I got a number of fascinating replies to yesterday’s post about the federal calendar and presidential holidays, specifically whether we should ditch Columbus Day in favor of a national holiday celebrating Abraham Lincoln. I also learned a bit more about how Lincoln never got a national holiday originally because the states of the old Confederacy, whose representatives and senators had outsized seniority throughout the 20th century, simply wouldn’t hear of it. Indeed, the 1968 federal law which clustered federal holidays into long weekends and which in effect though not formally consolidated Washington’s birthday into “President’s Day” was still under the shadow of southern resistance to anything commemorating Abraham Lincoln.
Continue reading “The Uncanny Artifice of George Washington”ICE Agents Under Criminal Investigation for Allegedly Lying About Shooting
‘Materially Inconsistent’
Two ICE officers were put on leave and are under criminal investigation for potential perjury in an incident in which one of the officers shot a Venezuelan national in Minneapolis last month, according to acting ICE director Todd Lyons.
As has happened in the other shootings by federal agents in Minnesota, video evidence appears to have done in the officers.
“A joint review by ICE and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” Lyons said in a statement.
The dramatic reversal in the case came after the Trump DOJ last week dropped criminal charges against the wounded man, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and his Venezuelan friend, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna. Both men had both been accused of assaulting the ICE agent who opened fire, allegedly hitting him with a broom and snow shovel.
The feds had not yet brought an indictment when, in a highly unusual move, they sought to dismiss the charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be re-filed. A judge granted the request and dismissed the case on Friday.
In moving to dismiss the case, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office made an extraordinary admission: “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit … as well as the preliminary-hearing testimony … that was based on information presented to the Affiant.”
The complaint affidavit by FBI Special Agent Timothy G. Schanz was based on, among other things, “information I have learned from other law enforcement officers.” It appears to rely heavily on the accounts offered by the two ICE agents who are now suspected of possible perjury.
Lawyers for the two Venezuelan men had insisted that the ICE agent who discharged his weapon fired through a closed door after the two Venezuelan men had fled inside. They had offered in court photographic evidence of what they claimed was a bullet hole through an exterior door and a corresponding bullet hole in an interior wall.
“Lying under oath is a serious federal offense,” Lyons said, in a significant change of tone from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s initial claim that it was an “attempted murder” and DHS’ assertion that the attack had been fueled by rhetoric from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats.
The investigation of the two ICE agents is being conducted jointly by ICE and the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office. The feds continue to refuse to cooperate with a separate state investigation into the shooting.
Another ‘Facilitate’ Case …
In a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns of Boston ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Babson College freshman Any Lucia López Belloza, who was detained en route home to Texas at Thanksgiving and removed to her native Honduras, where she had not lived since she was a young child. López’s deportation came despite a court order barring her removal.
Jan. 6 Never Ends
- Saber-rattling ahead of the midterms, President Trump vowed to impose a nationwide voter ID requirement via executive order if Congress fails to act. Your occasional reminder that an executive order is the executive branch’s version of an office-wide internal memo.
- Current and former DOJ and FBI officials are alarmed that a conspiracy-fueled search warrant for the Fulton County voting center made it past a magistrate judge, MSNow reports.
- Ahead of the FBI seizure of ballots and voting records in Atlanta, St. Louis U.S. Attorney Thomas Albus, who signed the search warrant, took part in meetings with some of the fringe lawyers tasked by President Trump with reinvestigating his 2020 loss, including Ed Martin and Kurt Olsen, ProPublica reports.
Trump Attack on Higher Ed
- UCLA: In a major win for University of California faculty groups and unions, the Trump administration dropped its appeal of a court order blocking its $1.2 billion settlement with UCLA.
- Harvard: The Trump DOJ sued Harvard University to obtain sensitive admissions data to determine with it is using race in admission decisions. According to the WSJ, the administration is seeking “all admissions data for the past five academic years, including applicant test scores, a racial breakdown of applicants, grade-point averages, extracurricular activities, essays and admission outcomes.”
