For almost a decade now, we’ve watched as Trump plowed through guardrails intended to restrain a rogue executive, exploited one loophole after another, and managed to turn every legal ambiguity in his favor.
So it’s worth noting that one relatively small structural guardrail held firm and provided a check today on one of Trump’s worst abuses.
Continue reading “One Small Guardrail Finally Held Up Against Trump”A federal judge has ruled that former insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan was invalidly appointed as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and has dismissed the indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The dual rulings by U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie of South Carolina are the most significant judicial rebukes yet to the politically motivated prosecutions driven by the White House of political nemeses of President Donald Trump. Comey was indicted for allegedly lying to Congress, and James for alleged mortgage fraud, but both cases were widely seen by legal experts as flimsy and pretextual.
Continue reading “Comey and James Cases Dismissed Over Halligan’s Invalid Appointment”I mentioned earlier this month that we had this panel at our 25th anniversary event that I simply loved, an oral history of TPM. We published the audio of the panel as last week’s installment of the podcast. I have my own reasons for enjoying it, but I think you will too. In any case, one thing I was reminded of in listening to the discussion is that in recent years I’ve shifted toward analysis and away from my own reporting. Not as an absolute, of course. And in the spring I was reporting on a lot of stuff at once. But certainly over this year, I’ve written a lot of big-picture looks at what I think is happening in the country, what the Trump administration is trying to do, what people can and are doing to resist those efforts, what the big global story is. Listening to the panel discussion made me a bit hungry to do more of the thread-collecting and yanking of nitty gritty reporting, the grabbing on to a story and getting everything of out it, finding and introducing the key characters, finding the arc of their story.
Continue reading “Chaos, Confrontation and Consequences—Get Ready for Year Two”Incisive new reporting from Charlie Savage on the sprawling investigate the investigators charade going on in South Florida puts U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon back in the thick of things.
What’s emerged in the last few weeks is that Miami U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones is overseeing a criminal investigation that stretches all the way back to the 2016 election. He has reportedly issued subpoenas to investigators of the 2016 Trump-Russia connection, including former CIA Director John Brennan and FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page.
If Mike Davis — the shit-stirring conservative legal activist — is to be believed, the Ft. Pierce grand jury is being used to advance a grand theory that the Deep State conspired to deprive Donald Trump of his civil rights. Davis was more coy with the NYT. Cannon, of course, interfered with the criminal investigation of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case before he was indicted, then was randomly assigned his case and dismissed the indictment entirely, after slow-rolling the case for months.
The chance to use a grand jury under Cannon’s auspices to run an open-ended investigation pegged to the Mar-a-Lago search that sweeps up Trump grievances, paybacks, and scores to settle dating all he way back to the 2016 election has the potential to be the most dangerous and damaging of Trump’s many investigate the investigator retributions.
Former FBI Director James Comey on Friday filed a new motion to dismiss the indictment against him, rolling up all of the revelations over the course of last week about the unusual and perhaps fatally flawed handling of the grand jury by interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan.
In a statement to the WaPo on Friday, Costa Rica Security Minister Mario Zamora Cordero blew up the Trump administration’s deeply misleading representations to the judge in one of the Abrego Garcia cases.
Zamora Cordero said Costa Rica’s offer from August to accept Abrego Garcia and give him legal status still stands — which flies in the face of claims by the Trump administration that Costa Rica will no longer accept him. The Trump administration is insisting on deporting him to one of several African countries, most recently Liberia, to which he has no previous ties. As I wrote at length last week, the Trump administration has repeatedly defied court orders to provide a fact witness who can attest in court to its representations about Costa Rica.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers immediately notified the judge in his civil case of the new reporting from the WaPo, and his lawyers in his criminal case cited the report as additional evidence that his prosecution is vindictive, punishment for having exercised his legal rights to challenge his wrongful removal from the United States to El Salvador earlier this year.
FBI Director Kash Patel enlisted two SWAT-trained FBI agents in Atlanta to protect his aspiring country music singer girlfriend at the NRA’s annual convention last spring, the NYT reports.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that she will ask the state’s Supreme Court to revive the Trump 2020 fake electors case that was tossed out by the trial judge.
The Trump DOJ has renewed its previously rejected request for a federal judge in Florida to unseal the grand jury testimony related to Jeffrey Epstein and his confidante Ghislaine Maxwell. In the new motion filed late Friday, the Trump DOJ cited the recently passed law ‘ demanding that the department release its Epstein files as the basis for renewing its request to the court.
