In late August, a group of Russians who had asked and not received political asylum from the U.S. government found themselves back home. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had put them on a circuitous route: after being picked up from an airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, they made stops in the Caribbean before moving onwards to Cairo, Egypt.
From Cairo, a plane took them to Moscow.
Continue reading “Trump Admin Returns Russian Dissident Asylum Seekers to Putin”This story was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of The 19th. Meet Nadra and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
In the weeks since he was accused of showing explicit content on his office television, Oklahoma schools chief Ryan Walters has canceled a State Board of Education meeting and skipped a subsequent one on September 3, calling into question his ability to oversee public education and renewing threats to oust him from leadership.
Walters has not commented publicly on his absence, but a spokesperson for him said in a statement, “Superintendent Walters is focused on tackling the big issues facing Oklahoma schools.”
His decision to miss last week’s meeting, following his cancellation of the August session, has drawn attention to the multiple controversies he’s entangled in and reignited calls for his impeachment. His absence Wednesday reportedly marked the first time in decades that a superintendent skipped the board meeting.
In July, two education board members, Ryan Deatherage and Becky Carson, said they saw full-frontal nudity on Walters’ office TV during an executive session of the board. The state superintendent not only vehemently denied the claims but also accused the duo of spreading “falsehoods” about him in a coordinated attack spearheaded by Gov. Kevin Stitt, a fellow Republican with whom Walters has clashed.
An investigation into the July incident remains ongoing. However, Oklahoma House Speaker Kyle Hilbert said in August that his preliminary findings suggested that neither Walters nor the board members had acted improperly. Nudity did appear on Walters’ office TV, Hilbert said, but only because of a “bizarre accident involving a newly installed television defaulting to a pre-programmed channel.”
Tensions between Walters and the board members did not dissipate after Hilbert’s findings. Carson, in particular, said she was offended by the suggestion that she and her colleague would lie, and Walters fumed over the damage to his reputation.
About two weeks after the accusations, hundreds of protesters — members of Oklahoma’s new, independent Sooner State political party — rallied at the state capitol to demand his impeachment. The protesters raised concerns that Oklahoma ranked 50th in a report on public school quality across the country, a criticism that connects to a wider net of controversies involving Walters.He announced this summer that Oklahoma students would receive free lunch although the state legislature hadn’t budgeted funding to public schools for such a massive undertaking, and a federal deadline lapsed that would have helped many school districts achieve this goal. He has also started requiring California and New York transplants who apply for Oklahoma teaching jobs to take an ideologically-driven “America First” test designed by conservative organization PragerU.
Due to his ongoing tensions with Stitt over issues including immigration — Walters wanted to question public school families about their legal status and the governor objected — the superintendent was not present when Education Secretary Linda McMahon visited Oklahoma as part of her nationwide “Returning Education to the States” tour in August. Stitt, however, did appear with the secretary. President Donald Trump had reportedly considered Walters for McMahon’s position after becoming president-elect in November. The state superintendent famously sparked a backlash in 2024 after trying to get Trump-endorsed Bibles in all Oklahoma public school classrooms to the tune of $3 million, a plan he later walked back.
Walters’ absence from the board meeting has increased scrutiny of his leadership. During Wednesday’s brief session, the board decided to hire a new attorney to replace its previous lawyer, who recently resigned. Board members and lawmakers say Walters’ cancellation of the August meeting and nonattendance at Wednesday’s means pressing issues aren’t being addressed.
State Sen. Mark Mann, a Democrat from Oklahoma City, described Walters’ behavior to Oklahoma’s News 4 as “really just dereliction of duty.” He added, “That agency is barely functioning; it’s in the worst shape it’s ever been in.”
State Rep. Ellen Pogemiller, also a Democrat from Oklahoma City, said it is not too late to pursue impeachment.
“As a taxpayer, I would have wanted my state superintendent to show up in a meeting like that,” she said.
House Education Chair Dick Lowe, a Republican, said he is unhappy with Walters’ leadership, too. But he is not ready to oust the superintendent from office.
The State Board of Education is scheduled to have its next regular meeting September 25.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Trump Justice Department is taking the unprecedented step of compiling a national voter database, the NYT reports:
The effort to essentially establish a national voting database, involving more than 30 states, has elicited serious concerns among voting rights experts because it is led by allies of the president, who as recently as this January refused to acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. fairly won the 2020 election. It has also raised worries that those same officials could use the data to revive lies of a stolen election, or try to discredit future election results.
