Trump DOJ Stonewalls Criminal Contempt Inquiry

Posted on by David Kurtz

Will Emil Bove Have to Testify?

A lot of weekend news to cover this morning, but I want to continue to keep front and center the contempt of court proceedings in the original Alien Enemies Act case.

The Trump DOJ faced a Friday deadline set by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. to submit sworn declarations by the officials involved in the decision to continue with the AEA deportation flights in mid-March even after Boasberg ordered the deportations stopped and the planes turned around.

The Trump DOJ acknowledged that it was taking a narrow view of what Boasberg meant by “involved in the decision” and submitted declarations from only three senior officials:

Of note, Blanche explicitly mentioned former DOJ official and now appeals court Judge Emil Bove has having been involved in providing what he asserts is “privileged legal advice” to DHS in the matter. It remains to be seen whether Boasberg will demand either a declaration or testimony from a sitting judge whose potential contempt of court occurred prior to taking the bench.

In its filing accompanying the declarations, DOJ pulled back from having earlier identified Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign as involved in the decision and didn’t submit a declaration from him, saying he only relayed Boasberg’s oral and written orders.

In filing the declarations, the Justice Department remained defiant. Among other arguments, it told Boasberg that:

  • given the declarations, there is no basis for witness testimony in the contempt inquiry;
  • attorney-client privilege would prevent the lawyers (Blanche, Bove, and Mazzara) from testifying;
  • he could be in for a constitutional fight over compelling the testimony of Noem;
  • no criminal contempt occurred because his order was not “clear and reasonably specific.”

Seizing on the muddled mess that the laggardly D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals made of Boasberg’s contempt inquiry, the Justice Department leaned heavily on the concurring opinion of Appeals Court Judge Gregory Katsas: “[I]f a leading jurist like Judge Katsas concluded that Defendants’ interpretation of the TRO is legally correct, it is impossible to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Defendants’ interpretation is so unreasonable as to make their conduct criminally contumacious.”

Boasberg has moved the criminal contempt inquiry along as fast as the D.C. Circuit has allowed him to, so I would expect we’ll know what he wants to do next in the case as soon as today.

Another Wrongful Deportation Case

The Trump administration deported a Guatemalan man back to his home country despite an immigration judge order barring his removal to Guatemala because of fears he would face torture there. U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama of El Paso accused the Trump administration of “blatant lawlessness” in the case and ordered it to facilitate the return of Faustino Pablo Pablo to the United States by Dec. 12.

SCOTUS Takes Up Birthright Citizenship

The invented right-wing legal theory that birthright citizenship is not guaranteed by the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is going to get decided by the Supreme Court in its current term.

Pam Bondi Needs to Talk to Pam Bondi

Last year, before she became attorney general, Pam Bondi wrote a Supreme Court brief for the America First Policy Institute in which she argued: “Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders.”

Venezuela Boat Watch

Among the new developments:

  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continues to deny that he ordered Special Operations forces to kill everyone aboard an alleged drug-smuggling boat during a Sept. 2 attack, but in a new twist NBC News reports that Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley told lawmakers in a classified briefing last week that Hegseth ordered everyone killed “because they were on an internal list of narco-terrorists who U.S. intelligence and military officials determined could be lethally targeted.”
  • The second strike of the boat killed the two survivors of the first strike, Bradley told lawmakers, but he ordered a third and fourth strike to sink the boat, according to the NBC News report.
  • Despite administration claims, the boat was not bound for the United States but to rendezvous with a larger vessel bound for Suriname, CNN reports.

Clash Over Halligan Looms

The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has ratified keeping Lindsey Halligan in place as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia despite a judge’s ruling that she was invalidly appointed to the position, the NYT reports:

The office has told department officials that because Judge Currie’s order did not require a specific measure to be taken, like removing Ms. Halligan, she could stay even though the judge declared her appointment invalid, the people said.

In other words, the administration’s position was that since the court order did not explicitly remove Ms. Halligan from the job, she could keep it.

Under Judge Currie’s ruling, only the judges in that district may now appoint an interim U.S. attorney — but they have not publicly moved to do so.

New Ruling Thwarts Re-Indictment of Comey

Over the weekend, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of D.C.  issued a temporary restraining order barring prosecutors from accessing material seized years ago that belong to Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman, a close friend of and attorney for James Comey. Because the materials at issue largely formed the basis for the now-dismissed indictment of Comey, the ruling may delay any effort by the Trump DOJ to re-indict him.

