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.
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?
Another Raid on the US Treasury
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.
Trump DOJ Watch
Bloomberg: Ahead of the midterm elections, the Trump DOJ has dismantled a centralized election week command post at the FBI, discontinued mandatory election law training for prosecutors, and restricted access to threat briefings for state officials.
The Bulwark: How The Blaze’s crackpot reporting on the Capitol Hill pipebombs prompted a wild, unnecessary FBI raid.
Bloomberg: President Trump has nominated Don Berthiaume, a veteran federal watchdog attorney, as the DOJ inspector general. He has been serving as the acting DOJ IG.
Hmmm …
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 agents in Sunday’s raid were dressed in Chihuahua State Investigative Agency uniforms to blend in with Mexican officials,” according to unnamed sources familiar with the operation.
Two other CIA officers “were present during the raid.” They were in a pickup truck following the lead vehicle, which crashed, and “went down the mountain by foot in hopes of saving their colleagues, but it was too late.”
The CIA declined to comment on the report.
Mass Deportation Watch
Senate Republicans overnight used the budget reconciliation process to push through a blueprint for $70 billion in additional funding for immigration enforcement and reopening DHS. The 50-48 vote saw only Republican Sens. Rand Paul (KY) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) break party ranks.
In a ruling yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a California law requiring federal agents to wear identification.
The Trump administration is considering sending more than 1,000 Afghans who aided the anti-Taliban effort to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the NYT reports. The group, which includes interpreters and family members of U.S. service members, have been languishing in Qatar since they were evacuated from Afghanistan for their own safety.
2026 House Battlefield Map
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:
Punchbowl: Speaker Mike Johnson’s Congressional Leadership Fund purchased $153 million in air time for about 30 districts, roughly evenly split between defending GOP seats and trying to snag Democratic seats.
WSJ: The $272 million ad buy from the pro-Democrat House Majority PAC was overwhelmingly — nearly 80% — focused on GOP-held seats.
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.
Revealed: Trump Ballroom Contract
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.
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.
I Can’t Shake This One
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.
We have two noteworthy pieces for you this morning in TPM Cafe, both in different ways speaking to the state of the GOP.
Government agencies are normally funded for a year at a time, but Senate Republicans appeared poised, through the budget reconciliation process, to fund ICE and CBP for three years, depriving a potential, future Democratic House (or Senate) majority of a key check Congress can exercise over the executive branch: the power of the purse. A budget reconciliation bill lasting through the end of Trump’s term would insulate ICE from attempts at congressional reform of the type Democrats have been demanding since February. Charles Tiefer, former general counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives and a widely quoted expert on congressional oversight, sounds the alarm.
For history professor A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Josh Kovensky’s recent reporting — on the far-right’s attempt to create a state and even nation-wide controversy about the presence of Indian immigrants in Texas — brought to mind a 2006 furor in Texas, which pit nativist figures like Rush Limbaugh against a more moderate GOP than the one we have today, inspiring Congress to attempt an immigration crackdown that was later derailed by pro-immigrant activism. It’s a fascinating story and one that underscores what has become a theme at TPM: The extent to which, two decades later, the fringe has won control — at least for now. Read that here.
In Frisco, Texas, far-right activists are seizing upon the growing community of immigrant families from India as an example of the racist “Great Replacement” theory, with white Americans being supplanted by newcomers of color. The recent furor has a certain political logic to it that echoes events from exactly 20 years ago in the very same part of the Lone Star State. This may be the far right’s attempt to revive the spirit of 2006.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Rather disingenuously, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has proclaimed that the Senate will now fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through legislation that, he contends, has hardly anything in it to fear. He called the DHS budget reconciliation bill he anticipates soon passing the Senate “anorexic,” a strange term, as though the legislation were like a person with an eating disorder — but in context the majority leader apparently meant to convey the bill was thin, skeletal, near-empty, and utterly without threatening contents.
“There’s no cut in Medicaid,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. yelled numerous times over the past couple days as he testified in front of a handful of different congressional committees.
