This post follows up on the previous two posts about President Trump’s weak hand in trying to end his Iran War with something short of a humiliating climb-down from his demands for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender.” Trump’s claim yesterday of “very, very strong talks” with Tehran turn out, predictably, to be third-party talks aimed at coaxing Tehran into talking at all. As Reuters reports in this new (paywalled) story, Iran is actually dramatically upping its demands since the start of the war. Those include guarantees of no future attacks, reparations for war damage and formal control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Continue reading “Iran Has Trump Over a (Oil) Barrel. Sad.”Pam Bondi Finally Relents in US Attorney Fiasco
Judges Appoint Interim NJ US Attorney
After a monthslong saga in which the Trump DOJ put at risk dozens of criminal prosecutions with brazenly unlawful efforts to install an interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Attorney General Pam Bondi finally stood down.
After conferring with DOJ leadership, the local federal judges exercised their statutory authority to name Robert Frazer, a longtime career federal prosecutor in New Jersey, as the interim U.S. attorney.
Bondi had immediately fired the previous interim U.S. attorney named by the judges there, and had quickly fired similar judge-appointed prosecutors in the Northern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia. But this time, the two sides worked out an arrangement of some kind, though it wasn’t clear why Bondi finally capitulated.
U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, brought in from outside the district, had previously ruled that Trump’s original nominee for the permanent position, Alina Habba, was unlawfully serving as interim U.S. attorney and that Bondi’s naming of a “triumvirate” of three DOJ lawyers to jointly run the office was similarly unlawful. Brann had warned that Bondi’s shenanigans were putting federal criminal prosecutions across the state in jeopardy because criminal defendants were succeeding in challenging the legality of the actions by the leaderless U.S. Attorney’s Office.
In a notice to Brann of his appointment, Frazer said it “followed consultations between the District Court and the Department of Justice’s senior leadership.” Importantly, Frazer told Brann that the Justice Department “is prepared to seek superseding indictments” in cases where the unlawful leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s Office has called into question the legal viability of the prosecutions. A do-over, basically.
An absolutely blistering decision last week by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi in one of the jeopardized prosecutions — a child porn case — may have been the final straw that forced Bondi to relent. Among other things, Quraishi’s ruling ordered the trio of lawyers purporting to lead the office to appear in court in the coming weeks to defend the legality of arrangement.
“You have lost the confidence and the trust of this court,” Quraishi told a DOJ lawyer. “You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public.”
A week later, Bondi stopped the effort to bypass Senate confirmation and federal judges, and a legitimate U.S. attorney was appointed by the judges — at least in New Jersey. It’s not yet clear if this means Bondi is also relenting in other districts where interim U.S. attorneys have been contested.
SCOTUS Tackles Late-Arriving Ballots
- TPM’s Kate Riga: Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail
- Politico: Supreme Court worries Trump’s attack on late ballots could also threaten early voting
- Chris Geidner: The case “likely will come down to how Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett decide they would like to resolve the case.”
Voting Rights Watch
- Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, a Republican who is running for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots in a purported investigation of election fraud in the 2025 special election for Proposition 50, Democrats’ mid-decade redistricting vehicle.
- Republican Ben Ginsberg and Democrat Bob Bauer have launched the Bipartisan American Election Project to fight back against President Trump’s efforts to take election powers from the states and put them under federal control.
A (Exclusive) Play in Three Acts
The three-day evidentiary hearing that I covered in Baltimore over the Trump administration’s ongoing violations of a court-approved settlement agreement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum culminated yesterday with the Trump DOJ confirming to the judge that 91 additional instances of wrongful deportations had been discovered in recent days but not reported to opposing counsel or to the court.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ordered the administration to investigate the circumstances of the deportations, the timing of the discovery, who was involved, and why the government had not disclosed them immediately.
Here’s the series of three exclusives from the hearing, which was only covered by TPM:
- Thursday: Trump Admin Wrongfully Deported More Than 100 Asylum Seekers
- Friday: Judge Orders DOJ to Get Answers On Wrongful Deportations
- Monday: Trump Admin Confirms 91 Wrongful Deportations of Asylum Seeker
Big Deal
Over the weekend, the Trump-controlled Merit Service Protection Board, historically an independent agency that protects civil service workers from retaliations, embraced President Trump’s unfettered interpretation of his Article II powers to affirm the firing of executive branch immigration judges, Bloomberg reported:
The two-member MSPB panel reversed an administrative judge’s decision that reinstated the fired DOJ employees. The board determined it lacks jurisdiction to intervene in the attorney general’s constitutionally protected terminations.
