Welcome Back to the Franchise: The Biennial Resurrection of the Non-Citizen Voting Myth

Posted on by Khaya Himmelman

In case you missed it last week, The Franchise is our newly revived, weekly newsletter on elections and voting rights in America as the Trump administration continues its assault on election administration, the franchise and democracy overall. Join us this year as we unpack the ways in which the Trump administration attempts to stomp on states’ rights and predetermine the outcome of the midterms. You can sign up here.

As always, there’s a lot to unpack in the world of elections this week. 

Continue reading “Welcome Back to the Franchise: The Biennial Resurrection of the Non-Citizen Voting Myth” →

Judge Rules Against Hegseth, Finding That He ‘Trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment Freedoms’

Posted on by Kate Riga

A federal judge ruled in favor of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) Thursday, finding that Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated the senator’s constitutional rights by attempting to downgrade his rank and retirement benefits. 

Continue reading “Judge Rules Against Hegseth, Finding That He ‘Trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment Freedoms’” →

Trump DOJ Gives Federal Judges a Big New Eff You

Posted on by David Kurtz

‘You Are Fired, Donald Kinsella’

The Trump administration’s effort to bypass Senate confirmation for some blue state U.S. attorneys is not nearly over.

After its bids to appoint Lindsey Halligan, Alina Habba, and others were rejected by federal courts as unlawful and invalid, the administration is now escalating its slow-rolling confrontation with the judicial branch over the limits of its statutory powers.

With a tone and flourish that suggested he was auditioning for “The Apprentice,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche immediately fired an interim U.S. attorney who had just been sworn in yesterday by the federal judges in the Northern District of New York.

The pattern is probably familiar to you by now.

Last year, the Trump administration tried an elaborate workaround in the district to bypass the Senate and local judges and retain control over who can appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely. After the controversial John A. Sarcone III’s initial term as interim U.S. attorney expired by statute in July, the federal judges in the district declined to extend his term.

The Trump DOJ made Sarcone (who had no prior experience as a prosecutor) a “special attorney” and contended that gave him all the powers of a U.S. attorney. But a federal judge last month rejected that workaround as invalid, in a challenge brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Still, the judge stopped short of removing Sarcone, and he limped along in the purported role until his 210-day term under a different statute expired this month.

At that point, the judges went ahead and exercised their statutory powers to appoint an interim U.S. attorney until the Senate confirms someone to the permanent position, naming Donald T. Kinsella, 79, who has had a long legal career that included a stint as chief of the criminal division in that U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Kinsella was sworn in yesterday in a private ceremony, the NYT reports, but within hours Blanche purported to fire him:

“Reached by phone on Wednesday evening, Mr. Kinsella said that he did not yet know whether the White House email carried the force of law,” the NYT reports. “He said he would discuss the matter with the district judges in the morning and go from there.”

It’s not the first time this has happened. In New Jersey last July, the federal judges appointed Desiree Leigh Grace as interim U.S. attorney when Habba’s initial 120-day term ended. But she was promptly fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi. “This Department of Justice does not tolerate rogue judges — especially when they threaten the President’s core Article II powers,” Bondi posted on X at the time.

The judges didn’t challenge the firing of Grace, a career federal prosecutor, and she is now in private practice, according to her LinkedIn profile. Instead, Habba continued to serve even after an outside judge ruled in August that her appointment was invalid past the initial 120 days. That decision was upheld on appeal in December, at which point Habba finally stepped down.

But that didn’t stop Bondi. She named three people to jointly run the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office rather than concede the appointment power to federal judges. That arrangement is currently being challenged in court.

In the Eastern District of Virginia, the judges similarly let Halligan’s term expire even after her appointment was invalidated by an outside judge, suggesting they wanted to avoid a direct confrontation with the executive branch. Since then, they have been advertising for the interim position but have not announced their appointment and the vacancy remains.

The statutory scheme is clearly intended to put a use-it-or-lose-it constraint on the president: either nominate someone who can win Senate approval or lose your appointment power to federal judges. While the Trump administration’s challenge to the statutory arrangement doesn’t really impinge on the judicial branch’s constitutional role, it is a direct challenge to the Senate’s powers of advise and consent under the Constitution.

