In a late-night Truth, Trump claims that the Southern Poverty Law Center was part of his grand, imagined conspiracy to steal the 2020 election, and writes that his DOJ’s politicized prosecution of the non-profit is a step toward overturning his electoral defeat.
(Hat tip to law professor and election expert Rick Hasen who, like us, is not really sure what Trump is going for here beyond a kind of bête noire word cloud.)
Here’s U.S. Attorney for DC “Judge” Jeanine Pirro announcing that her office is dropping its investigation into the chair of the Federal Reserve:
Her attempt to save face here is accomplished by claiming the Fed Inspector General will take over her work. But, as various reporters have noted, Powell himself had already asked the IG to look into cost overruns. It’s not clear anything new is happening.
Continue reading “Trump DOJ Attempts Climb-Down on Powell Investigation”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
The Italian prime minister and leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni, has made fostering ties with foreign leaders a central part of her political strategy. A few years before winning Italy’s 2022 general elections, she started cultivating ties with the U.S. and European conservative world as part of a broader political rebranding effort aimed at projecting a more moderate image at home and gaining legitimacy abroad.
She subsequently became a familiar face within Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement. Meloni shares similar views to MAGA on migration, sovereignty and national identity. She also aligns with the movement on a constellation of other themes ranging from fighting against “wokeism” and defending the traditional family to the rejection of liberalism, globalism and environmentalism.
After Trump was elected as U.S. president for the second time in late 2024, Meloni’s ties with the American far-right suddenly became a matter of foreign policy. But her relationship with Trump has turned out to be a more demanding balancing act than Meloni may have anticipated. And now their alliance — at least for the time being — appears to be over.
On April 13 Meloni described Trump’s recent social media attack on Pope Leo, who had criticized the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, as “unacceptable”. This prompted a rebuke from Trump, who said Meloni “lacked courage” for not joining the war. The conditions for this breakdown have been in place for some time.
Trump and Meloni’s shared far-right traits should not hide some key differences between the two leaders. In foreign policy, Meloni has adopted a pro-NATO position and is a staunch supporter of Ukraine. These positions have aided Meloni in what has been called her quest for “respectability,” but they clash with Trump’s lack of support for Ukraine and belligerent position towards NATO.
Politically, Meloni has also faced constraints that have moderated her leadership. Externally, the EU’s institutional and financial straitjacket has required Meloni to work collaboratively with the bloc. This requirement has limited Meloni’s room for maneuver in her dealings with Trump and clashes with the U.S. president’s rejection of multilateralism.
Internally, the logic of coalition politics — in particular the moderating presence of the pro-European Forza Italia party in her government — and the fact that centrist voters represent a decisive constituency in Italy have both acted as a further centripetal force on Meloni’s agenda.
Despite these divergences, Meloni’s ideological closeness to Trump did initially translate into diplomatic gains that helped boost her profile with fellow EU leaders. She was the first EU leader to meet with Trump after the imposition of his global trade tariff regime in 2025.
Meloni also managed to organize a trilateral meeting in Rome with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the U.S. vice-president, J.D. Vance. Following the meting, Vance called Meloni a “bridge” between the two sides of the Atlantic.
Still, beyond the legitimacy gains for Meloni and her party, the material advantages Italy has extracted from her relationship with Trump have been limited. Italy was not spared trade tariffs, for instance. Nor did it manage to obtain a discount on Trump’s demand for NATO members to raise military spending to 5% of their GDP.
The scarcity of tangible policy gains from her ties with Trump may be one reason for Meloni’s decision to distance herself from the U.S. president. But Italian domestic politics are another important factor.
The indirect effects of Trump’s policies are likely to have played a key role in the recent defeat Meloni suffered in a referendum on judicial reform. This referendum, which came one month into Trump’s war in Iran, morphed into a vote on the Meloni government.
The Iran war has caused energy prices across Europe to rise and has generated fears among Italians of possible security repercussions. With a recent survey indicating 79% of Italians now hold a negative opinion on Trump, it seems that voters used the referendum to signal their discontent to Meloni ahead of general elections in 2027.
Opposition parties, both on the left and right, hailed the result as a sign that voters are looking for change. And Roberto Vannacci, a former general turned politician, is capitalizing on voters’ increased unease with the impact of Trump’s policies. He has criticized Meloni for what he sees as her Washington-first alignment and soft approach to key far-right issues.
Trump’s attack on the Pope — indefensible for Meloni as someone who has defined herself as a Christian and whose party draws on a vast Catholic electorate — gave the Italian prime minister the exit she needed to signal her distance from Trump’s recent actions to voters.