Trump DOJ Leads Attack on Voting Rights

Mother Jones: “Over the last six months, [the Trump DOJ] has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from dozens of states in an effort to create the federal government’s first-ever national database of registered voters, accompanied by their private information: party affiliation, voting history, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, even physical characteristics.”

The Death of Independent Agencies

Ahead of Supreme Court oral arguments today over whether President Trump can unilaterally fire a FTC commissioner, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel with two Trump appointees ruled that Trump lawfully fired — without cause — Cathy Harris, a Democratic member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board.

The Destruction: Vax Edition

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel stacked with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allies has dramatically altered the recommendation for infants to immediately receive the hepatitis B vaccine, upending 30 years of wildly successfully public health policy.

The Corruption: Pardon Edition

  • Trump is big mad that his pardon of Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar (TX) didn’t engender enough personal loyalty for Cuellar not to seek re-election, potentially costing Republicans a pick-up in the 2026 midterms.
  • Trump pardoned sports executive Tim Leiweke — who was convicted by Trump’s own Justice Department — after a round of golf with former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who was one of Leiweke’s lawyers, the WSJ reports.
  • Convicted fraudster David Gentile, the former private equity executive whose seven-year sentence was commuted by Trump, will not have to pay $15.5 million in restitution by the terms of the clemency order, Politico reports.
  • The Trump DOJ says it will be up to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Pardon Attorney Ed Martin to decide which people and which crimes are covered by Trump’s sweeping pardons related to the 2020 fake electors scheme and other Big Lie related offenses.

Indiana Redistricting Hangs in the Balance

With the Indiana House having passed a new GOP friendly mid-decade congressional district map, all attention turns to the Republican-controlled state Senate, where its fate is not as cut and dry as you might expect.

Such a Big Boy

At the 0:42-second mark, Trump’s mask comes off for a moment and the insatiable neediness of an unloved child emerges:

this shit is just beyond parody, man

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-05T17:33:36.577Z

Racism With a Big Dose of Cringe

Under a new Trump administration policy, Americans will no longer have free access to national parks on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day or Juneteenth, but will now have free access on June 14 — President Trump’s birthday, which coincides with Flag Day.

RIP V3 Camera

Over the weekend, the 38th episode in the eruption sequence that began at Kilauea volcano last December was particularly vigorous, with a laterally-jetting lava fountain knocking a remote camera on the crater rim out of commission:

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Trump’s Attacks on DEI May Hurt Men in College Admission  

Posted on by John Light

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show.

The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.

“This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”

Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

For years universities and colleges have beentryingto keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers ofmen have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions. 

Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.

Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.

But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.

“The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.

“What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.” 

At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

School% of males admitted% of females admitted
Brown University7.04.4
University of Chicago5.63.7
Yale University4.63.4
University of Miami22.516.5
Middlebury College12.29.6
Baylor University56.847.9
Pomona College7.66.7
Tulane University14.913.4
Vassar College20.417.6

SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets

Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.

In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.” 

The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.

Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.

Related: Inaccurate, impossible: Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”

Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female,said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”

Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

“For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”

The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show. Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.

“If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.

At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’” 

The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.

Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent. 

Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.

Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.

At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.

Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.” 

There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.

“It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”

This story about men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast. This article first appeared on The Hechinger Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal

Posted on by John Light

This story first appeared at ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.

Continue reading “Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal” →

Court Reform: Breaking the Corrupt Rule of the Six GOPers Is Everything

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I’ve become something of a broken record on this. But repetition sometimes serves a critical purpose. Supreme Court reform is now the sine qua non of any reformist program in the United States, any program to re-implant/re-secure civic democracy in the United States. Filibuster reform, abolition of the filibuster, is comparably important. In fact, the two are interwoven with each other in such a way as to be almost indistinguishably joined together.

But a lot of people know the filibuster has to go. Reforming the Supreme Court, which involves one of several ways of breaking the power of the six corrupt Republican appointees, is a much harder lift. It’s not a harder lift in voting terms. It can be done by passing an ordinary law (once you’ve done away with the filibuster) and having a president to sign it. But for many in the political class, for many elected officials, it remains unthinkable. On the plus side, Democratic voters and opinion leaders have some time to lay the groundwork. The soonest anything can happen is January 2029. (You need Congress and the White House.) But there’s a huge amount of work to do. Because my sense is that Democratic officeholders, party elites, aren’t even close to being there. And there’s really no future without it.

Texas Gets a Pass for a Gerrymandering Free-For-All. Will California Be Given the Same?

Posted on by Kate Riga

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️

Is What’s Good for Texas Good for California?

