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The beneficiaries of President Donald Trump’s mercy in his second term have mostly been people with access to the president or his inner circle. Those who have followed the rules set out by the Department of Justice, meanwhile, are still waiting.
The Trump DOJ’s bogus prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James just got a lot more difficult to pull off, with what appears to be a major administration coverup of the origins of the case against her.
In a new report, the WSJ has fleshed out a Reuters account from last week about the ousting of the acting inspector general at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It gets a little complicated, but stick with me. It’s important.
As you well know by now, FHFA director Bill Pulte is the instigator of the bogus mortgage fraud investigations of James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA). The Trump administration has seized on Pulte’s bogus claims to, variously, indict James, attempt to fire Cook, and launch a criminal investigation of Schiff.
It’s the James case that’s of most interest here. She is seeking to dismiss the indictment against her on the grounds that it is a vindictive and selective prosecution. The new revelations bolster her arguments for dismissal.
Watchdogs at Fannie Mae had been looking into whether Pulte had “improperly obtained mortgage records of key Democratic officials,” including James, the WSJ reports:
Fannie’s ethics and investigations group had received internal complaints alleging senior officials had improperly directed staff to access the mortgage documents of James and others, according to the people. The Fannie investigators were probing to find out who had made the orders, whether Pulte had the authority to seek the documents and whether or not they had followed proper procedure, the people said.
The investigation into who was rifling around in the personal mortgage records of prominent Democrats was serious enough, apparently, to bring it to Joe Allen, the acting inspector general for FHFA, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (For those keeping score at home, Pulte is not just just the director of FHFA, he’s also chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.)
That’s where things get interesting, according to the WSJ: “The acting inspector general then passed the report to the U.S. attorney’s office in eastern Virginia, some of the people said.” The Eastern District of Virginia is where recently-installed U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan is prosecuting James.
Still with me?
Last week’s Reuter’s report went further in describing the connection between Allen’s work and the James prosecution (emphasis mine):
Allen received notice of his termination from the White House after he made efforts to provide key information to prosecutors in that office, according to four sources. The information he turned over was constitutionally required, two of them said, while a third described it as being potentially relevant in discovery.
The description by Reuters is vague, but it suggests that Allen was attempting to give exculpatory evidence to the prosecution team, which, generally speaking, the government is legally required to share with the defendant — in this case, James.
In her motion last Friday to dismiss the case for vindictive prosecution, James referenced the Reuters’ report and indicated that she had not received from prosecutors whatever it was that Allen had turned over:
“The defense is left guessing at what other prosecutorial vindictiveness discovery exists in the government’s hands,” James’ lawyers wrote.
Allen wasn’t the only one ousted. About a dozen officials within Fannie Mae’s ethics and internal investigations unit were fired on Oct. 29 in the wake of the probe into origins of the bogus mortgage fraud claims and who had access to the personal mortgage records of James and others.
To sum up: Internal government watchdogs who were looking into the origins of the bogus mortgage fraud claims emanating from the Trump administration were fired en masse, but not before the acting inspector general for the FHFA managed to turn over what appears to be exculpatory evidence to federal prosecutors in the James case.
Stay tuned on this one.
Kash Patel and the ‘Boondoggle Ranch’
In a story headlined “Kash Patel’s ‘Effin Wild’ Ride as FBI Director,” the WSJ brings together the worst of his recent transgressions and adds a new boondoggle:
Patel allegedly disrupted a counterterrorism investigation by prematurely posting about arrests in Michigan on Halloween: “Two friends of the alleged terrorists in New Jersey and Washington state caught wind of the arrests and moved up plans to leave the country, according to court documents and law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.”
Patel used his government plane to attend his country music singer girlfriend’s performance of the national anthem in Pennsylvania and then fly to her Nashville home – in the middle of the government shutdown.
Patel used the Gulfstream G550 to visit a “hunting resort” in Texas called the Boondoggle Ranch.
This mostly pales next to Patel purging the FBI of agents who investigated Trump and allowing the bureau to be used to target Trump foes for retribution, but it is the kind of conduct that can get you in trouble in MAGA world if you’re not the president.
