Trump DOJ Hit With a Wild Series of Bench Slaps

Posted on by David Kurtz

Trump Judge to DOJ: ‘Give Me a Break’

The judicial branch’s response to the Trump rampage has been slow but as The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic suggests, there are signs that it’s gathering steam. The more judges that dispense with the government’s presumption of regularity, the wider the door opens to investigating irregularities.

Still, the pace is halting and often hard to visualize because it comes in so many different flavors across so many different courts. But the past 24 hours have seen a flurry of examples of judicial pushback against the Trump administration that offers a good snapshot of the emerging moment:

In Florida: U.S. District Judge Kyle Dudek of Ft. Myers, a Trump appointee, issued an apoplectic order in a habeas case after the Trump administration failed to abide by his order to give an ICE detainee a bond hearing.

The Trump DOJ had originally conceded that the detainee was entitled to a bond hearing in front of an immigration judge. “What happened next borders on the surreal,” Dudek wrote in an order first flagged by Joyce Vance.

The immigration judge refused to hold a bond hearing, the administration went along with it, waiving its right to appeal, and then came back to Dudek saying its original concession “was in error.”

Dudek was not having any of it:

The Government was right the first time. And its request for a do-over here is not just legally unsupportable, it is a masterclass in litigation cynicism. A federal court is not a testing lab where the Executive branch can pilot a concession to get a case closed, stand by silently while its own administrative process flouts the resulting mandate, and then stroll back in demanding a clean slate. Give me a break.

But Dudek wasn’t done.

Rather than just re-order a bond hearing, he ordered the detainee released within 48 hours “because the Government has shown a complete inability to follow judicial directions.”

In Rhode Island: Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. popped the Trump administration for not immediately complying with his order to resume making asylum decisions and restart immigration processing.

“It should almost go without saying—but the Court will say it anyway for the sake of ‘clarify[ing]’ the Government’s ‘current obligations’ — that court orders vacating and setting aside agency policies have immediate effect once they are issued,” McConnell wrote.

McConnell gave the administration 24 hours to file a status report on the “specific steps” it’s taken to comply with his order: “There is no excuse this time; the Government has an obligation to immediately comply with this Order.”

In Illinois: After a federal judge ordered an evidentiary hearing into possible grand jury improprieties in an unrelated fraud case by the same prosecutor implicated in grand jury misconduct in the Broadview Six case, the Trump DOJ folded.

It moved to dismiss charges against two defendants in the rather serious fraud case rather than see its prosecutors, including potentially Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, hauled to the stand to give sworn testimony about the grand jury proceedings.

In D.C.: Chief Judge James Boasberg rejected a revisionist move by the Trump DOJ to vacate his earlier order quashing grand jury subpoenas in the politicized investigation of the Federal Reserve and its then-chairman Jay Powell. In revisiting his earlier ruling, Boasberg colorfully summarized it thusly:

This Court found that the subpoenas were meant to harass Powell and to pressure him to truckle to the President’s policy preferences. It also concluded that the Government had no good-faith basis to believe that Powell was guilty of any crime other than displeasing the President and that the Government’s justifications were mere pretexts.

As he rejected the latest move, Boasberg dryly called it “a creative way to clear its loss from the books.”

Trump’s Ultimate Revisionism

It sounds like Republicans will make a push in the lame-duck session of Congress after the midterm elections to expunge Donald Trump’s two first-term impeachments.

“I think it makes a lot of sense the more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) told the WSJ.

Slush Fund Ain’t Dead Yet

The Atlantic:

Behind the scenes, Justice Department and other Trump-administration officials have quietly assured allies that plans for some form of payout remain on track. I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated. 

Programming alert: I’ll be in court this morning in Alexandria, Virginia, in the case challenging the slush fund where the judge has already ordered the administration temporarily to pause any movement on the fund. Stay tuned …

Kennedy Center Deadline Is Today

Under court order to remove Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center by today, the performing arts venue’s Trump-aligned board made a last-ditch effort to buy more time, asking the judge to pause his order while it appeals his ruling. The move to appeal the ruling came on the 13th day of a 14-day window to remove Trump’s name, setting the stage for a series of last-minute rulings today from the trial court and possibly the appeals court.

