This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Over the weekend, The New York Timespublished a flurry of internal Supreme Court memos related to its unsigned, unexplained February 2016 order that blocked the Clean Power Plan, an Environmental Protection Agency rule that required states to implement plans to reduce carbon emissions within their borders, from taking effect. At the time, this was (to use a legal term of art) pretty weird: When the Court issued its ruling, a Republican-led challenge to the rule was still pending before a federal appeals court in D.C. By leapfrogging that court, the justices extended special treatment to this country’s fossil fuels industry, effectively concluding that the viability of its business model was simply too important to leave to the usual legal process.
The Court’s order gave rise to what is now known as the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”—a form of expedited review that the conservative justices have since wielded at their convenience to stymie Democratic presidents on the one hand, and, on the other, to give President Donald Trump just about anything he wants. The memos obtained by the Times make clear that one of the principal reasons the Court acted as it did is that Chief Justice John Roberts, a lifelong Republican, really did not like what would have been President Barack Obama’s signature climate initiative, and decided to use the powers of his office to spike it.
There is, as they say, a lot going on in these memos. But it is worth remembering that of the many, many justices who would bristle at the notion that the Court would ever allow partisan politics to taint its deliberative process in this manner, none do so quite as officiously as Roberts. In 2018, after Trump disparaged a particular court ruling as the work of an “Obama judge,” Roberts issued a rare public rebuke: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
I’ve described to you many times how TPM was saved by an early shift to building a membership system. We began it at the end of 2012 and started building it in earnest in about 2014. That gave us a five or six year head start on almost everyone else. We were thus much better positioned when the collapse of the digital ad economy hit in the couple years just before the pandemic. But today I’d like to share with you another part of that transition because it intersects with a fascinating story of Trump era corruption published today in the New York Times. It’s the story of a couple Syrian-born billionaires, already in business with the Trump family, lining up Trump’s personal support to secure another vast payday. In “a sign of how powerful Mr. Trump has become,” Times reporter Eric Lipton says after laying out the basic facts of the story, “To get almost anything done in the nation’s capital requires not alienating a vexed and vengeful president, and, ideally, pleasing him.”
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
March unfolded like a stress test for U.S. counterterrorism authorities.
The month opened with a gunman in an Iranian-flag shirt killing three people at a bar in Texas. Then, an attack with homemade explosives outside the mayor’s mansion in New York City. Next came a deadly shooting March 12 on a Virginia college campus and, the same afternoon, a car-ramming at a Michigan synagogue. Days later, agents arrested a man charged with threatening a mass shooting at an Ohio mosque.
To current and former national security officials, these were omens, signs of the dangers they predicted last year when President Donald Trump began redirecting counterterrorism resources toward his mass deportation campaign.
They had warned of a diminished ability to respond should major global events inflame threats at home and abroad. Now, they say, the war in Iran has locked the Trump administration into a showdown with a sophisticated state sponsor of terrorism at a time when U.S. security agencies have hemorrhaged expertise and leadership is in flux.
The urgency of the moment has trained a spotlight on Sebastian Gorka, the White House counterterrorism adviser tasked with drafting a blueprint for fighting homegrown and international threats. Nearly a year ago, Gorka declared a national counterterrorism strategy “imminent.” By July, he was “on the cusp” of unveiling the plan — a phrase he repeated three months later in October. And again in January.
To date, no strategy has appeared, and no explanation for the delay. When it is finally released, current and former counterterrorism personnel say, they expect a document rooted in politics rather than intelligence, with little detail on how to combat threats after a year of deep cuts across national security agencies.
“Strategies are only worth the amount of resources you put into them,” said a former senior official who served in the first Trump administration. “We’re entering very dangerous territory.”
At first glance, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway’s Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution is certainly delusional, but not in a way that’s particularly interesting or insightful for a MAGA movement rooted in a cult of personality.
The hagiography of the Court’s most openly partisan archconservative, premised on insider access to the justices and those in their orbit, reads like the gushing raptures of a K-pop stan.
A rather unusual series of events over the past 48 hours has exposed the extent of the CIA’s involvement in counternarcotics operations in Mexico.
A brief timeline to catch you up:
Sunday: Four government investigators — two from Mexico and two from the United States — were killed around 2 a.m. local time in a car accident in the northern state of Chihuahua while viewing newly discovered drug labs, according to Mexican officials. A government convoy was navigating the rugged highlands of the Sierra Madre Occidental when the lead vehicle plunged about 200 meters down a cliff and caught fire, killing all four occupants, the NYT reported. The two Americans were “training officers assigned to the United States Embassy in Mexico,” according to the report.
Monday: The story took on a surprising new dimension when Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded an explanation for the operation in which the investigators were killed, the AP reported:
“It was not an operation that the security cabinet was aware of,” Sheinbaum told journalists. “We were not informed; it was a decision by the Chihuahua government.” She said they must have authorization from the federal government for such collaboration at the state level “as established by the Constitution.”