I’m not sure what the Supreme Court will ultimately say about this, but its unitary executive priors suggest it will want to preserve the president’s powers. What’s striking, though, is that Trump’s conduct in appointing people without prosecutorial experience and who are personally and politically beholden to him — Halligan was a White House aide and former personal attorney to Trump — is precisely why the power to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely was delegated to judges. Trump is proving the point in a way that makes the risks not merely hypothetical.

As of this morning, Sarcone is listed as the first assistant U.S. attorney on the office’s website.

Pirro Won ZERO Grand Jurors

The politicized attempt to indict six sitting Democratic members of Congress was not only rejected by a D.C. federal grand jury, but U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s case was unanimously rejected by grand jurors, NBC News reports.

To secure an indictment, Pirro needed the votes of 12 grand jurors out of the 16-23 that typically make up a grand jury. She got zero.

Dance Photographer Presented the Case

Pirro picked a former state prosecutor with whom she had worked decades ago in Westchester County, New York, to present the case against congressional Democrats to the grand jury. Steven Vandervelden had no prior federal prosecution experience before being hired by Pirro last year.

As Bloomberg reports, Vandervelden maintains an active business as what he describes as a “fine-art dance, fitness, and portrait photographer.”

“In a brief phone interview Wednesday, he confirmed he is the same Vandervelden who posted an update to his studio’s Instagram account several hours earlier,” Bloomberg snarkily noted.

Pirro gave Bloomberg a statement for the ages in defense of Vandervelden (emphasis mine):

Steven Vandervelden is one of the best prosecutors and best investigators that I have worked with in well over three decades in the criminal justice system. Any attempt to undercut his expertise is nothing more than an effort to detract from his excellent prosecutorial record to which few can compare. And by the way, everybody has a hobby.

The other Pirro hand on the case was Carlton Davis, who has minimal experience as a federal prosecutor.

Ron Swanson Walks Amongst Us

One of the White House-hired election conspiracists identified in the FBI affidavit to obtain a search warrant for the Fulton County election spent a couple of hours on the phone with TPM’s Hunter Walker shortly after the affidavit was unsealed.

What emerges from the interview with Clay Parikh is a man drawn to apocalyptic theology and obsessed with Deep State conspiracies who watches too much TV. In addition to treating “Parks and Rec” character Ron Swanson as a personal hero, Parikh seems to take NBC’s “The Blacklist” quite literally.

These are the people to whom Trump is delegating the vast powers of the state to carry out his retribution campaign against everyone he holds responsible for having lost the 2020 election.

The Retribution: Supermax Edition

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from sending to Supermax 20 prisoners whose death sentences were commuted by President Biden.

U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly of D.C., said federal regulations provide only two bases for sending inmates to the infamous prison in Florence, Colorado, and it was obvious that President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi had predetermined that the men would be transferred there. Trump had promised that the former death row inmates would be treated has harshly as possible.

“[I]t is likely that the process provided to Plaintiffs was an empty exercise to approve an outcome that was decided before it even began, thereby contravening their due process
rights,” Kelly, a Trump appointee, ruled.

CBP Shoots Laser at Party Balloon

The absurdity that is the Trump II presidency was on full display with the abrupt closure of the main airport for El Paso, the 69th largest metro area in the country.

The initial reports about what happened and why were confused, and the Trump administration is still maintaining what is now an apparent fiction: That it was defending against a drone attack from across the border in Mexico.

What really happened, according to the most reliable reports, is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth agreed to lend to DHS the military’s anti-drone high-energy laser and Custom and Border Patrol used it to shoot down … a “party balloon.” That recklessness apparently alarmed the FAA — which was not alerted to the deployment of the laser — because of the risk of cowboy laser shooters from CBP accidentally targeting civilian aircraft.

It’s comic mishap that would made Dr. Strangelove blush.

Not Worth Anyone’s Time

Televised congressional hearings lost their civic utility a long time ago, but the Trump administration has introduced a reality TV element that makes them actively damaging and distorting:

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

How Trump’s Immigration Crusade Is Endangering Black Americans

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

From what began as a routine traffic stop in Georgia, U.S. Army veteran Godfrey Wade was detained, transferred to a facility in Louisiana, and shipped off to a country he hadn’t known in 50 years.

Sixty-seven-year-old Roderick Johnson, a Black U.S. citizen, found himself zip-tied and left outside for hours after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents broke down the door of his apartment and many others in a building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.