Live Today at 3 p.m. ET: Chris Geidner

I can’t count the number of times that the Trump administration’s crusade against transgender Americans was the last item to miss the cut for that day’s Morning Memo.

Since it’s been a recurring frustration that I haven’t been able to give this important story more consistent attention, I’ve invited Chris Geidner, the nation’s leading reporter on it, to join me this afternoon for a catch-up session.

We’ll be live here at 3 p.m. ET. I hope you can join us.

Photo of the Day: 8647 Edition

You have to squint, but it’s mostly there. The WaPo paints a vivid picture of the Keystone Cops reaction to protest: “Multiple emergency vehicles could be seen encircling the grass about 1 p.m. A team of officers stood over brown patches in the grass, wearing gloves, and collected samples for testing from the grass with materials from a yellow case. Pedestrians were not permitted to walk on the grass, and a Park Service helicopter circled overhead.”

WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 11: The numbers “8647” are seen on the grass of the National Mall on June 11, 2026 in Washington, DC. The U.S. Park Police are handling the investigation into the markings in the grass. The numbers have been adopted by critics of President Donald Trump’s administration, serving as a form of protest. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

So Busted

A close friend texted me yesterday: “Hi, MM today is like Very Terrible, Very Terrible, Very Terrible, War Crimes, Ebola, THE END.”

It’s been like that a lot lately.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve drifted away from the practice of sprinkling into Morning Memo some nonpolitical reminders of our common humanity, the larger world, and … dare I say it? … joy.

So this is my pledge to try to get back to that practice and offer the occasional respite from the nonstop American carnage.

See Ya Back Here Monday

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

TPM VIDEO: David Kurtz and Chris Geidner on the Trump Admin’s Anti-Trans Crusade

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

The Trump administration’s unrelenting anti-trans crusade has many familiar Trump II elements: performative cruelty; using the powers of the state to bully a vulnerable, marginalized, disfavored group; and outrageous misconduct in pursuit of poisonous policy objectives.

TPM Editor-at-Large David Kurtz was joined by Chris Geidner, publisher of the Law Dork newsletter and the leading American journalist covering these issues, to talk about this sweeping assault on transgender Americans.

Check out the full video below.


60 Years Ago, a Civil Rights Icon Was Shot. A Flood of Now-Familiar Conspiracy Theories Followed.

Posted on by John Light

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

On June 6, 1966, on a stretch of Highway 51 just south of Hernando, Mississippi, a portly, middle-aged white man named Aubrey Norvell stepped out of a gully, lifted his shotgun and fired three shots at James Meredith, a Black civil rights activist and Air Force veteran.

Famous for integrating the University of Mississippi four years earlier, Meredith was on the second day of a walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, with the aims of registering voters and defying white intimidation.

Bloodied by bird shot, Meredith again returned to the national spotlight. The shooting transformed his walk into a civil rights spectacle.

Activists descended upon Mississippi for a three-week mass march. It featured titans of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., while inspiring Mississippians to march down country roads, volunteer their homes and food, and register at their local courthouses. During these protests, the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael introduced “Black Power,” a slogan of self-determination that marked the next stage in the Black freedom struggle.

It is a rich, intricate and evocative story — one that I tried to chronicle in my book, “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.”

Sixty years later, however, a mystery lingers. Clouded in the haze of a political extravaganza, Norvell never revealed his motivations for shooting Meredith.

His silence allowed for the flourishing of conspiracy theories — most notably, from those most resistant to racial equality. In a political and rhetorical strategy that echoes into the present day, many white conservative Southerners painted themselves as Norvell’s real victims.

American activist James Meredith on his way to class at University of Mississippi, escorted by US Marshal James McShane, left, and John Doar of the Justice Department, Oxford, Mississippi, October 1962. (Photo by FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

‘A quiet, Christian man’

At first, it was civil rights activists who suspected a conspiracy. Meredith’s companions testified that law enforcement had reacted slowly to Norvell’s threat. They assumed that Norvell was a virulent white supremacist, in cahoots with a racist police force.

But as reporters investigated Norvell, they found no evidence of a hate-spewing Klansman. He lived in a middle-class Memphis suburb. He had no criminal record. Neighbors described him as a “quiet, Christian man” who never mentioned civil rights, one way or another.

Upon posting bond, Norvell disappeared from the public eye until his trial that November.