- Nationwide: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is creating a list of top universities that will no longer be eligible for tuition assistance for service members because they are “biased,” CNN reports:
Boat Strike Campaign Death Toll at 124
Three people were killed in a Feb. 13 U.S. attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean, bringing the death toll in the lawless campaign of attacks to at least 124.
Trump Uses Military as Political Props
In a campaign-style rally at the newly renamed Ft. “Bragg” — no longer named for the notorious Confederate general but, in a sly wink and nod of white nationalists, for an obscure WWII paratrooper — President Trump gave an overtly political speech to uniformed personnel, urging them to vote Republican in this year’s midterm elections.
Judge Rejects White Nationalist Revisionism
On the official day of celebration of George Washington’s birthday, when the federal courts are usually closed, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ordered the Trump administration to restore exhibits about slavery to the national park site commemorating the first president’s former home in Philadelphia.
In her strongly worded opinion, citing Orwell’s 1984, the Bush II appointee wrote:
The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.
Rejecting the government’s argument, Rufe entered a preliminary injunction against the administration ordering it to restore the slavery exhibits and not to make any further changes to the President’s House site.
What It Means to Be a White ‘Race Traitor’
America’s racial caste system, which places white people on top, has existed since before the country was founded. And yet there have always been white people who have worked against and betrayed notions of racial hierarchy, rejecting the fictions that undergird them and the illegitimate power that racial caste justifies. These people are perhaps the most powerful weapon against these systems.
That’s why, like so many of the archetypal race traitors before them, the willingness of Good and Pretti to put themselves in danger for the cause of racial justice proved an unparalleled galvanizing force, one that simultaneously affirms the best about America, and the worst.
Jesse Jackson, 1941-2026
In my youth, I wrestled with strong feelings about Jesse Jackson, both pro and con. As an adult, I was better able to resolve the conflicting elements of who he was when I came to understand: It was hard for Jesse Jackson to be Jesse Jackson.
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Career Politicians Have Failed Us. Here’s What Self-Governance Could Look Like.
This excerpt is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Democracy’s most radical, yet purist premise is people’s power as exercise of power, not simply consent to power. As I detail in my new book Politics Without Politicians, in classical Athens, governing was not the domain of a political class but a shared civic practice and a duty distributed in part on the basis of random selection (with frequent rotation). Additionally, whatever its profound exclusions in the definition of who counted as a citizen, the Athenian system was built on the idea that no citizen was too poor, too uneducated, or too timid to be deprived of a voice about common affairs. Democracy meant, in those days, ruling and being ruled in turn, as opposed to what it means today: regularly consenting, via elections, to never ruling and always being ruled by career politicians. At a moment when many Americans feel alienated from politics as something done by and for others, it seemed important to revisit a model that treated self-government as a lived, everyday responsibility.
Continue reading “Career Politicians Have Failed Us. Here’s What Self-Governance Could Look Like.”In Which Josh Proposes Revising the Federal Holiday Calendar
When I was a little boy in the Southern California school system in the 70s and 80s, there were separate holidays for Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. Or at least this was my recollection. Both were celebrated. Then Martin Luther King Day became a federal holiday in 1986. I thought at time and for many years after that Presidents Day was created out of a consolidation of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays in order to make room for Martin Luther King Day, on the reasoning that there’s a limit on the number of federal holidays. A number of years ago I looked into this and it turned out that this wasn’t true. I can’t remember the exact details. Lincoln’s birthday was never a federal holiday but it was celebrated in California. There was also a shift beginning around the same time to rebrand Washington’s birthday as Presidents Day. (Officially, it’s still Washington’s Birthday.)
In any case, my interest in this is that Abraham Lincoln should really have a national holiday. Some of this is a matter of him just really being a great president quite apart from the revolution brought about by the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments. Sometimes great iconic figures aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But the twin presidencies of Washington and Lincoln are if anything more powerful and important on close examination than they seem, though Washington’s role isn’t limited to his presidency. You have to see it in the context of his military and de facto political leadership during the Revolutionary War and his role in the period between the Revolution and his presidency, including his role at the constitutional convention. In any case, point being Washington and Lincoln are both critical figures in our national history. The holiday problem is that we have a logjam of birthdays, with King’s in January and both Washington’s and Lincoln’s falling in February. I guess there’s some reason why we can’t have that many national holidays right after each other. Fine. I don’t make the rules.
