Merry Christmas, everyone.
Judge Calls Trump DOJ’s Bluff On Todd Blanche’s Testimony
Put Up or Shut Up Time
A complicated dance is underway in the criminal case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia over his claim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump DOJ, so let me give you the toplines first:
The bad news … We may not get to hear live testimony from three top DOJ officials: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, associate deputy attorney general Aakash Singh, and acting principal associate deputy attorney James McHenry.
The good news … The judge may not need that testimony to go ahead and rule that Abrego Garcia is the victim of a vindictive prosecution and dismiss the case.
That’s the upshot of a new order from U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of Nashville, in which he scratched the existing Jan. 27 trial date from the calendar and instead scheduled a Jan. 28 evidentiary hearing on the vindictive prosecution claim.
It’s time for the Trump DOJ to put up or shut, though Crenshaw put it more nicely than that.
That’s the simplest way to explain it. Now let me see if I can give you a more thorough version without making your eyes cross.
Crenshaw already ruled in October that there was “a realistic likelihood of vindictiveness” against Abrego Garcia. Most importantly for our purposes, that decision created a presumption in Abrego Garcia’s favor that this is a vindictive prosecution and shifted the burden to the government to now rebut that presumption “with objective, on-the-record explanations” that it had a legitimate basis for charging Abrego Garcia, as Crenshaw explained in yesterday’s order.
If the government succeeds in rebutting the presumption of vindictive prosecution, then the burden shifts back to Abrego Garcia to “prove that the offered justification is pretextual and that actual vindictiveness has occurred,” Crenshaw ruled.
With that as background, here’s the kind of sneaky genius thing that Crenshaw did.
Crenshaw decided to bifurcate the proceedings by holding the Jan. 28 evidentiary hearing only on the initial question of whether the Trump DOJ can rebut the existing presumption in Abrego Garcia’s favor that this is a vindictive prosecution. If the Trump DOJ fails, then that may very well spell the end of the criminal case because dismissal is one remedy for vindictive prosecution.
If the Trump DOJ succeeds, then the burden shifts back to Abrego Garcia to show actual vindictiveness. In that case, Crenshaw would then rule on the outstanding question of whether Blanche and the other DOJ officials must comply with Abrego Garcia’s subpoena for their testimony. At the moment, the Trump DOJ has a motion pending to quash those subpoenas as part of what has been a raging battle over how much discovery into the vindictive prosecution Abrego Garcia is allowed to have.
(Most of that discovery dispute has been under seal, so our visibility into it has been very limited. But in a separate order this week, Crenshaw said he will unseal a crucial order he issued on Dec. 3 — but not until Dec. 30, presumably to give the administration time to ask an appeals court to keep the order sealed.)
The Trump DOJ may try to get the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene before any of this plays out the way Crenshaw has planned, but by bifurcating the proceedings he has reduced the risk of that happening because he’s pushing off decisions on some of the most sensitive privilege-laden discovery issues.
For his part, Abrego Garcia has been arguing that the evidence the Trump DOJ plans to present to show it’s not a vindictive prosecution — testimony from Homeland Security Investigations Supervisory Special Agent John VanWie of Baltimore, HSI Special Agent Rana Saoud of Nashville, and maybe the testimony of Nashville acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire — is insufficient to rebut the presumption and that Crenshaw should just dismiss the case.
While we might savor the chance to see top Trump DOJ officials squirm on the witness stand, Crenshaw is telegraphing quite a bit here about how he sees this case. Sure, there’s good practical reasons for him to punt on ruling on the motion to quash. Why decide something you may not need to decide yet? But the overall thrust of Crenshaw’s two orders this week suggests a judge who after reviewing in his chambers over 3,000 internal government documents in the case is very open to the vindictive prosecution claim and very skeptical of the Trump DOJ’s arguments against it.
BFD
President Trump is blocked from deploying federalized national guards to enforce the law unless regular armed forces are insufficient for the task, the Supreme Court held in a major ruling yesterday.
