The Christian right has been gaining traction in Washington, D.C. under President Donald Trump. And now, one Trump-aligned religious group has their sights set on the moon.
Continue reading “A Pro-Trump Christian Group Wants to Put a Cross on the Moon “FBI Demands Backup As It Tries to Substantiate Trump’s 2020 Delusions
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
The FBI is ramping up its probe into the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia — part of the Trump administration’s continuing effort to sow seeds of distrust in the state’s election system and magically materialize evidence of election fraud to support President Trump’s 2020 delusions about the election results there.
Continue reading “FBI Demands Backup As It Tries to Substantiate Trump’s 2020 Delusions”E. Jean Carroll on the Verge of Forcing $5M From Trump
Time to Pay Up, Bub
President Trump’s last-ditch bid to avoid having to cough up $5 million to pay the judgement that E. Jean Carroll won against him for sexual abuse and defamation was rejected by an appeals court.
The late-evening denial by the Second Circuit came after the trial judge earlier in the day ordered the court clerk to disburse to Carroll the money Trump had deposited with the court, plus some $800,000 in accrued interest.
In an accompanying opinion, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Manhattan accused Trump of “stalling” the case for years before declaring it was time for Trump to pay up:
Carroll has waited a long time, not so much for the money, but for the comeuppance Trump so richly deserves and has spent most of his life avoiding with the help of a family fortune, a endless string of enablers, and hardball litigation tactics.
Mass Deportation Watch
- Houston: The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the immigrant killed by ICE this week in Houston, is demanding an independent investigation at the same time the Houston district attorney is saying the feds have sidelined local officials from participating in any investigation.
- Eswatini: Eleven more migrants have been deported to the African country where they were immediately detained in its notorious Matsapha correctional facility, a U.S. lawyers told Reuters. “The arrivals bring to 29 the number sent to the southern African country under a $5.1 million agreement that has been challenged by lawyers who say deportees are being detained despite having already served sentences for crimes committed in the United States,” Reuters reports.
Judge Dugan Avoids Jail Time
Former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine but avoided any jail time for her conviction on a felony obstruction charge for shielding an immigrant from ICE agents in her courthouse last year.
Trump DOJ Watch
- Chicago: After a last-minute bid to avoid having to appear in federal court this morning was rejected by the judge, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutrous is set to have to explain why his public comments about a criminal case against reputed members of the Tren de Aragua gang didn’t violate the judge’s order sealing the case.
- Houston: Federal judges in the Southern District of Texas have appointed the virulently Islamophobic Aaron Reitz as interim U.S. attorney. “Islam is not compatible with Western Civilization,” Reitz declared this year, during his unsuccessful GOP primary campaign run for state attorney general, in an X post that remains live.
- Main Justice: The Trump DOJ has eschewed challenging mergers on antitrust grounds because of reticence from Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the department’s No. 3 official, Bloomberg reports:
He has taken an unusually active role in the work of the antitrust division compared to previous administrations, stifling merger litigation, according to people familiar with the matter. …
In meetings about antitrust issues, Woodward has questioned why the DOJ can’t simply stop reviewing deals and suggested that blocking a merger could violate a company’s constitutionally protected due process rights, according to some of the people, who are familiar with his remarks.
Jan. 6 Never Ends
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman surveys the states where election deniers are on the ballot this year to serve as top election officials: Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Vermont. They are all, of course, Republican candidates.
Platner Out
Graham Platner’s inevitable withdrawal came in a video posted last evening. Now Maine Democrats now have 18 days to try to salvage come kind of challenge to Sen. Susan Collins (R).
Hostilities With Iran Continue Into Day 2
With the ceasefire in in tatters, the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire overnight in the biggest escalation of hostilities since President Trump declared the Islamic republic’s “unconditional surrender” last month.
Criminalizing Dissent: International Edition
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invited senior ministers from more than 60 countries to a meeting in D.C. next week about the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism,” the WaPo reports, based on documents it reviewed.
The Trump administration has at various levels labeled left-wing opposition to the president as “domestic terrorism,” and has successfully brought criminal charges in at least one case.