The decision strips immigration judges of civil service protections, but is also provides the legal basis to approve of Trump’s mass terminations of civil service workers without cause or due process:
The MSPB, a quasi-judicial executive branch agency conducting initial review of federal employees’ wrongful termination claims, had paused other similar cases, waiting until the late Friday decision on the immigration judges to weigh in on whether Trump has such authority to override statutory removal protections.
The MSPB is down to two GOP members and one vacancy. Trump purported to fire the Democratic MSPB chair Cathy Harris last year, and she appealed her case to the Supreme Court last week.
Latest From the Middle East …
- WSJ: The back-channel diplomacy behind Trump’s U-turn on attacking Iran’s power plants
- Reuters: Trump approved joint attack on Iran after call from Netanyahu
- Maps: How the Iran Conflict Is Widening
Pentagon Continues to Harass Reporters
It sure looks like the Pentagon already had a plan in place to retaliate against journalists if its restrictive press policies lost in court. After a judge Friday blocked the press restrictions in a lawsuit brought by the NYT, the Pentagon announced on Monday a new set of restrictions that includes moving all reporters out of correspondents’ corridor to an annex on the grounds and requiring authorized escorts of journalists who wish to go inside the Pentagon.
The Corruption: SEC Edition
Strong reporting from Reuters on last week’s resignation of SEC Enforcement Division Director Margaret Ryan:
- She “clashed with agency leaders over the direction of its enforcement program, including the handling of cases with ties to President Donald Trump and his family”
- She “wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges for fraud and other misconduct including in cases that touched the president’s circle, but faced resistance from SEC chair Paul Atkins and other top Republican political appointees.”
- “One case that sparked tension involved cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a major backer of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial venture, and another involved Tesla boss Elon Musk …”
Ryan — a former Marine, military judge, and clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — had little experience in securities law, Reuters reports.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Are Republicans Trying to Hoodwink Trump on the SAVE Act?
Emine Yücel has a report up this morning on a new “deal” being kicked around the Senate that would attempt to fix the airport situation. This proposal would fund most of DHS — including the TSA — without funding ICE enforcement operations.
Republicans would then seek to fund those operations later this year, in a reconciliation bill, which, under Senate rules, can pass with only 51 votes. That means Republicans won’t need Democrats to get it through.
The deal is similar to how one might have predicted this would end for weeks. But it includes one weird, emerging point: Republicans might also try to pass the SAVE America Act through reconciliation.
Continue reading “Are Republicans Trying to Hoodwink Trump on the SAVE Act?”Senators Are Talking About a New Deal to Partially End the DHS Shutdown
The momentum to end the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown picked up Monday evening.
Continue reading “Senators Are Talking About a New Deal to Partially End the DHS Shutdown”Trump Takes the TSA Hostage in Gambit to Pass the SAVE Act
Trump Makes the Unexpected Choice to Fully Own Airport Chaos
Senate Democrats and the Trump White House have been exchanging proposals on ICE reforms for months without much progress. The negotiations have been ongoing since Democrats in February began to refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security without meaningful reforms to ICE and CBP officers’ practices and conduct. It’s this standoff that has contributed to chaos in airports as TSA staff miss paychecks, and its against this backdrop that Trump, seemingly inspired by a caller on a right-wing radio show, ordered ICE agents to deploy to back them up on Sunday.
As negotiations continue, over the past few weeks, Democrats in both chambers have repeatedly tried to get Republicans on board to a bill that would fund all other agencies under the DHS umbrella — including TSA, the Secret Service, FEMA and the Coast Guard. The bill would, notably, help to ameliorate the long lines at airports. Each time the effort was blocked by Republicans.
In recent days, negotiations have picked up and Senate Republicans were seemingly more open to funding all of DHS except ICE — basically, taking the Democrats’ deal. Republicans could then address ICE funding later in a party-line reconciliation bill, which only needs 50 votes in the Senate, not the 60 most other legislation requires.
But overnight, President Donald Trump blew that plan up. He is holding DHS funding hostage to address another of his priorities.