Mass Deportation Watch
- WaPo: ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses
- Reason: DHS Says Recording or Following Law Enforcement ‘Sure Sounds Like Obstruction of Justice’
Judges Under Threat
As a result of the various threats and intimidation, judges have had to adapt their daily lives, according to NBC News interviews with six sitting judges, as well as former judges and others familiar with the current threat landscape.
One judge moved house. Another had to freeze her credit cards after a security breach.
Other judges have taken actions to adapt to the changing landscape by upgrading home security systems, changing the route they drive to work and ensuring family members limit personal information they post online, according to the current and former judges.
Venezuela Watch
- NYT: U.S. Is Adding to Its Military Buildup in the Caribbean
- WSJ: U.S. Moves Troops and Additional Special Operations Aircraft Into Caribbean
The Corruption: All Day Long Edition
- The Guardian: Thanks to Donald Trump, 2025 was a good year … for white-collar criminals
- WSJ: Lobbyists close to President Trump say their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million, but some pardon-seekers have offered success fees of as much as $6 million.
- NYT: Hundreds of Big Post-Election Donors Have Benefited From Trump’s Return to Office
Good Read
WSJ: How Putin Got His Preferred U.S. Envoy: Come Alone, No CIA
Quote of the Day
Neo-Nazi Terror Group Steps Up US Ops
The Guardian: “In the shifting political climate of the second Trump administration, where the FBI has openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists, the Base appears free to organize and prepare for their stated objective of fomenting an armed insurgency against the US government.”
An Eventful Geologic Year
Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the current Kilauea eruption, and on cue it resumed overnight with the 39th episode in the sequence of lava effusions. Last night’s lava fountaining reached heights of 1,400 feet before the episode ended after just shy of six hours.
I geek out over this stuff mainly because I’m dazzled by the natural phenomenon, but I also have a deep-seated need to keep time by some measure other than the frenetic pace of modern human life.
While we’ve been obsessing over a white Christian nationalist presidency and the searing path of destruction his impulsivity leaves behind, Kilauea has spent the last year steadily filling the gaping crater that its 2018 summit collapse left behind (this data set does not include last night’s episode):
Outside of the summit crater, wind-blown volcanic fragments have created a new geologic feature on the downwind edge of the crater rim: a 130-foot-tall mound of tephra. The growth of the tephra mound has been dramatic at times. Individual eruptions have added as much as 25 feet in height to the tephra mound in only a few hours.
And, no, this isn’t some clumsy meta-reflection on creation emerging from destruction. In politics, unlike geology, destruction is just destruction.
New Year’s Plans?
Join me for the first Morning Memo live event, on Jan. 29 in D.C. We’ll have a panel discussion on DOJ weaponization, take audience questions, and mingle at a reception afterwards. Tickets are available here. I hope to see you there!
Happy Holidays!
Morning Memo will be on hiatus until Jan. 5.
If news demands it, I might put out intermittent special holiday editions. But the plan is to pick back up when the news does in the new year.
I’m making my first visit back to my home state of Louisiana since 2014. Looking forward to renewing old connections, exploring past haunts, and gorging myself on dearly missed cuisine — all in 70-degree weather.
Wishing you peace and joy this holiday season however you may celebrate it.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Parents and Doctors Are Left in the Dark Amid Trump Admin’s Murky Childhood Vaccine Guidelines
Dr. Jessica Weisz, a pediatrician in D.C., has seen more and more parents who are skeptical about vaccinating their children.She cares for about 15 families a day, and said that what used to be monthly questions about vaccine safety have become weekly ones.
But, she emphasized, that was not yet the norm.
“Overwhelmingly, most parents and caregivers want their children to be vaccinated,” Weisz, who is also president of the D.C. chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), told TPM.
Last Friday, the Washington Post published an article outlining plans for new childhood vaccine guidelines coming out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The guidelines would recommend fewer vaccines and encourage a “shared clinical decision making” model which calls on parents and doctors to discuss guidance for most shots in the absence of clear guidance from the federal governement. The U.S. reportedly plans to follow an immunization schedule similar to that of Denmark.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for HHS, did not confirm the plans in a comment to the Washington Post. “Unless you hear it from HHS directly, this is pure speculation,” Nixon told the Post. But 2025 has seen federal health agencies repeatedly pare back vaccine recommendations while federal officials cast doubt publcily on the efficacy.