Ed Martin Tries to Save Tina Peters
Former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters was convicted on state charges for trying to prove the 2020 Big Lie, so a presidential pardon from Donald Trump won’t help her, but U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin is continuing to advocate for some sort of federal intervention on her behalf, CNN reports:
Martin has continued to advocate for relief for Peters in recent weeks, several people familiar with the push told CNN, even though it is extremely unusual for the Justice Department to intervene in a state case this way. The department has already involved itself in a long-shot federal case, known as a habeas petition, that Peters filed in March, and urged a federal judge to free her from state prison while she appeals her conviction. That matter is still pending, but a decision is expected this year.
In the meantime, Martin says the Justice Department is trying to get Peters moved to federal prison.
Trump’s Attack on Higher Ed: Berkeley Edition
A protest Monday night in Berkeley at event held by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA has gotten the attention of the Trump DOJ. Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the civil rights division, tweeted the announcement of her “investigation” while propagandizing about “Antifa.”
Every protest on a college campus is now a pretext for the Trump administration to “investigate” the university.
The Destruction: CFPB Edition
The Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has taken the position that the funding mechanism for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unlawful, leaving the agency with only enough cash to continue operating until early 2026, Politico reports.
Tracking Trump’s Domestic Military Deployments
Lawfare has a new tracker of the size, location, and purported legal authority for President Trump’s various domestic military deployments:
The U.S. military is being used inside the United States. There's a lot we don't know about how, why, and under what authorities.Lawfare's new project–which includes a tracker and a map–follows where and how the military is being domestically deployed. www.lawfaremedia.org/projects-ser…
The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group has arrived in the Caribbean region as part of the Trump administration’s saber-rattling directed toward the government of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
The United Kingdom — one of the Five Eyes countries — has suspended sharing intelligence with the United States about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in what it regards as illegal U.S. strikes, CNN reports.
$3M and ‘Sincere Regrets’
The Kansas newspaper raided by local law enforcement in August 2023 has reached a $3 million settlement with Marion County that includes a public apology.
Quote of the Day
“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”–Jeffrey Epstein, referring to Donald Trump in a January 2019 email
The House can be expected to pass the government funding bill tonight, which, after President Trump signs it, will end the shutdown. The eight senators — seven Democrats and an independent — who voted for cloture to end the shutdown have been widely condemned. “America deserves better,” likely presidential candidate Gavin Newsom declared. But in my opinion, the eight senators did the right thing and did the Democratic Party a favor.
It was March 2020 and suddenly I had much more free time on my hands. Presumably you did, too.
All the hours we’d otherwise have spent commuting, traveling, or socializing were suddenly ours to fill with other diversions. In hindsight, it’s striking how much we gave over to screentime. That includes all the restless evenings wiled away in the infinite scroll. But even bringing our favorite hobbies and goods and services home entailed logging on.
How do you make sourdough starter? Ask the internet.
What’s the best recipe for your favorite cocktail? Ask the internet.
How do you exercise in your living room with bodyweight or minimal equipment? Ask the internet.
With these questions, we gave precious details about ourselves over to the companies that control the information our computers feed to us.
And it was through this give and take that I eventually realized our information ecosystem had undergone a transformation. Where the digital-media universe had, for most of its existence, resembled a content archipelago divided by niche, somewhere along the line it had become an amorphous blob, and politics had suffused everything — often in subliminal, insidious ways.
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, explanations for Donald Trump’s decisive victory abounded. One narrative that quickly took hold was Trump’s popularity with online “manosphere” influencers — Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Adin Ross, the NELK Boys, Theo Von — and their massive audiences of young men, many of whom are reeled in to their content by seemingly apolitical interests, then radicalized over time by these creators’ takes on feminism and “wokeness.”
But we’ve seen far less attention paid to how young women are also being radicalized in digital spaces, similarly lured by seemingly apolitical content — about celebrity gossip, “natural” birth control, “clean girl” aesthetics, and dating — only to eventually be persuaded that our rights to abortion, contraception, even to vote or own bank accounts, were all a mistake. Billionaire-backed, anti-feminist women’s media outlets and viral female lifestyle influencers are increasingly shaping young women’s politics, too.
As a reporter at Jezebel and now at the newsletter Abortion, Every Day, I’ve watched TikTok and other social platforms become hotbeds for birth control disinformation. For years now, conservative outlets like the National Review have baselessly characterized birth control pills as “carcinogenic,” and anti-abortion organizations frequently lie that hormonal contraception can cause infertility and a range of other adverse health outcomes. But it wasn’t until the last several years, with the rise of women’s lifestyle influencers who don’t outwardly identify as right-wing, that anti-birth control content reached mainstream audiences.
