Not Buying it for One Hot Second

For the first time, the Trump administration has provided a federal judge with a list of lawyers and officials it claims were involved in defying an emergency court order that blocked deportations under the Alien Enemies Act while they were underway in mid-March.

The new filing in the original Alien Enemies Act case in Washington, D.C., came as U.S. District Judge James Boasberg resumes a criminal contempt of court inquiry to determine who was responsible for violating his order. When Boasberg ordered the deportations halted and the planes turned around, more than 100 Venezuelan men were en route to El Salvador, where they would remain imprisoned at the notorious CECOT facility for months before being repatriated to Venezuela.

In providing the names of the officials from the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, the administration is making its first real representations about who was involved and who was ultimately responsible for proceeding despite Boasberg’s order. But given how frequently its representations to the court in this case in particular have been misleading, incomplete, or downright false, it’s worth taking its initial cast of characters with a grain of salt.

Specifically, the administration places ultimate responsibility for the decision to deplane the Venezuelan men in El Salvador on DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Perhaps. But making Noem the final decision-maker also serves to shield the Trump White House from scrutiny for its involvement in one of the most serious second-term clashes between the executive and judicial branches. No White House officials are listed in the administration’s new filing.

Nothing about the conduct of the Trump II White House would suggest that Noem was running the Alien Enemies Act operation herself, let alone out there freelancing on her own. As TPM has reported, the Alien Enemies Act operation had been underway for months before President Trump secretly signed the AEA proclamation, all with the clear intent of bypassing judicial scrutiny until the deportations were a fait accompli.

“We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,” a senior administration official told Axios on March 16, in a report that said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “orchestrated” the process in the West Wing in tandem with Noem. 

The AEA deportations were one of the White House’s first major moves in its mass deportation scheme, the signature initiative of President Trump’s second term. But we’re supposed to believe that the buck stopped with … Kristi Noem.

The Administration Witness List

Here’s the full list of potential witnesses mentioned in the administration’s filing in the contempt of court inquiry:

• Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign
• Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche
• Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove
• DHS Acting General Counsel Joseph Mazzara
• Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem

The ACLU Witness List: Emil Bove et al

Morning Memo mused last week whether now-Judge Emil Bove of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals would be called to testify in the contempt of court inquiry. Bove appears on both the administration’s and the ACLU’s potential witness list.

The ACLU’s full list, which it says came entirely from the whistleblower disclosure of fired DOJer Erez Reuveni:

• Former Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Immigration Litigation Erez Reuveni
• Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign
• Former Acting Director of Office of Immigration Litigation August Flentje
• Counselor to the Deputy Attorney General James McHenry
• Associate Deputy Attorney General Paul Perkins
• Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security James Percival
• Acting General Counsel for the Department of Homeland Security Joseph Mazzara
• Former Acting Assistant Attorney General (now Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney
  General) Yaakov Roth
• Former Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove

Venezuela Watch

• NYT: Satellite Data Reveals How the U.S. Navy Is Deployed Near Venezuela
• The Guardian: US justice department memo about boat strikes diverges from Trump narrative
• NYT: What the Pentagon’s Attack Videos Reveal About the Boat Strikes at Sea

The Retribution: Lawful Orders Edition

The new retribution campaign against congressional Democrats is inextricably intertwined with President Trump’s saber-rattling toward Venezuela, and in particular his lawless campaign of lethal strikes on the high seas. It was in part because of the attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats that Democrats with military and intelligence backgrounds reminded service members that they’re not obligated to follow illegal orders.

In a reaction that bears all the hallmarks of a performative lashing-out by deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, the administration has lobbed baseless charges of sedition against the Democratic lawmakers, with President Trump accusing them of being traitors who should executed.

The Pentagon targeted Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a former Navy captain, with threats of returning him to active duty to court-martial him. The White House is now also abusively using the FBI by dispatching it to interview the Democratic members involved in the video. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division “appeared to open an inquiry into me.”

The FBI has reportedly approached Capitol Police about interviewing the lawmakers, who enjoy not just the Constitution’s First Amendment protections but also the shelter of the Speech or Debate Clause.