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Texas does not have to redraw its maximal gerrymander, finding that the map is not illegally race-based, and that it’s too close to the election (in 11 months) to require a redraw. 

The decision, from an unsigned majority plus a concurrence written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, comes as no surprise to those who have watched the Roberts Court steadily hack away at anti-gerrymandering protections. 

After the 2019 death knell of Rucho v. Common Cause, when the majority ruled that partisan gerrymandering claims can’t be litigated in federal court, it became even harder to demonstrate the existence of a theoretically still-illegal racial gerrymanders, as race and partisan allegiance are often intertwined (for what it’s worth, the district court in the Texas case, in a nearly 200-page ruling, found bountiful evidence that the new maps were predicated on race). And on top of that, the right-wing justices have been messing with the Purcell principle for years, selectively ruling that changes to voting procedures impermissibly encroach on coming elections to uphold Republican-friendly maps.

Now the question lingers: Will the Supreme Court’s open arms policy to maps that let candidates choose their voters extend to the party they oppose? California, the poster child for blue state reactivity to the Trump-ordered Republican gerrymanders, is mentioned twice in the brief ruling. 

Once, from the unsigned majority: “Texas adopted the first new map, then California responded with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done.”

And once, in Alito’s concurrence: “First, the dissent does not dispute — because it is indisputable — that the impetus for the adoption of the concurring map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

Both of these crumbs seem to lead to the same place: The nameless conservatives (the three liberals all signed onto a dissent) and Alito/Gorsuch/Thomas use constructions that equalize the actions of Texas and California. Texas acted out of partisan interest (legal), so California did the same. 

It’s a cold comfort, as states free of pesky redistricting reforms race to erase voter choice from the process of selecting U.S. representatives. And you can bet that the California Republican Pparty (joined by the Trump Justice Department) will try to find some race-based idiosyncrasy to set that stateit apart from Texas’ process. 

The Court has shown itself to be staunchly anti-democratic. The only remaining question is whether it’ll be consistently so. 

— Kate Riga

Trump’s Institute of Peace, Taken with Guns 

President Trump has stamped his name on the distinct building that once housed the U.S. Institute of Peace, which DOGE commandeered and hollowed out in the early days of his term. 

Trump hanging his shingle on the headquarters of an effort to globally spread diplomacy and charitable works would be ironic enough without the backstory of how his people took it over. 

Back in March, DOGE stormed the building with a panoply of armed officers. FBI agents arrived unannounced at the home of the Institute’s security chief, as DOGE tried to force its way into the building. DOGE members threatened the federal contracts of all of the Institute’s ex-security contractors to get them to fork over the key. 

“This conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigations, using armed law enforcement from three different agencies — the Metropolitan Police Department, Department of State security police, the FBI — to carry out Executive Order 14217 — all of that targeting, probably terrorizing, the employees and the staff at the Institute when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals,” a federal judge said in a hearing over the Institute’s seizure. “Why?” 

The case is still pending at the appellate level, though the government has been granted access to the Institute in the meantime.

The building, steps away from the Lincoln Memorial and topped by sweeping, white, dove-like wings, sits as a monument to Trump’s destruction both at home and abroad — his own Ministry of Peace.  

— Kate Riga

The ‘Affordability President’ No Longer Believes in Affordability

Last weekend, President Donald Trump was branding himself “THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT” and suggesting this message should be the center of Republicans’ midterm election strategy. By Tuesday, Trump had changed his tune.

“Affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats,” Trump said in a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

The flip-flop messaging has come amid increasing dissatisfaction over the economy and rising prices. Democrats and, notably, New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, have homed in on the issue, and swept the November elections. Trump quickly moved to embrace the issue.

Trump indicated the area was one where he and Mamdani had common ground when they met in the Oval Office last month. However, on Monday, when TPM asked Mamdani about Trump’s efforts to take the mantle of “affordability,” the mayor-elect offered a decidedly diplomatic and non-committal response.

For his part, Trump clearly seems finished with his brief romance with the concept

“They just say the word,” Trump said of Democrats. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it — ‘affordability.’ I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”

And what about now that he’s president? Well, even as he rejected the notion that people are worried about prices, Trump conceded, “There is still more to do.”

— Hunter Walker

Mike Lindell Runs for Governor

The MyPillow Founder and energetic public face of the “Stop the Steal” movement filed paperwork this week to run for governor of Minnesota. 

Although he has not yet formally announced his gubernatorial run, in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio on Wednesday, Mike Lindell said that he was “98 percent sure” that he will run for governor. 

