Resurrecting Arizona’s 2020 Election Denial Lunacy

Posted on by Khaya Himmelman

Hi, and welcome back to The Franchise!

This week, we’ll be looking at the Trump DOJ’s attempt to expand its 2020 voter fraud probe into Arizona, along with the backstory on the Cyber Ninja “audit” that’s wrapped up in all of this (and yes, it is absolutely insane that we are still talking about the 2020 election). Plus, Trump has moved on to issuing threats to get his SAVE America Act passed and, of course, the latest in the redistricting battle.  

Let’s dig in.

Continue reading “Resurrecting Arizona’s 2020 Election Denial Lunacy” →

Goin’ Fast

Posted on by Joe Ragazzo

We’ve already sold more than 50% of our ticket allotment for our Austin event on April 8. Remember: If you are a member, you get discounted tickets. If you missed the discount code, just shoot me an email at joe@talkingpointsmemo.com and I’ll get you the goods.

If we sell out, please add yourself to the waitlist. Sometimes people drop out, sometimes we’re able to negotiate additional space.

At any rate, get your tickets here! We hope to see you soon!

Veterans Who Depend on Mental Health Care Keep Losing Their Therapists Under Trump

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

As Jason Beaman recounts his long slog searching for mental health therapy last year, he sounds defeated.

The first therapist assigned to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs told him at their initial meeting that she was leaving the agency. A few months later, his second therapist told him she was also leaving. An appointment with a third counselor was canceled with no explanation.

These were huge setbacks for the 54-year-old veteran of the Navy and Army Reserve. Nearly a decade ago, a spiral of depression and anxiety left him homeless and living on the streets of Spokane, Washington. A VA social worker threw him a lifeline, helping him apply for benefits, find housing and get into therapy.

He still needs mental health care, he and his physician say. But bouncing from therapist to therapist has left him exhausted.

“I just quit. I don’t want to mess with the therapist anymore,” Beaman said. He spends much of his time now alone playing video games or walking with his dogs.

After President Donald Trump returned to office last year, his administration announced plans to overhaul the VA, one of the largest health care systems in the country, to deliver “the highest quality care.”

“This administration is finally going to give the veterans what they want,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said last March, as the department announced tens of thousands of job cuts.

But in interview after interview, veterans across the country told ProPublica that one year into the second Trump administration it’s become more difficult to get treatment, as hundreds of therapists and social workers have left the VA. Many of them have not been replaced.

While front-line mental health care workers were largely exempted from the job cuts, hundreds chose to leave anyway. Some cited disagreements with new administration policies, including several targeting the LGBTQ+ community, while others, facing diminished ranks, said they simply could no longer provide proper care.

In January, the department had around 500 fewer psychologists and psychiatrists than it had at the same time last year, ProPublica found.

Although the losses represent a relatively small number — about 4% of psychologists and 6% of psychiatrists — they are notable for an agency that has long struggled with inadequate mental health staffing. For years, administrators have listed psychologists in particular among their most “severe staffing shortages.”

Mental health is not the only area where the VA has lost medical staff. The agency has eliminated more than 14,000 vacant health care positions across the system, according to data first reported by The New York Times.

Data published by the VA going back to May 2023 shows that the agency was adding psychologists every quarter until Trump’s return to the White House. Then, the trend flipped, with departures outpacing hires in all four quarters of last year.

Compounding the losses, the agency’s cohort of social workers, some of whom are licensed therapists who provide mental health counseling, declined by nearly 700 staffers over the year.

To better understand the departures and their impact on veterans’ care, ProPublica interviewed dozens of former and current VA staffers as well as patients.

ProPublica also examined a previously unreported internal employee exit survey, which included hundreds of responses from mental health care workers.

“Mental Health is understaffed, burned out, and there is not enough mental health care for the Veterans who need the services,” wrote one New York-based former employee, according to the records.

“Support is no longer there to provide ethical and good care for these Veterans,” wrote a second, based in Indiana. “Scheduling issues are incredibly high due to poor staff hiring and retainment.”

Yet another wrote that the number of new patients seeking help at their Kansas facility was far too high, making it “unethical to accept more veterans in our clinics.”

Many of those vacated positions have gone unfilled due to a yearlong hiring freeze, which was only lifted in January.

Echoing the exit survey, many who remain on staff describe crushing workloads as they struggle to fill the gaps. Those reached by ProPublica, who agreed to speak only under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that as staffing losses mount, they’ve seen their patient loads increase, while administrators shorten their appointments and pack more and more clients into group therapy sessions.

