One figure has emerged repeatedly in the first two days of a trial over President Trump’s attempted deployment of the National Guard to Portland: The out-of-control, tear gas-happy federal officer.
Continue reading “Portland Points to Random Use of Force by Fed Officers as It Fights Nat’l Guard Deployment “Republicans on the Hill and right-wing media, in tandem with the Trump administration, are creating a MAGA feedback loop by releasing DOJ and FBI records from the “Arctic Frost” investigation, pretending they contain new and damaging revelations not already publicly reported or contained in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s own report, and howling in faux outrage over the supposed Deep State conspiracy against President Trump and Jan. 6 participants.
It is a model of disinformation first perfected in the B-E-N-G-H-A-Z-I attack and constantly re-adapted for the Trump era.
One of the challenges is that each far-flung conspiracy theory develops its own argot that pretty quickly becomes impenetrable to outsiders but remains a tribal signifier to powerful effect.
Suffice to say for our current purposes that Arctic Frost was the FBI investigation of the conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election that ended up being a precursor to Smith’s investigation. All the noise a few weeks ago about Smith getting the toll records (flagrantly miscast as tapping the phones) of GOP members of Congress? That was a legal and already known part of the Arctic Frost investigation, but Hill Republicans seized on newly-released documents to portray it as a scandal they had just unearthed. The demand for Smith to testify on the Hill is part of this latest outbreak of targeted outrage.
While mainstream outlets struggle to cover the true dynamic of these disinformation campaigns, the latest ever-evolving Deep State conspiracy becomes a staple of right-wing media, fed by supposed new disclosures from the administration and laundered through Hill Republicans.
While Smith has been in Trump’s crosshairs since the day he was appointed special counsel, the new drip-drip-drip of “revelations” is fueling the fire to seek retribution against Smith at a new level of intensity. Given the current prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James and President Trump’s repeated threats against Smith, we may well look back on this new spasm of disinformation as softening the ground for a bogus prosecution of Smith.
It gives President Trump another opportunity to demand that Smith be investigated and imprisoned without necessarily directly ordering it: “These thugs should all be investigated and put in prison. A disgrace to humanity. Deranged Jack Smith is a criminal!!!” Trump posted yesterday.
After suspending prosecutors who dared to refer to Jan. 6 as involving a “a mob of rioters,” the Trump DOJ filed a new sentencing memo in the case of Taylor Taranto, who is set to be sentenced today.
By the time he was pardoned by President Trump for his role in Jan. 6, Taranto had been convicted on unrelated threats and firearms charges after being arrested in June 2023 near the D.C. home of the Obamas.
Here’s what was redacted in the new sentencing memo
It’ll be interesting to see if the judge has anything to say about this during sentencing. Stay tuned …
Immigration officers are using facial recognition technology on American streets to confirm citizenship status, 404 Media reports.
The U.S. attorney in the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia revealed to the judge yesterday that he had received new documents he had never seen before from the Homeland Security Investigations supervisory agent overseeing the probe into alleged human smuggling.
The revelation comes in the context of the Trump administration fighting tooth and nail to avoid providing discovery to Abrego Garcia in support of his vindictive prosecution claim. Suddenly coughing up “a significant number of documents” the day before the judge’s deadline for providing him with ex parte access to the discovery is … suspicious.
The judge has scheduled two days of hearings next week to adjudicate the vindictive prosecution claim, but the discovery dispute is jeopardizing that schedule.
DHS claims it was not served with a federal court order barring the removal of a 44-year-old man who has lived in the United States since he was an infant until after it had already deported him to Laos. The ACLU has joined the case and is asking the judge to order the repatriation of Chanthila Souvannarath.
Anticipating that the Roberts Court will eviscerate the Voting Right Act, the Louisiana legislature passed a bill pushing back next year’s primary elections by about a month in hopes that it will have more time to redraw its congressional maps. Louisiana is challenging a key provision of the Voting Right Act at the Supreme Court, where oral arguments were heard earlier this month. A decision in the case wouldn’t typically be expected until the first half of next year, creating a time crunch that some red states are looking to ease by pushing election dates back.
DNI Tulsi Gabbard, with help on the Hill, is trying to wrest primary responsibility for counterintelligence away from the FBI, prompting a fierce turf battle.
Neither Gabbard nor FBI Director Kash Patel are qualified to lead counterintelligence efforts, but at least the FBI has the experience and capacity. The idea of this administration overhauling counterintelligence operations is chilling.
A federal jury in the Eastern District of Virginia acquitted a former Coast Guard officer accused of soliciting President Donald Trump’s assassination on Bluesky. Prosecutors argued that a Feb. 18 post and earlier social media posts amounted to inducing others to commit violence. Defense attorneys contended it was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the defendant didn’t take any affirmative steps to engage in violence.
The Tennessee man jailed for more than month for posting to Facebook a Charlie Kirk meme has been released after prosecutors dropped the charges.
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In 2007, Oprah Winfrey featured Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy model turned anti-vaccine activist, on her show to talk about her son Evan’s autism diagnosis. “The University of Google is where I got my degree from,” she said during that appearance. McCarthy would go on to become one of the most visible purveyors of disinformation around vaccines and autism, encouraging countless parents to believe that vaccines give children developmental disabilities.