Meanwhile, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton faces a slew of complications, including a potential conflict of interest, in responding to the “baldly political directive” he received from Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate only Democrats’ connections to Epstein, Politico reports.
Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary administrative stay allowing Texas to continue using its new pro-GOP congressional district map while the Supreme Court considers whether to put a lower court ruling throwing out the map on hold while the state’s appeal proceeds.
The right-wing provocateurs Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl — convicted in Ohio and awaiting sentencing in Michigan for racist robocalls — were paid $960,000 by former nursing home magnate Joseph Schwartz for help seeking a presidential pardon. Schwartz, who was sentenced earlier this year to three years in prison for defrauding the government of $38 million, was pardoned by President Trump on Nov. 14, after serving only three months.
Schwartz is not the only client paying Burkman and Wohl for pardon help, as NOTUS has reported.
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This story is a few days old. But I only came across it yesterday. Meet Austin Smith. He’s a former state legislator in Arizona, member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus. Or former member. He was also strategic director of Turning Points Action, Turning Points’ political arm. (Yes, what other arm would their be?) He was also a hardcore “vote fraud” hustler. And now rather predictably he’s pled guilty to attempted election fraud. Yes, surprise, surprise. In fact, he’s from Surprise, Arizona. No really. You can read the story here.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license
Everyone has looked up at the clouds and seen faces, animals, objects. Human brains are hardwired for this kind of whimsy. But some people – perhaps a surprising number – look to the sky and see government plots and wicked deeds written there. Conspiracy theorists say that contrails – long streaks of condensation left by aircraft – are actually chemtrails, clouds of chemical or biological agents dumped on the unsuspecting public for nefarious purposes. Different motives are ascribed, from weather control to mass poisoning.
The chemtrails theory has circulated since 1996, when conspiracy theorists misinterpreted a U.S. Air Force research paper about weather modification, a valid topic of research. Social media and conservative news outlets have since magnified the conspiracy theory. One recent study notes that X, formerly Twitter, is a particularly active node of this “broad online community of conspiracy.”
I’m a communications researcher who studies conspiracy theories. The thoroughly debunked chemtrails theory provides a textbook example of how conspiracy theories work.
Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, whose podcast averages over a million viewers per episode, recently interviewed Dane Wigington, a longtime opponent of what he calls “geoengineering.” While the interview has been extensively discredited and mocked in other media coverage, it is only one example of the spike in chemtrail belief.
Although chemtrail belief spans the political spectrum, it is particularly evident in Republican circles. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has professed his support for the theory. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has written legislation to ban chemical weather control, and many state legislatures have done the same.
Online influencers with millions of followers have promoted what was once a fringe theory to a large audience. It finds a ready audience among climate change deniers and anti-deep state agitators who fear government mind control.
Although research on weather modification is real, the overwhelming majority of qualified experts deny that the chemtrail theory has any solid basis in fact. For example, geoengineering researcher David Keith’s lab posted a blunt statement on its website. A wealth of other resources exist online, and many of their conclusions are posted at contrailscience.com.
But even without a deep dive into the science, the chemtrail theory has glaring logical problems. Two of them are falsifiability and parsimony. https://www.youtube.com/embed/-X8Xfl0JdTQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 The philosopher Karl Popper explains that unless your conjecture can be proved false, it lies outside the realm of science.
According to psychologist Rob Brotherton, conspiracy theories have a classic “heads I win, tails you lose” structure. Conspiracy theorists say that chemtrails are part of a nefarious government plot, but its existence has been covered up by the same villains. If there was any evidence that weather modification was actually happening, that would support the theory, but any evidence denying chemtrails also supports the theory – specifically, the part that alleges a cover-up.
People who subscribe to the conspiracy theory consider anyone who confirms it to be a brave whistleblower and anyone who denies it to be foolish, evil or paid off. Therefore, no amount of information could even hypothetically disprove it for true believers. This denial makes the theory nonfalsifiable, meaning it’s impossible to disprove. By contrast, good theories are not false, but they must also be constructed in such a way that if they were false, evidence could show that.
Nonfalsifiable theories are inherently suspect because they exist in a closed loop of self-confirmation. In practice, theories are not usually declared “false” based on a single test but are taken more or less seriously based on the preponderance of good evidence and scientific consensus. This approach is important because conspiracy theories and disinformation often claim to falsify mainstream theories, or at least exploit a poor understanding of what certainty means in scientific methods.