In an escalation of his pressure campaign on his own party’s senators to pass the SAVE Act — which the Senate is currently debating with little hope of actually passing it — Trump announced on social media that Republicans should not make a deal with Democrats to end the ongoing DHS-specific government shutdown until Democrats agree to pass the voting requirements legislation.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” Trump said in a Sunday night Truth Social post. “It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate…”
Of course, there is almost no chance that Democrats will support the SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill, in adequate numbers to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. Trump’s gambit has the effect of further increasing pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and other Republican senators to change filibuster rules to pass the SAVE Act — and, potentially, to fund DHS, too.
This all came about within hours of Trump offering his own solution to TSA agents not getting paid: ICE would help out! Photos and video Monday captured the immigration officers milling around in airports across the country.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) laid it all out in a social media post on Monday.
“After blocking it 7 times, Senate Republicans agree that we should fund TSA, FEMA and Coast Guard, and set ICE aside while we negotiate reforms,” Slotkin said. “President Trump is holding DHS funding hostage to protect ICE.”
— Emine Yücel
War, on Market Time
Some are starting to see a pattern that could not exemplify Trump II more: that the president is timing major announcements or moves in the war to coincide with the opening and closing of the stock market.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) argued this on Monday in a post on X, calling Trump’s claim that the U.S. is negotiating an end to the war “a panicky message to the markets: ‘No war escalation until markets close on Friday.’” Bloomberg reported on Monday that Trump had started negotiations with Iran partly out of a desire to calm the markets.
There’s a precedent for this: early COVID. This is ancient history by this point, but in March 2020, the stock market was in freefall. This was deeply concerning to Trump, who would hold press conferences on Friday afternoon in the hours before the market closed. At one point, he reportedly sent supporters a signed chart of the Dow Jones shooting upwards at around the time that he began a news conference in which he declared a national emergency over the pandemic.
With Iran, Trump threatened to bomb Iranian power plants on Saturday. No trading then. He posted that he would call off the strikes that he announced and that negotiations were going well on Monday morning, before markets opened.
It’s all showmanship, a more disturbing consequence of having a reality TV show star run the country. In COVID, as now, the reality ended up being far grimmer than whatever show the president could stage. Around 20 million jobs were lost in 2020; the stock market continued to plummet until the Fed stepped in. Iran is just starting.
— Josh Kovensky
Trump’s Notorious Hatred for Windmills Incurs a Price Tag
It’s in the billions, as the Interior Department negotiates settlements with wind farms that it ordered to halt construction. From the Washington Post, which reports that the operations were labeled a security threat by the DoD:
The Trump administration reached an agreement to pay $1 billion to French energy firm TotalEnergies to stop developing two offshore wind farms off the coast of New York and North Carolina, instead directing the investments to oil and gas projects.
[…]
The company’s two offshore wind projects — called Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay — were still in the planning stages, having yet to be fully permitted, and far from being built. Last year, the Interior Department had stopped all additional federal permits for renewable energy projects, leaving the vast majority of offshore wind projects dead in the water.
The department based the stop-work orders on national security concerns, flagged in a classified report by the Defense Department that has not been made public.
— John Light
In Case You Missed It
New from David Kurtz: EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin Confirms 91 Wrongful Deportations of Asylum Seekers
Today’s Supreme Court dispatch from Kate Riga: Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail
The Backchannel: Iran Is Setting the Pace; Trump Is Reacting.
TPM Cafe: I Homeschool My Kids, but I’m Repulsed by the Parental Rights Movement
More on the administration’s ramshackle affordability campaign from Layla A. Jones: Trump Says He’s Concerned About Housing Access. His Policies Are Making it Worse.
Photos: Airline Travelers Encounter Armed ICE Agents at Airports Across the Country
Morning Memo: Trump DOJ Keeps Charging First and Investigating Later
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Trump Slinks Away From His Promise of a Texas Senate Endorsement — Kate Riga, Emine Yücel and Khaya Himmelman
What We Are Reading
Democratic States Seek to Block Massive TV Station Merger — Dave Dayen, American Prospect
Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids — Jeff Ernsthausen, Mario Ariza, McKenzie Funk, Mica Rosenberg and Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica
The Rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Creep — Miles Klee, Wired
“Gooning Towards the Führer” as policy coordination: The Trumpist administrative style — Henry Farrell, Programmable Matter
PHOTOS: Airline Travelers Encounter Armed ICE Agents at Airports Across the Country
Airline travelers across the country were greeted with the sight of armed Department of Homeland Security and ICE agents on Monday. President Trump ordered the officers to be dispatched to at least 13 airports in what he claimed is an effort to ease long security lines caused by the ongoing shutdown of DHS.