The competing narratives — medical professionals widely endorse decades of science supporting vaccine safety while the federal government under President Donald Trump does not — creates a confusing environment that ulitmately shifts long-standing medical recommendation practices from the federal government and onto parents, individual practitioners, and medical associations.
“The kinds of statements that come from our health officials are unlike anything we’ve seen in the recent history of vaccination in the United States,” said Jason Schwartz, an associate professor of health policy at Yale. ”And all of that will undoubtedly cause alarm among parents.”
After a piecemeal assault on childhood vaccines, the new, reported planned guidance from the federal government concentrates ascientific recommendations in a way medical professionals who spoke to TPM fear will harm children, confuse parents, burden health care providers, and create unpredictable ripple effects impacting vaccine manufacturers and insurance coverage.
“If we are shifting policy away from a standardized vaccination schedule, that affects who needs vaccines, how much [vaccine manufacturers] make, who pays for it, [and] is it universally available to everyone,” said Weisz.
There have for months been rumblings about official changes coming down from HHS to the childhood vaccination schedule. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaxxer, in June booted all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, and installed his own disciples. Those new members set off altering immunization schedules and recommendations, eliminating clarity where they did not outright nix recommended vaccinations, and sowing distrust in vaccine safety. In November, the CDC stunned the medical and research community when it updated a webpage about autism and vaccines to imply that vaccines can cause autism, a claim that has been roundly debunked.
The page, updated on Nov. 19, lists key points that include, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim,” and “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
A flood of medical professional organizations went on the record at the time refuting the government’s claims. More than three dozen organizations issued a joint statement decrying the use of “taxpayer-funded health agencies” to “spread harmful rumors.”
“The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism,” Dr. Susan J. Kressly, national AAP president, said in a statement.
Then, in early December, ACIP voted to undo the hepatitis B immunization recommendations for newborn babies, reversing a policy that had been in place for more than 30 years.
“I think it’s gonna be dangerous in terms of the fall out for pediatric vaccines,” Arthur Caplan, a renowned bioethicist and the founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told TPM.
“Parents are made nervous when what they consider trusted government authorities start to attack that scehdule start to raise phony concerns about risks,” Caplan said. “There are a lot of people who just see CDC or HHS and say ‘I trust that.’”
Schwartz who studies vaccine policy specifically, described an environment where well-meaning parents who want to do what’s best for their child’s health are driving blind, with competing medical claims being made by various authority figures.
“It’s really important to remember that the vast majority of parents who are confronted with decisions around vaccinating their children do not have deeply held, strong beliefs questioning the safety of vaccines,” Schwartz told TPM. “Instead, they’re trying to figure out how to navigate this landscape that seems contested.”
Most parents aren’t partisan actors, said Schwartz, but aren’t as confident in the safety of shots for their children because of federal policy changes. And the CDC’s new emphasis on a shared clinical decision making model, said Schwartz, both falsely implies pediatricians weren’t already talking to parents about vaccine choices and will likely take up more time in physicians’ already busy schedules.
Caplan is part of a yet-to-be released study wherein researchers are finding that Kennedy’s unsubstantiated claims from September linking Tylenol to autism has already led “a significant number” of pregnant women to cut back on using the over-the-counter drug.
“I may think Kennedy is a kook and a chronic liar, but that doesn’t mean that that’s how his messages are perceived by many Americans,” Caplan said.
Still, as Weisz’s anecdotal evidence from patients in the liberal DMV area suggests, survey after survey has continued to show more parents than not still trust childhood immunization safety.
An October survey from KFF and the Washington Post of more than 2,700 parents found 81% support public school vaccine requirements. Ninety percent of parents supported vaccines for the measles, mumps and rubella, while a much smaller majority, 56%, supported vaccinating children against the flu. Only 43% of parents in that study said it was important for children to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
In November, Pew Research Center published a study finding 71% U.S. parents were at least somewhat confident in vaccine safety testing and 68% were at least somewhat confident in the childhood vaccine schedule.