The significance of bird shot

By presenting a blank slate, Norvell allowed white Southern conservatives to launch a counternarrative. The previous decade of Black activism, from the Montgomery bus boycott through the Selma-to-Montgomery march, had taught them that open violence ignited public outrage and prompted civil rights legislation. So they distanced themselves from Norvell.

Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson noted that Meredith was attacked “by birdshot by an out-of-state resident.” It foreshadowed the language employed by a host of Southern politicians and newspaper editorialists.

Again and again, in speeches and articles and letters, they mentioned that Norvell used bird shot. If he was aiming to kill, why pepper Meredith with pellets? They claimed a conspiracy against the white South.

“The whole affair smells badly of a plot instigated by the Communist-controlled rights groups and capitalized on by the press, the government, and all the other liberal screamers,” wrote one woman to Sen. James Eastland, as I discovered during my research. Like many others, she imagined that civil rights organizations paid Norvell to wound Meredith, which would stoke a media hubbub and invite the federal government to persecute white Southerners.

(Original Caption) Dr Martin Luther King Jr, (C) leads his “Mississippi Freedom Marchers” into Yalobusha county, “one of the roughest counties in the state.” An ambush of James Meredith has ballooned his personal voter registration march from Memphis to Jackson into the King-led march.

Searching for a conspiracy

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission opened in 1956 to protect white supremacy. In an incredible twist to this tale, a commission investigator authorized a $5,000 bribe to Norvell’s attorney if Norvell would admit that liberals paid him to shoot Meredith.

According to commission files, an FBI agent from Mississippi, high-ranking officials of the Memphis Police Department and a Mississippi district attorney all agreed that Norvell’s shooting was “a hired job for the advancement of various civil rights groups.”

Segregationists kept grasping at this far-fetched scenario, exaggerating and manipulating it to serve the purpose of discrediting the Meredith March Against Fear. A Mississippi sheriff named Jack Cauthen went even further, suggesting Meredith hadn’t even been shot in the first place. He claimed to have put his arm around Meredith, who had rejoined the march for its final days.

“His back was just smooth as silk. There hadn’t been no pellets or shots in James’s back,” asserted Cauthen, as I found while conducting research for my book. “I don’t think he was shot, no sir.”

Echoes from the past

Norvell pleaded guilty and spent 18 months in Parchman Prison in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Despite being approached by many journalists and historians — including me — he never revealed his motive. He died in 2016.

In the 1960s, white southerners perceived that their way of life was under assault by big institutions, including the federal government and the media. They blamed the Civil Rights Movement on nefarious “outside agitators” determined to smash their status. Their political motivations led them down bizarre and fantastical paths, with some even fashioning themselves as the true victims of Norvell’s attack.

Racist conspiracy theories still plague American politics, from baseless accusations that Barack Obama was born in Kenya to false assertions that global elites are engineering a “great replacement” of white Americans.

Even if these notions emerge from a modern sense of dislocation and anxiety, I think they have roots in the same crass bigotry that defined the conspiratorial segregationists of the civil rights era.

The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mike Johnson Is Talking About Cutting Social Safety Net Programs — Again

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

‘They Have to be Adjusted and Fixed’

Austerity only matters when Democrats are in charge.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) signaled this week how Republicans may begin stonewalling and messaging about Democrats should the party succeed in taking back the House this fall.

Buried at the bottom of a Washington Post piece about how the Social Security trust fund will begin running low on money by 2032, an insolvency problem that President Trump’s immigration policies and tax cuts for the wealthy have contributed to, was a quote from Johnson about his supposed plan to cut social services in order to decrease the deficit and, apparently, save the program:

“The reason we are in trouble is because over 74 percent of federal spending is on autopilot, mandatory spending,” Johnson reportedly recently told a Louisiana radio station. “That’s your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and then things like Social Security. They have to be adjusted and fixed.”

It is hardly worth pointing out hypocrisy at this point amid Republican leadership’s utter capitulation to the Trump regime, but for posterity’s sake: Johnson was a key figure in ensuring the passage of the first reconciliation package of Trump’s second term — the Big Beautiful Bill that slashed Medicaid funding in order to help offset the impact of making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy permanent. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that that legislation alone will add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years. Early CBO estimates show that the immigration enforcement package that Congress just passed via reconciliation (instead of the normal appropriations process) will add another $72 billion to the national debt over 10 years. In Republicans’ eyes, the trillions of dollars that those pieces of legislation will add to the deficit are not a factor in whether or not the legislation should be passed.

