A grand jury Tuesday night declined to indict two protesters in the Chicago area accused of assaulting law enforcement, the latest in a shocking string of failures by the Trump Department of Justice.
Continue reading “Jury Refuses To Indict Chicago ICE Protesters In Latest Revolt Against Trump Overreach”A Shortlist of Federal Data the Trump Administration Has Tampered With or Destroyed
The scale and scope of federal data and statistics that have been completely removed or otherwise compromised by President Donald Trump’s administration is too overwhelming to chronicle fully. When the president’s executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives came down in January and February, the federal agencies now under his authority scrambled to comply. Per tallies at the time, around 8,000 webpages and approximately 3,000 datasets were taken down or modified. Some went back up, but not without changes that subject matter experts are still working to quantify nearly nine months later.
“We know that in some cases what was changed was about identity. But in other cases, there just hadn’t been systematic analysis or transparency about what was done to them,” said Margaret Levenstein, director at the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. “And so we don’t know what else might have been changed.”
Some of the most sweeping alterations were made to data on transgender and gender identity-related topics, and diversity and race, thanks to the so-called “Defending Women” and “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs” executive orders, respectively. Those changes, which have been thoroughly reported, are some of the clearest examples of explicit policy decisions that have compromised the accuracy and adequacy of information that makes a difference in people’s lives.
Data has also been compromised as a result of Trump’s firing spree. Some of the disruption results from deep layoffs at federal statistical and research agencies like the National Occupational Research Agenda, United States Agency for International Development, and the National Center for Education Statistics, as well as the dismissal of experienced officials like ousted Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
Many agencies have long flagged that budgetary constraints were limiting their ability to accrue accurate, timely data on which both the private and public sector rely. But the actions of the Trump administration have made this existing problem far worse.
Continue reading “A Shortlist of Federal Data the Trump Administration Has Tampered With or Destroyed”Top Trump Education Officials Are Dismantling Public Schools: ‘We’re Going to Have a Lot of Empty School Buildings’
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been clear about her desire to shut down the agency she runs. She’s laid off half the staff and joked about padlocking the door.
She calls it “the final mission.”
But the department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.
Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students.
McMahon has described her agency moving “at lightning rocket speed,” and the department’s actions in just one week in September reflect that urgency.
Continue reading “Top Trump Education Officials Are Dismantling Public Schools: ‘We’re Going to Have a Lot of Empty School Buildings’”Election Denier Tries To Make It Easier For Candidates To Challenge Voting Rules
Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL), who voted in 2020 to overturn the presidential election results, leads a case the Supreme Court heard Wednesday in which he and a couple of Republican electors challenge Illinois’ ballot-counting grace period.
Continue reading “Election Denier Tries To Make It Easier For Candidates To Challenge Voting Rules”The Shutdown, Zombie Politics and How Trump Stumbled Into Not Being All-Powerful
It’s always a complicated matter to say who is “winning” a shutdown fight. By one measure, no one “wins” since voters are unhappy with everyone and more generally the “system” for letting things get to such a point of dysfunction. Polls provide one of our most objective measures. But majority opinion isn’t always the terrain that one or both parties is playing to. What’s more, it may be fickle. If it doesn’t last until the next election, does it even matter? The real measure is who’s moving and who’s not, who is coming off their first positions, negotiating with themselves? By this measure — and in fact the others too — Democrats are pretty clearly winning the current shutdown fight.
Polls have been clear: more Americans blame Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown then Democrats. Every poll that I’m aware of has shown this. Republicans now say the latest polls show the blame divide narrowing in their favor. And it’s possible that’s true, though it could just as easily be noise in the polls. And in any case losing by slightly less isn’t exactly a big rallying cry. The real evidence is who is budging. The shutdown started with the White House saying it absolutely wouldn’t budge and threatening a big new round of layoffs to punish Democrats into submission. More and more evidence now shows that the firings threat was a bluff the White House feels unable to follow through on. As this has become more obvious, they’ve been forced to say that they’ve simply decided to delay the firings for no apparent reason. Even the elite media outlets which for days were passing on the White House threats as news are now, belatedly, seeing that it’s not happening, at least not yet. After failing to follow through on that threat, the White House and OMB moved to a new threat: no back pay. But that seems as empty a threat as the first one. In any negotiation or test of wills the failure to follow through on a threat always signals weakness. And these are no different.
Continue reading “The Shutdown, Zombie Politics and How Trump Stumbled Into Not Being All-Powerful”Key Witness Undercuts Trump DOJ’s Witch Hunt Against Jim Comey
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
‘Problematic’ and ‘Likely Insurmountable Problems’
Prior reporting had already suggested that a key witness in the bogus prosecution of former FBI Director Jim Comey was not helpful to prosecutors, but ABC News has a new story out this morning that expands on the obstacle the witness presents to interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s case.