“It was always bad,” said one VA psychologist, referring to staffing at a facility in Arizona. “And now it’s at a breaking point.”

The therapist described being stretched so thin that schedulers replaced some one-on-one sessions with online group sessions that included as many as 35 veterans. The therapist said despite that they were still overloaded with individual sessions and had to limit each one to as little as 16 minutes.

The VA declined ProPublica’s request to interview an official familiar with its mental health programs. In an email, VA spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz accused ProPublica of attempting to mislead the public by “cherry picking issues that are limited to a handful of sites and in many cases were worse under the Biden Administration.”

He argued that the agency’s performance around mental health has improved since Trump took office, citing more than 15.5 million direct mental health care appointments in the most recent fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025), a 4% increase from the previous fiscal year. He did not say whether those additional appointments were for individual therapy. Kasperowicz also noted that the administration has opened 25 new health care clinics.

After ProPublica shared its findings and the names of veterans who would appear in this story, the agency reached out to several to inquire about their care and offer help. The veterans told ProPublica they remained skeptical that the VA would consistently respond to their mental health needs.

As the ranks of mental health care providers at the VA have shrunk, the department has proposed shifting billions of dollars into community care, a program in which veterans obtain health care via private physicians and other providers. But the program has been stretched thin amid the loss of administrative staff and ongoing issues finding private therapists, ProPublica found, with veterans encountering longer delays as they seek help.

In December, patients waited an average of around 25 days just to receive a confirmed appointment date, nearly four times the VA’s stated goal for scheduling community care.

Collins has disputed assertions that there’s a systemwide problem with access to mental health care. “And if you need emergency care, or are in a crisis situation, you have immediate care,” he told a Senate committee in January.

He said the VA’s average wait time for new patients seeking mental health care appointments was less than 20 days, the number it has set as its goal. But other VA officials have acknowledged problems with access.

“There are wait times at some facilities that are beyond what our expectations and standards would be,” Dr. Ilse Wiechers, assistant undersecretary for health for patient care services, told senators at a separate hearing.

ProPublica’s analysis found that wait times fluctuate dramatically, and fast access to care can depend on location. For example, the small clinic near Beaman’s home in rural Nebraska, with its comparatively small staff, saw appointment wait times for new mental health clients climb as high as 60 days in December and drop to 20 days in February, according to the VA figures.

But a closer look at the entire VA system reveals that a large number of facilities are struggling. In early February, more than half of its hospitals and clinics reported one-on-one mental health appointment wait times for new patients that were longer, and in some cases far longer, than the VA’s 20-day goal, according to a ProPublica analysis of data published on the agency’s website.

In late December, Beaman said he received an email from the VA saying he’d been approved for additional therapy. He was able to meet with a therapist in January — after about six months of waiting and going more than a year without a session. In the interim, he said, he relied on prescription medications, video games and his therapy dogs to keep him steady. Still, his anxiety worsened, he said, and now he often feels so uncomfortable around others that he rarely leaves his home except to walk his dogs while wearing headphones so no one speaks to him.

Kasperowicz, the VA spokesperson, wrote in his email to ProPublica that Beaman had “more than a dozen mental health visits at VA between late 2024 to mid-2025 through the Cheyenne VA clinic” in Wyoming, which is about an hour-and-a-half trip for Beaman. Kasperowicz declined, however, to say whether those appointments involved the one-on-one mental health counseling Beaman had requested. Beaman said he only had two sessions for one-on-one therapy in 2025 — meetings that were truncated because of the therapists’ impending departures.

Kasperowicz also said that one of Beaman’s appointments didn’t occur because he had “moved.” Beaman, however, said he has lived at only one address in Nebraska.

Experts warn that the exodus of mental health care providers from the VA has hurt the agency’s ability to meet veterans’ unique needs.

“VA psychologists are best in class,” said Russell Lemle, former chief psychologist for the San Francisco VA Health Care System and a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. “They have research and training and decades-long experience” working with veterans. 

“When you lose them, the veterans are the ones who pay the price,” he said.

“It Could Mean Life or Death”

Michelle Phillips, 56, a Navy veteran from Ohio, saw her therapist in remote sessions once a week for two years for her PTSD. Then, in December, Phillips’ therapist told her that she was quitting the VA because of Trump’s policies.

