I wanted to provide a quick update on the case of Professor Xiaofeng Wang at Indiana University. For overview details, see the posts below. The latest is the IU chapter of a faculty organization (the American Association of University Professors) has sent a letter to the university challenging Professor Wang’s termination. You can see that letter here. The letter itself is the best evidence we as yet have that Wang was in fact fired by the university. The university itself has not confirmed that or publicly commented at all. And at least no one who is talking appears to be in contact with Wang. So we don’t have any confirmation from him or anyone speaking on his behalf.
Continue reading “Another Update on the Situation at Indiana University”Judges Hold The Line On Trump’s Attacks On Big Law
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
So Far So Good
Two federal judges in DC late Friday blocked key provisions of President Trump’s executive orders targeting major U.S. law firms. The decisions came after WilmerHale and Jenner & Block rushed to court seeking temporary restraining orders to forestall some of the most egregious aspects of the executive orders targeting each firm.
“The retaliatory nature of the Executive Order at issue here is clear from its face,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled in the WilmerHale case.
U.S. District Judge John Bates similarly ruled in favor of Jenner & Block. During a hearing in the case, Bates said from the bench: “The legal profession as a whole is watching and wondering if their courtroom activities … will cause the government to turn their eyes to them next.”
Leon and Bates are both Bush II appointees.
Skadden Strikes A Deal With Trump
Skadden Arps became the first major law firm to strike a preemptive deal with President Trump rather than risk being targeted by one of his executive orders. Unlike Skadden, Paul Weiss didn’t strike a deal with Trump until after he’d issued an executive order against it. In both cases, Trump loudly touted his success in winning fealty from the firms.
Alien Enemies Act Developments
- The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow it to continue deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
- In the court proceedings over the Alien Enemies Act, the ACLU has obtained ICE’s subjective checklist for determining whether someone is a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.
- In a separate case, U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy of Boston has issued a nationwide injunction blocking the Trump administration’s policy of deportations to third countries without a chance to challenge the removal in court.
More Reveals From The Signal Fiasco
- Mike Waltz: Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz has created and hosted multiple other sensitive conversations on Signal with Cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations, two U.S. officials told the WSJ.
- Pete Hegseth: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, the WSJ reports.
IMPORTANT: A Blow To Indy Agencies
A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals brushed aside Supreme Court precedent – while pretending otherwise – to allow President Trump’s firings of members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board to stand.
Judge Throws CFPB A Lifeline
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued a blistering opinion and ordered the Trump administration to resume the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and rehire its fired workers.
“Absent an injunction freezing the status quo – preserving the agency’s data, its operational capacity, and its workforce – there is a substantial risk that the defendants will complete the destruction of the agency completely in violation of law well before the Court can rule on the merits, and it will be impossible to rebuild,” Jackson wrote.
In her ruling, Jackson also took the Trump administration defendants – acting CFPB Director Russell Vought and the CFPB itself – to the woodshed for not being forthcoming with the court. “[T]he Court is left with little confidence that the defense can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.”
A Photo For Our Times
Elon Musk gives out one of two $1 million check during a town hall in Wisconsin after a unanimous state Supreme Court declined to hear an attempt to block Musk from distributing the checks ahead of Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
Good Read
TPM’s Josh Marshall: Elon Musk and the Threat of the Over-Mighty Subject
DOGE Watch
- WaPo: DOGE fires nearly all staff at U.S. Institute of Peace headquarters
- NYT: Over the weekend, DOGE accessed a federal payroll system over the objections of career staff who have now been placed on administrative leave and under investigation.
- Politico: DOGE’s Marko Elez – fired from Treasury after racist social media posts — has been working for weeks on sensitive systems at HHS, new government disclosures revealed Saturday.
- Judd Legum: How the Social Security Administration and DOGE are gaslighting Americans
- Wired: DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
The Destruction: Foreign Aid
- NYT: Trump’s USAID Cuts Hobble Earthquake Response in Myanmar
- Politico: Appeals Court clears the way for Musk and DOGE to resume cuts to USAID.