Like most conspiracy theories, the chemtrail story tends not to meet the criteria of parsimony, also known as Occam’s razor, which suggests that the more suppositions a theory requires to be true, the less likely it actually is. While not perfect, this concept can be an important way to think about probability when it comes to conspiracy theories. Is it more likely that the government is covering up a massive weather program, mind-control program or both that involve thousands or millions of silent, complicit agents, from the local weather reporter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or that we’re seeing ice crystals from plane engines?
Of course, calling something a “conspiracy theory” does not automatically invalidate it. After all, real conspiracies do exist. But it’s important to remember scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan’s adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In the case of chemtrails, the evidence just isn’t there. https://www.youtube.com/embed/h9xtpqXzyfA?wmode=transparent&start=0 Scientists explain how humans are susceptible to believing conspiracy theories.
If the evidence against it is so powerful and the logic is so weak, why do people believe the chemtrail conspiracy theory? As I have argued in my new book, “Post-Weird: Fragmentation, Community, and the Decline of the Mainstream,” conspiracy theorists create bonds with each other through shared practices of interpreting the world, seeing every detail and scrap of evidence as unshakable signs of a larger, hidden meaning.
Uncertainty, ambiguity and chaos can be overwhelming. Conspiracy theories are symptoms, ad hoc attempts to deal with the anxiety caused by feelings of powerlessness in a chaotic and complicated world where awful things like tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires can happen seemingly at random for reasons that even well-informed people struggle to understand. When people feel overwhelmed and helpless, they create fantasies that give an illusion of mastery and control.
Although there are liberal chemtrail believers, aversion to uncertainty might explain why the theory has become so popular with Carlson’s audience: Researchers have long argued that authoritarian, right-wing beliefs have a similar underlying structure.
On some level, chemtrail theorists would rather be targets of an evil conspiracy than face the limits of their knowledge and power, even though conspiracy beliefs are not completely satisfying. Sigmund Freud described a fort-da (“gone-here”) game played by his grandson where he threw away a toy and dragged it back on a string, something Freud interpreted as a simulation of control when the child had none. Conspiracy theories may serve a similar purpose, allowing their believers to feel that the world isn’t really random and that they, the ones who see through the charade, really have some control over it. The grander the conspiracy, the more brilliant and heroic the conspiracy theorists must be.
Conspiracies are dramatic and exciting, with clear lines of good and evil, whereas real life is boring and sometimes scary. The chemtrail theory is ultimately prideful. It’s a way for theorists to feel powerful and smart when they face things beyond their comprehension and control. Conspiracy theories come and go, but responding to them in the long term means finding better ways to embrace uncertainty, ambiguity and our own limits alongside a new embrace of the tools we do have: logic, evidence and even humility.
The DOJ is trying to stack the immigration court system with new hires that it’s calling “deportation judges,” a branding exercise revealed in a recruitment ad and website that the Department posted on Thursday.
Continue reading “Let’s Go Branding”So Trump didn’t rendition Mamdani. They appear to be huge friends now. What gives?
Here’s my take since I’ve got this question again and again in the last hour.
Continue reading “What to Make of That Mamdani-Trump Meeting?”Just before I began writing this post, I saw this article from The Washington Post about the rise of billionaires in American politics. Given Bezos’s ownership and the recent shift in its editorial policies I’m mildly surprised they published it. The key points aren’t terribly surprising. But it brings them together in one place — the vast growth in billionaire giving over the first quarter of this century, the rapid trend from a relatively even partisan split to overwhelming giving to Republicans. It is among other things the story of billionaires becoming increasingly class conscious. It’s always been true that money buys influence in American politics. In some ways, it was even greater and more brazen in the past since there wasn’t even the pretense of limits on giving or disclosure.
But the role of billionaire ownership of the political process has not only grown rapidly in recent years. Public recognition of that fact has, too, which has — perhaps paradoxically or perhaps not — spurred the drive for even tighter ownership. It’s no exaggeration to say that the deca-billionaire or even centi-billionaire class — setting aside those who might command a mere few billion dollars — act now as a kind of post-modern nobility, a class which does not rule exclusively but interacts with politics in a fundamentally different way from the rest of society.
Continue reading “The Brittle Grip of Ultra-Wealth”U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher just unsealed this morning her Nov. 14 opinion in the case of “Cristian,” the 20-year-old Venezuelan man wrongfully deported under the Alien Enemies Act in violation of an existing court-approved settlement agreement.
As in the Abrego Garcia case, Gallagher had ordered the Trump administration in April to “facilitate” Cristian’s return to the United States from El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. The government stonewalled for months, filing frequently delinquent status reports that provided little information and no real assurance that it was making a good faith effort to comply with her order.
