On Thursday, a group of Michigan Republican lawmakers sent a letter to U.S. Attorney Pam Bondi asking the Department of Justice to deploy federal election monitors to oversee Michigan’s primary and general elections next year. The reason for the request, as outlined in the letter, centers on a supposed conflict of interest around Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who is also running for governor in 2026.
Continue reading “Michigan Republicans Demand DOJ Send Federal Election Monitors for 2026”Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts
This story first appeared at ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”
Continue reading “Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts”Nevada Supreme Court Revives Fake Electors Case
Not Dead Yet
A unanimous Nevada Supreme Court reinstated criminal charges against six people who were allegedly involved in President Trump’s 2020 fake electors scheme. The case had previously been dismissed on grounds that it had been filed in the wrong county.
The six defendants — which include state GOP chairman Michael McDonald, vice chair Jim Hindle and the Republican National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid — were all quietly given preemptive pardons by President Trump a week ago. None of them have been charged federally.
Decision On Halligan by Thanksgiving
I was in court yesterday for the joint hearing in the James Comey and Letitia James cases over the challange to Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney. U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie gave no indication that she thinks Halligan was lawfully appointed, but she didn’t tip off what remedy she is leaning toward. You can read my full report here.
Trump DOJ Struggles To Defend Maureen Comey Lawsuit
After Maureen Comey, the respected federal prosecutor who was fired for being the daughter of Trump nemesis James Comey, sued for wrongful termination, the Justice Department struggled to find lawyers to defend the case.
Maureen Comey’s home office — the Southern District of New York — recused itself, and several other DOJ components declined to defend the lawsuit.
After the NYT first reported the internal dynamics yesterday, the Justice Department notified the judge in the case that “the Acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York agreed to accept reassignment of this matter.” That would be John Sarcone III, one of the toadier Trump interim U.S. attorneys, who was already rejected by the judges of the district but who serves on indefinitely with a new title.
The Retribution: Eric Swalwell Edition
Bill Pulte is at it again.
The director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency has made a criminal referral of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) on bogus mortgage fraud allegations.
Swalwell figured prominently in both of Trump’s impeachments, making him a prime target for the president’s campaign of retribution. Swalwell joins New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Federal Reserve Board Gov. Lisa Cook, becoming the fourth Democrat to face a criminal referral from the eager-to-please Pulte.
In a major coverup, internal government watchdogs were fired en masse in recent weeks after looking into whether Pulte had improperly accessed the personal mortgage records of prominent Democrats.
Swalwell has long expected to face a vengeance-driven prosecution from the Trump DOJ.
More Trouble in Pulte World
Senior Fannie Mae officials were ousted after sounding the alarm that a confidant of Bill Pulte provided confidential mortgage pricing data from Fannie Mae to a principal competitor, the AP reports.
FBI Agent of Chaos
Garrett Graff on “the slow public unraveling of Kash Patel’s tenure director as FBI director”:
There was literally nothing in Kash Patel’s background to indicate he was going to be a good FBI director. He was a grifting conspiracist with no meaningful executive management or leadership background, who knew little about the bureau or its traditions, and had never served a day in the military or worked as an FBI agent nor as an intelligence or law enforcement officer. Unlike every modern FBI director before him, he’d never served in a Senate-confirmed role before.
Trump’s First Nominee For Attorney General
NYT: “For all the public furor over [Matt] Gaetz — who always asserted that he broke no laws even as the House Ethics Committee found that he violated Florida’s statutory rape laws — little attention has been given to the story of the girl, how she came to be exploited and how she has coped with what happened to her and the ensuing political scandal.”
Trump DOJ Moves To Block CA Redistricting
The Trump DOJ is seeking to intervene in an existing lawsuit challenging California’s new congressional districts map and block its use in the midterms. In a bitter historical irony, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division — with a storied history of protecting minority voters from discrimination — is claiming that the California map is an “unlawful racial gerrymandering” because it favors Latino voters.
While it doesn’t explicitly say it’s fighting discrimination against white voters, the Trump DOJ argues that the new map “was adopted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color in violation of Section 2 of the VRA.” Using Section 2 to stymie minority representation turns the Voting Rights Act on its head.
