House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has been careful to not publicly disagree with the Trump administration as it pressures Texas Republicans to engage in mid-decade redistricting to help the party potentially net five new U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterms.
Continue reading “Speaker Johnson Comes Out Against Midcycle Redistricting … When Dems Do It”Trump, Elections and the Opposition’s Strategic Depth
President Trump has a new post up on Truth Social today in which he claims that states only run elections and count ballots as agents acting at his direction as president of the United States. The key lines are “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tell them …” He claims he’s going to issue an executive order to ban voting by mail and any voting machines he doesn’t like.
Put simply, this is total bullshit.
Continue reading “Trump, Elections and the Opposition’s Strategic Depth”RFK Jr. Wants to Overhaul the US ‘Vaccine Court.’ What Would That Actually Look Like?
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
For almost 40 years, people who suspect they’ve been harmed by a vaccine have been able to turn to a little-known system called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program – often simply called the vaccine court.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a critic of the vaccine court, calling it “biased” against compensating people, slow and unfair. He has said that he wants to “revolutionize” or “fix” this system.
I’m a scholar of law, health and medicine. I investigated the history, politics and debates about the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in my book “Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury.”
Although vaccines are extensively tested and monitored, and are both overwhelmingly safe for the vast majority of people and extremely cost-effective, some people will experience a harmful reaction to a vaccine. The vaccine court establishes a way to figure out who those people are and to provide justice to them.
Having studied the vaccine court for 15 years, I agree that it could use some fixing. But changing it dramatically will be difficult and potentially damaging to public health.
Deciphering vaccine injuries
The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is essentially a process that enables doctors, lawyers, patients, parents and government officials to determine who deserves compensation for a legitimate vaccine injury.
It was established in 1986 by an act of Congress to solve a specific social problem: possible vaccine injuries to children from the whole-cell pertussis vaccine. That vaccine, which was discontinued in the U.S. in the 1990s, could cause alarming side effects like prolonged crying and convulsions. Parents sued vaccine manufacturers, and some stopped producing vaccines.
Congress was worried that lawsuits would collapse the country’s vaccine supply, allowing diseases to make a comeback. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 created the vaccine court process and shielded vaccine manufacturers from these lawsuits.
Here’s how it works: A person who feels they have experienced a vaccine-related injury files a claim to be heard by a legal official called a special master in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The Health and Human Services secretary is named as the defendant and is represented by Department of Justice attorneys.
Doctors who work for HHS evaluate the medical records and make a recommendation about whether they think the vaccine caused the person’s medical problem. Some agreed-upon vaccine injuries are listed for automatic compensation, while other outcomes that are scientifically contested go through a hearing to determine if the vaccine caused the problem.
Awards come from a trust fund, built up through a 75-cent excise tax on each dose of covered vaccine sold. Petitioners’ attorneys who specialize in vaccine injury claims are paid by the trust fund, whether they win or lose.
Some updates are needed
Much has changed in the decades since Congress wrote the law, but Congress has not enacted updates to keep up.
For instance, the law supplies only eight special masters to hear all the cases, but the caseload has risen dramatically as more vaccines have been covered by the law. It set a damages cap of $250,000 in 1986 but did not account for inflation. The statute of limitations for an injury is three years, but in my research, I found many people file too late and miss their chance.
When the law was written, it only covered vaccines recommended for children. In 2023, the program expanded to include vaccines for pregnant women. Vaccines just for adults, like shingles, are not covered. COVID-19 vaccine claims go to another system for emergency countermeasures vaccines that has been widely criticized. These vaccines could be added to the program, as lawyers who bring claims there have advocated.
These reform ideas are “friendly amendments” with bipartisan support. Kennedy has mentioned some of them, too.
A complex system is hard to revolutionize
Kennedy hasn’t publicly stated enough details about his plan for the vaccine court to reveal the changes he intends to make. The first and least disruptive course of action would be to ask Congress to pass the bipartisan reforms noted above.