A little less than a year ago, Trump began his push for state legislatures in, first, Texas, then other red states, to redraw their congressional district lines, a gambit that, he had apparently been told, would help him hold onto the House in the midterms even as his poll numbers began the long march downward that continues to this day.
Democrats counter-attacked — and, as Khaya Himmelman reports this morning, they are succeeding. (Trump is now telling supporters he believes gerrymandering may be “not good.”) Virginia voters have followed California’s lead, authorizing new, bluer maps for their state. As things stand now, that puts Democrats slightly ahead in this fight.
The overall picture is quite a bit more complicated, however. Here’s some of what we’re keeping tabs on.
We’re moving into the second half of our Annual TPM Membership Drive. So we’re at the crunch time when we really need to be adding numbers. Let me be as direct as I can. If you’re not a member, your signing up today will make a big difference in the vitality and health of TPM. I would be so grateful if you could take a moment literally right now and click this link and sign up. We’ve made it super easy. I delay things I plan to do as much as anyone. But if you could take a moment literally right now and click that link we would all appreciate it so much.
The country is beginning to wake up to the sheer level of strategic failure of Trump’s impulsive and unilateral war on Iran. Let me start with an extended quote from a weekend article in the New York Times …
The colossally corrupt indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center shows just how powerful a politicized DOJ can be in the hands of a rogue president — and how difficult it is even this late in the game for the press and the public to have a clear-eyed view of retributive prosecutions.
While the SPLC has long been a tormenter of extremists and therefore targeted by the right, it has not been subjected to the kind of drumbeat narrative against it from President Trump that would help to elevate the bogus nature of the prosecution more clearly in the public mind. So there was a lot of “let’s wait and see what they’ve got” in yesterday’s coverage of the new federal indictment out of Alabama. Even I felt some trepidation about assuming it was another bogus politicized prosecution until we got a better handle on the allegations.
But let’s be clear: They got nothing. Period. Full stop.
The indictment reads like what you would expect a bunch of young conservative lawyers who fancy themselves as clever and who have an axe to grind against an anti-white supremacy organization to come up with. It’s too cute by half. It insists that up is down.
SPLC payments to informants to get intel on extremist group activities that it then shared with law enforcement were, in this telling, funding white supremacism. Setting up shell entities to protect the informants by shielding the origins of the payments is recast as a money laundering conspiracy. Running the payments through normal banking channels somehow turned the banks into victims and gave rise to a slew of wire fraud and false statement charges.
I watched the full press conference by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, and it was breathtaking how little they have against the SPLC and how ill-prepared they were to address the most obviously troubling questions that the case raises, like what was the fraud precisely? Or what evidence exactly makes decades of payments to extremist informants not a watchdog function but the promotion of extremism?
In a telling moment, Blanche let slip that the SLPC investigation originated under Trump I, was shelved under Biden, and then reanimated in Trump II.
For context and history plus a real unpacking of the indictment, I recommended:
Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama: “At first blush, these allegations feel like an extension of the revenge docket and the attacks on universities and law firms, an effort to delegitimize and marginalize an organization that is pushing back against the administration. We’ll have a chance to study the charges as we learn more about the government’s evidence. The government’s core theory is that the SPLC paid high-ranking white supremacists, but they seem to ignore the reason—that the use of paid informants was essential to the intelligence the Center was gathering on the groups they were members of, including intelligence that was shared with the FBI.”
Chris Geidner, who shows how the facts pleaded in the indictment itself belie Blanche’s claims during the press conference, where he went well beyond the indictment by alleging that the SPLC “was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.”
The underlying danger here goes well beyond the SPLC. Not every vindictive prosecution is going to be as open and obvious as those against James Comey, Letitia James, John Brennan, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, etc. Even a well-respected, longstanding organization with a distinguished history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan and right-wing extremism that most reporters are very familiar with is easily placed under a pall of suspicion and doubt by the most transparently bad faith DOJ in our history.