Venezuela Watch
- The 20th unlawful U.S. strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats on the high seas killed 4 people in the Caribbean.
- The secret OLC memo from the Trump DOJ blessing the unlawful air strikes that have killed 80 people is based in part on a slew of false premises from the White House about cartels being terrorist organizations engaged in an armed conflict with the United States, the NYT reports.
- The family of a Colombian fisherman killed in September in a U.S. strike in the Caribbean wants justice.
Only the Best People
Racist comments in a group chat sank the nomination of White House staffer Paul Ingrassia, 30, to lead the Office of Special Counsel, but he’s now failing upward to become deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration.
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Digital Media’s Union Wave Helped Shape a Generation’s Thinking About Unions
When Maya Schenwar and her colleagues at Truthout began to talk about unionizing, the global economy had just imploded. It was 2008, and most people still thought of digital news outlets — particularly progressive or left-leaning ones like Truthout — as “blogs.”
“At the time, a lot of people saw online writing as something that you did for free,” Schenwar told me in July 2025. Unionizing allowed them to change that narrative, to insist in public that what they did was work, “not just someone’s LiveJournal.”
Legacy media, like the New York Times, had unions, and to most journalists, those were the dream jobs. But as the global economic crisis spread, the Truthout staff — around 20 people at the time — began to talk about their own precarity as well as the precarity they were covering, and to discuss what it might mean to make their own jobs into good jobs, jobs worth hanging on to.
They signed that first union contract in 2010, the first all-digital news site to unionize. Their union drive had contained a lot of “firsts.” They had to figure out how to build trust virtually — they all worked from home and Truthout had no central office — and even had the country’s first virtual card check to verify employees’ signed union cards. In doing so, they laid out a path that workers at dozens of media outlets have followed. Transforming their own working conditions helped change the reputation and power of digital publications, and to shape a generation’s thinking about labor unions.
Continue reading “Digital Media’s Union Wave Helped Shape a Generation’s Thinking About Unions”The Trump White House Is Trying to Hide Its Judicial Nominees From You
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Over the last seven weeks, Senate Republicans have picked up the pace in confirming judges whose unifying characteristic is their desperation to demonstrate their loyalty to President Donald Trump above all else. What’s worse, the Senate is processing them with less public scrutiny than usual and little resistance, even by Senate Democrat standards. And with a new vacancy on the Eighth Circuit, Trump has yet another chance to reinforce Republican dominance on the nation’s most lopsided appeals court.
Continue reading “The Trump White House Is Trying to Hide Its Judicial Nominees From You”It’s a Big Club, And You Ain’t In It
Risking So Much, Just to Save the Filibuster
Two of the eight centrist Democratic senators who helped end the shutdown this week have now said that keeping the filibuster played a decisive role in their decision.
Sen. Angus King (I-ME), who caucuses with the Democrats, told the Portland Press-Herald that it was Trump touting his newfound enthusiasm for nuking the filibuster after the Democratic sweep in elections last week which pushed him over.
“Don’t forget that Donald Trump’s position on this wasn’t to negotiate, but to end it — entirely on their terms — by pressuring the Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster, thus eliminating Democratic leverage on this — or anything else — altogether. And I know that this was not an idle threat or negotiating ploy; he meant it and a growing number in the Republican caucus agreed,” King said. “No filibuster and we’d be facing a nationwide abortion ban, voter suppression laws and, quite possibly, the elimination of the Affordable Care Act itself with no tool to stop it.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) made a similar remark in an op-ed published this week in the New York Times.
“More likely, the chaos of continuing the shutdown would have led them to eliminate the Senate filibuster so they could pass a government funding bill with no Democratic votes, a dangerous consolidation of one-party rule,” Kaine wrote.
It’s an argument that avoids the broader picture: They gave up a fight that, per polling and this month’s election, they seemed to be winning. In exchange, they protected a procedural tool that would likely hobble future Democratic administrations’ agendas.
This all feeds into a broader question about democracy.