But some of his comments suggest he may seek to dismantle it, not fix it. None of his options are straightforward, however, and consequences are hard to predict.
Straight up changing the vaccine court’s structure would probably be the most difficult path. It requires Congress to amend the 1986 law that set it up and President Donald Trump to sign the legislation. Passing the bill to dismantle it requires the same process. Either direction involves all the difficulties of getting a contentious bill through Congress. Even the “friendly amendments” are hard – a 2021 bill to fix the vaccine court was introduced but failed to advance.
However, there are several less direct possibilities.
Adding autism to the injuries list
Kennedy has long supported discredited claims about harms from vaccines, but the vaccine court has been a bulwark against claims that lack mainstream scientific support. For example, the vaccine court held a yearslong court process from 2002 to 2010 and found that autism was not a vaccine injury. The autism trials drew on 50 expert reports, 939 medical articles and 28 experts testifying on the record. The special masters deciding the cases found that none of the causation hypotheses put forward to connect autism and vaccines were reliable as medical or scientific theories.
Much of Kennedy’s ire is directed at the special masters, who he claims “prioritize the solvency” of the system “over their duty to compensate victims.” But the special masters do not work for him. Rather, they are appointed by a majority of the judges in the Court of Federal Claims for four-year terms – and those judges themselves have 15-year terms. Kennedy cannot legally remove any of them in the middle of their service to install new judges who share his views.
Given that, he may seek to put conditions like autism on the list of presumed vaccine injuries, in effect overturning the special masters’ decisions. Revising the list of recognized injuries to add ones without medical evidence is within Kennedy’s powers, but it would still be difficult. It requires a long administrative process with feedback from an advisory committee and the public. Such revisions have historically been controversial, and are usually linked to major scientific reviews of their validity.
Public health and medical groups are already mobilized against Kennedy’s vaccine policy moves. If he failed to follow legally required procedures while adding new injuries to the list, he could be sued to stop the changes.
Targeting vaccine manufacturers
Kennedy could also lean on his newly reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to withdraw recommendations for certain vaccines, which would also remove them from eligibility in the vaccine compensation court. Lawsuits against manufacturers could then go straight to regular courts. On Aug. 14, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services may have taken a step in this direction by announcing the revival of a childhood vaccine safety task force in response to a lawsuit by anti-vaccine activists.
Kennedy has also supported legislation that would allow claims currently heard in vaccine court to go to regular courts. These drastic reforms could essentially dismantle the vaccine court.
People claiming vaccine injuries could hope to win damages through personal injury lawsuits in the civil justice system instead of vaccine court, perhaps by convincing a jury or getting a settlement. These types of settlements were what prompted the creation of the vaccine court in the first place. But these lawsuits could be hard to win. There is a higher bar for scientific evidence in regular courts than in vaccine court, and plaintiffs would have to sue large corporations rather than file a government claim.
Raising the idea of reforming the vaccine court has provoked strong reactions across the many groups with a stake in the program. It is a complex system with multiple constituents, and Kennedy’s approaches so far pull in different directions. The push to revolutionize it will test the strength of its complex design, but the vaccine court may yet hold up.
Looking Again at the 2026 Senate Map
There’s a long way to go before November 2026. The pace of malign events just keeps increasing. But even with all that I want to mention some significant shifts on the 2026 Senate recruiting front. It’s an article of faith for very good reasons that regaining control of Senate is an almost impossible hill for Democrats to climb given the map in play. Democrats have two challenging holds in Georgia and Michigan. Their best pickup opportunities are in states that have repeatedly eluded them, Maine and North Carolina. Beyond that it’s all reliably red states. All that, alas, remains basically the same. But there are a series of shifts that make Democrats taking over the Senate look more plausible even though the odds remain against it.
Let’s run through some details.
Continue reading “Looking Again at the 2026 Senate Map”Ed Martin Confirms Ed Martin’s Witch Hunt Against Elected Democrats
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
A Classic Example of Political Corruption
Ed Martin had no prior experience as a prosecutor when he became acting D.C. U.S. attorney earlier this year. And it shows.
