From TPM Reader JB …
Continue reading “TPM Readers Tell Us Why They Contribute #1”I contribute to the Journalism Fund for the same reason I am an Inside Member. Over the last quarter century, having read TPM since 2000, I have found it to be an invaluable lens for bringing the cacophony of national events into understandable order.
Detroit election officials accused the Justice Department of using “thin gruel” to create a “pretext” to justify sending voting monitors to the city for Michigan’s August 4 primary, letters exclusively obtained by TPM show. That includes what city officials suggested was a false claim about federal monitors during the 2024 election.
Continue reading “READ: Detroit Responds to DOJ Sending Election Monitors to Three Blue Michigan Cities”The Justice Department alumni group, Justice Connection, has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging senators to reject acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination to be AG ahead of his confirmation hearing next week.
The letter is signed by 1,200 former DOJ employees. Signees’ experience spans 14 administrations, both Democratic and Republican, and includes “dozens of U.S. attorneys, component heads, and other senior leaders, many of whom led major offices across the department and FBI. They also include signatories who worked in 77 U.S. Attorney’s Offices, dozens of whom worked in Blanche’s former office in the Southern District of New York,” Justice Connection said in a statement.
The letter focuses primarily on Blanche’s disastrous leadership at the Justice Department, and the part he has played in dismantling the longstanding firewall between the Justice Department and the White House that Trump has taken a sledgehammer to during his second term. They call out the nominee for his role in the “degradation of DOJ’s apolitical career workforce.”
The letter helps unpack the crucial role of civil servants at the DOJ and Blanche’s role in carrying out Trump’s retribution against them, often for politically motivated reasons. An excerpt:
Of the more than 100,000 employees at the Justice Department, 99 percent are career civil servants. Anyone who’s worked there, and through administrations of both parties, knows they are the department’s backbone. They’re the ones who keep us safe by prosecuting violent crime, investigating drug trafficking, and countering terrorism and espionage. They keep us prosperous by enforcing antitrust laws and holding financial fraudsters accountable. They protect our fundamental freedoms by upholding civil rights laws, and they keep our elected officials honest by pursuing public corruption.
Todd Blanche knows this; he served as a career DOJ prosecutor for almost a decade. But that hasn’t stopped him from demonizing career employees, undermining their work, and driving them out of the department.
Under Blanche’s leadership, approximately 16,000 employees have left, and departures aren’t slowing down. They include FBI agents and analysts in field offices across the country, and more than a quarter of the department’s attorneys.
Blanche has fired or overseen the firings of hundreds of these employees – usually without notice, and for improper, unlawful reasons. Some were terminated for having worked on cases the President didn’t like; for being relatives of the President’s foes; for adjudicating immigration cases in accordance with due process; for declining to initiate vindictive prosecutions; or for refusing to lie in court. These terminations violate the very civil service statutes designed to prevent corruption and political purges.
“The culture of fear Blanche has instilled within DOJ’s workforce must end,” the former DOJ employees concluded, before urging members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Blanche’s nomination.
“DOJ Respect for career professionals must return. Would-be job applicants need to believe the Justice Department lives up to the virtue in its name. And instead of exhibiting fealty to the president, the Attorney General must heed John Adams’ admonition that our republic remains a ‘government of laws, not of men.’ For the sake of the institution where we once proudly served, we urge you to reject Todd Blanche’s nomination,” they wrote.
While Republicans make up the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee — the panel that will have to vote to bring Blanche’s nomination to the Senate floor for a final vote — Blanche’s confirmation in the Senate is not guaranteed at this point. It’s not even guaranteed that his nomination will move out of committee.
That’s, in part, because two lame duck Republican who either have beef with President Trump or have made it clear they’re not always a rubber stamp for his agenda in recent months, sit on the committee: Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) (Trump recently ended his career in the Senate) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) (recently retired, sometimes takes issues with Trump’s corruption).