Democrats spent the final weeks of the 2024 election framing it as a contest over the core of our political system. After the first Trump term, January 6, the GOP’s radicalization against democracy and the principle of equality with the other side, that’s understandable. It’s true that abolishing the filibuster would clear the path for the Republican base to badger their senators into, willingly or not, passing the kinds of laws that King mentioned. But, as experts and online pedants alike will remind you, elections have consequences.
When you consider the kind of agenda that a future, pro-democracy and anti-corruption administration might have in mind, it’s very hard to imagine that passing with the current filibuster in place. Even more broadly than that, Democrats spent their growing leverage from the shutdown not on a present-day policy win, but on preserving a perpetual obstacle to the country governing itself.
— Josh Kovensky
Epstein, Epstein, Epstein
Relatedly but far more pruriently, thousands of files from Jeffery Epstein’s email account were released this week. You’ve already seen the headlines. But the way it happened was a funny instance of escalation: House Democrats released a small tranche of emails in which Epstein discussed Trump, including with influential Democratic Party-associated confidantes Kathy Ruemmler and Larry Summers.
House Republicans followed that up by dropping a batch of more than 20,000 emails into the public domain. There’s enough here to tarnish-by-association the reputations of figures across the American elite. Steve Bannon is there, as are Alan Dershowitz and Michael Woff.
But Ruemmler and Summers are particularly interesting, albeit for different reasons.
Ruemmler was President Obama’s White House counsel from 2011 to 2014. She was a candidate for attorney general after Eric Holder, and rose to that level of prestige along with a cadre of federal prosecutors who, under the Bush administration, staffed the Enron Task Force. That group gave rise to several extremely luminous legal careers: Andrew Weissmann, a Mueller investigation prosecutor, worked on the case, as did at least two DOJ criminal division chiefs.
All this is to contrast that prestige with the extremely grubby reality that the emails expose, at least as it pertains to Ruemmler. She comes off as more like one of Epstein’s buddies than anything else. At one point she complains to him about having to “observe all of the people” at a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike who are “at least 100 pounds overweight,” prompting “a mild panic attack” before resolving to never eat “another bite of food for the rest of my life out of fear that I will end up like one of these people.” Elsewhere, Ruemmler dismisses a news story about the allegations against Epstein as a “novella of rehashed crap.” Like others, they track Trump’s rise, commiserate over his election and note the progress of the Mueller investigation.
Ruemmler, now chief legal officer at Goldman Sachs, has said that she regrets ever knowing Epstein. As the emails show, she knew the accusations he had faced. The exchanges occurred after he, in 2008, pled guilty to soliciting prostitution with a minor. Again, Ruemmler was someone who was seen, at the time of the messages, as a viable candidate for the country’s top law enforcement officer.
Summers cuts a different figure in the messages, seeking advice on relationships with the opposite sex from the disgraced financier.
In one March 2019 exchange, Summers describes a female acquaintance as having told him she was busy after he asked what she was “up to.”
“I said awfully coy u are,” Summers wrote in the message. “And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming.”
“I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits,” he added later.
Epstein replied that the unnamed woman was “smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.”
Summers described his relationship with Epstein to the Harvard Crimson as “a major error judgment.”
As with Ruemmler, the point with Summers is less that it’s an error of judgment — these people are smart, sophisticated, and occupy immense positions of influence and public trust. It’s not plausible to treat the exchanges we’ve seen as an isolated mistake.
— Josh Kovensky
How Trump’s Redistricting Push Hit a Wall in Utah
This week, a Utah judge rejected a Republican-led congressional map in favor of a map put forward by the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government that allowed for a Democratic district around Salt Lake City. The ruling represents a major setback for the Trump administration’s pressure campaign to get red states across the country to gerrymander their maps midcycle in an effort to sway the 2026 midterm elections.
Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah, explained in an interview with TPM that Utah’s redistricting effort was met with “perhaps the most impressive grassroots anti-gerrymandering effort in the United States.”
Biele emphasized too, that unlike other redistricting efforts, the map that the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government put forth isn’t and was never meant to be partisan. She acknowledged that the newly approved map is “not going to make Utah a democratic state,” a notion she described as “absurd.”