And while driving in Minnesota, an American couple reportedly from Illinois endured an ICE traffic stop wherein the driver was asked to produce identification and can be heard saying he’s a U.S. citizen.

Harassment from law enforcement, traffic stops turned bad, and the use of what are essentially no-knock warrants aren’t foreign tactics to many Black people living in America. But under President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigration campaign, the perpetrating officers have expanded to include Customs and Border Patrol and ICE agents. Black Americans, especially those who have been convicted of crimes or participate in political dissent, risk being swept up in Trump’s immigration dragnet. The Trump administration has even threatened its political enemies with the prospect of denaturalization. As the administration dilutes civil rights, including through Supreme Court-approved policy like “Kavanaugh stops,” which let federal immigration agents engage in racial profiling, activists and constitutional law scholars told TPM the overlap of street-level policing and immigration enforcement poses unique risks to Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved here.  

On the campaign trail, Trump and his allies pledged to execute an unprecedented and aggressive deportation agenda. Tom Homan, current White House Border Czar and Trump’s former head of ICE, bragged about the operation in July 2024. 

“Trump comes back in January — I’ll be on his heels coming back,” Homan told attendees at the National Conservatism Conference. “And I will run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.” 

Since then, the administration, through a dizzying flurry of action, has laid the groundwork for compromising civil rights in America, including the rights of naturalized citizens. (It has gone so far that Homan has now been sent in to control of ICE, cast as a voice of moderation.) Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in February 2025 said they were weighing their ability to deport non-immigrant Americans convicted of crimes to foreign prisons. The president doubled down on his desire to deport citizens convicted of crimes in April.

“If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem,” Trump told reporters during a meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office. “If we can do that, that’s good. And I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people. Really bad people. Every bit as bad as the ones coming in.”

This in particular should raise alarm bells for Black people, said Karla McKanders, the director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Black people are around twice as likely to be searched during traffic stops as any other racial group, according to 2022 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics analyzed by the Prison Policy Initiative. Black people are disproportionately more likely to be incarcerated than white people. And Black people are 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white people, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

McKanders studied what she calls the prison-to-deportation pipeline, and has shown that Black immigrants are much more likely to experience traffic stops and subsequent immigration action. With Kavanaugh stops, named after Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and allowing for federal law enforcement to engage in racial profiling, Black Americans can be stopped just for being Black, regardless of immigration status.

“Black descendants of enslaved people should be concerned because the same kind of pipeline of disproportionately being impacted by traffic stops applies across the board to all Black people,” McKanders told TPM.

Trump has also directed federal law enforcement to investigate left-leaning advocacy groups which the administration has classified as domestic terrorist organizations, which experts told TPM was “a clear blueprint for going after political enemies.” 

And the administration has also repeatedly ruminated about a denaturalization campaign, including in a June DOJ enforcement memo that imagined targeting people “who pose a potential danger to national security,” a dangerously broad classification under an administration which has widened the definitions of terrorism to punish Trump’s opposition.

“[I]f this administration can label anyone a domestic terrorist and say that a domestic terrorist is not entitled to due process, then that could erode not only that person’s rights but could put them in jeopardy,” said Timothy Welbeck, a constitutional law and African American studies professor at Temple University. “If someone is not entitled to due process, anyone could be labeled a criminal, their rights can be infringed upon, and they can be disappeared, and that should concern us all.”

Heather Wills is the deputy executive director at the Workers Center for Racial Justice in Chicago, the city where Black Americans were corralled alongside Latino immigrants by ICE agents who descended on an apartment complex in the middle of the night. She said any idea that Black community organizations have a separate fight from immigrant communities is a myth.

“Our struggles are parallel, our struggles are intersectional, and we have always been advocating for constitutional and human rights for all people,” Wills said.

D.C. is another example, said Amaha Kassa, executive director and founder of African Communities Together. This past summer, the nation’s capitol saw National Guard soldiers flood Black neighborhoods and chase residents in encounters posted to social media. Kassa said the federal law enforcement presence, whether Guard troops or ICE agents, show the intersection between issues that have long plagued Black communities, and immigration enforcement that seeks to alter the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

“I think what we could not have anticipated was how reckless and lawless the use of executive power has been,” Kassa said. “And certainly,” he added later, “they are aggressively seeking to denaturalize people who may have had any contact with the criminal justice system. Clearly there’s a risk of denaturalization and stripping of citizenship from people who’ve had criminal convictions.”

Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship is another looming concern for Black Americans. The Jan. 20, 2025 executive order contrasted the 14th Amendment protections against “excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race” with children born to undocumented parents or parents with legal temporary residence in the U.S. 

Almost as soon as Trump issued his order, it was met with an avalanche of legal challenges, eventually becoming subject to a class action lawsuit filed by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the birthright citizenship case in April.

In response to a TPM inquiry, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the president’s executive order “would not apply retroactively” and is designed to remove the guarantee of citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants. “This is an absurd argument made in bad faith by partisan actors seeking to attack the Administration’s efforts to safeguard American citizenship,” Jackson said. “The government’s position is that the Citizenship Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment was expressly designed to ensure that slaves and their descendants were guaranteed citizenship and that it does not guarantee citizenship to the children of illegal aliens.”

But experts said revoking any part of the 14th Amendment citizenship protections is a slippery slope for generational U.S. citizens, including Black Americans whose naturalization is guaranteed only under that amendment.

“To start to even question the supreme law of the land, which has always been what it is, raises a lot of concerns,” Minnesota-based immigration attorney Nkechi James-Gillman told TPM. “Because if that one becomes compromised, what else?”

Meet the ‘Cabal’-Hating ‘Special Government Employee’ Involved in the Fulton County FBI Raid

Posted on by Hunter Walker

Clay Parikh does not want to talk about who he is working with inside the White House. However, in an extraordinary and extensive conversation with TPM, he had a lot to say about many other things, including his concerns that the “deep state” and a shadowy “cabal” is influencing our elections. 

Continue reading “Meet the ‘Cabal’-Hating ‘Special Government Employee’ Involved in the Fulton County FBI Raid” →

Bondi Won’t Say Who Is On DOJ’s New List Of Domestic Terrorists Besides ‘Antifa’

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

‘I Know Antifa Is Part of That’

Attorney General Pam Bondi repeatedly skirted attempts on Wednesday by Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) to get answers about Trump administration directives from September, which included the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NPSM-7), that cast a bunch of non-controversial ideas — “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” — as worthy of investigation by federal law enforcement. It was interpreted, rightly, as an attempt to train the might of federal law enforcement on Trump’s political and ideological enemies.

It’s a focus of the Trump administration’s that TPM’s Josh Kovensky has been covering for months. Much of the work of Trump’s second term has fixated on cracking down on dissent and Trump’s perceived political foes, including U.S. citizens who reside in blue states and cities across the nation. The DOJ memos from last year that Scanlon elevated in her questions to Bondi today not only labeled “antifa” and non-profit or activists associated with the amorphous, leftist ideology as potentially contributing to domestic terrorism, but also directed prosecutors across the country to target people who espouse speech that suggests “extremism on migration, race, and gender.”

Josh Kovensky gets into all of this a lot more in depth in a new rolling project on TPM, focused on the Trump administration’s efforts to create an “enemy within.” But during today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing with Bondi, Scanlon attempted to get Bondi to confirm whether the Justice Department has, in fact, created some sort of list of groups that it deems domestic terrorist organizations, as outlined in the directives last year. Scanlon also asked Bondi if she’d commit to sharing that list with Congress if/when it is created (the deadline for creating such a list and reporting to President Trump and Stephen Miller with it has already passed).

“I’d remind you that when the U.S. government designates an entity as a foreign terrorist organization, it must report that to Congress and to the entity because the government can make a mistake and the entity has the opportunity to contest it,” Scanlon said. “So your position seems to be that if you falsely designate an American or an American organization as a terrorist group there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Bondi not only refused to give any specifics about the “list” — beyond declaring that “antifa” is on it — but she also would not commit to sharing that information with Congress:

Scanlon: As you know, as a lawyer, holding beliefs that the White House disagrees with is not a crime. And the statute defining domestic terrorism requires acts, not just thoughts and ideas. That’s why legal experts, non-profit leaders, religious freedom and civil rights advocates immediately raised the alarm that the new presidential directive was a politically motivated attack on civil society, designed to silence those who disagree with the administration.