But you can all but guarantee that as soon as Democrats are in a position of power again, we will be hearing a lot about how the deficit has ballooned due to social services spending. Blaming Democrats for this newly rediscovered problem will become the party’s Priority No. 1. This may be what Johnson was foreshadowing. Aware of how unpopular it is to talk about making cuts to the social safety net, Johnson also, critically, previewed a plan for Social Security to be “adjusted and fixed” — the details of which we will not know about until, conveniently, after the midterms (and even the vague remarks are already causing issues for members of his conference). Per WaPo:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) suggested Monday that he would release a plan next year to address ballooning entitlement spending, leading to Democratic attacks.

As Paul Krugman explains in a piece unpacking a recent Social Security Trustees’ report about the solvency of Social Security trust fund, Republicans will likely use these metrics in the future to slash benefits:

But this is a ploy, because while the cost of maintaining Social Security benefits at their promised level isn’t trivial, it is in fact affordable. According to the Trustees’ report, the actuarial balance of OASDI up through 2050 — the amount of additional funds it would need to keep paying full benefits for the next 25 years — is 1.06 percent of GDP. To put that number in perspective, the Trump administration proposes increasing military spending next year by $420 billion, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of GDP – without any discussion of whether that’s affordable.

…

So don’t believe Republicans’ gaslighting that it will be necessary to cut Social Security benefits. All that is necessary to preserve Social Security is political will to raise taxes on the wealthy and a sensible immigration policy.

Is Trump Hoping Jay Clayton Will Play a Part in 2020 Retribution?

Before she left as director of national intelligence to help care for her husband, Tulsi Gabbard was intimately involved in various executive branch efforts to unearth something that will help bolster Trump’s beliefs that the 2020 election was stolen from him. She was inexplicably present as the FBI raided Fulton County, Georgia, for its election records and materials — and even helped connect President Trump via phone with the agents who conducted the raid. Reporting emerged after the Fulton County raid suggesting that Trump gave Gabbard an outsized role in overseeing the administration’s investigations into the 2020 vote, reportedly because he did not believe his Department of Justice was moving fast enough in doing his bidding.

After Gabbard’s departure, Trump announced that Bill Pulte would serve as acting DNI in her stead. An extreme Trump loyalist with little to no foreign intelligence experience, Pulte’s appointment caused even some members of Republican congressional leadership to express their concerns about what might happen should he be permanently nominated to the post. On Thursday, Trump declared on Truth Social that he was appointing Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney in Manhattan and the former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the position.

And while he has hedged himself a bit more, at least publicly, when speaking about Trump’s claims of rampant fraud — most recently, Trump is fixated on vote counting in California being slow, and therefore fraudulent (to him) — he has signaled a willingness to fuel various conspiracy theories on that front. Per New York Times:

This week, Mr. Clayton appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and raised concerns about the recent elections in California, after Mr. Trump suggested there had been fraud in the vote.

Mr. Clayton told CNBC earlier this month that the country was “doing an absolutely terrible job” on issues of election integrity, “and the American people are right to question it.” He also questioned California voting laws, including the lack of voter identification.

“I’m not saying that there is fraud,” Mr. Clayton said. “I am saying that the opportunity for fraud makes no sense to me when we can make a much better system.”

Whole States Are RSVP-ing ‘No’ to Trump’s Vanity Bday Bash

Per new reporting out today, from NOTUS:

Days after an exodus of musical acts, officials from Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Oregon told NOTUS they won’t officially send a delegation to the 16-day fair, one of the most high-profile celebrations of the nation’s 250th birthday this summer.

In Case You Missed It

The lastest on the Broadview Six from Josh Kovensky: Prosecutors Left, Bogus Cases Collapsed as Boutros Charged Broadview Six

And more, inside Morning Memo today: The Broadview Six Fallout Spreads to Other Cases

New edition of The Franchise, from Khaya Himmelman: A Seasoned Big Liar May Soon be Running Elections in Nevada

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

What the Pentagon’s Snub of Mormons Was Really All About

What We Are Reading

Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files

And Then There Were 23(ish)…

These N.Y.C. Tables Are Impossible to Get. Except During a Knicks Game.

