Since the September day when President Donald Trump symbolically renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War, the U.S. military has conducted at least 21 strikes on Venezuelan boats, killing 83 people allegedly suspected of drug trafficking. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth convened an unprecedented and widely mocked pep rally of military generals and flag officers during which he pledged his commitment to the “warrior ethos.” And Hegseth has continued to fire or demote military generals and admirals, purging at least two dozen of them during his tenure, the New York Times reported.
Continue reading “The Original Department of War Decimated Native Americans and Segregated the Military. Why Does Trump Want to Go Back?”Site Access Issues
UPDATE: The wider issue seems resolved, and we’ve restored member services.
Original post: An internet-wide Cloudflare issue has made access to TPM a bit shaky this morning. While the wider issue is being resolved and to ensure you can access TPM, we’ve disabled member services temporarily. Don’t be alarmed if you can’t sign in to TPM; you should still be able to read TPM. We’ll restore member services as soon as the underlying issue, which is outside of our control, is resolved.
Massie Revels in Trump’s Epstein Floundering
Trump Is Buying Time
As my colleague David Kurtz articulated well in today’s edition of Morning Memo, the mainstream media has rushed to declare that President Trump has reversed or flipped on releasing all the documents that the Justice Department has on its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Continue reading “Massie Revels in Trump’s Epstein Floundering”Did Trump’s Epstein Switcheroo Send Marjorie Greene on Her Wild Arc?
I try not to share ideas or theories that I suspect, by the odds, are not likely true. But sometimes I’m curious enough about one that I want to share it with that proviso. Here’s one. Like almost everyone else, I’ve being trying to make sense of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent arc. Mostly I’ve come up totally dry. I can’t make sense of it. I’ve seen various theories, that she’s making a long play for the future leadership of the post-Trump MAGA movement or other cunning and ambition-driven theories. But none of them really explain what I’ve seen.
Here’s an idea.
Continue reading “Did Trump’s Epstein Switcheroo Send Marjorie Greene on Her Wild Arc?”Judge Just Blew a Gaping Hole in the Comey Prosecution
The extent of the prosecutorial and investigative misconduct in the James Comey case is even greater than previously known, a federal magistrate judge revealed in an extraordinary new ruling today.
Continue reading “Judge Just Blew a Gaping Hole in the Comey Prosecution”Trump Has the Look of the Weak Horse; People Are Acting Accordingly
One of my instrument panel watchwords for understanding politics is that all power is unitary. In the case of presidents, you don’t have one bundle of power in one area and a siloed, distinct and unaffected bundle in another. A president’s power is a uniform commodity wherever he reaches. What boosts it or drags it down in one area affects it everywhere else. That’s the best way to understand President Trump’s position 10 months into his second term. It’s hard to know whether it was the five-week government shutdown which focused public attention on draconian cuts to health care, the election night shellacking, the first signs of MAGA diehards defecting from the president, the grotesque and absurd Epstein cat-and-mouse game or a dozen other comparable examples. What makes it both hard to pick apart the different drivers of a president’s decline and perilous for the president himself is that the different drivers feed on themselves. They become both cause and effect in a mounting spiral.
Continue reading “Trump Has the Look of the Weak Horse; People Are Acting Accordingly”Trump Threatens Primaries Against Indiana GOPers Who Won’t Cave on Gerrymandering
Reacting to yet another obstacle in his path to redraw congressional district maps to help Republicans flip Democratic seats in as many states as possible before the midterms, President Trump slammed Indiana Republicans on Sunday for not bending the knee.
Continue reading “Trump Threatens Primaries Against Indiana GOPers Who Won’t Cave on Gerrymandering”Trump’s New Sham: The House Should Vote to Force Me to Release the Epstein Files That I Won’t Release
LOL Wut?
Poised to lose a House vote this week calling for the Justice Department to release its Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump snookered a good chunk of political media by declaring in a social media post last evening that the House should vote to release the files.
Knowing he’s going to lose the vote — and knowing that the vote itself won’t be enough to pry the files loose unless the Senate agrees and he doesn’t veto it — Trump tried to redefine the setback by withdrawing his opposition to the vote, but not actually releasing the Epstein files.
But who in the world would be fooled by this?
