There’s a new Politico piece out today on the prep work that Democratic attorneys general around the nation are doing to create a legal battle plan for the seemingly inevitable reality that will arrive this fall, when President Trump attempts to make good on his threats to interfere with states’ election administration.
Continue reading “Dem Attorneys General Prepare for What Seems Inevitable: Trump Election Interference”A culture of impunity or at least a culture of elite impunity is now so widely discussed that it has become almost a cliché of American political discourse. But clichés and caricatures have power when they contain a strong or recognizable element of truth. And we are in the midst of a kind of performance of impunity which is revealing and bracing to behold. A few days ago, the former Prince Andrew, now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, was arrested and questioned in an investigation of alleged crimes tied to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew is the first prince to be arrested in 400 years. (Technically, he’s the first British prince ever to be arrested. The last example, Charles I, was king of England. This was before the Union Treaty of 1707 which created Great Britain. Charles was tried and executed.) Today, police in the United Kingdom arrested Peter Mandelson, now a Labour party elder (he made his name under Tony Blair) who was until September the British ambassador to the United States. The investigation that led to his arrest was spurred by the release of the Epstein Files. His earlier resignation as ambassador was also tied to his relationship with Epstein.
Continue reading “Donald Trump, Jeff Epstein and the Politics of Impunity”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Last Tuesday, early voting began in the primary elections to choose nominees for Texas’s upcoming U.S. Senate race. One of the Republican candidates for that Senate seat, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, marked the occasion by publishing a “legal advisory” informing Texans that a host of normal election activities are actually crimes.
Texas effectively makes it illegal for you to encourage people to vote for a particular person or proposal if you’re in the vicinity of a ballot. Under state law, any in-person interaction that occurs “in the physical presence of an official ballot or a ballot voted by mail” and is “intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure” constitutes “vote harvesting services.” If you offer or receive “compensation” or some “other benefit” in exchange for such “services,” you face up to ten years in prison, and up to $10,000 in fines.
Continue reading “Republican-Appointed Texas Federal Judge Endorses ‘Vote Harvesting’ Conspiracy Amid Primaries”The pace of this important story is slow by dramatic standards, but by the somnambulant standards of the federal judiciary, the erosion of the credibility of the Justice Department, which took decades to establish and has all but vanished in one year under Trump II, is moving at lightning speed.
The first six items in today’s Morning Memo feature some variation on the theme of confrontation between federal judges and the Trump DOJ, all of them since late last week.
One of the things I hear most often from readers is: So what? If the judges don’t do anything about it, this is all play-acting.
I think this is more than kabuki theater. There has been movement. As Lawfare’s Anna Bower and I discussed at last month’s Morning Memo Live event, it took district judges about six months last year to catch on to what was happening and stop giving the Trump DOJ any benefit of the doubt. Over the last six months, you’ve seen increasingly harsh assessments from judges, and slow but definite steps towards contempt and sanctions.
It’s slow going though, and ultimately it will be up to appeals courts to have district judges’ backs, and the track record on that front so far is decidedly underwhelming.
A NYT review found 35 instances since August in which federal judges have issued show cause orders for why Trump DOJ attorneys should not be sanctioned for failing to abide by court orders in immigrant habeas cases.
The judge in Minnesota who last week found special assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Isihara in contempt and imposed a $500 fine until he complied with her order (he did) issued a scathing new rebuke in that case despite the government’s eventual compliance:
SAUSA Isihara blamed his oversights on this case inadvertently “slipp[ing] through the cracks.” But SAUSA Isihara had notice of this case and at least three chances to remedy the issue before the show-cause hearing. And the Government offered little defense to avoid contempt. Rather, the Government asked the Court to exercise its “discretion” and “good graces” based on the understaffing and oversized caseloads in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge, the Government has offered that excuse to this Court again, and again, and again (and to other judges in this district again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again) to excuse its oversights and disobedience of court orders in immigration habeas cases.
Isihara, a military JAG, isn’t the problem, but a symptom of a Justice Department deliberately broken by President Trump (whose mug shot now adorns the exterior wall of Main Justice in a victorious middle-finger authoritarian salute), as U.S. District Judge Laura M. Provinzino pointed out in a footnote:
SAUSA Isihara stated at the show-cause hearing that prior to joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office as a SAUSA last month, he had not practiced in federal court. Since joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he has been assigned nearly 130 cases.
