With a tentative confirmation hearing date set for mid-July today, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, met with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Tuesday.
Continue reading “Cornyn Suggests He’s Undecided on Blanche After Predicting ‘Miserable’ Final Two Years for Trump”News just moved today that federal prosecutors in Minneapolis have brought conspiracy charges against 15 Minneapolis demonstrators whom the government has identified as being members of “Antifa.” (I don’t know when or if “Metro Surge” officially ended. But apparently most of the incidents are more recent than the period this winter when Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed.) Our team is currently reviewing the indictment; check out Kate Riga’s latest for more details about the case. But I checked in with staff and our initial sense is that it is likely yet another case of overcharging, perhaps comparable to what happened in Broadview. It contains the same legal theory in which a protest amounts to a conspiracy in which every member of the protest is legally responsible for anything any other protestor does. It’s a dagger at the heart of the 1st Amendment.
Continue reading “Broadview 2.0?”Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced an eight-count felony indictment against 15 anti-ICE protesters Tuesday, centered on a broad “antifa”-inflected conspiracy.
Continue reading “MN U.S. Attorney Won’t Say Whether Officers Were Harmed As He Charges ICE Protesters with Felonies”There’s no question that Trump’s Iran War has been a disaster for the United States. There’s no way around that. The U.S. can absorb the cash costs of the conflict without too much difficulty. But along with everything else Trump has done over the last 18 months, it has given the U.S. the reputation of what amounts to a rogue state. Rebuilding trust in U.S. actions and intentions at best will be a very long process. The conflict has also redounded massively to the benefit of China, the only real peer competitor to the U.S. on the global stage.
But I wanted to point out two impacts of the war which are some versions of positives even if they are secondary effects of a disastrous adventure that never should have happened.
Hal Duncan, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the deputy director for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was in front of the Senate Budget Committee Tuesday morning for the first leg of his confirmation hearing.
Democratic members of the panel grilled Duncan on the actions of OMB Director Russ Vought throughout the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, during which he impounded and — with the help of congressional Republicans — rescinded funds that had been appropriated by Congress, in the process undermining the legislative branch’s power of the purse. Duncan’s responses did not inspire much confidence that, if confirmed, he’d handle the day-to-day operations at OMB much differently.
He is also scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday. If confirmed, Duncan — a former staffer of Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who currently works in OMB — will replace former congressman Dan Bishop, who is now serving as the interim Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina.
Here are three takeaways from Duncan’s first round of questioning:
When asked if he would object to OMB unilaterally refusing to spend money that Congress authorized — in other words impounding funds — Duncan refused to say he would.
“There is essentially a constitutional understanding that has been reinforced by the Supreme Court twice — that the power of the purse cannot be delegated to the president no matter how much the president wants to cancel programs that are authorized and funded or start programs that aren’t funded,” Ranking Member Jeff Merkley (D-OR) said during the hearing. “He doesn’t get to decide that and yet what we’re seeing is programs getting canceled … Will you defend the separation of powers and throw up a cautionary yellow flag and express some concerns if the strategy of OMB is to cancel an authorized and funded program?”
Duncan responded: “As you know, the President ran on restoring the impoundment authority. It’s an authority that presidents had exercised for over 200 years and, that being said, we have been in full compliance with the Impoundment Control Act to date.”
Despite Duncan’s claims, the OMB and the Trump administration were found repeatedly to have impounded federal funds approved by Congress, as documented in several decisions from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan legislative branch federal agency that examines how federal taxpayer dollars are spent.
Duncan’s answer signals an alignment with Vought’s belief that the administration has the inherent constitutional authority to impound funds. He has testified to this belief himself several times before and he made the same claim in April when he appeared before the Senate Budget Committee.
In addition to impoundments, over the past year and a half, the Trump White House found other ways to undo appropriators’ decisions, pushing congressional Republicans to authorize a rescissions package last year and championing a pockets rescissions package, which the GAO also found to be outside of the law.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), ranking member for the Senate Appropriations Committee, brought up pocket rescissions during her line of questioning.
“Can you assure all of us that OMB will not attempt to do another end run around Congress with an illegal pocket rescission this September?” Murray asked Duncan.