After Cristian and the other CECOT prisoners were repatriated to Venezuela — the country from which he was seeking asylum in the United States — his lawyers lost contact with him. That means one of two things, Gallagher wrote in her newly unsealed opinion (emphasis mine):
It is possible, at this point, that Cristian has decided to forego a return to the United States and has voluntarily absented himself from contact with his counsel. It is equally possible that Cristian has been the victim of the anticipated violence that caused him to seek asylum in the United States in the first instance.
In perhaps the harshest language of her opinion, Gallagher wrote that “it is clear that [the Trump administration] knowingly played a role in Cristian’s landing in the country from which he had sought asylum.”
If the prospect of an asylum-seeker being cast back to the wolves wasn’t jarring enough, Gallagher’s opinion today declined to find the Trump administration in contempt of court for its conduct in the case.
While Gallagher didn’t dispute the government’s lack of good faith or its desultory efforts to abide by the terms of her orders, she ultimately concluded that criminal contempt was overkill: “While this Court shares Class Counsel’s frustration with what appears to be lack of good faith government efforts at compliance with this Court’s order, it cannot find, on the particular facts of this case, the factors needed to find probable cause for criminal contempt.”
Gallagher found the late and paltry status reports from the government to be too ticky tacky a violation of her order to warrant criminal contempt, and she attributed the lack of good faith efforts in seeking Cristian’s return not the DHS but to the State Department, which was not a defendant in the case and therefore beyond her reach for a contempt finding:
Of course, in other times, one might assume that a federal agency not specifically named in a case would still use its best efforts to effectuate its sister agencies’ compliance with a valid order from a federal court. This Court certainly hoped, in entering the April 23 Order, that events would unfold in that manner and that the federal government as a whole would undertake compliance efforts. Its hopes were dashed.
It was cold comfort that Gallagher left intact her order that the Trump administration must facilitate Cristian’s return to the United States … if he ever resurfaces.
The Trump administration spent another day in court stonewalling U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland, defying her explicit order to put on a government witness who could testify with direct knowledge of its efforts to deport the much-abused Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a third country. I was at the courthouse and wrote a full report on that aspect of the hearing.
Separately, on the merits of the case, the Trump administration seems increasingly hobbled by its inability to produce any evidence that a final order of removal was ever issued for Abrego Garcia. Xinis has all but concluded that a final order of removal simply never existed, and her pending decision may well turn on that omission, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports.
The bitter irony is that the absence of a final order of removal means Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation to El Salvador in March was doubly unlawful. We already knew that it was in violation of an immigration judge order that he not be removed to El Salvador specifically, but it now appears likely there was no legal basis to remove him anywhere at all.
One day after prosecutor repeatedly told a federal judge in open court that the grand jury in the political prosecution of James Comey had not reviewed the final two-count indictment in the case, U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan reversed course in a new filing that insisted the grand jury had in fact signed off on the indictment.
Citing the transcript of the presentment proceeding in court, Halligan used almost comical passive voice and misdirection in the filing — titled “Government’s Notice Correcting The Record” — to execute her double reverse somersault, without ever owning the statements from prosecutors in court.
I’m sure Morning Memo will be coming back to the question of whether Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is criminally investigating U.S. Pardon Attorney/Weaponization Working Group czar/Special Attorney Ed Martin, but for now here are the best of the many, many reports that emerged yesterday on this very curious new wrinkle:
Don Moynihan: How the FBI Became the Face of Deprofessionalization
In the flurry of unusual prosecutions in DC during Trump’s initial surge of federal law enforcement and the national guard into the District, one case stood out. After a federal grand jury refused to indict Kevontae Stewart on a weapons charge, the Trump DOJ took the case to a D.C. Superior Court grand jury, secured an indictment, and then brought that indictment back to federal court. The federal magistrate judge balked at the unusual maneuver and ultimately refused to accept the indictment.
The Trump DOJ then asked U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to overturn the magistrate’s decision, and yesterday Boasberg sided with the government. In an opinion that was solicitous of the magistrate and conceded it was a close call, Boasberg concluded that the government had the better argument for which statutory scheme applied, favoring the D.C. Code over the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
The Coast Guard swiftly reversed course and reclassified the swastika and the noose as prohibited hate symbols, after a WaPo report that it had downgraded them to just “potentially divisive” symbols.
When Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) filed a complaint with Capitol Police about President Trump issuing death threats against Democratic members of Congress, she had to complete a form that included a field for identifying who made the threat. Houlahan simply filled in “The President,” she told Greg Sargent.
On George Washington, President Trump, and his calls for Democratic members of Congress to be put to death:
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