The change, Phillips said, “could mean life or death.”

Years of depression have led Phillips to isolate. Inside her small home about an hour outside of Columbus, the city where she enlisted in 1988, the walls are filled with reminders of brighter times — photos of family members and military paraphernalia from her time in the service. Her only real company is an aging dog, and she almost never leaves.

Her virtual therapy sessions were “the only contact that I had coming in my home to talk to me every week,” she said. “And I would sit and just wait for that appointment.”

Phillips said the counselor requested that the VA continue her one-on-one remote counseling with a new therapist — which totaled about four hours per month. The agency initially offered her virtual group therapy, an option that her previous therapist dismissed as inappropriate. In the third week of January, the VA told Phillips she could have an appointment for one-on-one sessions in March. She later declined the appointment because she didn’t want to face starting over with a new therapist.

Phillips, who is disabled and doesn’t work, said she will try to pay for one-on-one therapy out of pocket with the same therapist who left the VA but will likely only be able to afford one, possibly two, sessions a month.

James Jones said his close connection to his VA therapist, who was trained in combat trauma, helped him control his PTSD-fueled episodes of anger and alcohol abuse. Now the 54-year-old Gulf War veteran, who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, has seen his care cut in half after his therapist told him colleagues had quit and he had to pick up the load.

His sessions went from an hour every week to half an hour every two weeks. “I can tell it’s rushed,” said Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. “I’m not able to work through something.”

Others have found it difficult to establish care in the first place.

Last summer, George Retes, 26, who left the Army in 2022 after serving for four years, was driving to work in Camarillo, California, when he was suddenly caught between immigration agents and protesters. Retes said the agents broke his car window, pepper-sprayed him and detained him for days. The incident, which ProPublica detailed last fall, left him shaken and exacerbated the PTSD that was first sparked after he faced missile attacks in Iraq, Retes said. (The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to ProPublica’s questions about Retes.)

Following his release, Retes found himself withdrawing from the world. “I wasn’t texting anyone or talking to anyone,” he said. “Not even my kids.”

A few weeks after being arrested, Retes sought help from the VA clinic in Ventura, California, where staffers told him they’d be in touch for an appointment. But Retes said he never heard back, even after he called to follow up. His incident with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was in July. Retes is still waiting.

According to data on the VA’s website, new patients seeking individual therapy at the Ventura clinic had to wait an average of two and a half months in early February.

The VA said it could not discuss Jones’ or Retes’ accounts because the veterans declined to waive their privacy rights.

Strains on the System

The VA overhaul has also taken a toll on mental health providers, many of whom quit after spending years at the agency.

Natalie McCarthy worked as a social worker and mental health therapist for a decade before quitting the VA in May. Like many others working in mental health, she did all of her work remotely; from her Ohio home she saw vets mostly from the Washington, D.C., area.

But McCarthy and her colleagues faced pressure to return to agency offices after the VA issued new restrictions on telehealth workers. She was uneasy about the prospect of having to conduct sessions in makeshift spaces like conference rooms filled with other counselors — a situation that raised widespread ethical concerns over the legally mandated privacy for medical conversations.

Complicating matters, McCarthy said, were Trump’s orders eliminating diversity and equity initiatives within the federal government. She said she began to worry that therapists would no longer be able to discuss the subject of race with their patients or document patients’ thoughts on the topic in their session notes. So she quit.

“I was angry that veterans were in that position,” said McCarthy, who started her own practice. “I was angry that I was in that position. It just felt like an unnecessary thing to have to navigate.”

Psychologist Mary Brinkmeyer found herself in a similar situation. She started at a VA facility in metropolitan Norfolk, Virginia, in 2022 after seeing a posting for an LGBTQ+ care coordinator, which oversees support programs for LGBTQ+ veterans and helps navigate their care. She quit last February after her superiors began enforcing Trump’s anti-diversity orders.

Brinkmeyer said she was told to stop conducting training for physicians and other staff on best practices for caring for LGBTQ+ patients. Then, she said, staff members were ordered to remove all LGBTQ+ paraphernalia from the facility such as rainbow flags, identity-affirming literature and program brochures. Also, an edict was issued directing people to use the bathroom of their gender assigned at birth, Brinkmeyer said.

That’s when the VA stopped feeling like a welcoming place. “There was a failure of empathy,” she said.

The VA did not respond directly to either Brinkmeyer’s or McCarthy’s accounts of how the administration’s policies had impacted the quality of mental health care.