Over the last couple days I’ve argued both that the denouement of the shutdown standoff was a flub and an embarrassment and also that the overall situation is going reasonably well. This isn’t defending the members of the Democratic caucus. I don’t need to defend or attack them because I’m mostly indifferent to them. I’m looking to a half-dozen year or more time horizon in which almost all the current senators need to be convinced to take a dramatically different approach to politics or purged from the ranks of elected office. Let’s call it Change or Purge. To me, from March to now was a big step forward. The way of operating during this shutdown was very different from what happened in March. And the way it ended — here I know many disagree with me — doesn’t negate what happened during the last five weeks, either in terms of the changed behavior or what was accomplished. This is a multi-course treatment. The results of the first course were encouraging. So, on to the remaining nine.
Since I’ve focused on this Change or Purge framework in this post I’d like to flesh out some of what that means. Of course a lot of this is either characterological or a way of using power. That can be hard to capture in bullet points or outside the context of a specific political situation. But there are a series of things senators support or don’t support that gives a clear indication of whether they are serious about confronting the challenge of the moment or battling back from Trumpism.
Tucked into a spending bill that is part of the deal to end the government shutdown is a provision that would allow GOP senators to personally sue the federal government for as much as $500,000 over Special Counsel Jack Smith’s lawful search of their phone records, according to the NYT.
As part of his Jan. 6 investigation, Smith properly subpoenaed the toll records of some GOP members of Congress. In recent weeks, Republicans on the Hill have resurfaced this fact and morphed it into a Deep State conspiracy theory, exaggerating what Smith obtained and trying to turn it into a constitutional clash.
District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. approved measures that barred phone providers from notifying lawmakers that their data from around Jan. 6 was requested as part of the investigation, Politico notes. The provision in the bill imposes new restrictions that would require senators to receive notice of their records being sought and bars judges from preventing that notice unless the senator is under criminal investigation.
Most controversially, the provision in the bill retroactively allows senators targeted by Smith to sue the federal government, the NYT reports: “Because the provision is retroactive to 2022, it would appear to make eligible the eight lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed by investigators for Mr. Smith as he examined efforts by Donald J. Trump to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election.”
The Republican senators in question are Lindsey Graham (SC), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Bill Hagerty (TN), Josh Hawley (MO), Dan Sullivan (AK), Tommy Tuberville (AL), Ron Johnson (WI), and Cynthia Lummis (WI).
The language in the bill came directly from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Politico reports.
Jan 6. Pardons Are Trump’s Bat Signal
A good piece by Politico’s legal reporting duo on the implications of President Trump’s latest pardons in the 2020 Big Lie scheme:
(1) It’s a precursor for election denialism in the future:
The mass pardon — the first in history to cover people accused of criminally conspiring with the president who issued it — comes as Trump continues to stoke false claims about rampant cheating by Democrats and sow doubts about the integrity of future elections. And his opponents see the pardon as a permission slip for similar efforts in 2026 and 2028.
(2) It’s extremely broad:
But the language in the pardon also underscores that Trump’s clemency is not limited to people named in the document. Rather, it applies to anyone who helped devise or advocate for Trump’s strategy to use fraudulent slates of presidential electors as a prong of his strategy to remain in power, as well as others who worked to “expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities” in the 2020 election.
The Corruption: Pardonpalooza Edition
In addition to the latest round of Jan. 6 pardons, President Trump continues to give special treatment to a combination of the politically connected and the publicly corrupt:
Former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada and his former chief of staff Cade Cothren were pardoned even though they’d only been convicted in May on fraud, money laundering and conspiracy charges tied to a scheme involving constituent mailer services, Politico reports. Casada had been sentenced in September to 36 months in prison.
Without making a public announcement, President Trump pardoned Robert Harshbarger Jr., the husband of Rep. Diana Harshbarger (TN), who pleaded guilty to health care fraud in 2013, the NYT reports.
Blanche: Trump DOJ ‘At War’ With Judges
With the Trump DOJ struggling to retain lawyers and staff, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche made a pitch to young conservative lawyers Friday at a Federalist Society event in D.C. to join the war against “activist judges.”