So, Ms. Bondi, section three of that memo directed you, as attorney general, to submit to the president and Stephen Miller a list of groups or entities whose members are engaged in acts that meet the definition of domestic terrorism. And then on December 4, you directed the FBI to work with a variety of law enforcement entities to compile a list of groups and entities engaged in such acts. Can we assume that you or persons under your direction at the Department of Justice have prepared that list of groups or entities who are designated as domestic terrorist organizations? And I just remind you that’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question.

Bondi: Well I’m not going to answer it ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but what I will say is, I know Antifa is part of that.

Scanlon pressed Bondi again on if she would commit to sharing such a list with Congress. Bondi responded saying, “We will comply with the law in all matters,” and later adding, “I’m not going to commit to anything with you because you won’t let me answer questions.”

While Bondi refused to engage with the congresswoman’s line of questioning, Scanlon did seize on the moment to outline, in clear terms, what exactly the Trump administration appears to be doing with this specific layer of its crackdown on dissent: silencing the opposition.

“The administration is keeping lists of Americans who the White House says are engaged in domestic terrorism. Those lists could include Americans who have not committed any acts of terrorism, but simply disagree with this administration — people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti,” she said. “… Americans have never tolerated political demagogues who use the government to punish people on an enemies list.”

— Nicole LaFond

Bovino Praised ICE Agent Who Shot Chicago Woman

Lawyers for Marimar Martinez — a teacher in Chicago who was shot five times by an ICE agent in October, dubbed a “domestic terrorist” by a Trump administration press release, and charged with assaulting or impeding a federal officer before the government reversed course and moved to dismiss the case against her — have been pushing to get the government to correct the record since her case was dropped. In court last week, Department of Homeland Security lawyers refused to change their stance on Martinez, standing by their press releases and statements put out in the aftermath of the shooting, which labeled Martinez a domestic terrorist and alleged she rammed ICE agents with her vehicle, along with nine other cars that never existed. She has rejected the government’s account and said that the agents were the aggressors. The agent who shot her did not have his body camera on during the encounter, but other footage from the scene and testimony from the agent involved helped dispel the government’s narrative.

A federal judge ruled on Friday that additional evidence from the case could be released publicly, including additional text messages and emails that the agent who shot her, Charles Exum, sent and received in the aftermath of the incident. Some texts that Exum sent after the shooting have already been made public. In one, he brags about how many times he shot Martinez. In line with the Friday order, more of Exum’s communications were released Tuesday. They shed light on how Exum was praised by Trump administration officials in the hours after the incident. One particularly troubling exchange, per NBC News:

In one email hours after the shooting of Martinez, Bovino, the former commander-at-large of Border Patrol who has since been removed from the post and returned to his station in El Centro, California, wrote to Exum, “I’d like to extend an offer for you to extend your retirement beyond age 57. … In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much yet left to do!!”

— Nicole LaFond

Top House Appropriations Dem Introduces Bill to Fund DHS Without ICE, CBP

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced a bill on Wednesday to fully fund every agency under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) except Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot be abolished, but I will not provide a single dime of funding until we see radical changes in how it operates,” DeLauro said in a statement. “If Republican leadership blocks this legislation from moving forward, they are responsible for any shuttered agencies, furloughed workers, missed paychecks, or reduced services.”

DeLauro’s bill would make sure a potential, impending DHS-specific partial shutdown would only include a funding lapse for ICE and CBP and not impact departments like TSA, FEMA and the Coast Guard. That funding lapse however would largely be symbolic as ICE and CBP already have a separate pool of funding they can draw on that was allocated by 2025’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Congress has until Feb. 13 to find a way to fund DHS or face a partial shutdown. A shutdown has been looking more and more likely as the (barely existing) negotiations between the Trump White House/Republicans and congressional Democrats have seemingly reached a stalemate. Most Democrats say unless they see more meaningful negotiations around the ICE reforms they have pushed, they would not vote to pass another CR. Some may be open to DeLauro’s solution as they have been discussing the possibility of breaking out parts of the DHS bill and funding them while negotiations on ICE and CBP continue.

— Emine Yücel

In Case You Missed It

The latest in Josh Kovensky’s coverage of the Trump administration’s efforts to treat dissent as terrorism: Feds Cast About for an ‘Antifa’ That Encompasses All Trump Opponents

TPM Cafe: DHS Was Built to Come After People Like Me. Now, They Are After All of Us.