Much like those seeking mental health care directly from the VA, veterans referred to community care are also struggling to secure appointments.

Gwyn Bourlakov, 58, enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1998 and over the following 21 years she was awarded a Bronze Star for her service in the invasion of Iraq, climbed the ranks to become a major and won a Fulbright scholarship to study Russian history.

Today, after a series of professional setbacks, Bourlakov works as a museum security guard. Lingering PTSD from her time in the service, coupled with deep bouts of depression over her current circumstances, have kept her seeking the VA’s help despite long-standing frustrations with its services.

After she began looking for a new therapist last year following a move to Colorado, officials at her local VA clinic in Golden said at her intake appointment that its in-house providers were swamped and could not see new patients for at least six months.

She asked if she could get help through community care, but staffers told her that the system was so overwhelmed that it would be a “nightmare,” she recalled. Veterans living in eastern Colorado waited 57 days on average to get a community care appointment scheduled in December, VA figures show.

Bourlakov said she tried to get help through a separate VA clinic, but when her phone calls went unanswered, she finally gave up.

“I don’t have time for all of that,” she explained. “It’s just like shouting into the wind.”

Following inquiries from ProPublica, VA officials reached out to Bourlakov and other veterans interviewed for this story to offer additional assistance with their mental health care. The calls left several frustrated, saying it shouldn’t take questions from the media for them to get help from the VA. 

Though skeptical, Bourlakov decided to move forward. She was contacted by three separate VA representatives in February asking about her health and if she needed help scheduling a therapy appointment. 

The earliest telehealth appointment they offered was not until June, she said. The next available in-person slot was not until July. Bourlakov opted for June.

Of Course It Did: Trump Tantrum Led to Reversal on Law Firm Appeals

Posted on by David Kurtz

‘I Never Signed Off On That’

Duh.

In the madcap world of the Trump II White House, you knew that President Trump had to be the cause of last week’s humiliating DOJ reversal of its appeal in the law firm executive order cases. And now it’s confirmed.

Within 24 hours, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department went from moving to drop its appeal of the four law firms cases it had lost to telling the appeals court … never mind.

The reversal came after Trump blew his top upon learning from news reports that the administration would be dropping its appeals, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“I never signed off on that,” the WSJ quotes the president as saying in an Oval Office outburst over his displeasure with DOJ leaders.

Trump then directed White House officials to tell the Justice Department to reverse itself, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed: “At the president’s direction, the Department of Justice quickly amended this filing.”

There’s been considerable speculation over the exact sequence of events. Did DOJ give the White House a heads-up in advance or was it freelancing? Was the White House Counsel’s Office involved from the get-go or did it fail to “manage up” (an impossible task with Trump)? Did Trump know in advance but change his mind because he disliked the optics?

The new reporting doesn’t precisely answer those questions, but it suggests the failure was with the White House Counsel’s Office and West Wing aides, or at least that’s the DOJ perspective:

Before Trump’s intervention, top department officials believed they had signoff from the White House Counsel’s Office and Trump’s top aides to drop the case. But Trump himself hadn’t been told of the decision, the people said, and has a longstanding modus operandi in legal matters: never drop a case willingly. Many other White House aides have wanted the issue to go away for months.

On the spectrum of Trump II depredations, it’s another symptom of the underlying disease of DOJ being run out of the White House as the personal attorney of President Trump, not of the Office of the Presidency or of the public trust it represents. The only silver lining may be that the clumsy, pathetic way the DOJ conducted itself in this instance hastens the slow awakening of appeals courts judges to the reality of the Trump II threat.

Latest From the Middle East …

This handout photo taken on March 11, 2026 and released by the Royal Thai Navy shows smoke rising from the Thai bulk carrier ‘Mayuree Naree’ near the Strait of Hormuz after an attack. A Thai bulk carrier travelling in the crucial Strait of Hormuz was attacked March 11, with 20 crew members rescued so far, the Thai navy said. (Photo by Handout / ROYAL THAI NAVY / AFP via Getty Images)
  • While the pace of Iranian retaliatory strikes seems to be slowing, it still managed to inflict substantial damage over the past 24 hours, including forcing Iraq to suspend all oil terminal operations, striking container ships off Iraq and Dubai, and targeting fuel tanks in Bahrain.
  • The U.S. was responsible for a Tomahawk missile strike on a school in southern Iran, a U.S. military investigation has preliminarily found. The strike that killed at least 175 people, many of them children, was the result of a “targeting mistake” based on old data, the NYT reports.
  • “The Iranian drone attack in Kuwait that killed six U.S. service members was more severe than has previously been revealed, with dozens suffering injuries including brain trauma, shrapnel wounds and burns,” CBS News reports.
  • The spillover conflict in Lebanon has claimed more than 600 lives there, as Israel continues to battle Iran’s proxy Hezbollah