Assigning some 130 cases to someone with no federal court experience is deliberate sabotage.
As Morning Memo reported two weeks ago, Trump DOJ lawyer Tiberius Davis told U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in a hearing in the original Alien Enemies Act case that the administration’s agreement with El Salvador to ship immigrants there for confinement, including in CECOT, would expire in March, after one year.
That was a bit of news, and it caught Boasberg’s ear because he’s overseeing a separate case in which human rights groups are suing to invalidate that agreement. So Boasberg circled back and asked Davis again if the agreement was set to expire after one year, and Davis confirmed what he’d originally said.
Three days later, Boasberg followed up in the other case by asked the Justice Department to file a brief on whether and when the agreement expires and whether that moots the case.
In its response to Boasberg, the Trump DOJ dipsy-doo’d again: “Defendants respectfully state that the non-legally binding diplomatic arrangement at issue in this case does not have a termination date.” (Davis is listed on the filing that case, too.)
It’s this kind of inability to get straight or consistent answers from DOJ lawyers that is driving judges crazy and spelled such a quick end to the presumption of regularity previously afforded to the Justice Department.
It’s still not clear that Davis was wrong when he told Boasberg it was a one-year agreement. In the case challenging the agreement, the plaintiffs already succeeded in making public a March 22, 2025 letter agreement between the administration and El Salvador that says El Salvador would hold the AEA detainees “for up to one year” in exchange for a $4.76 million grant.
Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.
U.S. Magistrate Judge William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia tore into Trump DOJ attorneys for not alerting him to a law protecting journalists from government searches and seizures when it applied for a search warrant last year for the home of WaPo Hannah Natanson.
Porter also revealed in the court hearing that he had previously turned down the Natanson search warrant several other times before he finally approved it.
On a separate front, the Trump DOJ is continuing to provoke a confrontation with federal judges over who has the power to name interim U.S. attorneys. As soon as the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia named James W. Hundley as a replacement for the disgraced Lindsey Halligan on Friday, he was fired by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche:
Here we go again. EDVA judges do not pick our US Attorney. POTUS does. James Hundley, you’re fired! https://t.co/QnHHUZqhw1
— Todd Blanche (@DAGToddBlanche) February 20, 2026
The latest eff you to federal judges came nine days after Blanche similarly fired the judge-appointed interim U.S. attorney in the Northern District of New York.
The death toll in the lawless U.S. campaign of high seas attacks against alleged drug-smuggling boats rose to at least 147 when three people were killed Friday in a strike in the eastern Pacific.
“I thought his head was going to explode.”—Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D-CT), who witnessed President Trump getting the news that the Supreme Court had struck down his global tariffs
After reviewing video footage of the incident, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office has determined no crime occurred when Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s husband Shawn DeRemer embraced a department employee in what his lawyer called a “friendly hug/embrace.”
“Based upon the evidence presented to this office in relation to the video, there is no indication of a crime,” a spokesperson for Pirro said.
Shawn DeRemer has reportedly been barred from the Labor Department’s D.C. headquarters and was disinvited to the premiere of the “Melania” documentary after two department employees complained he had touched them inappropriately.
DeRemer has denied the allegations.
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals lifted parts of the preliminary injunction issued by a district judge that required the Trump administration to restore slavery exhibits it had removed at the Philadelphia site of the former home of President George Washington, but by the time the appeals court intervened, the administration had already restored a significant portion of what it had originally taken down.
A majority of the full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for a 2024 Louisiana law requiring that the 10 Commandments be posted in every public school classroom, including colleges and universities.
Mike Somes: The Last Idiot Who Earnestly Believes in the American Experiment
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) has never quite fit in with the ever-growing contingent of MAGA lawmakers on Capitol Hill who show blind loyalty to the president. He is one of the few Senate Republicans who have publicly and repeatedly criticized President Donald Trump for his actions, though he has not always backed up that criticism with votes.
But in one career-defining case, he did. He was one of seven Republicans — ultimately not enough — who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
At the time of that vote, Cassidy had just been reelected. Trump’s faithful would have to wait six years to express their ire at the ballot box. Those six years are up.
Continue reading “MAHA Goes to War Against the Senator Who Let RFK Run the Health Agencies”This story was originally reported by Kate Sosin of The 19th. Meet Kate and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Sarah O’Neill loved her job as a data scientist at the National Security Agency (NSA).
“The government before last year was what I would consider to be a model employer,” O’Neill said.