Like the Russians Didn’t Already Know How to Play Trump

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff coached Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy aide on how to use flattery to sell Russia’s “peace” plan to President Trump, according to a recording of their Oct. 14 call that was obtained by Bloomberg.

Swalwell Goes on the Offensive

Rather than waiting around to see if he’ll be a target of one of President Trump’s vindictive prosecutions, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., against Bill Pulte, the renegade head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, for allegedly rifling through Swalwell’s personal mortgage records.x

Swalwell is one of several prominent Democrats whom Pulte has referred for criminal charges based on specious claims of mortgage fraud that he’s ginned up using his position at FHFA. Pulte is also the chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which along with FHFA, are also named as defendants in the lawsuit.

In the lawsuit, Swalwell alleges that the defendants violated the Privacy Act and illegally retaliated against him for exercising his rights under the First Amendment.

Indiana Redistricting Is Back On

In a sharp reversal, Indiana GOP lawmakers will now reconvene in December to consider the mid-decade redistricting being pushed by President Trump.

The Destruction: Fox in Henhouse Edition

Former Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-LA) — who as Louisiana’s surgeon general halted the state’s mass vaccination campaigns — has been quietly installed as the No. 2 official at the CDC.

The Corruption: Belated Revelation Edition

After dragging his feet for a year, President Trump finally fulfilled his promise to release the names (but not the amounts) of the 46 individual donors to his presidential transition. Trump eschewed federal transition funding because of the ethical requirements attached, but pledged to reveal the donors to his privately funded transition. Now he has.

It Was an Age of Excess

Trump is reportedly in disagreement with his architect over how big, garish, and obtrusive his new White House ballroom should be, “reflecting a conflict between architectural norms and Trump’s grandiose aesthetic,” the WaPo reports.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is the first Thanksgiving since the death of my old friend Paul Johnson, whose widely published recipe for turkey gumbo I’ll be using Friday. My son, Paul’s nephew, sent me this text last month that turned into a reflection on cooking, repetition, and memory:

I have a wooden spoon of Pableaux’s, and he lives in the asymmetric wear in the spoon’s bowl from him stirring right-handed. The left side of the neck of the spoon is splintered from being knocked against the edge of the pot to keep it from dripping onto the counter. I have 3  9” cast iron pans in my kitchen (one from each parent and one from Pableaux). The one I got from you, dad, is the same exact model as the one I inherited from Pableaux. When I helped Pableaux cook for his Red Beans Roadshow in 2016(17?), he showed me how he cooks his cornbread most of the way before taking the skillet out of the oven, flipping the whole loaf like a pancake, and catching it back in the skillet before topping it with butter and putting it back in the oven to finish cooking. The butter would pour out of the pan when the bread was turned out and dribble down its side, and after what I can only imagine was hundreds of iterations, a thick, bubbly crust of carbonized butter has built up on the left side of the pan, 90 degrees from the handle, right where a right-handed cook would let it dribble out. These are the places where I find Pableaux.

May you add another crusty layer to your own well-worn Thanksgiving traditions.

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No Dignity Left Behind

Pam Bondi long ago gave up her dignity, so having her corrupt prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James blow up is not a humiliation in the normal sense of the word. But as a lickspittle attorney general whose career is dependent on currying favor with President Trump, yesterday was a personal and professional disaster.

Bondi’s scheme to install Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and rush to indict Comey before the statute of limitations expired was thoroughly rejected by a federal judge. Comey’s indictment was dismissed along with James’. But it was quite a bit worse than that.

Bondi had overextended herself throughout the fight over Halligan’s appointment, taking unusual and embarrassing steps to try to paper over the flaws in her scheme. There was the first attempt to retroactively ratify Halligan’s acts as U.S. attorney and, bizarrely, to appoint Halligan to a second position, also retroactively, just in case the initial scheme failed.

That was followed by a public dressing-down when the judge questioned how Bondi could have ratified the Comey indictment since the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings were incomplete. That forced Bondi to rush out a second purported ratification, admitting that she had only seen a partial transcript but had since reviewed the fuller record.

Bondi’s maneuvering only reinforced how ham-handed and inept her scheming on Trump’s behalf had been. In the end, the judge rejected all of it: Bondi’s appointment of Halligan as interim U.S. attorney, her subsequent after-the-fact appointment of Halligan as a special attorney, her first ratification, and her second one.