The witness is longtime Comey friend Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University.
ABC News has consistently had good sources seemingly from within the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Its sources for the latest story are familiar with the contents of the internal memo in which career prosecutors laid out the reasons for not seeking an indictment of Comey. That decision led Trump to force out then-acting U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert (Trump’s own nominee for the permanent post) and replace him with Halligan, who promptly indicted the case personally.
As I read the ABC News story, the quoted phrases “problematic” and “likely insurmountable problems” are directly from the memo declining to prosecute:
Federal prosecutors investigating former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly making false statements to Congress determined that a central witness in their probe would prove “problematic” and likely prevent them from establishing their case to a jury, sources familiar with their findings told ABC News. …
According to prosecutors who investigated the circumstances surrounding Comey’s 2020 testimony for two months, using Richman’s testimony to prove that Comey knowingly provided false statements to Congress would result in “likely insurmountable problems” for the prosecution.
Investigators detailed those conclusions in a lengthy memo last month recommending that the office not move forward in charging Comey, according to sources familiar with the memo’s contents.
To put it bluntly, a key witness is “hostile,” in the words of Halligan’s deputy, to the prosecution’s case. Some cases can survive that kind of weakness, but prosecutors in Virginia and earlier in DC, have failed to find additional evidence that Comey lied to Congress as alleged. So there’s precious little evidence for prosecutors to use to overcome the weakness presented by Richman:
Investigators who reviewed material from Comey’s emails, including his correspondence with Richman, could not identify an instance when Comey approved leaking material to a reporter anonymously, sources told ABC News.
What’s this all mean?
(1) It reinforces Halligan’s prosecutorial misconduct in seeking an indictment against Comey despite the fatal flaws with the case already identified and spelled out by prosecutors.
(2) It shows how vulnerable the case will be to dismissal (on various grounds) before it ever gets to trial.
(3) It confirms that the point of this whole exercise — and of all of Trump’s politically motivated prosecutions — is to damage the target’s reputation, force them to spend time and money defending themselves, and in some instances take them off the political playing field (or at least wrong-foot them). A successful conviction is just icing; it’s not the ultimate objective.
One other point separate from the ABC News story: Halligan is still likely to face a challenge to the validity of her appointment as interim U.S. attorney, same as Trump interim USAs in New Jersey and Nevada. Whether it’s Comey or another criminal defendant in the Eastern District, someone is going to make that argument, and if they win it would likely nullify the Comey indictment that Halligan personally presented to the grand jury.
Comey is in court this morning in Alexandria, Virginia, for his arraignment.
Dark Times and Getting Darker
I’ve become a lot more circumspect over the last decade about trumpeting the worst trolling of the MAGA right because so much of it is performative and intended to shock, provoke, and stir the pot. But since President Trump and GOP elected officials started using the assassination of Charlie Kirk to paint all political opposition as terroristic, violent, and radical, the rhetoric has shifted to a darker, more ominous place than we’ve seen in U.S. politics in at least a century.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a GOP Senate candidate, is a leading MAGA troll but the press release he put out yesterday in his official capacity is so propagandistic and chilling in the tale it spins that it serves as a good indicator of where things stand right now. It reads in part:
In response to the political assassination of national hero Charlie Kirk and the disturbing rise of leftist violence across the country, Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched undercover investigations into various groups affiliated with left-wing political violence known to be operating in Texas.
“Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger. Corrupted ideologies like transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture and have unleashed their deranged and drugged-up foot soldiers on the American people,” said Attorney General Paxton. “The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk marks a turning point in America. There can be no compromise with those who want us dead. To that end, I have directed my office to continue its efforts to identify, investigate, and infiltrate these leftist terror cells. To those demented souls who seek to kill, steal, and destroy our country, know this: you cannot hide, you cannot escape, and justice is coming.”
During yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee testimony of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) used similarly chilling language:
What Civil Society Can Do to Beat Trumpism
“The struggle over regime change is about whether the aspiring authoritarians can subdue civil society. Their strategy is to play divide and conquer, rewarding friends and brutally punishing opponents. They win when society cracks, creating a self-enforcing set of expectations, in which everyone shuts up and complies because everyone expects everyone else to shut up and comply, too.”–Henry Farrell, professor of democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins
Welcome to the Era of Kavanaugh Raids
We talked last week about “Kavanaugh stops,” a word play on Terry stops, morbid legal humor for ICE’s detention of U.S. citizens caught up in President Trump’s authoritarian mass deportation system. But Garrett Graff draws a different historical parallel: the Palmer raids conducted by President Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1919-1920:
Palmer oversaw a series of sweeping raids against suspected Communists during the country’s first Red Scare (there are two and they’re worth distinguishing between!) that ultimately led to the arrests and detention of perhaps as many as 10,000 people across nearly 40 US cities. The raids were led by a rising bureaucratic star named J. Edgar Hoover. Many arrests and seizures happened absent any warrants; many “radicals” were detained for simply being members of entirely legal organizations.