The whole reason the House is voting is because the Trump DOJ — run out of the White House — won’t cough up the files. That is to say: Trump won’t release the files.
It’s not an about-face or a reversal. It’s a sham.
But It Gets Worse … It Always Gets Worse
Trump’s inane new position — that he wants House Republicans to vote to demand that he release the Epstein files that he refuses to release — comes after the president on Friday ordered the Justice Department to re-investigate everyone’s contacts with Jeffrey Epstein except his own.
While Trump has already broken the Justice Department — robbing it of its independence, capacity, and reputation — the demand to weaponize the Epstein case against Democrats will require a new level of Orwellian reality-denial by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
What’s groundbreaking about the new and improved Epstein investigation is that it wasn’t just career prosecutors but Bondi and Patel who said only a few months ago that there was nothing more to investigate. Trump is making them reverse and contort themselves in a degrading display of cult devotion that exceeds anything we’ve seen from them up to now. At this point, the only thing more cravenly loyal they could do is to investigate and indict themselves.
Bondi’s immediate public response to Trump’s demand: “Thank you, Mr. President.” She has turned the investigation over to the Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who now faces his own loyalty test.
Perhaps the Most Important News Since Friday
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — in a troubling and convoluted ruling — appears to have backed its way into not blocking U.S. District Judge James Boasberg from resuming contempt of court proceedings against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case. I’m sorry if you had to read that sentence twice, but you have to read the fractured court ruling several times to make sense of it. Chris Geidner gives it his best shot.
This is a critical case in the closely watched question of whether federal judges will hold the line on Trump’s attacks on their constitutional role. If a district judge like Boasberg can’t proceed to investigate the administration for contempt in a historically important case where it was blatantly contemptuous, then the battle to sustain an independent judiciary will have been lost before it had barely begun.
The Retribution: Jim Comey Edition
Following the court hearing Thursday, that signaled Lindsey Halligan’s appointment as U.S. attorney may not pass muster with the judge reviewing it, Attorney General Pam Bondi took the almost unbelievable step of attempting for a second time to ratify, after the fact and retroactively, the appointment Halligan’s conduct before the grand jury that indicted Jim Comey.
The new filing from Bondi attempts to patch the hole in her previous ratification, when it was revealed in court by the judge that Bondi had reviewed an incomplete transcript of the grand jury proceedings:
The Trump DOJ simultaneously filed a new declaration from Halligan that attempts to tamp down concern that parts of the grand jury proceedings weren’t recorded or are “missing.” Halligan attests that the gap in the transcript merely reflects the time when the grand jury was deliberating:
Halligan’s declaration clarifies some but not all of what happened in the grand jury proceedings. I had been assuming that after the grand jury returned the no-true bill as to one of the counts that Halligan would have gone back into the grand jury room and presented an alternative indictment on the two counts that they ultimately charged Comey with. But, according to her declaration, she had no further contact with the grand jury before it returned the two-count indictment.
Combine that with the paperwork fumbles (if that’s not too generous of a word) that the judge who accepted the indictment called Halligan out for in court, and there remains what Marcy Wheeler calls “a slew of problems” that I expect Comey’s lawyers will find a way to explore and possibly exploit.
Must Read
NYT: The Unraveling of the Justice Department … Sixty attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion.
The Corruption: Mike Flynn Edition
Former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn and former Trump White House lawyer Stefan Passantino have joined the gravy train of Trump allies seeking to extract taxpayer-funded settlements from the Trump DOJ over claims they were the victims of politically motivated retribution. Flynn is seeking $50 million.
Georgia Fake Electors Case Back On?
Peter Skandalakis, the director of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Council of Georgia, has assigned the Georgia fake electors case to himself after being unable to find another prosecutor willing to take it on following the disqualification of Atlanta DA Fani Willis – but it’s not clear if he’ll continue to pursue convictions of President Trump and his alleged co-conspirators.
Venezuela Watch
- NPR reports for the first time on comments earlier this year by then-Trump DOJ official Emil Bove, now a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, that perhaps foreshadowed the administration’s lawless attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats:
At a Justice Department conference in February, then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told the department’s top drug prosecutors that the Trump administration wasn’t interested in interdicting suspected drug vessels at sea anymore. Instead, he said, the U.S. should “just sink the boats,” according to three people present for the speech.