For years following the 2020 election, the close Trump ally and conspiracy theorist has been spreading elaborate and nonsensical lies about the integrity of the 2020 election, claiming, without a shred of evidence, that a foreign entity had systematically flipped votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, and that Trump is in fact the true winner of that election. 

Most recently, in September, a federal judge ruled that Lindell had defamed the voting technology company Smartmatic by spreading lies about the company and its supposed role in stealing the 2020 election. 

— Khaya Himmelman

Supreme Court Will Hear Birthright Citizenship Case, for Real This Time

Posted on by Kate Riga

Lawsuits have been percolating over President Trump’s unprecedented attempt to undermine birthright citizenship since the beginning of his second term, but it took until Friday for the Supreme Court to announce that it will hear the case on the merits. 

Continue reading “Supreme Court Will Hear Birthright Citizenship Case, for Real This Time” →

Indiana House Approves Gerrymandered Map. Now It’ll Go to Senate After Trump Threats

Posted on by Khaya Himmelman

Indiana’s Republican-controlled state House approved a new gerrymandered congressional map on Friday, as expected. 

Continue reading “Indiana House Approves Gerrymandered Map. Now It’ll Go to Senate After Trump Threats” →

3 States Are Challenging Precedent Against Posting the Ten Commandments in Public Schools

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

As disputes rage on over religion’s place in public schools, the Ten Commandments have become a focal point. At least a dozen states have considered proposals that would require the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, with Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas mandating their display in 2024 or 2025.

Challenges led to all three laws being at least partially blocked. Most recently, on Dec. 2, 2025, families in Texas filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to take down displays across the state. Federal trial court judges have already temporarily blocked the law in around two dozen districts. Ongoing appeals from the bills’ supporters, though, seem aimed at overturning a 45-year-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent prohibiting such displays.

Continue reading “3 States Are Challenging Precedent Against Posting the Ten Commandments in Public Schools” →

Lindsey Halligan Still Cosplaying as U.S. Attorney

Posted on by David Kurtz

Judges Noticed and Called It Out

Federal judges in the Eastern District of Virginia have been calling out the Trump DOJ in court for continuing to list Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney in court filings, more than a week after she was ruled invalidly appointed to the position, CNN reports.

Three different judges who were involved in different phases of the now-dismissed indictment against former FBI Director James Comey have raised the issue in open court. One ordered Halligan’s name struck from filings; another ordered an asterisk be placed next to Halligan’s name along with a citation to the court order disqualifying her.

Grand Jury Declines to Re-Indict Letitia James

A grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia declinined to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James on bogus mortgage fraud charges ginned up by the Trump administration as political retribution against her.

The grand jury returned a no-true bill after the original indictment against James was dismissed last week because of Halligan’s invalidly appointment.

The Trump DOJ may be preparing to continue to seek to re-indict James, the WaPo reports, but each failure adds more weight to her already substantial vindictive prosecution claim should the government ever succeed in securing a new indictment.

James May DQ Another Trump USA

In a hearing in Albany yesterday, a federal judge expressed skepticism that interim U.S. Attorney John Sarcone III of the Northern District of New York was validly appointed. Sarcone’s appointment is being challenged by New York Attorney General Letitia James after he issued two subpoenas to her office for information related to its past investigations of Trump and the NRA.

Like Halligan, the controversial Sarcone has no prior experience as a prosecutor. When his initial 120-day term as interim U.S. attorney expired, district judges declined to extend him in the position. In response, Attorney General Pam Bondi made him a special attorney, purporting to have the powers of the office indefinitely. U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield suggested she might disqualify Sarcone from all of his purported roles, Politico reports.

Judges have so far disqualified Trump U.S. attorneys in Virginia, Nevada, New Jersey, and California.

Quote of the Day

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service. You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States.”–Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, after watching video of the Sept. 2 double-tap strike that killed two survivors of the initial U.S. attack

For the Record …

As we continue to piece together the sequence of events in the double-tap strike, I want to note that in the classified briefing he gave to Congress Admiral Frank Bradley (i) stressed that Hegseth did not give a verbal order to “kill them all,” which was a key element of the WaPo story that sparked the furor; and (ii) said that Hegseth didn’t give a direct order for the second strike.

There’s some nuance and subtlety around these issues, which Greg Sargent explores with Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. Plus, a reminder that the entire campaign is unlawful, not just the strike on survivors.

Grotesquerie of the Day

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announces another boat strike in response to a request/wish from Turning Point USA’s Andrew Kolvet.