The Incompetence Is Staggering

Racing to respond to the utterly predictable impact of its Iran attack on global oil prices, President Trump made the impromptu policy announcement that the U.S. government would backstop insurers shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, but as the WSJ reports, the administration had little idea what it was proposing:

U.S. officials called London insurers and brokers, trying to figure out how the market operates, industry insiders said. Some have received calls asking for confidential data on the Lloyd’s market that participants have been reluctant to share.

Experts on the insurance market tell the WSJ that insurers are still willing to underwrite shipping through the Strait of Hormuz but that shippers, understandably, aren’t willing to risk the lives of their crews.

OH MY EYES!

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a press conference on US military action in Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on March 2, 2026. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

After aides to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth found the photos taken of him at a March 2 press briefing on the Iran attack to be “unflattering,” they barred news photographers from his subsequent two briefings, the WaPo reports. So we put together 10 choice Hegseth photos that they don’t want you see. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

Quote of the Day

“In the past, propaganda served the purposes of war; now war serves the purposes of propaganda.”—John Ganz

Mass Deportation Pace Slows

Since the pinnacle of Operation Metro Surge, the torrent of emergency habeas cases has slowed considerably from a peak of about 300 to 400 per day, from Jan. 16 to Feb. 17, down to closer to 200 a day in early March, according to an analysis by Politico which tracks with a separate NYT analysis on the recent decline in immigration arrests. Even the new lower number is “astonishing” compared to historical averages, Politico reports.

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A Tetchy Cornyn Shoves a Hand in the Camera When Pressed on His Filibuster Flip-Flop

Posted on by Kate Riga

SAVE Act Switcheroo

In his latest act of self-debasement to win President Trump’s endorsement, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on Wednesday penned a cringing op-ed in the New York Post in which he agreed to drop his longtime support for the Senate filibuster. 

He professed that the change of heart was prompted by radical Democrats pledging to nuke the filibuster whenever they hold power again. 

So it’s just coincidence, by Cornyn’s lights, that he steadfastly opposed filibuster abolition right up until last week when his runoff opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), promised to drop out of the race if Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) lowered the 60-vote threshold to allow for passage of the GOP’s voter restriction bill, the SAVE America Act.

Paxton’s move was a fairly transparent effort to redirect Trump’s anger away from him after he’d refused to preemptively drop out of the race.

Despite his alleged heel turn, Cornyn is a student at the Mitch McConnell school of Senate procedure: He knows that the filibuster doesn’t block Republican priorities — tax cuts and confirmations — and does block Democratic ones. He sees the value in both ensuring that Democrats never make good on their policy promises (a successful effort that has left the Democratic Party in deplorable standing) and in protecting elected Republicans from having to act on the unpopular whims of their hard-right base. 

A possible Trump endorsement, though, called louder. 

Still, playing the lickspittle isn’t always fun for a big, important U.S. senator. He got a mite peevish Wednesday when NBC reporter Brennan Leach pushed him on his flexible principles. 

“What would you say to those who say you just changed your mind to win the President’s endorsement?” she asked. 

“I would say that’s not true,” he replied with a wry smile. 

“You also said—” she began, before he interrupted, shoving a hand in her camera and saying: “I think we’re through. Go away.”

Spinelessness — it’s harder than it looks.

— Kate Riga

We’re the Bad Guys 

As expected after remnants of the missile were discovered, a preliminary (and ongoing) military investigation has found that the United States is responsible for the strike on the Iranian elementary school that left, per Iranian officials, over 175 people — mostly children — dead. 

The strike seems to have been the result of old data, which showed the school as part of a nearby base. 

Trump, never one to shrink from responsibility, was asked for his reaction to the findings Wednesday as he departed the White House: “I don’t know about it,” he said. He previously blamed the Iranians. 

— Kate Riga

Senate Republicans Block Dem Effort to Fund DHS Without ICE, CBP

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) sought unanimous consent on the Senate floor Wednesday to pass legislation to fund every agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — except Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Office of the Secretary.

Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) blocked Murray’s request, making it clear the Senate GOP would rather continue the ongoing shutdown instead of funding some of the programs under DHS.

The Washington Democrats’ bill would have made sure TSA and the rest of the programs under the DHS umbrella, including FEMA, Coast Guard and the Secret Service, were funded through the fiscal year while negotiations for meaningful ICE reform — which Dems have been calling for in exchange for their votes to fund ICE — continue.

“Republicans are not only dragging their feet on the basic reforms — they are refusing to fund TSA, FEMA, and other important DHS functions while these negotiations continue,” Murray said during a Wednesday floor speech.

Murray’s effort comes as the DHS-specific shutdown, which started on Feb. 14, approaches a month with no end in sight. With spring break kicking off and TSA agents set to miss their first paycheck since the shutdown started, airports across the country have been warning of hours-long security lines.

Congressional Democrats and the White House have been exchanging largely private proposals for a few weeks now, but the two sides have not made much progress as Republicans and the Trump White House refuse to enact several key reforms Democrats are demandingDemocrats are demanding to rein in ICE agents’ recent lawless actions.

— Emine Yücel

Hope, Change, ‘This Job Sucks’ 

The former Justice Department prosecutor who told a judge that her job “sucks” while in court defending the administration’s deportations is now running as a Democrat to challenge Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), per the Washington Post.

Julie Le said that she’d never supported Trump, and thought that if she stayed with ICE, she’d be in a better position to defend her family’s legality if any of them got arrested. 

She added that she’s challenging Omar not because she doesn’t think the congresswoman is “doing the job,” but for what she, personally, “could bring to the table.”

— Kate Riga

Clown Show, Clown Shoes 

Trump is reportedly buying all the men in his circle ill-fitting dress shoes — and they’re “afraid” not to wear them. 

The fear is such that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has apparently been donning a pair much too big for him. 

“You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,’” Vice President J.D. Vance recalled Trump saying during a podcast appearance, before triggering the gag reflexes of all in earshot by adding: “We won’t ask the second lady for comment on that particular topic.”

— Kate Riga

In Case You Missed It

Morning Memo: Ed Martin Clowns Himself Into Bonus Ethics Charges

The Backchannel: Borderline Personality Trump and the Uses of Press Myopia

Slideshow: 10 Pictures Of Pete Hegseth From The ‘Unflattering’ Batch The Pentagon Reportedly Doesn’t Want You To See

The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga heads to Austin: Alright Alright Alright! TPM Is Heading to Austin

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

Pam Bondi’s US Attorney Gambit Smacked Down by Judge as Unconstitutional

What We Are Reading

Report: President Donald Trump Is Giving “All The Boys” Dress Shoes That Don’t Fit Right — David Roth, Defector

The media is structurally pro-Trump — Elias Isquith, The Necessary Fictions

Joe Rogan Says Trump’s Supporters Feel ‘Betrayed’ by Iran War — Tim Balk, The New York Times

Borderline Personality Trump and the Uses of Press Myopia

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Every president wants favorable press coverage. Most feel a surprising level of grievance when they don’t get it. Donald Trump is singular in using the powers of his office to force news organizations to bend to his will. But when is it beyond friendly or fawning coverage, or always giving the president the benefit of the doubt? At the gym a couple days ago I watched the soon-to-be-gobbled-up CNN doing a news segment on gas prices with an energy industry analyst. They’re not the only ones talking about gas prices. But the tone of the segment seemed out of sync with a lot of other press coverage. It occurred to me that what Trump wants, distinctly if not uniquely, is a kind of spell preservation as much as good coverage or fawning per se. He governs the country by a kind of manic coaxing which is at war with short-term memory and thrives on the ability to keep as many people fixated on the super dramatic crisis of the moment without remembering that it was preceded by an endless litany of other crises with similar branding.

Continue reading “Borderline Personality Trump and the Uses of Press Myopia” →

‘Ka-pow’!

Posted on by Joe Ragazzo

In most ways, being a majority reader-funded news operation is an obviously good thing. However, at TPM we’ve always taken care that we are not contributing to a hierarchical news ecosystem. To address that, several years ago we started giving away Community-Supported Memberships free of charge. We also give away free memberships to students.

We talk a lot about how readers fund everything we do. It’s how we can afford to hire reporters. It’s how we can produce a podcast. It’s how we can host events. Memberships, along with the TPM Journalism Fund, also allow us to build an accessible AND sustainable news operation. And you need both.