Investigate the Investigators Watch
The latest developments in the bogus “grand conspiracy” retributive prosecution that the Trump DOJ is running down in south Florida, now under auspices of the newly-appointed Trump loyalist Joseph diGenova:
The NYT reports that weekend subpoenas sent out from a D.C. grand jury in the politically motivated case against former CIA Director John Brennan were promptly rescinded on Monday. The cooperating witness who had been subpoenaed will be interviewed voluntarily instead, which would be the more typical DOJ practice.
While the mother of all vindictive prosecutions is based in Florida, the purported perjury case against Brennan arises from a deposition he gave to Congress, so he would likely need to be indicted in D.C. Both the NYT and WaPo report that Miami U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones has been given special authority to bring cases outside of his home district, including in D.C.
The WaPo reports that Quiñones has been regularly meeting for months with Blanche’s office about the case. Blanche was in Florida Monday and met with diGenova and the case team and then posted on X about it:
The former Capitol Police officer who defended against the Jan. 6 attack but was then falsely accused of setting pipe bombs the night before has sued The Blaze and two of its reporters for defamation in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Shauni Kerkhoff, who now works at the CIA, has hired top-flight attorneys to pursue what could be an existential threat to the far-right media company founded by Glenn Beck. One of the Blaze reporters on the story, Steve Baker, was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct (his case was later dismissed when President Trump granted sweeping clemency to the Jan. 6 rioters).
Kerkhoff was for a time a suspect in the pipebombing case before being exonerated by the FBI, but new reporting from the NYT suggests Baker himself may have been the one to finger her as a suspect before he published his story:
But Mr. Baker said he may have helped trigger that investigation. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Baker said that shortly before his story published, he had taken his theory to sources at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
A spokesperson for the office said that a “whistle-blower” had come forward last year with an allegation about a security concern, which the agency documented and lawfully reported to the employing agency of the person, who was a member of the intelligence community.
The Blaze never contacted Kerkhoff before it published the false allegations against her, she says. More than three weeks after publishing, The Blaze took down its story.
Dems Win Virginia Redistricting Vote
In a big boost to Democrats in the mid-decade redistricting wars, Virginia voted to redraw its map, in a move that is expected to yield a pick-up of four Democratic seats. The win in Virginia means Democrats now have a 10-9 seat advantage over Republicans nationwide in the redistricting race, as both parties try to eke out gains to win House control in the fall’s midterm elections. The state’s Supreme Court could still step in to block the redistricting.
Rep. Cherfilus-McCormick Resigns
Indicted Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) resigned her seat just minutes before the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on whether to recommend her expulsion from the House.
More on the CIA Deaths in Mexico
While the NYT followed up the WaPo with its own confirmation that the two Americans killed over the weekend in a car accident in Mexico worked for the CIA, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government would investigate the incident to ensure no laws were broken, which could lead to a Mexican admonishment of the U.S. “We’re investigating what these people were doing and what agency they were working for,” she said.
Mass Deportation Watch
Colorado: Customs and Border Protection agent charged with assaulting a protester.
Florida: 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns injunction that aimed to shut down “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Texas: Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is using Trump-style tactics in fight with blue cities over ICE.
Good Read
ProPublica: Trump’s Counterterrorism Czar Sebastian Gorka, a Man Without a Counterterrorism Plan
Latest From the Middle East …
President Trump announces the U.S. ceasefire with Iran is extended indefinitely.
Vice President JD Vance hit pause on his planned trip to Pakistan as planned talks with Iran broke down.
President Trump is weighing punishing NATO allies who refused to back the Iran war, Politico reports: “The effort, which officials worked on ahead of NATO head Mark Rutte’s visit to Washington this month, includes an overview of members’ contributions to the alliance and places them into tiers, according to three European diplomats and a U.S. defense official familiar with the plan.”
10 Commandments in Schools Law Upheld
By a 9-8 vote, the hyper-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas law requiring the 10 Commandments to be posted prominently in every public school and university classroom in the state. The case is headed to the Supreme Court.
Anti-Vax Shenanigans
NYT: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refused to commit to supporting the vaccine recommendations of the new CDC director.