White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka has been pushing the myth of a broader international union of left-wing terrorists, and the State Department meeting seems to fall in line with that push. A linkage to foreign terrorist groups “can unlock certain investigative tools,” such as surveillance, one U.S. counterterrorism official told the WaPo.
How Much Risk Does New AF1 Present?
At the Secret Service’s insistence, President Trump returned from the NATO summit in Turkey aboard the old Air Force One, not the fancy newly refurbished Qatari-donated one, seeming to confirm suspicions — despite White House denials — that the gifted plane was rushed into service without all of the necessary security features, the NYT reports:
But people briefed on the new plane’s capabilities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues, said the new plane does not have all the features of the older plane. The switch in the president’s aircraft when he departed Turkey was a precautionary measure made at the advice of the Secret Service and not because of a specific threat, they said.
RIP Bonnie Tyler
I don’t usually share purely pop music here, but the voice of Bonnie Tyler, who has died at 75 after an extended illness, still immediately transports me back to the first couple of years of high school, when her music was ubiquitous:
News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
TPM Readers Tell Us Why They Contribute #5
From TPM Reader OM …
Continue reading “TPM Readers Tell Us Why They Contribute #5”I’ve been reading TPM since my junior year of college (I graduated in 2003, so pretty early in the TPM journey), and from the beginning, it’s done news the way I respect most: it has a perspective and a point of view, but it follows the reporting and respects the facts. The notion that news can or should be a neutral glass pane is farcical, and TPM is one of the first outlets I found in my formative years that didn’t pretend to do the “just the facts, ma’am” kabuki dance.
Come Nerd Out About Politics With TPM and The Handbasket
When news breaks — about, say, Graham Platner’s Senate campaign imploding over sexual assault allegations or Mitch McConnell’s hospitalization — I always scramble to open TPM’s Slack to see what my colleagues are posting about it. They’re so quick to share the latest updates or jokes that help add some levity to a grim situation.
That’s the spirit of our upcoming event in Brooklyn on Wednesday July 29. Our own Josh Marshall and Marisa Kabas, independent journalist and founder of The Handbasket newsletter, will weigh in on whatever hell is currently breaking loose, in a conversation moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. Marisa is a diligent chronicler of our current hellscape, who has broken stories about the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to freeze billions of dollars in federal grants and loans. (She also wrote an essay for our 25th anniversary last year about journalists becoming personal brands). So we’re thrilled to be able to bend her ear about the news of the day and making it work in independent media.
Nicole LaFond and I will kick off the event with some politics trivia for the audience, and we’ll end the night with a happy hour, where our staff hopes to meet readers of both The Handbasket and TPM. We’d really love to see you there.
Tickets are on sale now for $25 (or free for TPM Inside members). Get yours while they last.
TPM Readers Tell Us Why They Contribute #4
From TPM Reader BC …
Continue reading “TPM Readers Tell Us Why They Contribute #4”I am a long time reader, since the early aughts. I have been giving to the fund since I have been able. In the past year I have noticed some of the changes at TPM with the podcasts, newsletters, and Substack conversations and they are helping me navigate my changing relationship to the internet and social media. When I was thinking about this a couple days ago, I was actually thinking about Yglesias even before the post today. His history of punching down, smugness, and deliberate misinterpretation comes up a lot in my feed. It’s always a little disappointing when he gins these things. He is not stupid. I actually have wondered if it is a program when he needs to get some new subscriptions. Will Stancil and the people obsessed with him need to all take a breather. There are great voices on bluesky and it has its use but I have been trying to curate a little more and hang out at my library.
The Brief: Two-and-a-Half-Week Race to Replace Graham Platner Begins
Maine Dems Piece Together Plan to Help Party Hold Senate
Graham Platner is finally out. In a defiant statement last night, he once again denied the sexual assault allegations against him, but conceded what his allies had been telling him for days: it was time to leave the race. He called for an “open” and “democratic” process to replace him, Kate Riga reports.
The Maine Democratic State Committee voted overwhelmingly to hold a 600-person nominating convention, according to the Portland Press Herald, which broke the news. MS NOW reported that, per one proposal discussed Wednesday, county committees would convene in the next few days to choose their delegates to the convention. The new candidate must be chosen by July 27 — 19 days from yesterday, when Platner dropped out.