Reader NC here wrote in to thank us, but really his membership is made possible by all of you. (We’re sharing the below note with his permission). If you are not yet a member, I hope you’ll consider joining now during our Membership Drive.

Greetings!

I had been a TPM Prime member since the very beginning when I reached out to your team a couple of years ago to request a free Prime membership. The mission-driven coworking business that my wife and I had spent 15 years buiding with great care, deep passion, and our family savings, had been capsized by the covid pandemic. Not so much a casualty of Schumpeter’s creative destruction as a victim of Taleb’s black swan, we were nonetheless broke. With my beloved TPM membership on the household chopping block, you switched me over to a free membership–no questions asked.

Now that we’re back on our feet, I switched over to the paid, annual Prive AF membership. As a citizen and a customer, I say this with utmost sincerity: Thank you.

But as a fellow entrepreneur and business owner? Forget about it. That is next-level respect, the respect I have for the business side. It’s hard enough running a small business, much less a small business that deliberately eschews its industry’s main source of revenue (monetizing reader eyeballs via third parties) because it would compromise the editorial independence that is the main driver of customer value. And you’re a union shop. Ka-pow! 

With warmest regards and sincere thanks,

Photos: 10 Pictures of Pete Hegseth From the ‘Unflattering’ Batch the Pentagon Reportedly Doesn’t Want You to See

Posted on by John Light

These may be the last press photos of U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth that we see for a while.

On March 2, roughly two days after the U.S. and Israel launched their war against Iran, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a press briefing to discuss the hostilities. The event reportedly led to a further escalation in the ongoing battle between the Pentagon and its press corps due to allegedly “unflattering” photos of Hegseth.

Continue reading “Photos: 10 Pictures of Pete Hegseth From the ‘Unflattering’ Batch the Pentagon Reportedly Doesn’t Want You to See” →

Ed Martin Clowns Himself Into Bonus Ethics Charges

Posted on by David Kurtz

It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Clowning

Then-acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin already had plenty of trouble on his hands, all of his own making, when D.C. Bar disciplinary counsel last year began looking into his extortionist threat against Georgetown University. But good ol’ Ed, with characteristic aplomb, managed to make things a whole lot worse for himself.

In a newly filed two-count disciplinary case against Martin in DC, half of the complaint is devoted to his unconstitutional pressure campaign against the Jesuit University and half to Martin’s ham-handed efforts to block the probe by threatening the bar’s disciplinary counsel and by going over his head to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals while the probe was still underway.

In short, Martin managed to get a second count lodged against himself in the course of unsuccessfully fighting off the first count. Well done, sir, well done.

Morning Memo covered last March the details of Martin’s anti-DEI-fueled threat to Georgetown Law School Dean William M. Treanor. (He subsequently upped the ante by threatening Georgetown’s president and board of directors, too, according to the bar complaint.) So let me zero in on Count II, which is where the real comedy is.

Martin went nuclear on the disciplinary counsel right off the bat, according to the complaint:

That letter earned Martin an admonishment from the chief judge, who told him in a follow-up letter that the judges couldn’t meet with him ex parte — that is, without disciplinary counsel present — and that he needed to go through the normal bar disciplinary process.

A week later, Martin cc’ed the chief judge on an email to the disciplinary counsel, which earned him another admonishment from the chief judge:

A month later, after allegedly failing to respond to communications from the disciplinary counsel, Martin sent yet another letter to the chief judge, now taking aim at the disciplinary counsel himself:

That earned Martin a third admonishment from the chief judge.

For his efforts, Martin was hit with the second count in the bar complaint accusing him of (i) improperly communicating ex parte with a judge during a proceeding; and (ii) engaging in conduct that seriously interferes with the administration of justice.

Again, Martin was the acting U.S. attorney in D.C. while all this was going on. He remains the U.S. Pardon Attorney. He wore numerous other hats over the past year, including director of the Trump DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, Special Attorney for Mortgage Fraud, and assistant attorney general. Apologies if I left out any other titles.

The Trump DOJ came to Martin’s defense after the bar complaint was filed. You’ll recall that the Trump administration is promulgating a new rule that purports to subordinate state bar investigations of DOJ attorneys to the attorney general’s own investigation. Stay tuned.