- On Saturday, the U.S. killed three people in its 21st lawless strike against alleged drug-smuggling boats, bringing the death toll in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to at least 83.
- The dubious and still-secret OLC memo that justifies the lawless U.S. campaign against drug-smuggling boat claims fentanyl is a potential chemical weapon threat, the WSJ reports.
- Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, says reports that the OLC memo contains language absolving everyone in the chain of command from criminal liability for the strikes is unusual: “It signals a fear that what they’re doing is illegal and that they could possibly be subject to criminal action under U.S. law and under international law.”
Quote of the Day
In a reality TV presidency, you need beefs, heels, betrayals, prodigals returning, and all manner of plot tricks to sustain the manufactured artificial drama. Who knows where this plot twist ends up going:
Preach, Sister
It’s striking to me that a lot of people want politics to be about their personal feelings, in which case they’re not engaged in politics, though they may be engaged in the sabotage of politics. …
[Y]ou vote strategically not expressively; you’re facing a ballot, not a Tinder/Grindr profile or a confessional, which I say because people often seem to speak as though they need their candidate to be someone who matches up to them in every way, even though they are only one of hundreds to hundreds of millions of voters, or see this as being about purity, aka choosing the candidate who is without sin or flaw, who they themselves will feel purer for voting for …
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Feds Go After the Antifa International
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
The federal government demonstrated the latest example of how its putting Trump’s focus on Antifa into practice on Thursday by designating four European anti-fascist groups as foreign terrorist organizations.
The groups — Germany’s Antifa Ost, Italy’s Informal Anarchist Federation, and Greece’s Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense — will lose access to the U.S. financial system. More importantly, its now a crime for “U.S. persons” (that’s a broader category than citizens) to provide any form of support to these groups.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the designations, explicitly citing NSPM-7, the executive order that directed law enforcement to go after Antifa and to focus on vague ideological markers in doing so.
“Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism,’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas,” Rubio said in the statement.
As I reported this week, a wide range of progressive-leaning nonprofits are already deeply intimidated by the administration’s threats towards the left.
But the foreign terrorist designations show how far this is going. This required coordination between government agencies, and for the federal law enforcement offices that oversee counterterrorism policy to have some idea of who they’re targeting. In other words: no matter how amorphous and ill-defined Antifa may be, these designations are real evidence to demonstrate that the administration is doubling down on making investigations into the left very, very real.
— Josh Kovensky
Thune Payout Provision Riles Up House Republicans
House Republicans are furious about the 11th hour payout provision Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) shoved into the continuing resolution (CR) that ended the shutdown earlier this week.
So much so that Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) voted against reopening the government on Wednesday, saying he “could not in good conscience support a resolution that creates a self-indulgent legal provision for certain senators to enrich themselves by suing the Justice Department using taxpayer dollars.”
House GOP leadership is now working on bringing a standalone bill to the floor that would repeal the provision that would allow senators to sue the government for $500,000 or more if they discover their electronic records were seized without notification.
Thune’s provision comes as congressional Republicans have, in recent weeks, attempted to create a conspiracy theory out of the fact that former special counsel Jack Smith properly subpoenaed eight Senate Republicans’ phone records as a part of his investigation into President Donald Trump’s role in Jan. 6. As Politico noted earlier this week, the D.C. judge who approved the subpoenas did so with certain measures that blocked phone companies from notifying the senators that their data was requested as part of the investigation.
On the other side of the Capitol, Senate Republicans are largely distancing themselves from Thune’s provision.
Only one — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — of the eight known GOP senators whose phone records were seized, has publicly said they are planning to take advantage of the measure Thune snuck into the bill.
“It bothers the hell out of me and I’m going to sue, and I’m going to create opportunities for others to sue that weren’t in the Senate,” Graham recently told reporters, per the Post and Courier.
Meanwhile, the others — Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) — either said they would not sue or distanced themselves from the issue. A Sullivan spokesperson said the senator would support an effort to repeal the provision.
“I think the Senate provision is a bad idea,” Hawley said in a statement. “There needs to be accountability for the Biden DOJ’s outrageous abuse of the separation of powers, but the right way to do that is through public hearings, tough oversight, including of the complicit telecom companies, and prosecution where warranted.”