Caplan has found, as did the Pew study, that beliefs about vaccine safety cuts along political and class lines, with Republicans and respondants who have recieved less traditional education trusting vaccines less. Even still, a poll of parents in deep red Georgia conducted in late October and early November by Emory University found that 88% of parents in the state believe vaccines are safe.
The Emory study delved into parent understanding about insurer coverage of vaccines, and that’s where things got murky. Less than one-third of parents in Georgia knew that insurance companies generally follow ACIP recommendations when deciding what vaccines to cover.
For now, Schwartz said insurers are still required to cover vaccines because the federal government has left immunization recommendations in a gray area that doesn’t outright recommend the vaccines, but doesn’t unrecommend them either. The shared decision making model continues to require insurers to cover vaccinations. Still, the Washington Post cited a 2016 study that found most pediatricians weren’t aware of that. Nearly 10 years later, uncertainty persists.
“I think there’s still a lot of questions moving forward on what insurance companies will cover,” said Weisz.
Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s National Guard Occupation of Chicago
The Supreme Court upheld a block on the National Guard’s deployment to Chicago Tuesday, dealing the Trump administration a significant blow and embracing an interpretation of the laws that govern the Guard’s activation that differs considerably from the administration’s.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s National Guard Occupation of Chicago”The Epstein Files Keep Trickling Out. Here Are 5 Points on What’s Happening
In the five days since the Justice Department began releasing the Epstein files (in a piecemeal fashion that seemingly flouted a law President Trump signed last month), the usually quiet pre-holiday stretch has seen members of Congress issuing threats of prosecution, DOJ attempts to protect President Trump and a few newsworthy revelations.
Continue reading “The Epstein Files Keep Trickling Out. Here Are 5 Points on What’s Happening”AI: The Bright Shiny Object at the Crossroads of the Future
I got a host of very interesting responses to yesterday’s post about the tech platforms force-feeding the mass consumer market AI. I learned a lot from your responses, which included both direct personal experiences and expert perspectives on different dimensions of the topic. What is important to me about this moment is distinguishing two or three different very real things happening at once.
The first is a genuine critical mass in the development of LLM-based machine learning. This is a much better description than “AI” to my thinking, since the latter contains a vast range of meanings from simple and accurate to triumphalist and grandiose. But machine learning is real, and in recent years it’s developed real capabilities that are at least transformative in various areas of work and technology. I’m skeptical of what we’ve developed beyond this at this point but really don’t know. It could be a lot. And it will increase. I think this is the best way to understand the technology itself at this moment now.
Continue reading “AI: The Bright Shiny Object at the Crossroads of the Future”Major Ruling Offers Due Process to Alien Enemies Act Detainees
Morning Memo Live!
Join me Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C., for our first Morning Memo Live event.
I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on the politicization of the Justice Department, featuring:
- Stacey Young, a former 18-year DOJ veteran who is the founder and executive director of Justice Connection, a network of DOJ alumni providing support to current and recent DOJ employees;
- Aaron Zelinsky, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland who served on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, where he prosecuted Roger Stone, and who is now a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder in Baltimore; and
- Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare who covers rule of law issues and fields wacky Signal messages from Lindsey Halligan.
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With New Facts, Boasberg Changes His Mind
In the constitutional clash over President Trump’s unprecedented peacetime invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has ruled that the Venezuelan nationals shipped off to El Salvador’s CECOT facility can challenge their designations as alien enemies even though they’ve been released to their home country and are no longer in custody.
In an accompanying order, Boasberg gave the Trump administration until Jan. 5 to come up with a proposed plan to “facilitate the return” of the former AEA detainees to the United States or to provide them with presumably remote hearings that give them the due process they were denied when they were summarily deported in March without notice or a chance to challenge their designations as alien enemies.
While Boasberg also certified the former detainees case as a class action lawsuit, the real meat of his decision was a reversal of his own prior decision in the case over the summer. In light of the many significant new facts that have emerged, Boasberg reversed course and concluded that the detainees were in the constructive custody of the United States while they were being held at CECOT in El Salvador.