Meloni’s agenda remains far-right in its orientation, aligning with Trump’s in many ways from identity politics and migration to his stance on the green transition. How these ideological similarities are received by Italian voters over the coming year is likely to play a crucial role in determining Meloni’s political future.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Of all the charlatans, grifters, and ghouls in the Trump II playbill, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has always baffled me the most. I can’t figure out the motivations that drive him or the elaborate self-rationalizations that permit him to engage in wholesale misconduct and abuse of office.
I have been most confounded by his professional background. He spent more than a decade as a DOJ prosecutor in Manhattan, and another decade as a criminal defense attorney at major law firms in New York — which means that to spearhead DOJ politicization and weaponization, Blanche has had to set aside both the long-standing traditions of the Justice Department that he would have been immersed in and dispense with a criminal attorney’s instinctive revulsion at government overreach and prosecutorial abuse.
While I’ve encountered DOJers with little appreciation for DOJ tradition and defense attorneys who don’t fit the classic mold, it’s rare to find someone who embodies both of those departures from the norm. Add in that Blanche is 51, old enough to know better, that he had a solid previous career that wasn’t entirely dependent on Trump, and that nothing about his relatively modest past bears any obvious signs of a grasping ambition at the expense of all else, and I’m left to puzzle over his psychology, which I have neither the expertise nor access to meaningfully assess.
The inexplicable Blanche was on display at this week’s press conference announcing the shameful indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center. A seemingly nonplussed Blanche shrugged off the most pointed questions about what exactly the alleged fraud was, and made no attempt to offer assurances let alone solid evidence that this isn’t as political a prosecution as it appears on its face.
In a new story this morning, the NYT runs through a laundry list of bad acts Blanche has committed as acting attorney general. It’s framed in the context of Blanche shoring up his position against right-wing criticism in hopes of landing the permanent gig, or at least staying in the acting gig indefinitely, but let’s consider them on their own demerits:
The NYT story also contains evidence of the contradiction that Blanche presents, crediting him — if that’s not too generous — with sending goofball Ed Martin out to pasture; being overruled after telling the White House there was insufficient evidence to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James; opposing the appoint of Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia to lead the James and Comey prosecutions; and cautioning against the immediate arrest of Comey for a social media post that was bizarrely trumped up into an assassination threat against the president.
It all leaves me with the unsatisfying conclusion that Blanche is simply morally obtuse and ethically tone deaf. Maybe that’s the simplest answer, but I’m left wanting a better explanation.
As the week as unfolded, I’m gratified that the public discourse has gradually moved toward greater recognition that the Trump DOJ’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center is a travesty:
The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick talks about her exposé on FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged drinking on the job and his subsequent defamation lawsuit against her and the publication: “One of the things that has most gratifying immediately after the story published was I have been inundated by additional sourcing, going up to the very highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work … providing us with additional corroborating information.”
Via a FOIA request, Reuters has tallied some of the staffing losses that DOJ and its components have suffered under Trump II:
In total, DOJ employees 11,200 fewer people than it did during the fiscal year that ended three months before Trump began his second term, according to Reuters.
Leaning on the flimsy OLC memo that declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional, the White House Counsel’s Office has issued a new policy watering down document retention requirements, the WaPo reports.
An Army Special Forces master sergeant involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was indicted in federal court in Manhattan for allegedly using classified information on the operation to make $400,000 placing bets on Polymarket.
The ombudsman for Stars & Stripes, charged by Congress with maintaining the independence of the military newspaper, was fired after speaking out against an overhaul of the storied publication that Trump officials accuse of being “woke,” the WaPo reports.
“First of all, I think it’s very important that the unity or division of the church should not revolve around sexual matters. We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality I believe there are greater and more important issues such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion that would all take priority before that particular issue.”—Pope Leo XIV
Here’s his full answer. pic.twitter.com/haoCIPT9BA
— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) April 23, 2026
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
I mentioned this a bit earlier on Ari Melber’s show tonight when we were talking about the high-profile MAGA defections of Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan and others. I’ve seen various theories: It’s about the Iran War. It’s about AI Jesus. Yes, it’s about all those things, but as off-ramps more than causes or drivers. Trump looks like the weak horse and no one wants to bet on or be associated with the weak horse.
Continue reading “Strong Horse, Weak Horse”If you’re here from the Beat With Ari Melber, welcome! If you’re like to join our community and support our work, just click here. Thank you in advance.
Republicans in Congress are sweating after Viriginia voters approved a change to the state Constitution on Tuesday that allows for the use of new congressional maps this fall that would potentially flip four seats in Democrats’ favor (though, the state Supreme Court may still muck up matters for Dems).
Continue reading “Johnson Pressures DeSantis to Gerrymander Maps After Virginia Win for Dems”Hello, and welcome back to the Franchise!
The news of the week is, of course, the Virginia referendum, a setback for the Trump administration in its flailing plan to secure control of the U.S. House through a relentless months-long gerrymandering blitz. On Tuesday, Virginia voters approved a Democratic-led redistricting proposal, giving the party four additional congressional seats.