Continue reading “In Which Josh Proposes Revising the Federal Holiday Calendar”Guilt by Association: First ‘Antifa’ Case Sweeps Anti-Trump Activists Into One Terrorism Conspiracy
This article is part of TPM’s ongoing “Creating the Enemy Within” project, tracking the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.
When Amber Lowrey first heard that her sister had been arrested at a protest on July 4, it didn’t alarm her.
Continue reading “Guilt by Association: First ‘Antifa’ Case Sweeps Anti-Trump Activists Into One Terrorism Conspiracy”TikTokers Came to Springfield Looking for ICE. Then the Child Trafficking Rumors Began.
This story was originally reported by Amanda Becker of The 19th. Meet Amanda and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
The residents of Springfield, Ohio, had prepared for the arrival of immigration agents on February 3, the expiration date set by the Trump administration for Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, who account for nearly a quarter of the city’s population. A federal judge intervened at the last minute, pushing the deadline indefinitely. The agents never arrived.
Still, the city has found itself on edge this month and the threat is as unsettling as it is familiar: online misinformation, this time accusing the very people trying to protect their immigrant neighbors from deportation of trafficking their children instead.
Continue reading “TikTokers Came to Springfield Looking for ICE. Then the Child Trafficking Rumors Began.”Hegseth Vows to Keep up Kelly Retribution Crusade
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
After a federal judge decisively shot down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to downgrade Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-AZ) rank and retirement benefits this week, Hegseth wasted no time in responding publicly.
Continue reading “Hegseth Vows to Keep up Kelly Retribution Crusade “Has ICE Debuted New ‘No Lying’ Policy?
Yesterday, one of ICE’s and the White House’s prize ICE-as-victim cases blew up. We’ve seen a version of this happen before. The story is pushed on Fox. Charges follow. But as it begins to make its way through the courts, it falls apart and the charges are more or less quietly dropped. We’ve seen so, so many of these cases where it’s clear that what the ICE agents said just wasn’t true. I don’t even have to tell you about some of the more obscure ones. Though they didn’t get to charges since the purported attackers were already dead, you can see the pattern in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. First, the story was that protestors were trying to kill ICE agents and the agents barely emerged alive. Then we see the video and none of that is true. The key, though, is that in those cases where charges were filed, it’s always no harm no foul. The claims of ICE agents are shown to have been false, but it’s on to the next wilding spree. There are no consequences. Not for the original behavior. Not for lying about it.
But yesterday something different happened. The DOJ went into court and asked that a set of charges be dismissed with prejudice, i.e., they can’t be filed again. And the reason was this sentence that’s been rattling around my head for the last 24 hours. “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit.”
Continue reading “Has ICE Debuted New ‘No Lying’ Policy?”Boasberg Bashes Admin’s Latest Conduct in AEA Case
‘The Solution-less Mire’
In a careful, incremental, and modulated ruling designed to withstand an all but certain appeal by the Trump DOJ, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. ordered the administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a subset of the Venezuelan nationals spirited out of the country 11 months ago under the wartime Alien Enemies Act.
It marks the second time Boasberg has ordered the return of AEA detainees. The first time was in emergency rulings he issued as the AEA deportations unfolded over a weekend last March, when he ordered the removals stopped and the planes carrying the detainees to El Salvador turned around. The Trump administration defied those orders, but Boasberg’s subsequent efforts to hold those responsible in contempt of court have been thwarted twice by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the administration’s second appeal is currently languishing.
Throughout the latest round of litigation over how to give the AEA detainees the due process they were initially denied, the Trump DOJ has been sneering at Boasberg, rejecting the premises of his orders and barely engaging with his requests for information and proposed solutions. In yesterday’s order, Boasberg noted the pattern: “Apparently not interested in participating in this process, the Government’s responses essentially told the Court to pound sand.”