New from Layla A. Jones: January Jobs Report Shows Trump Is Failing On Campaign Promises to Blue Collar Workers

Morning Memo: This Is What an Out-of-Control DOJ Looks Like

Josh Marshall: Thinking Clearly About the Global Authoritarian Movement 

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

What Are the Masks for Exactly?

What We Are Reading

Pirro Enlists Dance Photographer-Lawyer in Lawmaker Video Case

No grand jurors found the Trump DOJ met low probable cause threshold in failed indictment of Democratic lawmakers 

Tillis pans ‘political lawfare’ after grand jury declines to indict Democratic lawmakers 

Thinking Clearly About the Global Authoritarian Movement

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Day after day we’re seeing more signs of Donald Trump’s slipping grip not only on public opinion, but at the margins of the GOP itself. But I thought it was a good time to remind ourselves that Donald Trump isn’t the only problem. Yes, there’s the GOP, which could easily dispatch him at any point if he didn’t have an iron hold over the party. There’s the 30%-40% of voters who are solidly in the MAGA camp. Without them, Trump’s nothing. I don’t mean either of those. I’m talking about the global authoritarian movement, which includes and is even perhaps led by Trump. But it exists quite apart from him and has roots in some of the wealthiest and most powerful people and governments around the world.

Continue reading “Thinking Clearly About the Global Authoritarian Movement” →

January Jobs Report Shows Trump Is Failing On Campaign Promises to Blue Collar Workers

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

After the first full year of President Donald Trump’s economic policies, which came with rhetoric aimed especially at growing manufacturing job opportunities through protectionist policies like tariffs, the verdict is in: Meh.

Continue reading “January Jobs Report Shows Trump Is Failing On Campaign Promises to Blue Collar Workers” →

This Is What an Out-of-Control DOJ Looks Like

Posted on by David Kurtz

An Attack on the Constitutional Order

Over the course yesterday afternoon and into the evening, the full extent of the Trump Justice Department’s deterioration into thuggery came into clearer view.

First came the release of the preposterous affidavit in support of the search warrant for 2020 election ballots and records in Fulton County, Georgia, which revealed that the FBI became involved after a “referral” from Kurt Olsen, a Stop the Steal lawyer who was hired last year by the administration to investigate the 2020 election. Olsen works in the Trump White as a “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” according to the affidavit.

Then came the news the the Trump DOJ had unbelievably sought indictments of six sitting Democratic members of Congress for participating in a video that reminded service members of their duty not to follow unlawful orders. A D.C. grand jury mercifully declined to indict Sens. Mark Kelly (AZ) and Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Reps. Jason Crow (CO), Maggie Goodlander (NH), Chrissy Houlahan (PA), and Chris Deluzio (PA).

The NYT put it succinctly: “The president, emboldened by his success in bending the Justice Department and F.B.I. to his will, has intensified his effort to deploy the vast arsenal of federal law enforcement to pursue his political agenda and personal grievances.”

This is what a fully politicized and weaponized Justice Department looks like. It is not a pretty thing. I am not by nature an alarmist, but caution is a luxury right now. This is a five-alarm fire. Every single American is in jeopardy when federal law enforcement operates outside the rule of law at the beck and call of any president, let alone a deranged mad king like Donald Trump.

A few thoughts on the latest developments:

  • I am baffled how the flimsy and obviously politicized search warrant application made it past federal magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas. One way of looking at the affidavit by FBI special agent Hugh Raymond Evans is that it conspicuously included everything a judge needed NOT to sign off on the search warrant.
  • This is probably the former lawyer in me speaking, but one of the most striking things about the worst of the Trump DOJ’s cases is how quickly they bring them. Clearly DOJ is under orders from the White House to act and act now. Careful investigation, extensive legal research, strategic decision-making about the long-term institutional impacts of bringing certain cases or taking particular positions in court — things DOJ would normally do, often at a pace that to outsiders looked ridiculously slow — are all out the window.
  • Grand juries are the surprise bulwark against fascism, but I’d hesitate before taking much solace from it or placing much reliance on it. First, targets of bogus investigations are still subject to harassment, threat, expense, and emotional distress during the investigation phase even if it doesn’t lead to an indictment. Second, grand juries remain easily manipulated and in a bad position to reject bogus prosecutions when prosecutors and investigators are not acting in good faith. The no-true bills returned of late remain the exception and not the rule.
  • It is hard to convey the extent to which both of yesterday’s cases defy the ethical obligations prosecutors have to do justice and to only bring cases they think they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt and win conviction. A grand jury rejection of an indictment isn’t no harm/no foul. D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s decision to bring that particular case is a travesty, especially given the First Amendment and Speech or Debate Clause protections for members of Congress.