‘Midway Blitz’ & ‘Metro Surge’ Were Always About Terrorizing Blue Cities

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I generally focus more on the iterative, step-by-step developments in a story like the Broadview Six case. So I want to make sure you see this Josh Kovensky piece on the context in which it all happened: Washington pressuring Chicago prosecutors to fall in line and abuse their power in the service of “Midway Blitz,” a U.S. attorney’s office hollowed out through high-level resignations and departures in 2025. All a mix desperation, violence and misconduct that brought us to that moment last October and today. Also don’t miss David Kurtz’s look at how the Broadview Six scandal is spreading to and endangering other cases which aren’t really tied to Midway Blitz at all.

I want to remind us of something that is easy to lose track of amidst the violence, predation and anger. Operations “Midway Blitz” and “Metro Surge” — both hideous faux-military operation tag lines — were never only or even mainly about mass deportation or even harassing immigrants (documented and not), though they did lots of both. Their aim was to terrorize blue cities, attack the communities that inhabit them and the states which are sovereign over them. This may strike some as a bold or ungenerous claim. But these operations were never efficient at rounding up undocumented immigrants. ICE has many more effective ways of doing that.

Continue reading “‘Midway Blitz’ & ‘Metro Surge’ Were Always About Terrorizing Blue Cities” →

A Seasoned Big Liar May Soon be Running Elections in Nevada

Posted on by Khaya Himmelman

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

We don’t yet have official results for Nevada’s secretary of state primary this week — officials are still counting ballots. But it appears that longtime election denier Jim Marchant — a GOP candidate and a major election conspiracy theorist who unsuccessfully ran for the same position back in 2022 — has a good chance of winning and, ominously, could actually be on a path toward becoming the chief election official in Nevada. 

Let me jog your memory because Marchant’s election denial history goes back a few years. 

Since 2020 Marchant has consistently and baselessly claimed that the 2020 election was stolen — from him and from President Trump. Marchant ran for a U.S. House seat in 2020 and lost. He has been maintaining his claims of a rigged election, and running for various elected offices on a campaign of election denialism, ever since. 

In 2022, Marchant, who is a former state legislator, was the GOP nominee for Nevada secretary of state and was the founding member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition — a cohort of Big Liars running for secretary of state positions in the aftermath of the 2020 election on a platform of overturning the 2020 results. 

He ultimately lost to Democrat Cisco Aguilar. At the time, he told NBC News that it is “almost statistically impossible that Joe Biden won [Nevada],” and that if he was secretary of state, he would not have certified the election results. He ran in the Republican primaries for Jacky Rosen’s Senate seat in 2024, placing third. Now, throwing his hat back in the ring for the secretary of state race again this year, he may finally be on the verge of a primary victory. 

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Marchant, who has ties to QAnon, was also at the helm of a conspiracy theory-fueled effort in Nye County to get rid of voting machines and move to a hand-counting ballot system — a system that is both inefficient and error-prone, but one that gained popularity among Big Lie enthusiasts post-2020 as Trump’s supporters spread lies about hacked voting machines. 

As always, there’s a lot more to unpack this week. Let’s dig in. 

The Big Lie: 2026 Edition

In some very on brand news… President Trump has begun spreading the 2026 edition of the Big Lie, following pretty much the same script as the 2020 version.

Trump stormed out of a “Meet the Press” interview that aired Sunday after NBC’s Kristen Welker pushed back on Trump’s comments about California’s “rigged” elections. 

Trump repeated some familiar (and completely baseless) claims about the 2020 election during the interview, and then specifically claimed that California’s primary election is being rigged because the state is still counting ballots in a few key races — something that is both expected and normal in a large state like California. 

“The election was rigged, it was a dirty election,” Trump said.  “And it’s happening again right now in California.”  

Trump claimed, without any evidence, that Republican candidates “are dropping fast because it’s a rigged election.”

The vote counting process in California can be especially time consuming due to the size of the state and the sheer volume of mail-in ballots it receives.

California has the biggest electorate in the country with over 23 million registered voters and it’s one of eight states that has universal mail-in voting. This means that all voters automatically receive mail-in ballots, which is why over 80 percent of California ballots are usually cast by mail. Election officials also must verify the signatures on mail-in ballots before they are processed. 