Since his nomination to the permanent position was aborted because of lack of Senate GOP support, Martin has been triple-hatting at Main Justice as (i) U.S. pardon attorney; (ii) the chief of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group” — the unintentionally revealing name of the outfit that’s charged with politicizing the Justice Department; and (iii) most recently as Bondi’s “special attorney” overseeing the politically motivated mortgage fraud investigations of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
It was in that third role that Martin was apparently serving when he went on Fox News and admitted that he’s using the pretext of the clearly bogus mortgage fraud probes to conduct an open-ended witch hunt into Schiff and James. “We’re also gonna look at everything else they’ve been doing,” Martin said on air:
Most legal experts think the mortgage fraud claims don’t amount to anything on the facts or on the law. But don’t underestimate the potency of ongoing criminal investigations hanging over anyone, especially elected officials, particularly when the investigations are used as justification for a wide-ranging probe of unspecified other wrongdoing.
Even if charges never come, this is a classic example of political corruption — and of authoritarian capture of the independence of federal prosecutors. Martin has embarked on a fishing expedition and he’ll keep it going for as long as it’s useful to the White House.
Speaking of Letitia James …
New York Attorney General Letitia James’ $500 million civil fraud judgment against Donald Trump has been held up on appeal for nearly a year, apparently because of deep divisions and three dueling written opinions on the five-justice appeals court panel, the WSJ reports.
Thread of the Day
With a new series of edicts, FBI Director Kash Patel is further degrading the bureau and converting into something akin to a national police department (which is NOT what the FBI has historically been):
Exclusive @MSNBC reporting with @MarcSantia4NY:
— Ken Dilanian (@DilanianMSNBC) August 15, 2025
FBI Director Kash Patel is imposing changes aimed at transforming the bureau into a national police force focused on violent crime, current and former officials tell MSNBC—at the expense, they say, of the FBI’s longstanding role…
A Recipe for Disaster
Red states are jumping on the bandwagon to send their national guards to the nation’s capital and show plurality Black D.C. who’s boss. West Virginia, Ohio, and South Carolina (still smarting from the last time it tried to overthrow D.C.) are first in line to engage in performative strong-arming of Democratic cities.
But the most alarming news to come out over a generally alarming weekend is that the national guardsmen may be armed, a reversal of an earlier decision that deployed the D.C. National Guard on the streets without weaponry on their persons or in the vehicles.
The ingredients could be in place for a cocktail of violence: federal agents and national guardsmen with little to no training in street policing being sent with guns into a peaceful urban area (that many of them are not even from) and expected to stir up trouble. It puts everyone — D.C. residents, local police, guardsmen, and federal agents — in an impossible situation.
One glimmer of good news was that the Trump administration was hauled into court Friday over its attempt to take over the D.C. police department and, under pressure from a federal judge, backed off its maximalist position.
ICYMI
Religion Dispatches: Latest ICE Recruitment Materials Include Overt Neo-Nazi Reference and Nazi-Nazi Script
Sign of the Times: The New Fascism Comes With Merch
The Florida GOP scrubbed its online store of a new line of merchandise touting the state’s new “Deportation Depot” after Home Depot complained it was an unapproved use of its branding.
Texas Dems Expected Back This Week
With California Democrats proceeding with their own mid-decade redistricting, Texas Democrats are expected to return to the state today, giving Republicans a quorum in the legislature to push through their redistricting plan. Texas Democrats succeeded in blocking the redistricting push in the first special session of the legislature. But when it ended, Friday Gov. Greg Abbott (R) immediately called a second special session, setting the stage for passing a new, more GOP friendly congressional district map to help national Republicans hold their House majority in next year’s midterms.