Boasberg had previously denied them habeas relief because of a lack of constructive custody, but found a separate legal avenue in equity that entitled them to pursue their denial of due process claims. This time, Boasberg found both avenues available to them. Of the two, the habeas path is probably the stronger option and is more readily defensible on appeal.
What changed Boasberg’s mind were the numerous revelations that have occurred since he first confronted the issue, among them: “statements by El Salvadoran officials, whistleblower statements by Government officials, public statements by top U.S. officials, and even clear evidence of a U.S.-Venezuelan prisoner swap.”
“All in all, the undisputed factual record indicates that the United States and El Salvador have behaved as principal and agent in the detention and subsequent release of Plaintiffs,” Boasberg ruled, pointing to “three takeaways” from the new evidence:
- “El Salvador acted at the behest of the United States”;
- “it was indifferent to Plaintiffs’ detention outside of honoring its arrangement with the United States”; and
- “the United States retained the ability to control their release from CECOT”
Boasberg zeroed in on the revelations by former DOJ lawyer turned whistleblower Erez Reuveni, including the notorious comment attributed to Emil Bove, who is now an appeals court judge: “According to his disclosure, the Principal Assistant Deputy Attorney General stated in a meeting that if courts attempted to stop the removals, DOJ would need to consider telling the courts, “Fuck you” and ignore any court order.”
It is, I believe, the first time Bove’s comment has made it into a judicial ruling, and Boasberg didn’t pull punches by redacting the curse word. Then again, Boasberg happened to be the first judge to get the administration’s “Fuck you” when it defied his orders and let the AEA deportation flights continue despite his orders to stop them and turn the planes around.
Bari Weiss Owns Spiking CECOT Segment
Editor-in-chief Bari Weiss confirmed it was her decision to spike the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, according to accounts from a CBS News staff meeting Monday morning.
Meanwhile, the executive producer of the legendary TV newsmagazine told colleagues that she had fought for the segment but was overruled by Weiss, the WaPo reports:
“In the end, our editor in chief had a different vision for how the piece should be, and it came late in the process, and we were not in a position to address the notes,” said executive producer Tanya Simon, according to a partial transcript of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post. “We pushed back, we defended our story, but she wanted changes, and I ultimately had to comply.”
Simon succeeded longtime executive producer Bill Owens, who resigned in April over then-parent company Paramount’s grubby settlement with Donald Trump over how 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris.
Weiss intervened so late in the editorial process that the segment had already aired on a streaming service in Canada. You can watch a quality HD-version of the CECOT segment here.
The Unrelenting Assault on Abrego Garcia
I was at the courthouse yesterday for Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s first in-person appearance in front of U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. At the time of every other hearing she’s held in his two cases since March, he’s been in the custody of either El Salvador, DOJ, or ICE.
Xinis, who ordered him freed from ICE detention on Dec. 11, is treading very carefully around the edges of her jurisdiction as she tries to prevent the Trump administration from subjecting Abrego Garcia to further unlawful treatment, including re-detaining him.
Here’s my brief dispatch.
Mass Deportation Watch
- NYT: Inside the Deportation Machine: How ICE has moved thousands of people through detention and out of the country
- WaPo: It’s a War: Inside ICE’s media machine
Another Unlawful Boat Strike
One person was killed in a U.S. strike Monday on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the death toll in the lawless campaign to 105.
Cannon Buries MAL Report For 2 More Months
Under a 60-day deadline from an appeals court to decide already whether to release Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon waited 49 days to finally rule … and then ordered the report kept secret for another two months.
In her ruling, Cannon said her order keeping the Justice Department from distributing the report would expire Feb. 24. She gave no explanation for that particular date.
Cannon ostentatiously extended an invitation for President Trump and his former co-defendants in the case to appeal her decision and try to keep the report buried for even longer: “Nothing in this Order prohibits any former or current party to this action from moving for leave to intervene, if warranted, and/or from timely seeking appropriate relief before that deadline.”
At the same time, Cannon issued a separate ruling that refused to allow the outside groups who had forced the issue with the appeals court — resulting in its November order for her to rule within 60 days on their motions, which had been pending since February — to intervene in the case.
All in a day’s work for Cannon.