“Some ballots will take counties up to 30 days to count every valid ballot and conduct a post-election audit,” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a statement last week, confirming that the state’s process would indeed take some time. “California elections officials prioritize the right to vote and election security over rushing the vote count. We have a process that by law ensures both voting rights and the integrity of elections, so I would call on all Californians to be patient.”

Of course, though, the explanation of this process did not (and never does!) stop Trump and his allies from spreading lies about last week’s primary election in California. 

“Four days and they aren’t even close to coming up with… You know why they are doing that? Because they are cheating on the election,” he added. 

After Welker asked Trump for evidence for his claims, he simply said: “They’re crooked just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked.”

“You play right into their hands with this stuff. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged,” he added, before ending the interview. 

Trump has similarly been vocal on Truth Social, alleging rampant fraud in California simply because the results of the election have shifted as … more ballots are counted. 

“There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY??? President DJT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. 

Following these baseless claims of fraud, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli, who is a Trump appointee, announced on Friday, that his office has opened “multiple election fraud investigations” and that the state’s elections have “serious structural vulnerabilities.” 

Essayli is also now calling out California officials for not handing over its voter rolls to the DOJ, a federal overreach that most other states have resisted and fought in court. 

“For over a year, the Department of Justice has been trying to audit California’s voter rolls,” he wrote on X this week. “Federal law gives the Attorney General the authority to review state voter files and confirm that only eligible U.S. citizens are voting in federal elections.”

Senate Dems are Sounding Alarm on Trump Admin’s Election Interference 

A group of Democratic senators is calling out the DOJ’s “quiet removal” of a long-standing 281-page guide for the prosecution of election-related crimes from its website. 

In a letter this week to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Sens. Alex Padilla (D-CA), Dick Durbin (D-IL),  Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and 21 other Senate Democrats, sounded “the alarm” on the administration’s continued attempts to interfere in the midterm elections. 

The letter comes in response to recent reporting from NOTUS, which documented the various ways the DOJ has failed to take steps to protect the 2026 midterm elections, including the removal of the long-standing Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses from the DOJ’s website. The now-deleted manual stated that DOJ prosecutors shouldn’t seize voting materials until after an election has been certified, as the senators point out in their letter. 

NOTUS also reported that the DOJ has gotten rid of election-integrity training for prosecutors and FBI agents, fired most of the lawyers in the Public Integrity Section, and has not established a “command center” to address election-related emergencies ahead of the midterm elections. 

“…the removal of this manual continues to raise the alarm about DOJ’s involvement in the upcoming midterm elections for partisan political purposes,” the letter reads. “We urge you to confirm the Department’s adherence to the principles outlined in the manual and be transparent about what, if any, changes the Department is making to this longstanding policy to protect elections from political interference.”

The letter also mentions the DOJ’s floundering campaign to seize sensitive voter information from 44 states and Washington D.C., and how that campaign may set the “pretext for more meritless pre- and post-election challenges, including interfering with election certification.” 

“To be clear, any attempts by DOJ to file lawsuits to stop eligible voters from voting, their votes from being counted, or elections from being certified, will fail, but any attempts are still corrosive to public trust and confidence in our election administration and invite threats against nonpartisan election workers,” the senators wrote. 

MAGA Georgia Election Board Shakeup

One of Georgia’s MAGA state election board members, Janice Johnston — who Donald Trump once referred to as a pitbull “fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” — resigned last week citing personal reasons.

“While I may be leaving the board, I’m not leaving the cause,”Johnston, who was appointed to the board in 2022, said last week. “My commitment to election integrity remains as strong as ever and I’ll continue supporting efforts that strengthen confidence, transparency and trust in our elections.”

Johnston, along with fellow MAGA-aligned board members Janelle King and Rick Jaffares, approved an extremely problematic rule in 2024 that gave county officials new authority over election administration. It also gave the board the ability to delay election certification until a “reasonable inquiry” into any discrepancies in the voting process had been conducted. 

The issue with the rules is that the “reasonable inquiry” language was incredibly vague, and designed to give the board more power than it should have over when an election is certified, as previously reported by TPM. 