Quote of the Day
“Trump has completely ceded narrative control to Putin. What Ukraine is just basically getting as a concession is for the Russians to stop fighting. And this is Putin’s way all the way through the 25 years of his presidency, which is: ‘I’m going to beat you up and my concession is that I stopped beating you up.’”–former Trump I National Security Council official Fiona Hill
D’oh!
Guests at a hotel in Anchorage found sensitive documents from the Trump-Putin summit on a public printer, NPR reports.
Trump’s D.C. Circuit Appointees Strike Again: CFPB Edition
D.C. Circuit Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, Trump appointees who have had out-sized influence in the first months of the Trump II presidency, cleared the way Friday for the Trump administration to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Judge Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee dissented.
“The notion that courts are powerless to prevent the President from abolishing the agencies of the federal government that he was elected to lead cannot be reconciled with either the constitutional separation of powers or our nation’s commitment to a government of laws,” Pillard wrote.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
TPM’s Layla A. Jones: The Trump Administration Is Laying the Groundwork for a Full Takeover of Federal Data
Judge Blocks FTC Probe of Media Matters
U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of D.C. sided with Media Matters in blocking a politically motived Federal Trade Commission investigation of the liberal watchdog group.
“This case presents a straightforward First Amendment violation,” Sooknanan ruled.
Media Matters has been struggling financially under the weight of bogus right-wing investigations into whether its reporting on antisemitic content on X/Twitter amounted to anticompetitive conduct. It also faces related serial lawsuits by Elon Musk.
“It should alarm all Americans when the government retaliates against individuals or organizations for engaging in constitutionally protected public debate,” Sooknanan wrote. “And that alarm should ring even louder when the Government retaliates against those engaged in newsgathering and reporting.”
A Rare Example of Organized Left-Wing Violence?
The purported attack at an ICE detention center in Texas last month caught my eye as an possible example of organized left-wing violence, a relative rarity since the 1970s. When I say “organized,” I don’t necessarily mean well-organized. The ragtag group’s alleged attack seemed especially hapless, even according to the official law enforcement account of the incident. Adding to the weirdness, the alleged perpetrators — among them two transgender women activists — appeared to be from in and around Dallas, which wouldn’t be my first choice for hotbeds of anti-fascism.
The WaPo’s Robert Klemko has dug a bit more into the “secretive network of Dallas anti-fascists” who “initially united around trans and queer identity issues.” He did a jailhouse interview with the group’s alleged ringleader, a former Marine Corps reservist of mixed Japanese and Korean descent who trained “very young, naive leftists,” as one witness put it, in close-quarters combat and large-scale gunfights at his mother’s taekwondo studio in suburban Dallas.
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Trump II Media Strategy: Edgelord Memes and Cops-Style Videos
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
Each day of the second Trump administration brings some new piece of content that it’s hard to believe is real. On Thursday, that was a video of armed, masked Border Patrol officers lurking outside California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press conference on redistricting. On Friday, it was the official White House account posting a video of 20 federal agents arresting the D.C. man who threw a Subway sandwich at an officer during protests over the military takeover of the city. The video’s blaring soundtrack, white timestamps on the screen, and choppy editing are straight out of Cops.
Continue reading “Trump II Media Strategy: Edgelord Memes and Cops-Style Videos”Majority of US Troops Surveyed Say They’re Aware of Their Duty to Not Follow Illegal Orders
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
With his Aug. 11, 2025, announcement that he was sending the National Guard – along with federal law enforcement – into Washington, D.C. to fight crime, President Donald Trump edged U.S. troops closer to the kind of military-civilian confrontations that can cross ethical and legal lines.
Indeed, since Trump returned to office, many of his actions have alarmed international human rights observers. His administration has deported immigrants without due process, held detainees in inhumane conditions, threatened the forcible removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and deployed both the National Guard and federal military troops to Los Angeles to quell largely peaceful protests.
When a sitting commander in chief authorizes acts like these, which many assert are clear violations of the law, men and women in uniform face an ethical dilemma: How should they respond to an order they believe is illegal?