The Destruction: Public Health And Medical Science
- WaPo: The Trump administration pushed out Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine scientist and an architect of the U.S. program to rapidly develop coronavirus vaccines.
- Stat News: Both deputy directors at the key FDA center that oversees the regulation of cancer drugs plan on departing the agency.
For Your Radar …
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: Trump’s executive order on elections includes a provision that could punish states for not sharing voter information with the Trump DOJ.
White House Crosses New Line In Corrupting DOJ
The Trump White House has taken the unprecedented step of directly firing at least two career DOJ prosecutors. The two known firings involved one line prosecutor in Los Angeles and another in Memphis, the NYT reports.
The Corruption: Trump’s Abuse Of The Pardon Power
- “President Trump pardoned Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who had been convicted of fraud in federal court for what prosecutors said were his lies to investors about his zero-emissions trucks,” the WSJ reported.
- President Trump commuted the sentence of Carlos Watson, a co-founder of the now-defunct digital media company Ozy Media, who was sentenced in December to almost 10 years in prison for trying to defraud investors and lenders by lying about the company’s finances, the NYT reports.
Naval Academy Purges Its Library Of ‘DEI’ Books
At the order of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Naval Academy has identified some 900 books that “run afoul” of President Trump’s anti-DEI order, including “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.,” “Einstein on Race and Racism,” and a biography on Jackie Robinson, the NYT reports.
So Gross
While President Trump has slammed the door shut on refugees, he has made a special exception for white Afrikaners from South Africa.
Unmasked
Jefferson Griffin, the state appeals court judge who continues to try to overturn his November loss in a North Carolina Supreme Court race, was photographed in 2001 wearing Confederate military garb and posing before a Confederate battle flag for his fraternity’s annual 2001 “Old South” ball, the AP reports.
The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account
Charlie Warzel: “The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.”
As If Everything Wasn’t Bad Enough
WaPo: “President Donald Trump on Sunday declined to rule out seeking a third presidential term — an unconstitutional act explicitly barred under the 22nd Amendment — saying that ‘there are methods which you could do it.'”
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More Details on Situation at Indiana University
Yesterday I told you about a situation at Indiana University tied to a Professor of Computer Science and cryptography named Xiaofeng Wang. According to very sketchy public reports, the FBI and DHS police searched two homes owned by Wang and a Library Systems analyst named Nianli Ma, who I assume is his spouse. Colleagues at other universities noted that Wang’s bio pages had been removed from the University website and no one seemed to know where he was. It was unclear whether he had been arrested or perhaps detained in an immigration action.
I can now report some new and as yet unreported details, which largely go to the timeline of events.
Continue reading “More Details on Situation at Indiana University”Sketchy First Reports
There’s a very weird situation developing at the Indiana University. It’s a case where there are lots of red flags but mostly a lack of information. I’ll try to give an overview. A highly regarded professor of computer science and cryptography named Xiaofeng Wang seems to have disappeared and his home was searched and swarmed over this morning by FBI agents and DHS police. On its face this sounds like some sort espionage investigation. I don’t know whether Xiaofeng is a U.S. citizen or not or a Chinese national. But I understand that he’s been at IU for about 20 years.
Continue reading “Sketchy First Reports”Democrats Caught A Break—Will They Do Anything With It?
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
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? “Help Us Close Strong
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.
DC Circuit Decides Supreme Court Already Overturned Its Own Precedent And Just Didn’t Tell Anyone
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”Elon Musk and the the Threat of the Over-Mighty Subject, Part II
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”Authoritarian Leaders Are Watching, Learning From One Another
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.
Bouncing from Europe to Russia
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.
Yearlong slide into autocracy
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.
Improving on Russian authoritarians
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.
A springboard for repression
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.
Trump Order Includes Provision That Could Punish States For Not Ceding Authority Over Election Admin To DOJ
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”