Today is the last day of our Annual March TPM Membership Drive. It’s also the last day of our 25% discount. We’ve already hit our 2,500 new member goal. But we’re so close we’re making a push to get to 3,000. We’re currently 67 new members short of that number. Thank you to everyone who helped us to get to 2,500. And if you haven’t become a member yet but would like to support our team and our work just click right here.
Thank you.
In another brazen step to weed out President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies and break down the barrier of political influence between the White House and the DOJ, Trump’s White House directly dismissed two career prosecutors without reason.
Continue reading “Trump’s WH Directly Fires Two Prosecutors In Stunning Escalation Of War On DOJ Independence”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”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
TPM’s Josh Marshall: Elon Musk and the Threat of the Over-Mighty Subject
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.
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.
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.
While President Trump has slammed the door shut on refugees, he has made a special exception for white Afrikaners from South Africa.
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.
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.”
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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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”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”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”