The question may already be affecting troop morale. “The moral injuries of this operation, I think, will be enduring,” a National Guard member who had been deployed to quell public unrest over immigration arrests in Los Angeles told The New York Times. “This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”
Troops who are ordered to do something illegal are put in a bind – so much so that some argue that troops themselves are harmed when given such orders. They are not trained in legal nuances, and they are conditioned to obey. Yet if they obey “manifestly unlawful” orders, they can be prosecuted. Some analysts fear that U.S. troops are ill-equipped to recognize this threshold.
We are scholars of international relations and international law. We conducted survey research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Human Security Lab and discovered that many service members do understand the distinction between legal and illegal orders, the duty to disobey certain orders, and when they should do so.
Compelled to disobey
U.S. service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the U.S. Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.
Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.
Our poll, fielded between June 13 and June 30, 2025, shows that service members understand these rules. Of the 818 active-duty troops we surveyed, just 9% stated that they would “obey any order.” Only 9% “didn’t know,” and only 2% had “no comment.”
When asked to describe unlawful orders in their own words, about 25% of respondents wrote about their duty to disobey orders that were “obviously wrong,” “obviously criminal” or “obviously unconstitutional.”
Another 8% spoke of immoral orders. One respondent wrote that “orders that clearly break international law, such as targeting non-combatants, are not just illegal — they’re immoral. As military personnel, we have a duty to uphold the law and refuse commands that betray that duty.”
Just over 40% of respondents listed specific examples of orders they would feel compelled to disobey.
The most common unprompted response, cited by 26% of those surveyed, was “harming civilians,” while another 15% of respondents gave a variety of other examples of violations of duty and law, such as “torturing prisoners” and “harming U.S. troops.”
One wrote that “an order would be obviously unlawful if it involved harming civilians, using torture, targeting people based on identity, or punishing others without legal process.”
Soldiers, not lawyers
But the open-ended answers pointed to another struggle troops face: Some no longer trust U.S. law as useful guidance.
Writing in their own words about how they would know an illegal order when they saw it, more troops emphasized international law as a standard of illegality than emphasized U.S. law.
Others implied that acts that are illegal under international law might become legal in the U.S.
“Trump will issue illegal orders,” wrote one respondent. “The new laws will allow it,” wrote another. A third wrote, “We are not required to obey such laws.”
Several emphasized the U.S. political situation directly in their remarks, stating they’d disobey “oppression or harming U.S. civilians that clearly goes against the Constitution” or an order for “use of the military to carry out deportations.”
Still, the percentage of respondents who said they would disobey specific orders – such as torture – is lower than the percentage of respondents who recognized the responsibility to disobey in general.
This is not surprising: Troops are trained to obey and face numerous social, psychological and institutional pressures to do so. By contrast, most troops receive relatively little training in the laws of war or human rights law.
Political scientists have found, however, that having information on international law affects attitudes about the use of force among the general public. It can also affect decision-making by military personnel.
This finding was also borne out in our survey.
When we explicitly reminded troops that shooting civilians was a violation of international law, their willingness to disobey increased 8 percentage points.
Drawing the line
As my research with another scholar showed in 2020, even thinking about law and morality can make a difference in opposition to certain war crimes.
The preliminary results from our survey led to a similar conclusion. Troops who answered questions on “manifestly unlawful orders” before they were asked questions on specific scenarios were much more likely to say they would refuse those specific illegal orders.
When asked if they would follow an order to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian city, for example, 69% of troops who received that question first said they would obey the order.
But when the respondents were asked to think about and comment on the duty to disobey unlawful orders before being asked if they would follow the order to bomb, the percentage who would obey the order dropped 13 points to 56%.
While many troops said they might obey questionable orders, the large number who would not is remarkable.
Military culture makes disobedience difficult: Soldiers can be court-martialed for obeying an unlawful order, or for disobeying a lawful one.