Judged by the perverse standards of the Trump White House, Bondi utterly failed. Appeals will follow and corrupt re-indictments may come, but for this day Bondi was the Trump’s incompetent henchman who left a string of messes behind for others to clean up.

A Missed Chance for a Perfect Test Case

The dismissal of the Comey indictment, while the right call on the law and the facts, does deprive us of as strong a vindictive prosecution claim as we’re likely to see. Comey’s legal team had structured its arguments to be the seminal test case for whether Donald Trump could freely use the Justice Department to exact retribution against his foes, with serious implications for the other vindictive prosecutions, both those pending and those still to come.

The Halligan appointment was part and parcel of that vindictive prosecution — a former Trump personal lawyer turned White House aide with no experience as a prosecutor rushed into place after her predecessor was ousted for refusing to do Trump’s dirty work — so you can’t easily separate it from the rest of Comey’s vindictive prosecution claim.

But to the extent the courts are going to have to grapple with new standards or benchmarks for vindictive prosecutions in the Trump era, the Comey case was as good as they get. Someone else will have to set that standard now, with perhaps fewer advantageous facts and without as stellar a legal team as Comey had.

Not a Fair Fight in Some Ways

Watching Comey’s legal team spar in court with B-team DOJ lawyers over the past two weeks was another reminder of how much damage Bondi has done to the Justice Department. Halligan was too inexperienced to fight this fight, so outside DOJ lawyers were brought in. They were no match for the Comey team.

While Comey is most often identified as a former FBI director, for the purposes of this case it was always more striking to me that he was a former deputy attorney general, the No. 2, who ran the department day to day. Being targeted by the department he once ran operationally, while also witnessing the erosion of its professionalism and traditions, made for an especially poignant tableau.

Comey was defended by longtime Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and Michael Dreeben, the former deputy solicitor general who was a legendary Supreme Court advocate and criminal law expert, plus several other highly capable litigators. The quality of his defense showed in every aspect of the case, especially when contrasted with what Bondi failed to bring to the table.

What Was at Stake in the Halligan Fight

In bypassing local judges to install Halligan, the Trump administration was seeking to rob both the judicial and legislative branches of some of their prerogatives.

The Retribution: Ed Martin Edition

Last week, I wasn’t sure what to make of the reports that the Trump DOJ seemed to be looking into how the bogus mortgage fraud claims against Letitia James and Adam Schiff emerged. It seemed hard to believe that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was overseeing an investigation into DOJ official Ed Martin and Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

It’s still not clear what exactly is going on, but the scenario that makes the most sense and best lines up with the reporting so far is that prosecutors and investigators are trying to get a handle on the origin story of the mortgage fraud nonsense now instead of finding themselves surprised later.

It all blew out into the open on Thursday when a potential witness named Christine Bish went public about being questioned by prosecutors that morning at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland (where an important hearing in the Abrego Garcia civil case happened to be underway). She was generally disgruntled that their questioning of her was not focused on Schiff’s conduct.

Since then reports have understandably been focused on the weird tactics Martin and Pulte used, including the possible use of intermediaries, to gin up the mortgage fraud claims. But the Trump DOJ has circled the wagons and it’s looking less likely now that Martin and Pulte are the targets of any investigation: “Martin and Pulte are not being investigated by a grand jury, according to a person familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly,” the WaPo reports.

Quote of the Day

“We’ve never dealt with this. This is really chilling.”–former Army JAG Geoffrey Corn, on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s unprecedented investigation into Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for exercising his First Amendment rights as a retired Navy captain

Trump Has Sidelined CISA for 2026

At the end of his first term, President Trump fired Christopher Krebs as head of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for publicly saying that the 2020 election was free from fraud. In his second term, Trump revoked Krebs’ security clearance and has gutted CISA, whose duties included protecting election infrastructure. The agency was mostly sidelined in this year’s elections, leaving election officials scrambling to fill the gaps going into next year’s midterms.

Real-Time Analysis

Greg Sargent and I had a quick conversation about all of the breaking news yesterday afternoon — from the Comey/James dismissals to Hegseth’s retaliation against Kelly:

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