She started the job in 2019, two years after she started her transition to living as a woman.
“That wasn’t an issue at all,” she said. “Everybody was supportive.”
Everything changed in January 2025. That’s when President Donald Trump took office for a second term and signed an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
Continue reading “A Pride Flag, a Bathroom Ban, a Job Change: LGBTQ+ Federal Workers Challenge Trump in Court”A funny thing happened today. I made one of my infrequent forays into Facebook and an acquaintance noted in a post her brief mention in the Epstein files. These weren’t incriminating in any way. Something she wrote was briefly mentioned in passing by people who didn’t appear even to know her. Then another friend chimed into the thread noting how he’d similarly been mentioned in an offhand and fortuitous and not incriminating way. So I thought: Am I in the Epstein Files?
Continue reading “Yes, TPM Is in the Epstein Files. But We Didn’t Do Anything Wrong! I Promise.”With increasing frequency in recent years, the White House has run afoul of a legal theory that has come into vogue among the Supreme Court’s conservatives: the major questions doctrine. It’s a trend we’ve covered quite a bit at TPM.
The newish “doctrine” holds that for the executive branch to take action on a “major question,” it must explicitly be granted the power to do so by Congress. What is a “major question”? The Court decides! You can see how this might be useful to justices who are particularly eager to tie the hands of regulatory agencies.
The Court’s ever-more right-wing majority has gestured toward the doctrine increasingly frequently, using it nearly exclusively to block policies championed by Democratic administrations, including Obama’s Clean Power Plan, aimed at diminishing U.S. reliance on coal, and Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
Yet Trump has scrambled everything. Tying the hands of regulatory agencies is a very 2024 area of right-wing legal concern. We are in a brave new world now, where the executive branch eschews such things as “helping” “borrowers” or “protecting” the “environment.” And, so, oral arguments in the tariffs case last November saw the liberal justices somewhat trollishly needling the Trump administration’s solicitor general (and, implicitly, their major questions doctrine-loving colleagues) about how sweeping tariffs reshaping the global economy could possibly not run afoul of the doctrine when, for example, student loan forgiveness did.
Some of the conservatives took the bait, Layla A. Jones wrote in our Friday coverage of the ruling. Justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch all leaned in part on the major questions doctrine to block Trump’s tariffs. The three liberal justices joined their majority, but argued that you didn’t need to point toward any doctrine, that normal interpretation of the law as written was enough to come to the conclusion that Donald Trump had gone far beyond the powers granted to him in the emergency statute he cited to impose tariffs.
Lest the Court be accused of ideological consistency, however, Justices Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh dissented, finding in part that, despite their previous enthusiasm for Biden-era major questions doctrine decisions, the legal theory doesn’t apply “in the foreign affairs context, including in foreign trade.” That, as much as anything else, is the news from Friday’s ruling: that half of the conservative wing of the Court was willing to contort itself in fresh ways to yet again expand the power of Trump’s executive branch.
— John Light
After the Supreme Court published its 6-3 decision overturning all of President Donald Trump’s tariffs imposed using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, the president called liberal justices “a disgrace to our nation” and accused conservative justices who ruled against him of disloyalty to the Constitution.
Trump also nodded at the at least five other provisions granting the executive branch tariff authority, none of which were at issue in the IEEPA case.
Each of the provisions offer a more restrictive avenue for charging a tax on foreign imports.
A Bloomberg Law explainer dug into the alternative provisions, which the administration has been considering for months.
Three of the five provisions — Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 201 and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 — require a federal investigation. Under the first, the Commerce Department has 270 days to return a decision on whether the importation of certain goods are a threat to national security. Under Section 201, the International Trade Commission must hold public hearings and get public comment, and U.S. Trade Representative is usually required to meet with targeted foreign governments before the president can tariff goods under Section 301. Sections 201 and 301, along with Section 122 of the same act, limit tariff duration. And three of the five provisions — Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, along with Sections 301 and 122 — restrict the tariff rate. The approaches are more piecemeal, can apply to just specific products or industries, and take far longer to enact than a stroke of Trump’s pen.
— Layla A. Jones
I have been contemplating for some time now whether and to what extent the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his highly controversial decisions over the past year and his loyal Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement will become a leading issue in the upcoming Republican primaries and general elections for congressional seats.
The MAHA movement has its own ride-or-die followers, but it remains to be seen how enduring the movement’s overlap is with the GOP voter base.