“We are of course going to require folks to talk to Maine voters in some way that is going to qualify them to be our U.S. Senate nominee beyond just declaring their intent,” Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson said in an MS NOW interview last night. “What that will most likely look like is petition collection from Maine Democratic voters across the state.”
Former state Senate president and candidate for governor Troy Jackson is already running to replace Platner, as is Jordan Wood, who lost a congressional primary last month, and brewer Dan Kleban, who ran in the Senate primary before dropping out to endorse Mills. Shenna Belows and Nirav Shah, other also-rans in the Maine gubernatorial primary, are expected to enter the race soon. Hannah Pingree, Bellows, Jackson and Shah each got between 20 and 25% of the vote, but, after ranked choice results were tabulated, Pingree emerged as the winner.
Actor Patrick Dempsey and historian-writer Heather Cox Richardson will not be running — just in case you were wondering.
New U.S. Attorney Ready to ‘Destroy the Left’
While campaigning for Texas Attorney General last year, Aaron Reitz promised to use the job, should he win it, to “to destroy the left.” He came in last place. But now, through an unusual process, he’s reportedly become U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, a job that will imbue him with tremendous power to carry out the Trump administration’s retribution.
- Bloomberg Law broke the news yesterday, writing that the district’s judges voted to appoint Reitz to the role, “according to a person familiar with the matter.” That means Reitz will not need to be confirmed by the Senate.
- A veteran of Ken Paxton’s state attorney general office, Reitz briefly led the Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Policy. He left that role to run in the race to replace Paxton; his old boss endorsed him, but he only got 14% of the vote.
- During that race, the Texas Tribune reviewed some of his tweets to get a sense of his views. He mused that he was a part of “a civilizational battle with anti-American forces on the left.” He called Kwanzaa “ANTI-USA and ANTI-CHRISTIAN,” promising to “run out all Kwanzaa-aligned elements poisoning our state.” He wrote that “Islamism is incompatible with American civilization. … When I’m AG, I’m going to wage counter-jihad against them.”
- Unfortunately, all this extreme rhetoric will put him right at home leading prosecutions for the Trump administration which, under NSPM-7, has made a priority of targeting groups on the left and others who, in the vague words of the White House directive, espouse “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
Tabs
- Last week, Trump rejected $227 million in disaster aid requests from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island as they repair from a major snowstorm earlier this year, Politico reports.
- “Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) formally requested an update on Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) health on Wednesday amid the senator’s recent and ongoing hospitalization,” Emine Yücel reports for TPM.
Man of the Hour
It’s JD Vance, offering up this deeply confusing sentiment: “I ask you a very simple question: When you come to vote in November, are you gonna vote for the pro-fraud party? Are you gonna vote for the party that is sending your tax dollars to the fraudsters?”
All The Places Election Deniers Could Be in Charge of Elections After the Midterms
In an increasingly ominous trend, there are currently hundreds of election deniers on the ballot for the 2026 midterm elections. And although history has shown election denialism is not a winning campaign strategy, it continues to be a powerful force in the right-wing movement, from President Donald Trump on down.
According to the nonpartisan non-profit States United Action, there are at least 140 election deniers currently running for statewide and congressional office. In statewide races, there are at least 42 election deniers running in 23 states. And in congressional races, there are at least 98 election deniers running in 25 states.
Continue reading “All The Places Election Deniers Could Be in Charge of Elections After the Midterms”Graham Platner Drops Out of Maine Senate Race, Leaving Dems to Find Replacement
Embattled Maine Democrat Graham Platner dropped out of the Senate race Wednesday, giving Democrats less than a month to find a replacement.
Continue reading “Graham Platner Drops Out of Maine Senate Race, Leaving Dems to Find Replacement”Help Us Hit This Number Tonight
Your contributions are helping us make good progress toward our goal in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We need to get 1/3 of the way toward our goal by tonight. That’s $166,666. (Ignore the satany numerology.) It’s doable tonight if we can keep up the current momentum. Can you make this evening the moment you join us? Just click right here and make a contribution at any amount that works for you.
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