The effort is being speared by two DOJ components acting in parallel: the civil rights division and the criminal division. They have been seeking individual voter data from around the country, involving 16 GOP-controlled states and 17 Democratic or swing states, the NYT reports:
In a private meeting with the staff of top state election officials last month, Michael Gates, a deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, disclosed that all 50 states would eventually receive similar requests, according to notes of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times. In particular, he said, the federal government wants the last four digits of every voter’s Social Security number.
Part of the motivation for the data collection appears to be stoking claims of widespread voting by undocumented immigrants, according to the report. But election law experts and state election officials are sounding the alarm about other uses the Trump DOJ may make of the data, ranging from sowing further doubt about the 2020 election to interfering in the 2026 midterms.
Combine the NYT report with recent comments from longtime GOP election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who before she became a major player in the Trump effort to overturn the 2020 election had spent decades trying to make it harder to vote, and you can start to see the groundwork being laid first for delegitimizing, then for rejecting a loss in the 2026 midterms:
Mitchell and those of her ilk must create a corrupt permission structure for Trump to involve himself in the midterms because constitutionally there is no legal role for the president. Indeed there is no national election, but rather concurrent state-level elections.
Law professor Justin Levitt, a noted election law expert at Loyola Marymount University, compared it to Trump’s takeover of D.C.: “It’s wading in, without authorization and against the law, with an overly heavy federal hand to take over a function that states are actually doing just fine,” Levitt told the NYT, “It’s wildly illegal, deeply troubling, and nobody asked for this.”
With no explanation, the Supreme Court used its emergency docket to give the Trump administration a greenlight to continue targeting people in immigration raids who look Hispanic, speak with an accent, or gather where undocumented Latinos are more likely to be found.
The court’s decision to lift a lower court injunction while the appeal proceeds suggested it was enforcing a lower standard than the individualized suspicion required by the 4th Amendment, though Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied as much in a concurring opinion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor vigorously dissented and was joined by the other two liberal justice.
Sifting through the implications of the case:
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”–Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo
At least 11 defendants arrested during President Trump’s show of force in D.C. have languished in jail longer than the constitutionally-permitted 48 hours before their initial appearance in front of a judge, the NYT reports.
The Supreme Court action on immigration raids in Los Angeles was not the day’s most glaring example of its misuse of its emergency. In an important independent agency case, Chief Justice John Roberts allowed President Trump to proceed with firing Democratic FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter while the appeal of the case is heard.
The emergency docket action effectively reversed Humphrey’s Executor, the landmark 1935 Supreme Court case that held President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not unilaterally remove FTC commissioners without cause. It wasn’t a surprising outcome given the Roberts Court’s steady undermining of the Humphrey’s Executor.
A right-wing think tanker was chosen as the first ombudsman to oversee CBS News under the Trump administration’s condition of approval for the merger of its parent company. Kenneth R. Weinstein, a former CEO of the Hudson Institute who also spent time at the Heritage Foundation, has no experience overseeing news coverage.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an unannounced visit to Puerto Rico as part of the Trump administration’s effort to destabilize Venezuela.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld E. Jean Carroll’s $83.3 million defamation judgment against Donald Trump.
An unidentified professor faces discipline and a department head and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences have been removed after a student objected to LGBTQ content in a children’s literature class, the Texas Tribune reports.
The employment actions came after a video of a in-class confrontation went viral:
The video, which does not show anyone’s face, captures audio of a student objecting to a professor teaching that there are more than two genders. The student says this conflicts with President Donald J. Trump’s executive order and her religious beliefs, and the professor responds she has a right to teach the lesson and the student has a right to leave.
Texas A&M University President Mark A. Welsh III defended the employment actions in a statement on X, framing it as misleading to students to include content in the classroom “that was not consistent with the course’s published description.”
It used to be that one could roughly say that while paleocons were fascists at home, reimagining America as a white ethnostate, they were relatively more dovish abroad and skeptical of foreign entanglements, while the neocons were fascists abroad, favoring unabashed imperialism, foreign adventures, and unilateral wars, but broadly in support of center-right liberal democracy at home. The current fusionism of the right is the worst of all possible worlds: fascist at home, fascist abroad.
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While Missouri Democrats stage protests and push Republican leadership to engage with them, it appears that Republicans in the Missouri state House will ultimately be able to pass redrawn congressional district maps this week, bowing to pressure from the Trump administration.