A New Vindictive Prosecution Claim

The parent company of Smartmatic — the voting machine company falsely reviled by MAGA conspiracists after the 2020 election which has pursued defamation claims against Fox News and right-wing Trump allies — is raising a compelling new claim of vindictive prosecution in a corporate bribery case where it was added as defendant last fall by the Trump DOJ.

Three things that make the Smartmatic vindictive prosecution claim stand out, as it argues in its new filing seeking to get the indictment in federal court in Miami dismissed:

  • Smartmatic cooperated with the investigation of its executives in the Philippines, where the alleged 2016 scheme took place, and wasn’t charged when the Biden administration initially brought the prosecution in 2024. Smartmatic was added to the case in a superseding indictment last fall.
  • The Trump administration has notoriously abandoned enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act in cases like this, but it made a notable exception for Smartmatic, the first company indicted under the federal law in 15 years.
  • Fox News, which is still fighting off a billion-dollar defamation claim from Smartmatic, has allegedly used the criminal charges to try to gain leverage in the civil lawsuit.

Among the other defendants in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuits: Newsmax, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox personality, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell.

Jan. 6 Never Ends: Arizona Edition

In a highly unusual development, Homeland Security Investigations is conducting its own investigation of the 2020 election results in Arizona, The Atlantic is reporting. This is in addition to the bogus conspiracy-fueled DOJ probe that led to a grand jury subpoena of state Senate records of its “audit” the 2020 election in Maricopa County. Here’s the key paragraph from The Atlantic in full:

Arizona’s acting special agent in charge for HSI, Matthew Murphy, told the state attorney general’s office [last month] that his office was now probing the 2020 election in Arizona, according to a person familiar with the details of the meeting. A state investigator asked why the government was scrutinizing the results, given that they had already been litigated and investigated. Murphy made clear that he was acting on “direction from D.C.,” the person told us, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The HSI investigation in Arizona, which has not previously been reported, comes as the FBI has embarked on a separate election probe in the state. “This is not a joint investigation” with HSI, a person familiar with the FBI investigation told us. HSI headquarters and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice are coordinating the investigation, which is focused on identifying alleged voter-fraud activity and related potential enforcement actions, according to a person familiar with the effort.

Mass Deportation Watch

  • WaPo: White House tells House GOP to avoid mass deportation talk ahead of midterms
  • CBS News: DOJ’s Alex Pretti shooting probe excludes prosecutors who specialize in civil rights cases, sources say
  • Politico: Judges say ICE, DOJ leaders are putting rank-and-file lawyers in ‘an impossible position’

Pam Bondi Moves Onto Military Base

Attorney General Pam Bondi joins the growing list of Trump II officials who have moved to military housing in the D.C. area due to threats against them, the NYT reports.

You Don’t Say?

TPM’s Josh Kovesnky has reported extensively on the Trump DOJ’s use of Kyle Shideler of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy as an expert witness in the Texas “antifa” case. Now The Intercept reports that on cross examination during the trial Shideler admitted that he “provided language that prosecutors used” in the indictment in the first-ever domestic terrorism case against a purported antifa cell. “I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition of antifa, and they used it,” Shideler said.

‘You Go to War With the Army You Have’

  • ProPublica: The US Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.
  • Politico: Hegseth gutted offices that would have probed Iran school strike
  • MSNow: DOJ losing experienced counterterrorism minds at a critical time
  • CNN: How Trump and Musk’s spending cuts are hampering US government readiness amid the Iran war

Whoa If True

The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is investigating whether a then-DOGE employee took possession of two highly sensitive databases (and kept one on a thumb drive) and planned to use them at his new job with a federal contractor, the WaPo reports.

The allegations against the unnamed DOGE bro came from an anonymous whistleblower who has subsequently spoken to the WaPo, which also reviewed the whistleblower’s written complaint, which was filed with the inspector general in January :

According to the complaint, he allegedly told the whistleblower that he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company.]” The engineer told colleagues that once he had removed personal details from the data, he wanted to upload it into the company’s systems. He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.

Before the inspector general began investigating the claims, the Social Security Administration itself dismissed them as “false based on evidence and investigations by all involved.”

When GOP Senators Actually Try

Enough opposition emerged among Senate Republicans, led by Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), to sink the nomination of political commentator Jeremy Carl as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. Carl wrote a 2024 book titled “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart” and claimed that it is white people who have faced persistent discrimination and been “erased” from American history, Politico reports. Carl withdrew his candidacy while lamenting the lack of unanimous support from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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