Before she embarked on this dangerous new path, McCarthy was like other moms — and a majority of caregivers for autistic people are women, particularly moms — trying to figure out how to help their children through the diagnosis. The medical community has a history of marginalizing and discrediting women’s health concerns, and for many years, scientists blamed autism on unloving mothers. So it’s understandable that women like McCarthy went online to try to learn more about the complex, largely misunderstood condition.
McCarthy is an easy target given her large media profile. But throughout the 2000s and through the 2010s, scores of less famous families and solo bloggers spread misinformation through their smaller platforms. These so-called “mommy bloggers” frequently focused on autism and vaccines, even as scientists repeatedly debunked the theory that vaccines played a role in autism. All of this made mainstream media efforts to push back against the lies around vaccines and autism all the more difficult.
Continue reading “Anti-Vax Facebook Groups Ushered in Our Current MAHA Nightmare “Since President Trump first came back to the White House, he has predictably taken significant steps to white wash the entire episode in 2021, which culminated in a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt the Electoral College certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory.
Continue reading “Federal Prosecutors Suspended for Not Using MAGA-Approved Verbiage to Describe Jan 6”Kate and Josh discuss Trump’s lust for an eternal presidency, the redistricting wars and Karine Jean-Pierre’s disastrous book tour.
Continue reading “Listen to This: The Book Tour From Hell”We’ve got about 20 tickets left for our 25th Anniversary Live Show next Thursday Nov. 6 at Metrograph in Manhattan. If you’ve somehow missed our messaging on this show until now, the programming includes an oral history of TPM with current and former TPM staff, a live edition of the Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga, and an (open bar) cocktail reception. If you’ve been waiting for the absolute best time to score a seat, the time has come. Just click here.
I still have some relative confidence that the Gaza ceasefire deal will make its way through the current flare-ups. That’s because the deal itself has very powerful stakeholders behind it, ones who can apply overwhelming pressure to the warring parties if they choose to. But what we’re now seeing all the reasons you’d expect a deal like this with Donald Trump to go south.
First is attention. The best argument against this deal sticking has always been that Trump will get bored and lose interest. It’s pretty clear that’s already happened. We heard his press secretary say only days ago that his main priority is building the new White House ballroom.
Continue reading “Is Trump’s Epic Middle East Peace Deal Falling Apart?”In what is now the third such ruling, a federal judge disqualified Bill Essayli as acting U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, ruling that his appointment was a Trump administration workaround that violated federal law.
Essayli has been ineligible for the post since the end of July, concluded U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright of Hawaii, who was brought in to the hear the challenge because local district judges have the power under one statutory scheme to appointment acting U.S. attorneys.
The decision follows similar rulings against Alina Habba in New Jersey and Sigal Chattah in Nevada that have thwarted a Trump White House effort to install loyalists and avoid or at least delay the toils of Senate confirmation.
The latest ruling has major implications for the corrupt political prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who are both challenging on similar grounds the appointment of Lindsey Halligan as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
But there are a couple of twists to the judge’s ruling against Essayli, whose appointment was challenged by three different criminal defendants and consolidated into one case:
The fact that no other attorney signed the Comey and James indictments other than Halligan looms large. Unlike the indictments Essayli obtained, both Comey and James argue that there was highly irregular conduct in their cases as part of a larger scheme of vindictive prosecutions.
Earlier yesterday, before the Essayli decision became public, the outside judge hearing the Comey and James challenges to Halligan gave the Trump DOJ a Monday deadline to provide to him for his sole review “all documents relating to the indictment signer’s participation in the grand jury proceedings, along with complete grand jury transcripts” because he “finds it necessary to determine the extent of the indictment signer’s involvement in the grand jury proceedings.”
The judge has set a joint oral argument on Halligan’s appointment for Nov. 13. Stay tuned …
The full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated a panel ruling that upheld President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland and will re-hear the case. The move comes after the dissenting judge on the panel essentially begged the full court to take up the case.
In a closely-watched hearing in Chicago, Customs and Border Protection commander Greg Bovino was ordered to meet every weekday at 6 p.m. CT with U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis to report on the use of force in “Operation Midway Blitz.”
Ellis summoned Bovino to court after lawyers complained that he had personally violated her court order on the use of tear gas by deploying it himself without warning. Ellis didn’t dig too deeply into the specifics of the incident involving Bovino, according to reports from court, but she did order Bovino to begin wearing a body cam and deliver to her all reports on the use of force and existing body cam footage from Sept. 2 to the present.
The Trump administration has used false or misleading footage on at least six occasions in government-produced videos promoting its mass deportation agenda, according to an analysis by WaPo that found some of the footage was from different times and locations than the videos claimed.
The Trump administration deported a man to Laos despite an Oct. 23 federal court order barring his removal, the AP reports.
Chanthila “Shawn” Souvannarath, 44, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and lived in the United States since before the age of 1, claims to have U.S. citizenship. He was taken into ICE custody in June in Alabama and had been detained at the immigrant detention center at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana.