— Emine Yücel
DOJ Sues California Over Prop 50
In the latest news in the ongoing redistricting battle, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in federal court on Thursday to try to block the new congressional districts in California that voters approved earlier this month, arguing that the new map used race as a “proxy to advance political interests.”
California voters approved Proposition 50 64% to 36% on Nov. 4, giving California officials the authority to temporarily bypass the state’s independent redistricting rules in order to create new congressional maps that will give Democrats an advantage in some Republican-led and swing districts in the state.
The measure was pushed forward by California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom as a way to offset the damage being done in Texas. GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott approved five new congressional maps in Texas that are expected to flip Democratic seats in the midterm elections.
The DOJ’s lawsuit joins a challenge from the California Republican Party, which claims that these new congressional district lines are “based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it.”
“Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50—the recent ballot initiative that junked California’s pre-existing electoral map in favor of a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines,” the lawsuit states. “In the press, California’s legislators and governor sold a plan to promote the interests of Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Currently, GOP-led states, including Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have all succumbed to Trump’s pressure campaign to redraw their congressional maps mid-cycle as a way to ensure Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House in the midterm elections. But the approval of Proposition 50 in California, combined with a series of setbacks in red states across the country, could derail Trump’s gerrymandering blitz.
— Khaya Himmelman
Even MAGA Thinks Trump’s New Mortgage Scheme is a Bad Idea
At 37 years old, Bill Pulte, Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency Director and heir to the Pulte home builders empire, is younger than the now-40-year-old median first-time homebuyer. This didn’t stop him from promoting Trump’s new 50-year mortgage proposal which, by definition, the median first-time homebuyer wouldn’t pay off until they’re 90.
The media this week picked up on an idea Trump floated in a substanceless social media post over the weekend suggesting he wanted to institute a 50-year mortgage payment plan. Pulte quickly backed the president, posting on X that the administration was “indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage – a complete game changer.” The idea would be that government-backed home loans could be paid off over a longer period of time, thereby lowering monthly mortgage payments. But legally, the government can’t back a loan longer than 30 years.
And a lot of people, apparently even Trump’s MAGA allies, think the idea sucks.
First of all, 50-year mortgages generally have higher interest rates than the traditional 30-year mortgage. A buyer would spend decades paying interest only, unable to generate any equity in the property. Axios broke down the true cost of a $500,000, 50-year mortgage and showed that after 30 years, a buyer would still owe nearly $400,000. What’s more, monthly payments would only be $83 less than those for a 30-year loan.
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham put it more bluntly, telling Trump during an interview this week that the proposal garnered “significant MAGA backlash, calling it a giveaway to the banks.”
Luckily for borrowers, the proposal appears to be DOA. The plan would likely require legislation to change the post-global financial crisis Dodd-Frank Act. Even then, “borrowers will not do it,” Bruce Marks, the CEO of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America told NPR. “They see through that. They will know that they will not generate any wealth.”
— Layla A. Jones
Post-Trump Reform Requires Reinvigorating American Democracy
After I wrote this “status interview” piece on Tuesday, I heard from TPM Reader AP who said, amidst general agreement, that he would either add to the list or replace DC/PR statehood with expanding the House of Representatives. I’m just seeing now that I hadn’t had a chance to respond yet to AP (I thought I had). But my response was going to be that I basically agree. And as I suggested in the original piece, despite presenting it as a checklist of five questions/agenda items, everything after the first two (filibuster and Supreme Court reform) might have been reclassified as ‘super important things that really need to be done.’ And to that list many more could be added. To go back to the original concept, the thinking behind that list wasn’t that it would be exhaustive but that it was a good list for determining who was serious and who was not, who is worth supporting and who needs to go.
But this potential addition gives me an opportunity to expand what a future era of reformism would need to accomplish because the House of Representatives is a good case study of a number of key trends that got us to this moment. The number of representatives was capped at 435 members in 1929 when the U.S. population stood at roughly 122 million people. That’s about a third of the current population. House districts now average a population of just over 750,000 of a million people. That’s a lot of people. The number was fixed when House districts had a bit over over 250,000 of a million people. Now it’s 750,000. That’s a huge difference and it matters since the House is meant to be the body closest to the people.
Continue reading “Post-Trump Reform Requires Reinvigorating American Democracy”