Quote of the Day
Here, I will say that this effort to use the military against American citizens — an effort backed, it seems, by almost the entire Republican Party — makes a mockery of the longstanding conservative claim that theirs is a movement of small government and states’ rights. Trump’s push to invade cities using the National Guard is as aggressive a use of federal power as one can imagine. And as we think about antecedents to this administration, this particular episode is structurally similar to the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required the citizens and officials of Northern free states to act as slave catchers against their will and often against the laws of the states in which they lived.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Trump Conveniently Lands On New Legal Theory That He Claims Could Deprive Feds Of Backpay
At a time when Republicans want to turn the screws on government-loving Democrats and their natural aversion to shutdowns, the Trump administration has conveniently stumbled upon a new statutory interpretation that, it threatens, might deprive federal workers of backpay after the shutdown.
The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 guarantees that all federal workers are retroactively paid after a lapse in appropriations. The Trump administration, via a draft Office of Management and Budget memo, is leaking its plans to argue that that law only applied to the 2019 shutdown, and that Congress must appropriate money specifically to reimburse furloughed feds.
“The supposed ‘new legal analysis’ is, to use a technical legal term, horseshit,” former OMB General Counsel Sam Bagenstos posted on Bluesky. “What the law actually says is that when Congress enacts a law ending a lapse, furloughed employees get paid at the earliest date possible. Period.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who represents a disproportionate number of federal employees, is threatening legal action.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is doing some aw shucksing, shrugging that this newfound information has just reached his desk, but oh boy wouldn’t he like it if the federal workers got paid.
President Trump, as always, is voicing the barely veiled strategic maneuvering underneath this novel legal interpretation.
“I can tell you this: The Democrats have put a lot of people in great risk and jeopardy, but it really depends on who you’re talking about,” he told reporters. “But for the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
Trump and OMB Director Russ Vought have already muddied their easy messaging — we, the adults in the room, wish we could reopen the government and get to work for the American people, but Democrats are recalcitrant hooligans — with their bloodlust for weaponizing the shutdown. Vought has been publicly posting about withholding federal funds from blue state projects, and the administration keeps professing that it’s about to start mass layoffs (which have yet to materialize — at least one agency is busy reinstating previously fired employees).
It makes their about-face as the party opposing the shutdown more fraught when they keep using it (or threatening to use it) to indulge in one of their favorite hobbies: brutalizing civil servants.
— Kate Riga
Bondi: Oppo Over Everything
Attorney General Pam Bondi attended a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, the focus of much attention in Washington, D.C. Epstein, political prosecutions, Tom Homan’s cash in a bag — there was a lot Democrats aimed to press her on. Republicans came prepared with a tale of political woe, having announced on Monday that several lawmakers had their phone records scrutinized by the FBI as part of the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In the end, Bondi barely did any testifying, either refusing to answer or dodging the Democrats’ questions.
The attorney general spent a good chunk of the almost five-hour long hearing personally attacking Democratic senators — including Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) — instead of answering their oversight questions. Any time she was confronted with questions she did not like or did not want to answer, Bondi pulled a line from a heap of campaign-style oppo research she came ready with to deflect and attack, playing to her audience of one in the White House.
“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” Bondi told Durbin when Durbin tried to question her about the National Guard being deployed to Chicago.
(She used that same line with a different city name swapped in to dodge questions from other Democratic senators.)
“I’ve been on this committee for more than 20 years. That’s the kind of testimony you expect from this administration,” Durbin said in response. “A simple question as to whether or not they had a legal rationale for deploying National Guard troops becomes grounds for personal attack. I think it’s a legitimate question. It’s my responsibility.”
Bondi also repeatedly tried to blame Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown, saying they were the reason law enforcement and her employees at the Justice Department were working without pay. Despite Bondi’s claims Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House and have been refusing to negotiate with Democrats.
— Emine Yücel
RINO Marjorie Taylor Greene
Unusual is the day that both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) approvingly cite the words of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
Greene had tweeted Monday night in support of extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies, writing that while she doesn’t like the health care law, she supports an extension to keep premiums from skyrocketing.
“Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!” she wrote.
“I think this is the first time I said this, but, on this issue, Representative Greene said it perfectly,” Schumer said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “Representative Greene is absolutely right.”
Jeffries, during his Tuesday press conference, propped up a posterboard of a Greene tweet: “Hi this is your daily reminder that insurance has become UNAFFORDABLE for most Americans. Health, Auto, and Home. I wish my party would make this a priority.”
— Kate Riga
VP Summit
On Monday night, former Vice President Kamala Harris held a public conversation with Napheesa Collier, a star WNBA player on the Minnesota Lynx and vice president of the players’ union.
The league is currently consumed by a labor struggle, as players negotiate for higher salaries and a fairer revenue-sharing deal in their collective bargaining agreement (WNBA players get a 9.3 percent share of the league’s income, while NBA players get 49-51 percent). The stalled negotiations caught fire last week, when Collier used her exit interview to call out WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert, who had dismissed concerns about ludicrously low salary floors (Caitlin Clark makes about $78,000 a year) and allegedly stated that the players, including Clark, should be “grateful” for the platform the league gives them.
“For so long, we tried to have these conversations and move the needle in those meetings that we would have with the league and with our leadership,” Collier said during her event with Harris. “I saw nothing was changing. Coaches and players, winning and losing alike, were complaining about the same things over and over again.”
“Whether I was going to get annihilated for this, or people were going to support me, I felt what I was doing was right,” she added. “I felt like it needed to be said.”
Harris called Collier a “living example of courage.”
The players’ union and the league have until October 31 to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement; a lockout may follow if an agreement isn’t reached.
— Kate Riga
In Case You Missed It
Morning Memo: Lindsey Halligan Will Have to Overrule Career Prosecutors to Indict Letitia James
Supreme Court dispatch: The Medical Science Is Always ‘Uncertain’ When It Pushes Against Supreme Court’s Bias
Backchannel: Don’t Believe the Hype: Trump Bum-Rushing DC Reporters Edition
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
A Major New Constitutional Clash Erupts in Oregon
What We Are Reading
Republicans post fake image of Oregon protest – using photos of South America — The Guardian
Memo to Bari Weiss Re: CBS News: You’re doomed — The Verge
Rutgers professor moving to Europe after threats over antifa accusations — The Guardian
Don’t Believe the Hype: Trump Bum-Rushing DC Reporters Edition
News comes today that Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is now threatening not to pay back pay to federal employees after this shutdown ends. There’s both more and less here than meets the eye. The step Vought has taken is to remove references to back pay from OMB guidance about the shutdown. The backpay rule is not based on OMB guidance. It’s federal law. And even better than that, it’s a federal law Trump signed.
Yes, yes, I know: federal law isn’t a big constraint on Trump White House planning. Make of that one what you will. But I want to zoom in on something else. The big, big threat coming from Vought was that the Trump administration would use the opportunity of the shutdown to institute large-scale firings of federal employees on the unsupported theory that the shutdown opened up more powers to fire federal employees. That’s not true. But that doesn’t matter. Because the Supreme Court has already given Trump power to fire as many federal employees as he wants, federal law notwithstanding.
Continue reading “Don’t Believe the Hype: Trump Bum-Rushing DC Reporters Edition”The Medical Science Is Always ‘Uncertain’ When It Pushes Against Supreme Court’s Bias
If you came into Tuesday’s oral argument over Colorado’s conversion therapy ban blind, you’d assume that the practice, meant to “turn” LBGTQ+ people “straight,” has supporters and detractors in equal measure, is a hotly debated medical practice.
Continue reading “The Medical Science Is Always ‘Uncertain’ When It Pushes Against Supreme Court’s Bias”Lindsey Halligan Will Have to Overrule Career Prosecutors to Indict Letitia James
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Here We Go Again?
A career federal prosecutor in Virginia is reportedly poised to decline to bring a criminal case against New York Attorney General Letitia James on bogus mortgage fraud charges drummed up by the Trump administration.
In light of the pressure from President Trump to charge James, the refusal by Elizabeth Yusi in the Eastern District of Virginia has attorneys in the office bracing for her firing, MSNBC reports. Yusi oversees major criminal prosecutions in the Norfolk office; the James property under scrutiny is in Norfolk. The Guardian subsequently confirmed the gist of the MSNBC report that Yusi doesn’t believe she has probable cause to charge James.
The exact timing of the unfolding clash remain unclear. MSNBC reported that Yusi expects to present her declination decision in the James case to newly installed interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan “in the coming weeks.”
Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert, was forced out by Trump for refusing to bring politically motivated prosecutions against former FBI Director Jim Comey and against James. Facing a looming statute of limitations deadline, Halligan’s first act as U.S. attorney was to immediately indict Comey on bogus charges of lying to Congress. Without pressing statute of limitations concerns, the James case doesn’t appear to be on a similar fast track.
As Molly Roberts writes at Lawfare, the James case is even weaker than the case against Comey: “It seems wholly unlikely that a prosecutor could reasonably expect to secure a conviction on any of the charges included in the criminal referral — which explains why, after interviewing and presenting to the grand jury witnesses from insurers to underwriters to realtors to James’s niece herself, the Eastern District team didn’t find evidence they felt was sufficient to prove that James knowingly made a false statement intended to influence a bank.”
John Durham Undercut Case Against Comey
ABC News reported that former Special Counsel John Durham “told federal prosecutors investigating James Comey that he was unable to uncover evidence that would support false statements or obstruction charges against the former FBI director.”
Durham’s controversial tenure as special counsel included the highly politicized investigation of the investigators who probed Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Durham met with federal prosecutors in August, according to the ABC News report: “[H]is conclusions raise the prospect that [he] could now become a key figure aiding Comey’s defense.”
Durham wasn’t alone. Investigators in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office had scrutinized Comey for years without finding any chargeable offenses.
After two months, Virginia prosecutors came to the same conclusions, ABC News reported.
But as we now know, Halligan rebuffed the decision not to charge Comey and personally brought the case to a grand jury, which indicted him on two of the three charges she had sought.
News of Durham being interviewed recently by investigators came as a judge moved up Comey’s arraignment to Wednesday to accommodate the large crowd expected at the courthouse in Alexandria.
Correction: Durham had no involvement with the Hunter Biden prosecution, as the original version of this item mistakenly said. Special Counsel David Weiss handled the Biden case.
A New Round of Investigating the Investigators Begins
The Republican noise machine is seizing on newly released information that in its early days the Jan. 6 criminal investigation sought phone records of several GOP senators, including Lindsey Graham (SC), Bill Hagerty (TN), Josh Hawley (MO), Ron Johnson (WI), Dan Sullivan (AK), Tommy Tuberville (AL), Cynthia Lummis (WY), and Marsha Blackburn (TN). Phone records for Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) were also obtained for the period right around the certification of the election, suggesting investigators were looking into whether the lawmakers were involved in the fake electors scheme.
To be clear, the information about the Jan. 6 investigation was released by the Trump FBI to Republicans on the Hill as a way to rewrite the history of the failed coup attempt and continue to attempt to cast it as a Biden-era abuse of power. Hill Republicans held a press conference yesterday to trumpet the new information.
Not all news outlets saw through the charade. Punchbowl headlined it a “New Jan. 6 controversy …”
Good Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: The Trump Administration’s Mostly Unnoticed Move to Crack Down on the Opposition
Trump Assault on the Rule of Law Even Worse Than Expected
Emily Bazelon returns to a group of former high-level officials in the DC legal establishment whom she surveyed last year before the election on the threat a Trump II presidency would pose to the rule of law. The group’s new assessment of what’s happened in the first months of Trump’s second term is exceedingly grim.
Abrego Garcia Still Twisting in the Wind
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland continues to get slow-rolled by the Trump administration in one of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia cases. But in a hearing yesterday in Abrego Garcia’s habeas corpus case, she gave the administration a deadline of this week to show that it has plans to deport him to a third country or she’ll order him released from detention.
Illinois Sues to Block Trump’s National Guard Deployment
A federal judge in Chicago declined to rule immediately on Illinois’ request for an injunction blocking President Trump from deploying national guard troops to the state.
Finally, Some Kind of Legal Rationale for Trump’s Cartel War?
The Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has produced a classified legal memo “that justifies lethal strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers,” CNN reports:
The opinion is significant, legal experts said, because it appears to justify an open-ended war against a secret list of groups, giving the president power to designate drug traffickers as enemy combatants and have them summarily killed without legal review. Historically, those involved in drug trafficking were considered criminals with due process rights, with the Coast Guard interdicting drug-trafficking vessels and arresting smugglers.
The administration has not provided a fully fleshed-out legal rationale for the lawless and lethal attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats on the high seas. It has also rebuffed congressional requests for the OLC memo.
Trump Pentagon Eases Worst of its Press Restrictions
After negotiations with national news organizations, the Pentagon has withdrawn a new rule that was interpreted as requiring it to sign off on news reports that included defense information it had not officially released, the NYT reports.
Uncle Walter Is Turning in His Grave
The new owners of CBS have officially installed Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!