The board, per state law, is only meant to play a ministerial role in the election certification process, making this election rule especially problematic. In June 2025, the Georgia State Supreme Court rejected this rule and others, saying that the board exceeded its authority in approving the changes. 

And, more recently, we learned that Johnston actually played a role in the FBI’s raid in Fulton County, Georgia as it seeks to investigate the 2020 election, per reporting from AJC. 

For many years, Johnston has baselessly claimed there was voter fraud in the 2020 election and has called for the dismissal of the Fulton County elections director. 

Johnston will be replaced by Carolyn Roddy, who was nominated by the Georgia Republican Party.

In Other Election News

CNN: Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive

Democracy Docket: ‘This is chaos’: Maricopa County election-denier official accused of seizing election equipment, ballots

Democracy Docket: Florida Supreme Court greenlights GOP gerrymander that violates state ban  

Votebeat: The Trump administration’s multiple investigations of the 2020 election may have more to do with 2026

Personalism and War: What’s Up With Trump and Iran?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

The U.S. and Iran have drifted back into active combat and President Trump is on Truth Social promising again to rain destruction down on the country and now more explicitly promising the outcome which triggered this conflict in the first place: the idea that Trump would duplicate in Iran what he has, kind of amazingly, pulled off so far in Venezuela. It’s a good moment to remember what’s going on here — what we’re doing here, big picture.

This war has been going on for almost four months. But most of that time has been under one or another kind of ceasefire, albeit often honored in the breach. A friend recently compared it to the so-called “Phoney War”, the eight-month period in 1939 and 1940 when Germany, France and Britain were nominally at war, though full-scale combat didn’t begin until the invasion of France in May 1940.

Continue reading “Personalism and War: What’s Up With Trump and Iran?” →

Brunson

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I’m not a huge basketball fan. A casual one, mostly. But it’s become more central to my sports interests over the years. When I was a kid, baseball and football were the only sports and baseball was … well, baseball. What else was there to say? At least in our home that’s how it was. But I’ve been pulled in the same way as the whole society has by the rise of American basketball over the course of my lifetime. And I’ve been pulled hard into Knicks’ destiny run. You’ll see other commentary about last night’s game, literally the biggest comeback in NBA playoff history. But I wanted to share one moment with you, one that came after the game when Knicks captain Jalen Brunson went on ESPN’s Inside the NBA post-game show.

Continue reading “Brunson” →

The Broadview Six Fallout Spreads to Other Cases

Posted on by David Kurtz

‘A Credibility Crisis’

The prosecutorial misconduct with the grand jury in the Broadview Six case is threatening otherwise unrelated cases handled by the same prosecutor, Sheri Mecklenburg.

In a move that is likely to bring even more scrutiny to U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros’ office, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman of Chicago scheduled an evidentiary hearing for June 17 over alleged grand jury misconduct by Mecklenburg in a high-profile COVID-testing fraud case.

Defense lawyers allege that Mecklenburg vouched for the evidence, disclosed off-the-record negotiations with a defense attorney, and used “inflammatory characterizations of the defendants, including name-calling and folk-wisdom metaphors.”

Coleman opened the door to the defense counsel calling witnesses at the hearing, including potentially Boutros himself, the Sun-Times reports:

The judge also told [Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur] there are “a lot of people in your sphere that I’m assuming are going to be asked to come testify, and you may want to avoid that.” The judge didn’t say out loud how MacArthur could avoid it, but she said MacArthur knows what to do.

The judge’s apparent implication was that the prosecutors would do well to dismiss the tainted case.

The Chicago Tribune put it all in a uniquely Chicago context:

If the evidentiary hearing goes forward, it would be the most significant inquiry into potential prosecutorial misconduct by the U.S. attorney’s office since the mid-1990s, when a trio of judges concluded that Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan and others had improperly given favors — including conjugal visits in government offices — to cooperators against leaders of the violent El Rukn street gang.

More than 30 years later, Hogan is at the center of the Broadview Six controversy after taking over the case in February when Mecklenburg left the office for a job in Washington, D.C.

By his own admission, Hogan was responsible for the misleading redactions in the grand jury transcript in the Broadview Six case that so infuriated U.S. District Judge April Perry and has her considering sanctions.

In a separate case this week, lawyers for a man serving a three-year prison sentence for bank fraud asked U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland to review the transcripts of his grand jury, which was also handled by Mecklenburg.