After meeting with Blanche last month, Cornyn posted on X saying he had a positive “interview,” but that he would not make a decision about how to vote until Blanche gave Senate Republicans a more robust briefing on his role in the creation of Trump’s comedically corrupt slush fund, which Blanche has shut down, for now. More from me last month:
Cornyn is, of course, one of 11 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Blanche’s nomination will have to advance out of this panel with a simple majority vote before reaching the Senate floor for a full confirmation vote. If all nine Democratic members vote against Blanche’s nomination, Republicans can only afford to lose one vote on their side of things. Republicans on the panel include staunch President Trump loyalists, like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Kennedy (R-LA). But Cornyn’s nod in the direction of a potentially showing some backbone, coupled with Sen. Thom Tillis’ (R-NC) newfound retirement-era reputation as a wildcard, does raise some questions about Blanche’s ability to be confirmed.
A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the DOJ cannot have access to a list of all of the names and personal contact information for the people who served as election workers during the 2020 election in Fulton County — the county that is home to Atlanta, Georgia and many of Trump and MAGA’s delusions about the 2020 election.
The DOJ obtained a grand jury subpoena back in April in an attempt to compel the county to hand over this info for all the county employees and volunteers who helped with administering the election six years ago. A federal judge sided with the county in its legal efforts to block the subpoena. More from the Associated Press:
Fulton County asked a judge to quash the subpoena, arguing it was meant to “target, harass and punish the President’s perceived political opponents” and that it was “grossly over broad and untethered to any reasonable need.”
“Given the low need for the subpoenaed information and the highly burdensome nature of the disclosure of the same, the Subpoena is unreasonable and must be quashed,” U.S. District Judge William Ray wrote in his ruling.
John Light outlines the stakes in Maine and what would need to happen if Democrat Graham Platner actually listens to the chorus of Democrats pulling their endorsements and calling for him to drop out in the wake of a sexual assault allegation: The Brief: Graham Platner’s Exit Would Set Up a Busy Few Weeks in Maine
Kate Riga covers a ruling today from a federal judge in Massachusetts who denied the Trump administration’s request to stay her ruling blocking key sections of Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots while the Trump admin appeals. The Trump administration has filed an emergency appeal of the stay request to the 1st circuit court of appeals: Judge Denies Trump Request to Interfere with Absentee Ballots While Case Against His EO Plays Out
Christopher Mathias writes on what the far-right really means when it talks about “Remigration”: When You Hear ‘Remigration,’ Know That It Means Ethnic Cleansing
Hunter Walker has a new piece out this afternoon looking at how some mainstream Republicans waded into the waters of fringe conspiracy theory this weekend with Patriot Front’s unsettling visit to Washington, D.C.: Elon Musk And GOP House Members Weigh In On Deep White Nationalist Conspiracy Beef
‘I’m Mad at Trump’: Even Trumpers Can’t Stand How Shoddy the Great American State Fair Is
👀 🤔Republican Leaders Say They’ve Spoken With McConnell Since Hospitalization
Federal court strikes down Florida’s Stop WOKE Act in higher ed
Maryland plans August special session to set up 2028 redistricting
As America observed its 250th birthday this past weekend, billionaire Elon Musk and Republican members of Congress aired out a conspiracy theory that has emerged amid internecine white supremacist feuding.
Continue reading “Elon Musk and GOP House Members Weigh in on Deep White Nationalist Conspiracy Beef”First, thank you to everyone who has contributed since we kicked off this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive this morning. We’re now past $100,000 toward our goal of $500,000 for the drive. We truly appreciate it. To keep this going please click here to contribute. (See this post below for a bit more on the drive and here for why it’s so important this year.) One additional thing to add to the community part of this drive and the TPM community itself: if you contribute, drop us a line to let us know why. (Send it to talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com with the subject line: “TPM J Fund”) What made you want to contribute? What is important to you about TPM? What role does it play in your news and politics world? Different ways to answer it but basically, “why?” We’ll publish them here. Again, thank you and keep those contributions coming.