“I can’t commit to any of the fiscal tools the administration may or may not use in the future,” Duncan responded, also pointing to the Gerald Ford administration’s use of pocket rescissions.
Merkley later pushed back on Duncan’s example, saying that he would not be able to come up with any other instances of pocket rescissions after Ford as there were “several Supreme Court decisions” on the issue.
“One of them made it very clear that, in general, any sort of impoundment is unacceptable and rescission done without Congress is a form of impoundment,” Merkley said. He added that “the Ford example doesn’t at all address legitimacy or illegitimacy. The law still says any rescission must be done and … passed by both houses of Congress.”
Duncan was asked by Democratic senators if he thinks the 2020 election was rigged.
Duncan refused to answer that question directly, instead saying that he believes “Joe Biden was certified as the winner of the 2020 election.”
Duncan’s refusal to answer the question led Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) to push harder, beginning his questioning by asking: “Was the 2024 presidential election rigged?”
“Senator, President Trump won the 2024 presidential election,” Duncan answered.
“Yeah, folks, how about that? So he was asked twice, ‘Was the 2020 presidential election rigged?’ and he said ‘President Biden was certified to be the winner.’ He wouldn’t answer the question,” Kaine said, pointing to Duncan’s carefully crafted language in answering the same question in two very different ways.
“Mr. Duncan, you have either fallen victim to the conspiracy mindset that says that that election was rigged — and if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you shouldn’t be let anywhere near the position you’ve been nominated for,” Kaine continued. “Or you know President Biden won the election but you’re afraid of making an insecure president mad by acknowledging that fact. You answered so easily when I asked you the question about 2024. You didn’t fight, you didn’t evade, you didn’t obscure, you didn’t try to end run … The answer was just as simple about 2020.”
We are still, bizarrely, having to make sense of the Iran-U.S. “deal” on the basis of two or three different texts which are circulating on an unofficial basis. Meanwhile, the U.S., at least, refuses to release the text of the so-called “memorandum of understanding.” The Iranians are being somewhat more forthcoming, at least through their quasi-official state news agencies. But President Trump being a pathological liar shouldn’t obscure the fact that the Iranian regime is rather less than a reliable narrator. There’s surprisingly little public discussion in the United States about what conceivable good rationale there is for keeping the agreement secret while the White House is at least nominally trying to build public support for it. How can you know whether the deal is a good deal if you don’t know what the deal is? This is not a rhetorical question.
Continue reading “First Responses to Trump’s Hormuz Humiliation”President Trump’s oft-repeated claims that no public monies will be involved in his vanity ballroom project appear to be untrue, according to a new Washington Post report that also reveals the cost of the project has ballooned.
The newspaper obtained copies of detailed project summaries prepared for the White House by its contractor, Virginia-based Clark Construction. One summary from March estimated the cost of the project at $600 million, 50% more than the $400 million price tag Trump has repeatedly given publicly for the project.
More than half of the $600 million cost for the project would be covered by public funds, according to the March summary:
Congress has not authorized the project or allocated monies for it.
The alleged private funding for the project was itself problematic, a prime opportunity for corruption, with little transparency. In the end, it turns out to be problematic in every way.
In response to the WaPo story, the White House was still insisting on the $400 million figure: “President Trump and generous American patriots are funding the ballroom to the tune of approximately $400 million …”
Kash Patel, the social media addict who happens to be FBI director, posted this morning on X that the bureau thwarted a planned attack on President Trump’s UFC event at the White House on his birthday. “[M]ultiple individuals are now in custody and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold,” Patel posted.
Patel has a history of jumping the gun with social media posts on law enforcement activity and then having to backtrack, so proceed with caution on this.
The announcement by California Gov. Gavin Newsom — a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 — that the Trump DOJ is investigating his wife prompted an darkly comic response from what appear to be Justice Department sources.
The Wall Street Journal put it like this: “The probes have been going on since at least 2025 and were started by federal law-enforcement officials in California—not political appointees in Washington—after witnesses there came forward with information, the person said.”
The New York Times version was: “A person familiar with the matter … disputed Mr. Newsom’s assertion that the investigations were politically motivated, and said they had been initiated by federal law enforcement officials in California, not launched by officials in Washington.”
The implication: Hey, we know exactly what politically motivated investigations driven by the Trump White House and Main Justice look like and this ain’t it!