Yet between one-third to half of the U.S. troops we surveyed would be willing to disobey if ordered to shoot or starve civilians, torture prisoners or drop a nuclear bomb on a city.
The service members described the methods they would use. Some would confront their superiors directly. Others imagined indirect methods: asking questions, creating diversions, going AWOL, “becoming violently ill.”
Criminologist Eva Whitehead researched actual cases of troop disobedience of illegal orders and found that when some troops disobey – even indirectly – others can more easily find the courage to do the same.
Whitehead’s research showed that those who refuse to follow illegal or immoral orders are most effective when they stand up for their actions openly.
The initial results of our survey – coupled with a recent spike in calls to the GI Rights Hotline – suggest American men and women in uniform don’t want to obey unlawful orders.
Some are standing up loudly. Many are thinking ahead to what they might do if confronted with unlawful orders. And those we surveyed are looking for guidance from the Constitution and international law to determine where they may have to draw that line.
Zahra Marashi, an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, contributed to the research for this article.
Charting the Outer Bounds of Opposition and Resistance, and Then Some
I just belatedly read this piece by TPM alum and all around reasonably good fellow Brian Beutler wrote on the question of resistance to the Trump administration. Voting, organizing, protesting — those are all pretty straightforward. But what about when those aren’t enough? He starts from that saying we hear a lot now: No one’s going to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves. Well, what does that mean exactly, Brian asks. How do people protect themselves from manifestly illegal, tyrannical government actions or the violent paramilitaries they are working to cultivate? When does opposition and resistance need to move into extra-constitutional or extra-legal actions? These are harrowing, frightening and perhaps quite literally perilous questions to ask.
Brian starts by discussing whether DC should loosen its fairly tight gun laws. He’s quite conflicted about it. He also discusses the possibility and difficulties tied to blue states withholding taxes from the federal government. Very much by design, the federal government collects taxes directly from individuals. But he suggests some creative ways to square that circle that are floating around. Read Brian’s piece if you can.
Continue reading “Charting the Outer Bounds of Opposition and Resistance, and Then Some”Was There a Second Founding?
This is far from a novel thought. But it’s a timely one. We’re used to people who seem to think the 2nd Amendment is the whole Constitution. Others put the overriding focus on the 1st Amendment. But the one that deserves that focus is the 14th Amendment, the amendment which along with the groundbreaking but more straightforward 13th and 15th Amendments remakes the entire constitutional order. I remember in the late 1980s, I believe it was timed to the bicentennial of the federal constitution, then-Justice Thurgood Marshall gave a speech in which he argued that the original, pre-Civil War Constitution was a defective and even shameful instrument. It had, he argued, no claim on our respect or veneration. It’s only with the new founding in the post-Civil War settlement that we have a founding document that has a claim on our allegiance.
Continue reading “Was There a Second Founding?”D.C. Sues to Block Pam Bondi’s Newest Power Grab Over Local Police
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Things Have Escalated in D.C.
The clumsy Trumpian takeover of D.C. has been as comical as it has been foreboding. The notion of FBI agents — not trained in street-level policing at all — walking a beat is as Keystone Cops as it is sinister. The images of mismatched federal agents plodding along through the quiet streets of Georgetown have added to the comedy. The D.C. resident openly hurling a Subway sandwich at a federal agent and then scampering down the street captured the absurdity of the whole situation, including the impossible position law enforcement officers are being put it.
Still, combined with the federal presence in Los Angeles and the stated goals of Trump and his minions to effectively occupy blue cities — which is really to say bring Black and brown people and their elected representatives to heel in a high-profile, performative, reality TV way — Trump’s D.C. gambit is also deeply disquieting. While it may be tempting to wave away the show of force as silly and ineffectual, the underlying urge toward violence continues to animate Trump and the MAGA movement in dangerous and unpredictable ways. This will not end well.
The overnight developments in D.C. were less comedic than substantive. Attorney General Pam Bondi asserted a new level of authority over the D.C. police, purporting to install Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as D.C.’s “emergency police commissioner,” a commissar of sorts over the entire force. She also purported to issue new guidance rescinding previous directions on enforcement priorities from the local police chief.