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Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.
“Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.
The announcement linked to guidance from his office about election laws in Texas, which included a requirement to be a U.S. citizen, a prohibition on collecting mail ballots on behalf of others and a warning that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.”
“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.
Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Continue reading “Ken Paxton Vowed to Crack Down on “Illegal Voting.” He May Have Violated Texas Election Law.”A federal judge denied the Trump administration’s stay request Tuesday and will continue to block key sections of an executive order that would give the federal government unprecedented control of absentee voting.
Continue reading “Judge Denies Trump Request to Interfere with Absentee Ballots While Case Against His EO Plays Out”This story has been percolating in local media since last month — credit to Syracuse.com, which appears to be the lead dog on this story — but the totality of it just hit the national radar over the last 24 hours or so.
In two instances in western New York, ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility — which has apparently switched from serving as an internal watchdog to targeting online critics — has tried to force people who posted criticisms of ICE to sign a “Warning Notice” admitting that their criticisms were unlawful.
David Streever of Rochester, New York, sued ICE on Monday in federal court in D.C., alleging that ICE’s OPR violated his First Amendment rights when it went to his home last month and then tracked him down while he was traveling to issue him a “Warning Notice” about a critical email he sent to then-acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons. He refused to sign it.
“Like many Americans, I was deeply upset after the shootings in Minnesota and I felt compelled to do something,” Streever said in a press release about his lawsuit. “Writing an email to the head of ICE seemed like the least I could do to express my sense of outrage. I never dreamed it would lead to a knock on my door by federal officers or descending on my hotel in the dark of night.”
The visit to Streever’s home came the same day that ICE OPR approached Paigelynne Gonyea while she was serving as a poll worker at a polling place in Syracuse, New York, about an Instagram post from January about the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good. Gonyea also refused to sign the “Warning Notice.”
In Gonyea’s case, there’s some dispute over which Instagram post prompted ICE to investigate. She says it was this post that urged the indictment of the ICE agent by name:
ICE claims it was a separate post that provided the agent’s home address, a claim Gonyea denies.
The fact that both cases are out of western New York could mean a particularly aggressive ICE OPR effort in that area, rather than a nationwide push. The “Warning Notice” in the Rochester case looks looks nearly identical to an image of the one in the Syracuse case.
The story has now been picked up by Wired, the WaPo, and the New York Times.
Streever is being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which said in a statement: “Simply put, the only threat here is the one DHS and ICE officials pose to Streever’s First Amendment freedoms — and those of his fellow Americans.”
National Guard troops deployed to combat street crime shot and killed an allegedly armed Black man in Memphis early Sunday.
The incident began when Memphis police responded to reports of shots having been fired. With assistance from the National Guard, they began pursuing “an armed male carrying a handgun,” according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which has taken over investigation of the shooting and issued a statement on the incident:
During the pursuit, the male turned toward NG members with his weapon. Tennessee National Guard soldiers discharged their weapons, striking the male. The male was pronounced deceased at the scene.
Tyrin Johnson, 20, was pronounced dead at the scene.
National Guard troops are not typically trained in policing or in the use of force in the civilian context.
Bloomberg: “Justice Department leaders’ shutdown of a long-running criminal case against Abbott Laboratories over contaminated baby formula has fueled a broader pullback on corporate prosecutions protecting consumer health, said people familiar with the situation.”
Drawing on the work of Mark Warren, Henry Farrell has an important new piece that argues for a more expansive understanding of corruption in a democracy …
To understand corruption properly, we shouldn’t think of it as an individual level phenomenon. Classical thinkers, like Machiavelli, understood corruption as a condition that could afflict governments and indeed societies. But if we value democracy as the best way to order our affairs, we should understand corruption as not a moral phenomenon but a political one, which involves the corruption of democratic processes.