U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick of Baton Rouge entered an ex parte TRO on Thursday after finding that Souvannarath had made a “substantial claim” of having U.S. citizenship. But by Sunday, Souvannarath messaged his wife on WhatsApp that he was in Laos.
The ACLU, which is representing Souvannarath, called it a “stunning violation of a federal court order.”
Here’s the genius argument a Trump DOJ attorney put forward in court yesterday to defend mass layoffs of federal workers during the government shutdown:
A Justice Department attorney defending the administration at the hearing Tuesday, Michael Velchik, said the firings were lawful and represented the will of the electorate expressed through President Donald Trump’s victory at the polls last year.
“The American people selected someone known above all else for his eloquence in communicating to employees that, ‘You’re fired!’” Velchik said, referring to Trump’s trademark line on his television show, “The Apprentice.”
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco rejected the Trump administration’s position and indefinitely extended her order banning reductions in force at most major government agencies during the government shutdown.
The Trump White House sacked all six Biden-appointed members of the Commission of Fine Arts in preparation for stacking the independent agency with loyalists. The commission was expected to review plans for Trump’s new White House ballroom and a triumphal arch in D.C.
The U.S. continued its lawless conduct on the high seas with a series of three strikes on four alleged drug-smuggling boats Monday that killed 14 people in the Pacific off the coasts of Central and South America, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. A man survived one of the strikes in waters near Mexico and Guatemala and was apparently rescued by Mexican authorities. No word on his status.
Joe Kent, the Senate-confirmed director of the counterterrorism center and close adviser to DNI Tulsi Gabbard, obtained FBI files on the assassination of Charlie Kirk without the knowledge of senior FBI officials, the NYT reports.
Kent was reportedly investigating whether the man facing state charges for killing Kirk had help from other people or entities, according to the NYT. DOJ officials were alarmed that Kent was jeopardizing the criminal investigation.
The incident led to a White House meeting that included Kent, Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel, Vice President JD Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and unnamed top DOJ officials, according to the report.
A Tennessee man has been in jail for more than a month after posting a meme to Facebook that trolled the memorial service for the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The meme draws on a quote from Donald Trump following a January 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa: “We have to get over it.” The post on the What’s Happening in Perry County, Tennessee Facebook page prompted the sheriff to obtain an arrest warrant for Larry Bushart Jr. Here’s how The Intercept describes the, ummm, confusion:
It’s possible, perhaps, to imagine how the Trump meme might have set some members of the Facebook group on edge — at least upon first glance. The post invoked a school shooting at a “Perry High School.” The local high school in Linden is called Perry County High School. Moreover, just one month earlier, Weems had reported an alleged threat against the school, prompting administrators to cancel all classes “for the safety of our students and staff.” Still, it was easy to discern that, apart from the name “Perry,” there was nothing connecting the meme to Linden.
The indefatigable Phil Williams of Nashville New Channel 5, interviewed the Perry County (Tennessee, just so we’re clear) Sheriff Nick Weems, who managed in one sitting to pretty much blow up his own case. He admitted law enforcement knew it was an existing meme circulating on the internet, but claimed upset members of the public did not know that.
Weems said the arrest could have been avoided if Bushart had just taken down the post: “Whenever we sent Lexington Police Department out to speak to him and he refused to do that, I mean, what kind of person does that?” Weems asked. “What kind of person just says he don’t care?”
Bushart’s bond has been set at … $2 million.
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On July 8, something happened to Donald Trump that I’ve not seen happen in the entire decade he has dominated presidential politics. As his base clamored for more disclosures about sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his superpower — his ability to grab and redirect attention — briefly failed him. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he whined when a journalist asked about the Justice Department’s decision to abort any further disclosure of documents related to the case. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”
I’ve spent years tracking Trump’s favorite attention-management tactics, including in a 14-part podcast. And for several weeks in July, he cycled through all of them, attempting to focus attention somewhere other than Epstein. He tried polarization, claiming that the Epstein scandal, which his own aides and oldest son had stoked just months earlier, was instead just a Democratic hoax. He tried threats, attacking those who clamored for more. “I’ve lost a lot of faith in certain people,” he complained, “Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net, and so they try and do the Democrats’ work.” Even after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Epstein’s associate, the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, conducting a scripted proffer designed to minimize her crimes, Trump was left offering up a list of things he wanted people to cover instead of his own ties to Epstein. The most successful ploy was the same one he has used since 2018, chanting Russia Russia Russia. On July 18, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard renewed old complaints about the Russia investigation, screaming treason and blaming Barack Obama.
It took 10 days, threats against right-wing influencers still focused on Epstein, and Gabbard’s conspiracy theory before Trump started to reclaim his ability to redirect the media’s attention.
Continue reading “Without Online Trolls, There Would Be No Donald Trump “The Trump administration wants everyone to see what it’s doing in Chicago. The city is bearing the brunt of mass deportations. Over the past several weeks, federal agents have staged aggressive, high-profile operations. They’ve prompted protests, violence and potential violations of court orders over the use of tear gas.
Continue reading “911 Audio Reveals Harrowing Chicago Escalation”