Boasberg sprinkled similar admonitions throughout his ruling, which I’ve excerpted and condensed here:
Defendants at every turn have objected to Plaintiffs’ legitimate proposals without offering a single option for remedying the injury that they inflicted upon the deportees. … [I]t is up to the Government to remedy the wrong that it perpetrated here and to provide a means for doing so. … [M]indful of the flagrancy of the Government’s violations of the deportees’ due-process rights that landed Plaintiffs in this situation, the Court refuses to let them languish in the solution-less mire Defendants propose.
It is not clear how many, if any, of the 137 former detainees who were held for months in El Salvador’s CECOT prison wish to return to the United States, where they face certain detention and the threat of being deported to a third country again. But for those who make it out of Venezuela to third countries and who want to return, Boasberg crafted his order to give them relief similar to that accorded by the Supreme Court to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported the same weekend in March but on a different flight and not as an alleged alien enemy.
Boasberg stopped short for now of ordering the same relief for those detainees still in Venezuela, so as not to interfere in the executive branch’s conduct of foreign relations and risk being overturned on appeal. Those still in Venezuela will, however, be allowed to begin filing legal challenges to President Trump’s AEA proclamation and their designations as members of the Tren del Aragua gang. Boasberg saved for another day the question of remote hearings for the detainees abroad.
All of this just sets the stage for another round of appeals, which could drag on for months, further delaying any accountability for the administration’s wrongful conduct.
Mass Deportation Watch
- Minnesota: In an extraordinary outcome, the Trump DOJ moved to dismiss with prejudice felony charges of assaulting an ICE agent against two immigrants in Minneapolis, one of whom was shot by the agent in a widely covered Jan. 14 incident. “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit … as well as the preliminary-hearing testimony … that was based on information presented to the Affiant,” federal prosecutors said in their motion to dismiss the case. The judge granted the motion this morning and dismissed the case.
- Chicago: Newly released body camera footage of the three Border Patrol agents who shot Marimar Martinez of Chicago five times records one agent saying “Do something, bitch,” before another says, “It’s time to get aggressive and get the fuck out.”
- Minnesota: U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel ruled that ICE has been engaged in the wholesale deprivation of the constitutional rights of detainees at the Whipple federal building just outside of Minneapolis. “The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights,” Brasel wrote.
For the Record …
Last Friday’s Morning Memo led with a report in the Star Tribune that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and FBI were set to announce a joint investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti. No such announcement has been forthcoming, and yesterday Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told senators that the feds are still blocking state and local authorities from participating in the investigations of the shootings of Pretti and Renee Good.
Good Read
Everything you want to know — and a lot you don’t want to know — about how Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski are running DHS, via the WSJ.
The Retribution: Mark Kelly Edition
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C., long a colorful jurist, let the exclamation points fly in ruling that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated the constitutional rights of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) by attempting to downgrade his rank and retirement benefits over his participation in a video reminding troops of their duty not to follow unlawful orders.
It Was Jared
The controversial whistleblower complaint that DNI Tulsi Gabbard allegedly tried to bury involves an intercepted communication between two foreign nationals who discussed President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to the WSJ and a matching NYT piece.
Their phone call was intercepted by a foreign intelligence service and provided to the National Security Agency, the NYT reported.
“It couldn’t be determined which country the foreign nationals are from or what they discussed about Kushner,” the WSJ reported, but both papers noted that the conversation was at least in part about Iran.
The NYT went a little further:
The foreign nationals, they said, were commenting on Mr. Kushner’s influence with the Trump administration. At a time last year when Mr. Kushner’s role in Middle East peace talks was less public than it is now, the foreign officials were recorded saying that he was the person to speak to in order to influence the talks.
The intercept also included what officials described as “gossip” or speculation about Mr. Kushner that was not supported by other intelligence.
One final tidbit, via the NYT: “Mr. Kushner’s name was redacted in the original report from the National Security Agency, but people reading it, including the whistle-blower, were able to determine that the reference was to him.”