“We need you, because it is a war, and it’s something we will not win unless we keep on fighting,” the DOJ’s No. 2 said.
Blanche was specifically referring to legal setbacks the Trump administration has suffered in court at the district level.
It’s hard to get the media, it’s hard to get the American people to focus on what a travesty it is when you have an individual judge be able to stop an entire operation or an entire administrative policy that’s constitutional and allowed just because he or she chooses to do so. So, it’s a war.
Blanche’s remarks came the day after former Trump DOJ official told the same conference that Congress should start impeaching judges who have blocked Trump policies.
“What’s going to force the Supreme Courtto do something is fundamentally political pressure. It’s going to be when Congress starts impeaching judges and saying … ‘You are now encroaching into our territory,’” said Mizelle, whose wife is a federal district judge.
SCOTUS Takes Mail-In Ballot Case
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case challenging a Mississippi law that allows the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. The case had nationwide implications, with some 30 states allowing the counting of mail-in ballots after Election Day.
Mass Deportation Watch
The Trump administration took steps in court late last week to deport the repeatedly brutalized Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia, a country with which he no ties.
The NYT interviewed 40 of the Venezuelan men who were unlawfully imprisoned at CECOT earlier this yeat after being deported by the Trump administration under the Alien Enemies Act.
The Trump administration made a $7.5 million payment to the government of Equatorial Guinea as it seeks to deport people to the West African country, according to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Since April, DHS has stopped automatically capturing communications between officials and instead requires them to take screenshots of their messages in a bizarre work flow, the NYT reports: “The policy expects officials to first take screenshots of the text messages on their work phones, send it to their work email, download it on their work computers and then run a program that would recognize the text to store it in searchable formats, according to the department’s guidance submitted to the court.”
Trump’s Murderous Misadventure
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been busy purging at least two dozen flag officers and sidelining military lawyers precisely to allow the kind of unsanctioned war the Trump administration is engaged in against drug cartels and the Maduro regime in Venezuela:
The number of lawless U.S. strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific has risen to 19, with a death toll of 76 … that we know of.
The Trump administration has created a secret list of 24 of Latin American cartels and criminal organizations that are now “designated terrorist organizations,” The Intercept reports.
Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, a retired Air Force judge advocate, calls the U.S. strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats “murder.”
Kash Patel Leaves MI5 Hanging
FBI Director Kash Patel reassured the head of MI5 that he’d preserve the job of an FBI agent in London who helps with counterintelligence surveillance – then reneged on the promise, the NYT reports.
Trump Goes After BBC
President Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1 billion over how it edited a clip of his Jan. 6, 2021 speech on The Ellipse for a documentary last year. The disputed edit has already lead to the resignations of BBC Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News Chief Executive Deborah Turness. BBC Chairman Samir Shah issued an apology yesterday for the controversy.
Quote of the Day
“The deference and servility to Ms. Maxwell have reached such preposterous levels that one of the top officials at the facility has complained that he is ‘sick of having to be Maxwell’s bitch.’”–Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), describing preferential treatment allegedly being given to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell since her arrival at a minimum security prison camp
I learned many surprising lessons from my 20 months as editor-in-chief of Deadspin, the skeptical, irreverent, hilarious, trailblazing sports outlet that entertained, offended, and educated audiences in roughly equal measure.
I learned from a cease-and-desist letter that Jacuzzi is a trademarked brand, and that the hotel room in which a world-famous soccer star was alleged to have raped a woman contained a mere “spa” or “hot tub.” I learned from inhaling Chartbeat that our very dumbest stories and our very smartest stories would always be our biggest traffic drivers. I learned from our general counsel more than I ever wanted to know about the precise limits of fair use. I learned from my coworkers — all of them brilliant and entirely deranged — that there is no limit to how hard I can laugh in a soul-suckingly bland Times Square cubicle farm. Even knowing how it all ended, I’d still take the job 100 times out of 100.
The most consequential lessons I learned, though, were about the ways in which I had misunderstood “free market” capitalism, and about what that meant for the industry that gave me my career. Those are the lessons I haven’t stopped agonizing over six years later, the ones that led to my first book but also caused scores of sleepless nights.