MAHA PAC, a group headed by prominent movement activists, certainly seems to think you need MAHA behind you if you want to win as a Republican — and wants the party to understand their support is not guaranteed.
“Over the last decade, Republicans who have failed to embrace the gift of the MAGA movement have had their political careers meet an untimely demise because they failed to connect with the new Republican coalition built by President Trump,” Tony Lyons, a leading MAHA activist, wrote in a memo shared with the press this month, urging Republican leadership to use MAHA talking points to win elections. “Republicans serving now shouldn’t make the same mistake and fail to embrace the new gift of the MAHA movement.”
Despite MAHA’s self proclaimed power, progressive groups like Protect Our Care, which advocates for lawmakers to expand access to health care, see RFK Jr. as a major weakness for the Republican party in general.
“It’s a complete head scratcher to me, why anyone in the White House or on the campaign trail thinks that that Freakazoid, RFK Jr., would be a benefit to any Republican candidates anywhere in the country,” Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, told TPM. “This is someone who is extraordinarily unpopular. ”
“The coalition that he had, that people felt like there was some political benefit to, is tearing apart at the seams,” Woodhouse added. “And every position that he’s taken on vaccines and science and public health, and what they’ve done to health care — cutting Medicaid, cutting the Affordable Care Act — is so extraordinarily unpopular that we’d pay to put him on the road. I’d paid for his travel to go out and campaign for Republicans.”
— Emine Yücel
In a loss for Democrats, a county judge in Virginia temporarily blocked the advancement of an April voter referendum to approve new Democratic-favoring congressional maps ahead of the midterm elections.
Siding with Republicans, Tazewell Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. on Thursday granted an emergency injunction filed by the Republican National Committee, halting the Democratic-led April 21 referendum from occurring.
As a reminder, the state supreme court ruled earlier this month that the referendum could move forward. The state supreme court, however, has yet to make a final ruling on whether or not the proposal is legal.
On Wednesday, the RNC filed a lawsuit against Virginia election officials, arguing that both the redistricting proposal and the April referendum are unconstitutional.
In his Thursday ruling, siding with the RNC, Hurley said that the ballot language — in particular, the description that the proposal “restores fairness” — actually, according to Hurley, “destroys fairness, is the product of unfairness and is intended to increase unfairness.”
Thursday’s ruling is the latest development in a larger redistricting battle.
For months now, Trump has been pressuring red states across the country to adopt new gerrymandered maps as a way to ensure Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House in the midterm elections.
States like Virginia, California, and Maryland have responded with new Democratic-favoring maps of their own as a way to offset the impact of Trump’s gerrymandering blitz.
— Khaya Himmelman
Almost every article on today’s tariff decision includes, somewhere two or three paragraphs down, a note which explains that it’s unclear how or whether the federal government will issue refunds for illegally collected tariffs. The Court’s decision doesn’t address this. I’m not sure why it would really need to address this. The tariffs were illegal. The government had no legal authority to collect them. So it should be a simple matter for importers to go to court and compel the government to refund their money. But set all that aside. Is it really so uncertain? I’ll bet the White House is going to find a way to issue those refunds. Why? Because Trump insiders, especially the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have reportedly made huge, huge bets on the tariffs being tossed. They and their clients now, per a July report that prompted a Senate investigation, stand to make tens or even hundreds of billions on those refunds. Given that Lutnick is a primary player in White House tariff policy, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to find a way to issue those refunds.
Continue reading “The Fix Is In: Lutnick Family Could Make Killing On Tariff Demise”The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.
We say the Court “struck down” these tariffs. But that wording is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs were always transparently illegal. Saying the actions were “struck down” suggests at least a notional logic which the Court disagreed with, or perhaps one form of standing practice and constitutional understanding away from which the Court decided to chart another course. Neither is remotely the case. There’s no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed a unilateral power to “find” a national emergency and then used this (transparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers the law in question doesn’t even delegate. It is, among other things, an example of the central tenet of current conservative jurisprudence: to determine what law or constitution would require if words had no meaning. We could go into the further digression over whether Congress could “delegate” such powers, given the Constitution’s clarity on congressional authority over tariffs or whether any purported ambiguity in the law invokes yet another of the corrupt Court’s made-up doctrines. But doing so would be nothing more than ceding to the Court an authority to compel us to expend time exploring the vaporous logical intricacies of its bullshit doctrines.
Continue reading “Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision”