Continue reading “Missouri Republicans Now Also Poised to Do Trump’s Mid-Cycle Redistricting Dirty Work”As we’ve been discussing for a week there’s a big argument among Democrats about the looming shutdown fight. Senate Democrats seem set on making it a negotiation about Obamacare subsidies, the biggest part of the BBB cuts that kick in before 2026. Meanwhile, you have a growing chorus of people who aren’t Senate Democrats saying this is wrong. It’s not time for small-bore policy revisions. You’ve got to do something dramatic to rein in Trump’s increasingly dictatorial rule. I also see Lakshya Jain and Matt Yglesias saying that yes, maybe it’s time for a confrontation. But if you’re going to have a confrontation, you need to make that stand on the issue where your issue advantage is the greatest. And that’s on the health care subsidies. And at least on the first part of that I absolutely agree. Tariffs are actually pretty salient too. But let’s set that aside for a moment. Because there’s an unspoken part of this equation that makes all the difference.
So let’s get that clear and on the table.
Continue reading “What’s Unmentioned in the Intra-Dem Shutdown Debate”I was very pleased to see that Ezra Klein has joined the ranks of those who think that Democrats need to gird themselves for a fight in the budget showdown coming at the end of this month. I have various disagreements with Klein, some rooted in policy and others more attitudinal, temperamental. But his influence within the Democratic elite is unrivaled. His words really matter. They matter enough to make me think Senate Dems may actually shift in time to make a difference here. His essential point is irrefutable. None of the arguments for standing down from back in March, which were at least arguable then, hold up anymore. (It’s this column at the Times that I’m talking about in case you haven’t read it or read about it.)
There are a couple of follow-up points I’d like to make about this. One is the idea that the Democrats are making a decision to “shut the government down.” In a sense this is a semantic point. But some semantic points are extremely important, and this is one of them. You really need to get this right. If Democrats do what a growing number of outside observers say they should and indeed must, they’re not making a decision to shut the government down. In fact, they would very much like to avoid that. Sometimes when there’s a shutdown standoff a lot of Republicans really do want to shut the government down in and of itself because they’re hostile to most of the things government does. None of that applies to Democrats. They’d much prefer that Trump agreed to their demands and the threat of a shutdown never materializes.
Continue reading “On Shutdowns, Get the Wording Right and Other Thoughts”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent got into a heated confrontation with Federal Housing Finance Agency chief Bill Pulte last week at the Executive Branch, the MAGA-chic private club in D.C., Politico reports.
Bessent accused Pulte, the MAGA influencer ginning up mortgage fraud claims against Trump foes, of bad-mouthing him to Trump, leading to this diatribe from the sitting Treasury secretary: “Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fuck you. I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.”
Co-owner Omeed Malik attempted to intervene in the confrontation, prompting this memorable exchange:
“It’s either me or him,” Bessent said to Malik. “You tell me who’s getting the fuck out of here.”
“Or,” he added, “we could go outside.”
“To do what?” asked Pulte. “To talk?”
“No,” Bessent replied. “I’m going to fucking beat your ass.”
Even Trump-world insiders described the scene to Politico as “bonkers” and “unhinged.”
The signature piece of propaganda over the weekend, posted by President Trump on his social media platform:
“We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.”–Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking at President Trump’s Oval Office signing of an executive order making the Department of War a “secondary title” for the Department of Defense
Under absurd pressure from the Trump administration, CBS News will no longer edit pre-recorded interviews for Face the Nation.
Since we last checked in on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration has issued new threats to deport him, variously, to El Salvador (again!) and the small African country of Eswatini — all because he dared to challenge the error of his original unlawful deportation to El Salvador.
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On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”
Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.
DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”
The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen.
DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?”
Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.
Continue reading “The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security”Everyone is rightly shocked, disgusted, outraged by Trump’s Truth Social meme threatening to turn Chicago into a war zone. But where’s the National Guard exactly? Trump said he was doing this a couple weeks ago. He said they were “going in” right away a week later. Maybe he’ll do it tomorrow. I’m certainly not promising he won’t. But where are they?
Let me connect a few dots for you that may be a key part of the Trump-Epstein drama and may even be what Trump has been trying to keep hidden in those files. I’m not sure quite what we’re dealing with here. But I think this is significant.
Yesterday Speaker Mike Johnson was on the Hill talking to reporters running Trump defense on the Epstein files. It sounds like pretty standard stuff — and then he says this: “When he first heard the rumor he kicked [Epstein] out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant who tried to take this stuff down.” It’s an odd moment. Because Johnson says it in this kind of off-handed way and without explanation like it’s just one in a litany of talking points. But he clearly suggests that Trump played some role bringing about Epstein’s downfall, that he was an FBI informant who presumably told the authorities about Epstein’s sex crimes. The clip got a lot of attention on social media, unsurprisingly. One of Trump’s top surrogates is suggesting that far from being implicated in Epstein’s crimes, Trump is some secret good guy in the shadows, the guy who out of the limelight helped the authorities bring Epstein to justice.
Total fantasy, right?
Continue reading “Is This The Hidden Part of the Trump-Epstein Drama?”