As President Donald Trump’s deadline for a massive budget bill drew near early in the summer, Republican Senate leadership needed to corral the support of some members of the conference. The bill would help pay for tax cuts for the wealthy partly through cuts to Medicaid and needed nearly all Republican votes to pass. The impact on rural hospitals, analysts warned, would be severe. But Republican leadership was able to win over key votes by directing a small slice of money to a “rural hospital fund.”
Now, all 50 states are now vying for a piece of that $50 billion fund, billed as a savior for floundering rural hospitals — and a backstop against the harmful impacts of the now-passed, historic cuts to Medicaid. The fund, and its application process which closed last Wednesday, has been called “the rural health ‘Hunger Games.’” States are in a mad dash for a slice of the investment.
Despite that, due to Trump administration restrictions on how the fund can be used, advocates now say that hospitals will not be able to spend it in the areas they most need to address.
Under Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rules for distributing the funds, only 15% of any money awarded to states from this fund can be used to cover unpaid patient care, a major funding shortage for rural hospitals.
“If enough people keep coming in who can’t pay their bills, the hospital can’t just survive on nothing,” Adam Searing, an attorney and research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, told TPM. “That’s why we have more hospitals closing in non-Medicaid expansion states than elsewhere and this is just going to make that program worse.”
The grant funding will be distributed to states whose applications are approved by CMS over a five year period. Half of the $50 billion will be distributed equally to all approved applications. The other half will be distributed based on a complex weighted formula under which a range of policy-based factors account for about 15% of a state’s score. Some of those factors, advocates note, have a partisan valence.
Those policy points include whether a state restricts certain health insurance plans, sometimes called junk plans, which skirt Affordable Care Act rules, but also such MAHA-coded criteria as whether states restrict SNAP users from buying “non-nutritious foods” and whether states plan to institute Trump’s “Presidential Fitness Test” in schools.
“Ultimately the CMS administrator has non-reviewable authority to distribute that money,” Searing said. “And so that means they can do pretty much what they want and the states can’t complain about it.”
Ultimately, the rural health “fund” doesn’t deserve the name, rural emergency physician Rob Davidson told TPM last summer.
“I think we — probably all of us — need to stop saying that it’s a rural health fund,” he said.
Trump’s $3.4 trillion tax cuts and spending package, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, earned enough support from Republican lawmakers to pass the Senate largely only after the last-minute $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program was added.
Yet the $50 billion fund is largely designed not for shoring up hospitals budgets left by the Medicaid cuts and other gaps in patients’ ability to pay, but for state spending on workforce recruitment and retention, modernization and technological advancement initiatives, and preventative care. The initiatives are mostly things that, barring historic health care cuts, Searing said would garner bipartisan support.
In addition to the CMS provision that only 15% of the cash can be used by rural hospitals to cover the cost of uncompensated care, only 10% of any award amount can be used to cover direct and indirect administrative costs, and no funds can be used to supplement clinical services already covered by other insurance sources including private plans, Medicaid or Medicare. This despite the fact that insurer payments to hospitals don’t always cover the cost of patient services, according to a report from the CHQPR’s rural hospitals arm.
“We have found that many small rural hospitals are losing money because of low payments from private health plans, not because of how many Medicaid patients they have,” Harold D. Miller, CEO of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, told TPM in an email.
Speaking to the Daily Yonder, a national rural news service, CEO of the National Rural Health Association Alan Morgan said the fund largely pushes preventative services, initiatives his organization supports.
“But you can see there’s a huge disconnect here,” Morgan said. “The $50 billion cannot by legislation (and is not by the administration) going to be used to help rural hospitals keep their doors open. This $50 billion is about sustaining health care for the future. It has nothing to do with maintaining access today.”
During negotiations, advocates decried the provision, saying the $50 billion boost was a drop in the bucket compared to the $1 trillion cuts, about $137 billion of which will be taken away from rural hospitals, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. They warned the legislative language wasn’t strong enough, and didn’t even ensure that the comparatively small amount of money allotted would go to the most vulnerable rural communities.
Now that CMS has released its rules for the program’s grant application, those warnings are proving prescient.
There’s also the fear that the partisan aspects of the application rules could be used to block funding Democratic states, several of which have at-risk rural hospitals.
“We have an administration which just says right out, ‘We’re gonna cut money to blue states and blue communities,’ and it is doing it,” Searing said. “If you happen to live in a community that we disagree with politically, too bad.”