“This is a very Republican state, and it will remain a very Republican state. But it’s important to give people a chance to voice their opinion,” she said. “Our districting effort was not politically based. It was all about giving people the right to vote.”
In her ruling this week, Judge Dianna Gibson explained that the Republican maps did not abide by Proposition 4, a ballot amendment passed by Utah voters which puts forth nonpartisan redistricting requirements for the legislature. Republicans are currently trying to put forth a measure for next year to repeal Proposition 4. Biele described this effort as Republicans “working against their constituents.”
Though Republicans are planning to appeal Gibson’s ruling, Biele says she feels confident that the appeal will not be successful.
“I’m pretty sure that the Supreme Court of Utah will deny the appeal because they’ve already, they’ve already ruled in our favor,” she said. “Our Republican legislature is absolutely convinced they are the only people who know anything.”
— Khaya Himmelman
In Case You Missed It
Today’s big stories:
How the Trump Admin Has Sown Fear Among Progressive Nonprofits
JD Vance Received a Dire Warning About the Groyper Takeover of the GOP From a Strange Source
Dispatch from Court: Pam Bondi Takes a Beating in Court Over Lindsey Halligan’s Dubious Appointment
Morning Memo: The Corrupt Roots of America’s Elite Run Deep
TPM 25: We Tried to Get Big Tech to Pay for Wrecking Journalism. It Didn’t Work Out.
Backchannel: Bringing Guns to Gun Fights: Making Sense of the National Gerrymandering Battle
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Big Coverup Exposed in Bogus Mortgage Fraud Cases
What We Are Reading
Will People Trust Voting by Phone? Alaska Is Going to Find Out. — Nick Corasaniti, The New York Times
In Matt Gaetz Scandal, Circumstances Left Teen Vulnerable to Exploitation — Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times
Blurred lines: how Michael Wolff aspired to be part of elite circles he wrote about — Ed Pilkington, The Guardian
‘No! Not Larry Summers!’ Wails Devastated Nation — The Onion
Pam Bondi Takes a Beating in Court Over Lindsey Halligan’s Dubious Appointment
I was in federal court this morning in Alexandria, Virginia, for a hearing on the motions to disqualify interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan filed by former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Continue reading “Pam Bondi Takes a Beating in Court Over Lindsey Halligan’s Dubious Appointment”JD Vance Received a Dire Warning About the Groyper Takeover of the GOP From a Strange Source
The call warning of a dangerous tide of extremism in Donald Trump’s Washington is coming from inside the house — the vice president’s house.
Continue reading “JD Vance Received a Dire Warning About the Groyper Takeover of the GOP From a Strange Source”Today Is Actually the 25th Anniversary
Today, November 13th, is actually the first 25 anniversary of TPM. The first post, for a fortuitous set of reasons, was written in New Haven, Connecticut on November 13th, 2000.
Bringing Guns to Gun Fights: Making Sense of the National Gerrymandering Battle
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman has a report here on the state of the Trump White House’s national gerrymandering campaign. The upshot is that it’s not going great. Republicans have had a series of reverses of late, each with its own backstory ranging from legal difficulties to lack of legislative votes to resistance from established officeholders in very conservative states. Meanwhile Democrats’ counteroffensive is going surprisingly well. All told, the whole thing may end up as a wash.
There’s a second order part of this story I want to highlight. If you’ve been watching politics for a long time you know of a basic feature or pattern of American politics. Republicans are generally willing to act more boldly, audaciously, or even borderline criminally than Democrats are willing or able to do. The examples are legion. Because of this difference in how the parties operate, Republicans are almost always rewarded for this norm-breaking behavior. That’s how their strong-arm gerrymandering push looked likely to turn out. But now it looks like it won’t. Most analysts figure it will end up as more of a wash. Some of this is due to these contingent setbacks, the most recent of which is an apparently decisive court reversal in Utah. But the game change is how aggressively Democratic governors have moved to gerrymander their own states.
Continue reading “Bringing Guns to Gun Fights: Making Sense of the National Gerrymandering Battle”