… and applies it to the Roberts Court:
Across an apparently unrelated range of issues – campaign finance, executive immunity, political corruption and gerrymandering – the Roberts Court’s decisions have persistently corrupted the workings of democracy, so as to undermine equality in decision making and voice in favor of processes that are both duplicitous and exclusive.
The point is that individual level quid pro quo corruption is too narrow and cramped a way of thinking about the corruption of democracies — and the corruption of the Roberts Court, which has been a driving force in the deeper, systemic American corruption that has become so insidious over the past two decades.
A woman who dated Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner off and on a few years ago came forward a second time with new allegations that he sexually assaulted her. Jenny Racicot was first interviewed by the NYT for last month’s bombshell report in which she was one of several women who described unsettling behavior by Platner:
Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior “reckless” and “unsettling.”
Racicot was far more forthcoming about the incident in a Politico story published yesterday and in a later story by the WaPo. She also sat for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper:
Democrats quickly began abandoning Platner’s candidacy en masse. If he withdraws, as seems likely, state Dems have until July 27 to name a replacement candidate
NYT: “The number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs this fall dropped 15 percent from the previous year, according to data from over 50 top research universities, raising fears that the nation’s capacity to produce new science could be diminished.”
Today we’re launching our annual drive to support the TPM Journalism Fund. The pitch is as simple as it is essential: Many of our most committed members want to contribute more than their annual membership fee, and we’ve created a mechanism for doing so. It’s a critical part of our annual budget. We’re aiming to raise $500,000 this year. The size of the not-tax-deductible contributions we get for the fund has ranged in past years from single digits to five figures. If you’re in a position to pitch in, I’d really appreciate you contributing what you can. Just click here.
If that’s not the right value proposition for you, the best way to support TPM remains becoming a member, and we have a special discount on memberships right now. Just $25 for one year, if that better fits your pocketbook.
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Back in 2018, a 19-year-old neo-Nazi going by the name “ThomasRyan” wrote in a private Discord server that a “vast remigration program” in the United States was the “best outcome we can stand to look at.” There was no mistaking what ThomasRyan meant by “remigration,” a term only he and his ilk were using at the time. It meant the forced removal of non-white people from the U.S., a process ThomasRyan imagined would begin with the U.S. government escorting “willing” non-white people to their “ethnic homelands.” The “unwilling” — that is, immigrants and U.S. citizens who refused to leave the country that is their home — would be rounded up in chains so the government could “dump them” somewhere abroad.
Fast forward to the present and ThomasRyan — real name Thomas Rousseau — is the leader of Patriot Front, a growing white supremacist group known for committing hate crimes across America. The vision of “remigration” he articulated eight years ago in a neo-Nazi message board has become official U.S. policy.
Continue reading “When You Hear ‘Remigration,’ Know That It Means Ethnic Cleansing”It’s time to kick off this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. This fund is a critical part of what keeps TPM vital and strong. If you’ve contributed in the past — and especially if you haven’t — I hope you will take a moment this morning and join us in contributing. Just click right here. If you’re thinking you might get to it at some point, please take literally about a minute and a half and do it this morning. That helps us get to our goal all the quicker, and get back to focusing on the news 100% of the time.
This year we need to get to $500,000, and if we can get over that that will be great and a real assist. I explained here over the weekend why this year’s drive is particularly critical. TPM is a collaborative enterprise. It’s that way within our operation and from the literal beginning it’s been a collaboration with our readers, who gives us angles and tips and perspective on stories and who have our operation’s back with your financial support. It is a collaboration with you and today our team needs your support. We literally can’t produce what we are producing, play our — I believe critical — role in the news ecosystem without your contributions.
In the coming days I’m going to be sharing more about what we have planned over the next year and why the drive is so important. But for now, we need your help. Any amount gets us closer to our goal and helps us get there as fast as possible. It would mean so much to us if you could join with us today. It just takes stopping in your routine and giving us no more than two minutes today. Just click right here. We thank you.