Judges Not Fighting US Attorney Firing
The federal judges in the Northern District of New York put out a pretty milquetoast statement that suggest they are not going to fight the Trump DOJ’s immediate firing of the interim U.S. attorney they themselves had just appointed:
The Retribution: Blue States Edition
U.S. District Judge Manish S. Shah of Chicago blocked the Trump administration from clawing back $600 million in public health funds from four blue states — California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota — ruling that the evidence showed its decision was “based on arbitrary, capricious or unconstitutional rationales.”
Thread of the Day
Germany Prepares for War
That’s not a headline I expected to see in my lifetime.
With President Trump abandoning 80 years of U.S. defense of Europe and with Russia’s territorial ambitions uncontained, Germany is racing to prepare for armed conflict, the WSJ reports:
Germany’s military-intelligence agency estimates that within the next three years, Russia, whose armies poured into Ukraine in 2022, will have amassed enough weaponry and trained enough troops to be able to start a wider war across Europe. [Germany’s top military officer] says a smaller attack could come at any time.
Future Generations Weep
President Trump personally announced at the White House that he is reversing the Environmental Protection Agency’s nearly 17-year-old scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to human health. The elimination of the endangerment finding — the foundation for federal regulation of GHG emissions — puts the United States, already an international laggard on climate change policy, back at square one.
“Reversing the endangerment finding has been seen as the holy grail for those who deny the science of climate change. That’s because if the repeal is upheld in court, it could also prevent future administrations from restoring regulations to curb greenhouse gases,” climate change reporter Lisa Friedman wrote in a piece that adopts the typically restrained NYT style but still manages to vibrate with barely concealed outrage.
Beating back the flames of fascism while the fascists fan the flames of global warming is the dual-threat 21st-century apocalypse that I can still scarcely get my head around.
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Why Are Senate Democrats Still Voting to Confirm Trump’s Judicial Nominees?
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first in a series of eight “Arctic Frost Accountability” subcommittee hearings, which are ostensibly intended to provide oversight of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The real purpose, though, is to provide Republican senators with more camera time to relitigate the results of that election and the January 6 insurrection that followed.
In his opening remarks, Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, confronted his Republican colleagues over “their undying fealty to the president’s abnormal behavior” and “his attempt to whitewash history.” But he also called out another group of people who have been doing the same of late: Trump’s judicial nominees.
“Have you seen the contortions that these nominees have gone through when they’re asked the basic question, ‘Who won the election in 2020?’” Durbin asked. “They won’t answer. They go through these painful contortions. They can’t answer it because it’s an article of faith: If you’re loyal to Trump, you never accept the premise that he lost an election.”
Durbin is referring to the fact that, to date, all 37 of Trump’s second-term judicial nominees have refused to answer simple questions related to the 2020 election and the insurrection. Instead, nominees typically state only that President Joe Biden “was certified” as the victor, and they claim that as nominees, it would be “inappropriate” for them to say that the Capitol was attacked on January 6 (which they describe as a “political controversy”).
One explanation for this behavior is that nominees understand that if they don’t go along with the president’s conspiracy theories, their nominations would be immediately pulled. The other explanation is that they believe in these conspiracy theories, too.
Durbin has raised this pattern a number of times during Judiciary Committee meetings. In June, for example, he said he could not support the confirmation of Cristian Stevens, whom Trump nominated to a district court judgeship in Missouri, in light of Stevens’s inability to “acknowledge these basic facts and denounce the violence perpetrated against law enforcement on this day.”
Just last week, though, Durbin voted to confirm two of Trump’s nominees, David Clay Fowlkes and Aaron Peterson, to serve as life-tenured federal judges. And he’s not the only one: During Trump’s second term, 19 Democrats have voted to confirm at least one of Trump’s nominees. New Hampshire Senators Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen have voted to confirm six and seven nominees, respectively, and Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, has voted for five. Among Senate Democrats, Durbin and Virginia Senator Tim Kaine are tied for the lead in this ignominious category with eight yes votes apiece.
Continue reading “Why Are Senate Democrats Still Voting to Confirm Trump’s Judicial Nominees?”