Continue reading “Trump Admin Election Deniers Set Their Sights on Detroit”We had an illustration Tuesday night of one of the most crucial questions in our current politics and the one that will determine whether civic democracy can have a rebirth in the U.S. Gerrymandering is a bane to civic democracy because it dilutes the expression of the popular will by building district lines around partisan advantage or to diminish the power of disempowered minorities. Democrats spent much of the 2010s and 2020s fighting a legal and legislative battle against gerrymandering. But the Roberts Court has chosen to legalize every manner of gerrymandering, making the current a destructive race to the bottom.
Democrats had a choice. They could express effete outrage and a meaningless devotion to broken norms and principles and agree to wage elections on a permanently tilted plane. Or they could decide to play by the rules Republicans had forced on everyone. They did just that and it was unquestionable the right decision by every measure. It really never seemed to occur to Trump Republicans that Democrats would fight on the playbook Republicans created. There’s a special comedy to this because anyone familiar with the facts on the ground knew that Republicans had already used gerrymandering much more aggressively than Democrats. So there was much more juice in the gerrymandering lemon for Democrats if and when they decided to employ tactics Republicans have been using for more than a decade. It’s worth Democrats considering how deeply Republicans had internalized the belief that Democrats would simply never respond in kind.
Continue reading “FAFO and Other Things We Learned in the 2025-26 Redistricting Wars”In March, the FBI began investigating New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson after her February story on the use of bureau resources by Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend.
The unprecedented move to target a journalist for politically damaging reporting proceeded on the flimsy premise that her coverage of Alexis Wilkins, a country music singer, was potentially in violation of federal anti-stalking laws.
Among the affirmative steps that the FBI took against Williamson: It “combed through the bureau’s databases to determine whether the federal government had any information on Ms. Williamson to help make the argument that she deserved further scrutiny.”
The NYT notes that Williamson spoke with Wilkins on the phone once and never met her in person.
After that initial inquiry, FBI agents “recommended moving forward with a preliminary investigation,” but ran into concerns at the Justice Department, where even Trump DOJ officials “determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation,” the NYT reports.
The FBI denied it ever investigated Williamson but confirmed that “investigators were concerned about how the aggressive reporting techniques crossed lines of stalking. The FBI has since dropped the investigation and is not pursuing a case against Williamson.
A key unanswered question: Did Patel sic the FBI on the reporter or did FBI officials take the initiative to do on their own?
The Trump administration has agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page’s claims that the FBI and DOJ illegally entangled him in court-ordered surveillance. Page, who had lost in lower court proceedings, had appealed his case to the Supreme Court, but solicitor general D. John Sauer told the high court yesterday that the case has settled.
A report in the Los Angeles Times offers some new tidbits about the CIA deaths in Mexico last weekend that don’t quite square with the officials accounts from Chihuahua state officials, who maintained that the Americans were dozens of miles away and didn’t participate in the raid:
The CIA declined to comment on the report.
Two of the major super PAC funding sources for House campaigns made their initial fall ad buys, which serve as a map of sorts for the 2026 battleground:
In an autocracy—most vividly in overt monarchies but also many modern dictatorships—the state is embodied in the sovereign ruler. Their face is on the money; institutions and governments are denominated “royal”; infrastructure projects are named in their honor; and their birthdays are public holidays. The nation is, quite literally, theirs. “L’État, c’est moi.” …
A republic, with symbolism tracing back to antiquity, deliberately inverts these trappings of personal rule. The institutions belong to the public—res publica, in which all have a stake. The people, and not the rulers, are sovereign. The officeholder is a temporary steward, not a proprietor. When a president stamps his name and likeness on federal buildings and government programs and the national currency, he is asserting the monarchical claim: that these things are extensions of himself.
This is not something to be shrugged off as incidental. It is corrosive of America’s fundamental principles.
The WaPo has obtained the secret contract for donations to President Trump’s vanity ballroom project. It was signed in October, just two weeks before the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make room for colossal addition to the historic complex:
The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public.
The contract came to light only after Public Citizen sued to obtain it.
Gregg Gonsalves in The Nation:
The scope of the damage, and the enormous amounts of money, time, and energy that will be required to bring us just back to 2024 levels, boggles the mind. I am not sure anyone has really wrapped their heads around what this means, given that so many other areas of public life will need Marshall Plans of their own. Trump, in his malfeasance, malice, and incompetence, is running up quite a tab, and we, our children, and our children’s children, will be left with the bill.
My tendency is to shy away from anecdotal accounts as a poor proxy for complex problems and an obstacle to clear thinking, but I have not been able to shake this personal appeal from a British mother whose newborn daughter contracted measles in a 2013 outbreak, before she was old enough for the vaccine, and died of complications from the disease in 2023.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