Of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Federal prosecutors and FBI agents outside of D.C. can initiate their own politically motivated investigations, too. See, for example, Nevada.
Political appointees at Main Justice short-circuited the antitrust review by career attorneys of the Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the WSJ reports:
A team of career lawyers who had spent months scrutinizing the deal were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law, the people said.
The staff investigators hadn’t yet made a final recommendation—a typical step in the deal-review process—and were told Friday that the department would close the investigation, effectively clearing the deal at the federal level, some of the people said.
A somewhat convoluted story in the WSJ — packed full of denials by the key players — reports that Trump personal attorney Boris Epshteyn was involved in Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s successful effort to get the Trump DOJ to drop criminal charges against him.
As of last summer, the [Adani] family was telling people that Epshteyn was helping them, some of the people said.
Epshteyn, who also serves as the president’s adviser and legal coordinator, didn’t attend meetings with prosecutors. Nor did his name appear on legal papers. …
But Epshteyn’s presence was discussed inside the Justice Department and among others familiar with the case, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Epshteyn emphatically denied the claims in the WSJ article. The firm representing Adani in the case, Sullivan & Cromwell, said it “did not work with or retain Mr. Epshteyn.” The Adani Group also issued a denial: “We have no relationship with Boris Epshteyn, have not retained him in any capacity, and have made no payments to him, directly or indirectly.”
The NYT just published an exhaustive investigation of Jeffrey Epstein’s jailhouse death that concludes:
Some important questions about Epstein’s death remain unanswered and likely unanswerable. Nevertheless, our reporting establishes that Epstein showed a clear pattern of behavior in the weeks before his death suggesting an intent to kill himself. The apparent suicide note memorialized Epstein’s despair and desire to “say goodbye” on his own terms. Other writings from his final days presented a picture of a fraying mental state that sharply contrasted with the upbeat picture he presented to jail psychologists, including another note in which he hinted at ending his life. …
The picture drawn most clearly by this new information is not the elaborate conspiracy that his murder would have required; rather, it is an unfortunate though not improbable convergence of longstanding institutional failures, human errors and chance events, which created an opportunity for Epstein to act on what was by then a well-established desire that he had already tried and failed to realize.
I didn’t touch the reported deal with Iran in yesterday’s Morning Memo because so much of the reporting relied on President Trump’s own characterizations of it. I don’t grasp the editorial decision-making that leads major news outlets to take Trump’s statements on the Iran negotiations at face value, given his abysmal track record on exactly this topic.
A day later, the details remain sketchy. It’s not clear, for example, whether the two sides are even working from a common draft document. But what already seems to be unraveling is the initial round of misinformation from Trump that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened with the same free passage that existed before the war.
This NYT headline captures the inanity: Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees’
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
After more than a week of counting votes, the very likely outcome Khaya previewed last week is now official: an election denier, Jim Marchant, won the Republican primary for Secretary of State in Nevada. This comes after Vernon Jones, who also disputes the results of the 2020 election, advanced to a June 16 runoff for the same job in Georgia.
Outright election deniers seeking to win offices in which they’ll oversee elections at the local or state level is a story we’ll be following this year, as we have (unfortunately!) every election year for the better part of a decade now.
Continue reading “Conspiracy Theorist Wins Nomination to Oversee Nevada’s Elections”From TPM Reader JU …
Continue reading “Another Perspective From Maine”I just listened to your post-election day podcast about Graham Platner. I agree with your much of what you said, but want to share a slightly different take. In my view, Mainers aren’t shrugging off Platner’s baggage because Trump set so low a bar. I think Mainers are hungry for public servants who are not obviously and shamelessly full of shit.
(About me: I am a women, 67, Jewish, and have lived in Maine for 40 years. I have/had all the reservations about Platner you would expect. I did not rank him first, but I am not sorry he prevailed. Like most Dems, I will vote for him in November regardless.)
A very odd nugget from Barak Ravid of Axios. Here’s the key passage in the lede …
Continue reading “Admin Hawks Are Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud … to Axios”CIA Director John Ratcliffe told President Trump and other senior officials that intelligence gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies raised serious doubts about Iran’s willingness to make the nuclear concessions the U.S. is seeking in any final deal, according to three sources familiar with those discussions.