What those agents are doing on the ground is less clear. Photos and videos from New York City’s JFK International and LaGuardia Airports, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson and Houston’s Bush Intercontinental — some of the facilities with the worst delays — showed armed, uniformed officers walking the halls, clustered in corners chatting, and standing watch over winding security lines.
Continue reading “PHOTOS: Airline Travelers Encounter Armed ICE Agents at Airports Across the Country”EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin Confirms 91 Wrongful Deportations of Asylum Seekers
BALTIMORE—In a stunning courtroom admission, a Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge Monday that the Trump administration has identified 91 cases where asylum seekers were deported despite a court-ordered class action settlement barring them from being removed before their asylum applications were adjudicated.
Continue reading “EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin Confirms 91 Wrongful Deportations of Asylum Seekers”Iran Is Setting the Pace; Trump Is Reacting.
Beyond the bluster and carnage let’s look at the current situation in the war between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. I wrote most of this post before the overnight news that Trump is essentially suing for peace. But all of it still applies. And it comes down to one remarkable dynamic.
Despite the U.S. dominating the skies and almost every other combat domain, Iran has seized and holds the initiative in the war itself, forcing the U.S. to react to it and, in Trump’s hands, do so erratically and helplessly. Iran has the strategic initiative, despite constant and incredibly damaging attacks by the United States and Israel. Indeed, getting Iran to stop its primary retaliatory measure — throttling the Strait of Hormuz — now appears to be the main U.S. war aim. In other words, the main goal of the U.S. now is to get Iran to cease its retaliation for the U.S. starting the war in the first place.
The U.S. was already trying to get Iran to the bargaining table, according to this report last night from Axios. The fact that the U.S. is, reportedly, considering how to “package” cash payments to Iran (i.e. release frozen assets) is a testament to just how far we are from “unconditional surrender.” Meanwhile, this morning’s news confirms that the U.S. is getting talks started, or at least hoping to do so. Of course the simplest way to get Iran to release the strait is to stop the war. But the U.S. can’t do that, at least not openly, since that would amount to a massive and humiliating defeat.
Continue reading “Iran Is Setting the Pace; Trump Is Reacting.”Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail
The right wing of the Supreme Court happily churned out far-fetched hypotheticals as rationale to end a voting practice so common that 30 states use it — including ruby red Mississippi, which was defending its version during Monday’s oral arguments.
Continue reading “Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail”Muslim State Senator Challenges GOP Colleague in Lt. Gov Race After Ridiculously Islamophobic Ad
This story was originally reported by Mariel Padilla of The 19th. Meet Mariel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Nabilah Parkes was inside the state Senate chamber in Georgia when she first saw the video. Her Republican colleague, state Sen. Greg Dolezal, had just released a 30-second ad, reportedly made using AI, as part of his campaign for lieutenant governor that depicted Muslims terrorizing white Georgia residents and ended with the message: “Keep Georgia sharia free.” Shariah is the body of Islamic religious law.
The caption for the campaign ad, posted on social media earlier this month, said: “London has fallen. Europe is under siege. In America, the invaders who would rather pillage our generosity than assimilate are roaming Minnesota, New York, and LA. As Lt. Governor, I will fight the enemy before they’re within the gates and keep Georgia safe and Sharia free.”
Parkes, a Democratic state senator at the time, said she immediately turned around, went over to Dolezal’s desk and asked him, “What is this?”
“He refused to look at me and just looked down as if he was in shame,” Parkes said. “It was such a hateful, racist, Islamophobic video that he even came to my desk the next day and said, ‘Feel free to take a shot at me’ — as if he wanted me to even the score.”
Parkes took the shot and decided to run against him. If she wins, she would be Georgia’s first Muslim lieutenant governor.
Continue reading “Muslim State Senator Challenges GOP Colleague in Lt. Gov Race After Ridiculously Islamophobic Ad”