Judge Rowland agreed to review the transcripts, despite the man’s 2023 guilty plea: “The front office has created, as you know, a credibility crisis, and that is a real problem,” the judge told the prosecutor.

Judge Declines to Block Trump Slush Fund

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C. decided to take the Trump administration at its word (I know, but there’s at least a method to the madness) that the anti-weaponization slush fund is dead. After a brief hearing of less than 30 minutes, Leon ruled from the bench that if the slush fund is really dead then the case is moot and he has no jurisdiction to take action against it.

The ruling, while a win for the administration, came with a warning from Leon that it had now made representations to the court in writing and in arguments that he would hold it to.

After the hearing, I spoke with the lead attorney for the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which brought the lawsuit, and he acknowledged that one of the group’s goals was to get a ruling on mootness in order to box in the administration. After acting Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to commit in writing to Congress that the slush fund is dead, DOJ had to make that commitment in this case, and now Judge Leon can hold them to it.

Still, the biggest threat remains that the White House and DOJ will come up with a workaround, an alternative mechanism like the Federal Tort Claims Act, to pay off the Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump allies, a way of sidestepping the judge and their prior commitments not to proceed.

For more on the hearing:

David Kurtz goes live after hearing to block Trump’s slush fund by TPM

A recording from David Kurtz’s live video

Read on Substack

Quote of the Day

“Don’t play possum with this court.”—U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, warning the Trump DOJ that it better not just be pretending that the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is dead

The Situation Room?

I struggle to get past the opening anecdote from this excerpt of the new book by NYT reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Top administration officials used the Situation Room last summer for a meeting on containing the political fallout from the Epstein scandal — and, as if to demonstrate that the White House and Main Justice were no longer distinct entities, the upper ranks of DOJ participated in the meeting:

  • Attorney General Pam Bondi
  • FBI Director Kash Patel
  • Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche
  • Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr.
  • DOJ deputy chief of staff James Blair

Out of this meeting came Blanche’s infamous jailhouse interview of Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Retribution: The Banks

Another Trump grievance has come to forefront: Banks closing his accounts after the Jan. 6 coup attempt.

Trump signed an executive order back in August targeting the banks, and he and his family later filed suits against Capital One and JPMorgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon.

Now, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has subpoenaed a slew of banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, about whether they improperly closed customer accounts for political reasons, the WSJ reports.

Pirro reportedly launched her investigation on her own, without a referral from bank regulators, and is using the same two hand-picked prosecutors she assigned to the politically motivated investigation of the Federal Reserve and its then-chair Jay Powell.

The Retribution: Michigan Protestors

Trump DOJ is bringing unusual federal conspiracy charges against pro-Palestinian protestors with ties to the University of Michigan, raising the stakes in the administration’s push to criminalize dissent, opposition, and political views it disfavors.

The Corruption: Trump’s Crypto Craze

It’s tails Trump wins, and heads investors lose, according to a new analysis from Reuters:

A Reuters examination shows that the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April, according to a Reuters analysis. 

On Morality and Voting

Brian Beutler chews over Graham Platner:

Voting, particularly in a two-party democracy, is about harm reduction. Even when candidates are inspiring and well-intentioned, voting is still about harm reduction, because politics is highly impure. Superpower politics are especially impure. Voting is utilitarian. It is not like flashing a gang sign. In a contest between a bad candidate and a worse one, voting for the bad candidate is like expressing the moral intuition that someone should amputate a gangrenous leg rather than allow the patient to die.

Boat Strikes Take an Even Darker Turn

Amanda Klasing, on last week’s revelation that targeting decisions in the lawless U.S. high-seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats don’t factor in whether the boats are carrying drugs or arms:

The presence of drugs or arms on the targeted boats would not change the rights to due process and to life of people on board. It is, however, a baffling admission that this cruel and lethal program is targeting these boats based on criteria other than being in possession of the very items purported in the administration’s already unlawful and dubious justification.

Ebola Watch

Slate’s Jill Filipovic reports from Kenya: “The demise of USAID did not cause this Ebola outbreak. But it is a gift to Ebola. It likely delayed its detection and hampered efforts to deliver tests and treatment to the affected areas. It has broken down meticulously constructed networks of trust and generally slowed the response to the virus.”

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