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) 2025-12-05T01:47:12.483Z

BREAKING: Trump Admin Sources Are Unreliable

The NYT put itself in the delicate position this week of using anonymous administration sources to surface the emerging line of defense to the double-tap strike that killed two survivors of its ongoing unlawful campaign of high seas strikes — and it looks like the paper of record got burned, as it essentially admits:

Amid preparations for the briefing, multiple U.S. officials had told The Times that they had been told that one of the survivors had radioed for help, but the people said remarks from Admiral Bradley about communications were instead purely speculative. The reason for the disconnect was not clear.

One of the ironies of this episode is that the administration’s defenses weren’t very good even if they had been true.

Hegseth Stonewalled IG Report

Even though it was temperate in its tone and too limited in its recommendations, the inspector general report on the Signal fiasco was a damning indictment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The White House and Pentagon had launched a preemptive disinformation campaign ahead of the report’s public release, declaring that it completely exonerated Hegseth — but it did anything but clear him. In fact, Hegseth stonewalled the investigation that he claims exonerated him, refusing to provide his phone so the IG could probe other uses of Signal and to sit down for an interview with the IG.

Corrupt SCOTUS Takes It to a New Level

In clearing the way for Texas to use its unlawful race-based redistricting map for the 2026 midterm elections, the Roberts Court held true to form in a myriad of familiar ways. But I want to emphasize that it’s not just producing bad outcomes in the sense of preferencing conservative political goals over progressives ones; it’s having to wreck its own procedures, precedents, rules, and traditions to get there, creating all sorts of unpredictable and messy downstream effects. It’s a decidedly radical — not conservative — approach to judging. And if all that weren’t bad enough, the six-justice majority continues to gaslight (I can’t think of a better word) district judges by flaming them for abiding by the Supreme Court’s own past guidance.

Alleged Pipe Bomber Was 2020 Big Lie Adherent

Brian Cole Jr., the 30-year-old Virginia man arrested in connection with the pipe bombs found on Jan. 6, 2021 at the national headquarters of the two major political parties, is cooperating with authorities, NBC News reports, and told the FBI he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Yikes

The Trump DOJ is urging a judge to jail pardoned Jan. 6 defendant Taylor Taranto who has been alarmingly wandering the neighborhood of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) in recent days. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who convicted Taranto at a bench trial this year for a threat to federal buildings and for bringing weapons to President Barack Obama’s D.C. neighborhood, did not immediately send Taranto to prison but ordered him to return immediately to his home in Washington state for the holidays, Politico reports.

The Retribution: Visa Edition

The Trump administration is giving extra scrutiny to H-1B visa applications for evidence that applicants and family members traveling with them have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety — which the administration deems “censorship,” Reuters reports.

If there’s any doubt that this is payback for Trump being banned from social media platforms after Jan. 6, a State Department spokesperson cleared it up: “In the past, the President himself was the victim of this kind of abuse when social media companies locked his accounts. He does not want other Americans to suffer this way. Allowing foreigners to lead this type of censorship would both insult and injure the American people.”

Dark Arts Exposed

Covert ops don’t always go as planned, but we rarely hear about them. Two very disparate examples this week:

  • IRELAND: Russia is suspected of being behind a hybrid warfare campaign using drones to disrupt airspace around European airports. In the latest incident, five military-style drones triggered a major security alert in Ireland, arriving in the flight path of visiting Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shortly after his aircraft passed by. “Officials are treating it as a potential attempt to disrupt flight operations rather than to attack a target,” the Irish Times reported.
  • SYRIA: An October raid by U.S. forces and a local Syrian group that was targeting an Islamic State group official instead killed a man who had been working undercover gathering intelligence on the extremists, the AP reports, citing the man’s family and Syrian officials.

Typical Trump

James McCrery II, the architect who found Trump’s preferred plans for his beloved ballroom too garish, has been sidelined in favor of a new architect, Shalom Baranes. I wonder if Trump pays McCrery’s billed fees.

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Crooked as We Wanna Be, Say the Corrupt GOP Six

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Kate goes deeper on the new definition of “eve” the Court promulgated to help Republicans hold the House next year. (I don’t think it’ll be enough, but that’s another matter.) They take a principle that has some logic in extreme cases: there needs to be some balance between the merits of a case and potential disruption to an election. But given that we have House elections every two years, one year out cannot be the “eve” of an election. In any case, it’s more evidence of what we already know: we’re dealing with a corrupt Court at war with the Constitution. They do what they need to do to get the result they want. Read Kate.