D.C. officials immediately rejected Bondi’s claims to power. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb quickly issued an opinion that Bondi had exceeded the statutory authority that allows for the use of D.C. police for federal purposes. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has been walking a fine line between resisting and acquiescing to the Trump White House, endorsed the legal position of Schwalb, who is himself elected.
By this morning, Schwalb had filed suit in federal court in D.C. to block Bondi’s power grab.
Meanwhile, the saga of the sandwich guy is starting to take on real importance. Improbably, Sean Charles Dunn was a DOJ employee at the time he threw the Subway sandwich at an officer on a street corner. Bondi has since fired him. But things gets more interesting from there.
Dunn was first charged in D.C. Superior Court and released on Monday. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro then ratcheted up the case to a felony in federal court. Dunn tried to surrender on the federal charges, but some 20 federal officers showed up at his D.C. residence Wednesday night to arrest him.
The White House trumpeted the arrest in an off-the-wall video, which again has comedic elements. Note the first text on screen: “West End, DC.” Don’t be afraid. That’s the part of DC between the White House and Georgetown, filled with hotels, restaurants, bars, law firms, and George Washington University. Only in MAGA world would D.C.’s West End inspire fear and loathing:
The upshot of yesterday’s hearing was the judge agreed to release Dunn despite the new felony charge.
To cap off a wild day in D.C., we learned from a witness more about the sub in question: salami.
D.C. Grand Jury Twice Rejects Assault on Officer Case
Pirro’s office twice sought and failed to secure a grand jury indictment against a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE inmate transfer last month, a judge revealed in court Thursday, WUSA reports.
“Two presentations to the grand jury returned no bill both times,” Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey told defense counsel. “Suggesting the evidence is wanting, given the standard for indictment is probable cause. Suggesting the government may never get an indictment.”
Sydney Lori Reid was charged last month with the same felony being lodged against the D.C. sandwich thrower.
Gauntlet Thrown
A bunch of armed Border Patrol agents massed outside a Los Angeles press conference on redistricting being held by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), sparking outrage among local elected officials.
The Border Patrol was ostensibly there for a raid, the LAT reported, and one person was detained.
But the proximity in time and place was more than suspicious.
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who is spearheading the aggressive immigration enforcement in Southern California, swaggered onto the scene and declared: “We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that. We do that ourselves.”
Detention Camp Watch
- WaPo: ICE documents reveal plan to double immigrant detention space this year, expanding the capacity of the world’s largest immigration detention system from 50,000 to more than 107,000.
- AP: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans for second state-run immigration detention camp that he’s dubbing “Deportation Depot.”
- TPM’s Hunter Walker: Inside One Native American Tribe’s Fight Against The ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Camp
Quote of the Day
“What he’s trying to do is to present the best possible picture of what he’s doing, even if that means he has to cook the numbers, even if that means he has to distort the data. It’s basically a page from the authoritarian playbook.”–Robert Cropf, a political science professor at St. Louis University, on Trump’s war on data
Trump Judge Blocks Anti-DEI Initiative in Education
U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Maryland, a Trump appointee, struck down the Trump Education Department’s attempt to eliminate DEI at public schools and universities.
Costco Knuckles Under to Right Wing on Abortion Pill
Under political pressure from the right, Costco announced it will not dispense the abortion pill mifepristone from its pharmacies. Right-wing groups hailed the decision as a victory.
The Smallest of Men
President Trump cold-called Norway’s finance minister last month to lobby for the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv reported.
“Out of the blue, while finance minister Jens Stoltenberg was walking down the street in Oslo, Donald Trump called … He wanted the Nobel prize – and to discuss tariffs,” according to the newspaper.
Stoltenberg, who was NATO secretary-general during Trump’s first term, confirmed that a call about tariffs occurred but declined to provide further details.
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