John Brennan Tries to DQ Cannon
In a highly unusual effort, former CIA Director John Brennan is trying to pre-empt Aileen Cannon from overseeing a retributive grand jury investigation that is reportedly the hub for all manner of Trumpian investigate the investigators conspiracies and claims.
Brennan’s lawyers sent a 16-page letter, first reported by the NYT, to the chief judge of the Southern District of Florida to try to head off Cannon having a role in the grand jury that is expected to begin its work in January: “[W]e urge Your Honor to exercise your supervisory authority as Chief Judge to ensure the United States Attorney does not steer this matter to the Fort Pierce Division and to the courtroom of Judge Aileen Cannon.”
The chief judge had previously intervened privately to urge Cannon not to take the Mar-a-Lago criminal case after she’d overseen the civil Trump brought to try to head off the probe, the NYT reported in 2024.
The Bloodletting at Heritage Foundation
The fallout from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ embrace of the Tucker Carlson interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes continues, with resignations by staffers, many of whom are fleeing to Mike Pence’s think tank.
Among the reported departures from Heritage: Hans von Spakovsky, the longtime voting fraud bamboozler who has been a TPM favorite for nearly two decades.
One note on how to make sense of this: It’s definitely driven by a split over antisemitism, but it goes a little deeper than the surface ripples of think tankers moving around
As I understand it, the think tank world is largely an eat-what-you-kill operation. Think tankers have particular funders, and particular funders have think tankers. So I suspect the underlying split here is among funders, and the WSJ report that broke a lot of this open gives a prime example of this:
Art Pope, a longtime prominent donor in North Carolina, said he had stopped giving to the Heritage Foundation because he saw the group supporting populist economic policies in recent years. He is now giving to AAF, he said, in a bid to move the party in a different direction.
Whether it’s existing funders pulling the plug and shifting their donations to a different think tank, or a think tank like Pence’s being able to entice new funders to support taking on refugees from Heritage, or a combination of both, the fault lines we’re seeing on the surface are probably the result of the seismic movement of funders.
Trump’s Favorite Excuse in 2025
“I don’t know.”
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Zohran Mamdani on His Family’s Experience With Immigration Court and His Plans for ICE in NYC
Zohran Mamdani has felt the fear that stalks the halls of New York City’s immigration courts in the Trump era.
The mayor-elect found himself waiting nervously on a Manhattan sidewalk when his father, who is Indian-Ugandan, was called in for his citizenship interview.
“I was there earlier this year outside of 26 Federal Plaza,” Mamdani said in an interview with TPM. “I spent four hours waiting not knowing what was going to happen.”
During President Donald Trump’s second term, these types of legal proceedings have often ended in violent encounters between masked agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and immigrants who are seeking to become Americans. The building where Mamdani’s father had his interview has been ground zero for this phenomenon.
”I was lucky, unlike many New Yorkers, in that my father came down and out of 26 Federal Plaza.”
Continue reading “Zohran Mamdani on His Family’s Experience With Immigration Court and His Plans for ICE in NYC”One Agency Has Been Calling Out Trump’s Illegal Impoundment. That May Soon Change.
Throughout 2025, the Trump administration has, time after time, simply refused to spend funds that Congress appropriated. The obstinacy was without precedent in modern American governance; congressional Democrats suggested it had put the country on track toward a constitutional crisis. Republicans, who controlled both chambers of Congress, largely did nothing.
Piping up occasionally to affirm to those who were paying attention that they had not entirely lost their minds was a relatively small watchdog agency housed within the legislative branch: The Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Continue reading “One Agency Has Been Calling Out Trump’s Illegal Impoundment. That May Soon Change.”Abrego Garcia’s ‘Literal Double Bind’
GREENBELT, MD — For the first time since he was unlawfully deported to El Salvador in March, Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared in person this afternoon in front of U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland. He is no longer detained by El Salvador, the Justice Department, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But as his lawyer pointed out he remains in a “literal double bind,” with a bracelet on one ankle from his criminal case in Tennessee and an ICE bracelet on the other ankle from his immigration case in Maryland.
Continue reading “Abrego Garcia’s ‘Literal Double Bind’”