A final overarching point: Both of these cases are attacks on the constitutional framework. The Georgia case is a threat to states’ power to conduct federal elections, and targeting members of Congress with politicized prosecutions is direct attack on the separation of powers. So when I say that every American is in jeopardy from a lawless DOJ, that’s true both in sense of you could be next and in the peril it poses to the constitutional order.

Quote of the Day

“If these fuckers think that they’re going to intimidate us and threaten and bully me into silence, and they’re going to go after political opponents and get us to back down, they have another thing coming.”—Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), a former Army Ranger, reacting to the Trump DOJ’s attempted prosecution of him and five other Democratic members of Congress

A Pattern Is Emerging …

In the third such case recently, U.S. District Judge Hala Y. Jarbou of Lansing rebuffed the Trump DOJ’s request for Michigan’s voter data.

Mass Deportation Watch

  • Chicago: In an email, CBP commander Gregory Bovino praised the agent who shot a Chicago woman five times: “In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much yet left to do!!”
  • Nationwide: The Trump administration’s initial bold claims about shootings by federal agents are repeatedly falling apart in court.
  • Minnesota: Despite all the administration’s big talk, the Trump DOJ is charging many of the alleged assaults on federal agents in Minnesota as misdemeanors.

Faces of the Resistance

  • Joseph H. Thompson, a former senior federal prosecutor who resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota in January over Operation Metro Surge, has joined the legal defense team of former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who faces charges arising from his coverage of an anti-ICE protest at a St. Paul church.
  • J.P. Cooney, a former top deputy to the special counsel Jack Smith, plans to run for Congress as a Democrat in a newly drawn district in Virginia.

DHS Withdraws Bogus Subpoena

The Trump administration has withdrawn a retaliatory administrative subpoena targeting a WaPo reader who emailed a DHS lawyer after seeing him quoted in a newspaper article.

FAA Madness

Without any advance notice, the FAA overnight closed the airspace around El Paso’s airport through Feb. 20, citing nonspecific “national security reasons.” Then this morning, it just as abruptly, reopened it.

The airport is adjacent to the Army’s Ft. Bliss, which includes Biggs Army Airfield and Camp East Montana, the newly constructed ICE tent detention facility.

“The brief shutdown was related to a test of new military technology at nearby Fort Bliss Army base,” the NYT reports, thought that hardly begins to explain the mishandling of the closing of a major metro area’s airport.

The Destruction: Vaccine Edition

The FDA under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., refused to even accept Moderna’s application for a new mRNA flu vaccine, baffling the company, which had spent years and millions of dollars on the vaccine, including conducting a clinical trial with 41,000 participants.

The Corruption: Bridge to Nowhere Edition

President Trump’s extortionist threat to shut down the U.S. end of the soon-to-be-opened Canadian bridge to Michigan came after a phone call Monday from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who had just met with Matthew Moroun, the billionaire Detroit trucking magnate whose family — which operates an existing bridge between Michigan and Canada — has fought the new bridge for years, the NYT reports.

Taking the Gay Out of Stonewall

Stonewall Inn owner Stacy Lentz speaks during a protest in front of the Stonewall Monument in Manhattan in New York, on February 10, 2026 after the administration of US President Donald Trump ordered the removal of a Pride flag at the site. The Stonewall National Monument sits across the street from the Stonewall Inn, a National Historic Landmark known for its involvement in the beginning of the modern struggle for civil rights of gay and lesbian Americans. (Photo by Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)

In what appears to be part of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI historical revisionism, the Interior Department removed a Pride flag from NYC’s Stonewall Inn National Monument, which commemorates the cradle of the gay rights movement.

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Feds Cast About for an ‘Antifa’ That Encompasses All Trump Opponents

Posted on by Josh Kovensky

This article is part of TPM’s ongoing “Creating the Enemy Within” project, tracking the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.

For years, conspiracy theorists, grifters, and would-be authoritarians in search of a useful internal crisis have howled about a supposed threat hell-bent on destroying the government and the American way of life: antifa. 

Continue reading “Feds Cast About for an ‘Antifa’ That Encompasses All Trump Opponents” →