernicious kind: punishing lawyers for representing clients or causes personally offensive to this president. Perhaps a different kind of business might sensibly conclude that it should do what it could to placate a hostile administration. But a law firm, in this instance a leading one, is not any kind of business: It is a professional association with obligations not only to its clients, but to the legal system itself.
In addition to the Wilmer Hale executive order, President Trump issued new executive orders targeting federal worker unions and whitewashing U.S. history.
Election law expert Rick Hasen digs into Trump’s executive order on elections.
The Trump administration’s ban on trans service members has been blocked for the second time, when a federal judge in Washington state intervened yesterday shortly after the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay on an earlier court ruling that blocked the ban. Notably, even though the appeals court was siding with the Trump administration, it used unusual language to suggest the Pentagon should not take any adverse action against trans personnel while they sorted things out. Chris Geidner has the play by play in real time from yesterday (scroll down past the first section).
After widespread local revulsion over their planned visit to Greenland today, Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha will now only stop at a U.S. military base. The cultural exchanges that were originally part of the trip have been jettisoned.
Canada is reorienting itself to the fact that its southern neighbor is no longer a benign presence:
Carney: "The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 27, 2025 at 3:57 PM
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Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz is obviously having a bad week, having made a mistake that was not very national-security-adviser of him.
Continue reading “Trump May Be Having Regrets About Mike Waltz—For More Than One Reason”