Adding to suspicions of something being afoot, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico declined to identify who the U.S. investigators were or which agency they worked for, saying only that they were “supporting Chihuahua state authorities’ efforts to combat cartel operations,” according to the AP.
Tuesday: The reasons for the initial secrecy and vagueness became clear when the WaPo reported this morning that the two dead U.S. investigators worked for the CIA “as part of a significantly expanded role in battling narcotics trafficking in the Western Hemisphere”:
The four died as they were returning from meeting with Mexican officials in the aftermath of the operation to dismantle a clandestine drug lab in a remote area. Chihuahua’s attorney general, César Jáuregui Moreno, told Mexico’s El Universal newspaper that the Americans did not directly participate in the Mexican raid on the lab, which he called “perhaps one of the largest ever located.”
Looming over the story is Mexico’s extreme sensitivity to historic U.S. violations of its sovereignty. So you have President Sheinbaum insisting that “there are no joint operations on land or in the air,” only sharing of information within a “well-established” legal framework. And you have the attorney general of Chihuahua rushing to offer assurances that Sheinbaum was not notified about the operation because the CIA personnel were only involved in training and not in the raid on the drug lab, which involved only Mexican agents:
He said the Americans, whose agency affiliation he did not identify, were doing training work “about eight to nine hours away” from the location of the operation against the drug lab. After that operation, they met with personnel from Chihuahua’s state investigation agency, known as AEI, which participated in the raid, Jáuregui told El Universal. The accident occurred hours later, he said.
The Trump administration doesn’t have a good track record of recognizing let alone abiding by these kinds of finely drawn lines, as evidenced by its lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. It has not offered its own account of the incident in Mexico.
Fishing Boat Crew Survived U.S. Strike
The crew of an Ecuadoran fishing boat recounts to The Guardian what they claim was a U.S. drone attack on their vessel on March 26, some 200 miles northwest of the Galápagos Islands. No one was killed in the attack, but several crew members were injured. After being rescued by what they described as a U.S. patrol boat, they were transferred to a Salvadoran patrol boat and eventually taken to El Salvador, where they were questioned at a military base before being repatriated to Ecuador.
Great Read
NYT: The Night the Government Closed the Skies Over El Paso
Headline of the Day
Another not-in-my-lifetime headline: “Japan lifts post-World War II ban on lethal weapons exports”
DC Grand Jury Involved in Brennan Case
While the “grand conspiracy” investigation of Trump investigators is anchored in southern Florida, a D.C. grand jury is involved, CBS News reports:
Former senior intelligence and FBI officials who are cooperating with the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal probe into whether former CIA Director John Brennan lied to Congress were subpoenaed over the weekend to testify before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.
Trump DOJ Targets SPLC
The Southern Poverty Law Center announced this morning that it is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Trump DOJ. It believes the probe is focused on its past use of paid informants to infiltrate right-wing extremist groups.
Extremism Is Also a Grift
WaPo: The far-right influencer Nick Fuentes has pocketed roughly $900,000 from superfans since the start of 2025.
TPM on the Radio
TPM’s Josh Kovensky was on Texas Public Radio’s Texas Matters to talk about his article on the GOP’s election year imperative to revive Islamophobia as a way of firing up its base:
Only the Best People
Scandal-tarred Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is resigning.
‘The Literary Find of a Lifetime’
A bound volume of original love letters from John Keats that was stolen from the Whitney estate sometime before 1989 has been recovered after a man showed up at a Manhattan rare books store last year trying to sell it.
The story is cinematic in its details, including the British-mystery-TV-show-style involvement of rare book dealers in getting their hands on the long-lost volume and alerting law enforcement.
I was also gratified to learn that there is an Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. I clearly missed my calling.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
In the wake of two high profile resignations from male members of Congress who were accused of sexual misconduct and, in the case of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), assault, the House Ethics Committee issued a rare call for information about any known instances of sexual misconduct by members.
I sat down with Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker, former editor of The New York Observer and now a columnist for the Times, to discuss this year’s annual TPM Membership Drive and today’s media landscape. We discussed journalist independence, membership business models and why in the Trump Era only truly independent media can tell the truth without fear or favor.
I hope you give it a look.
Ready to join the TPM community as a member and support our team’s work? Just click right here.
It’s no great insight to say Trump’s impulsive Iran War has been a big political loser for him. Even some of his and the war’s supporters would concede that point. “Katrinas” are also wildly overdetermined and over-diagnosed in political talk. How many “Obama’s Katrinas” were there? How many did Joe Biden allegedly have? But it did occur to me this morning that it is something like that for Trump but for a specifically Trumpian reason. Donald Trump’s great super power is changing the subject. He never sticks to one racket or con until its rung out of all its juice. He’s always on to some new thing because — long before we lived in the broken world of social media — Trump has always lived in the attention economy. Attention is the great commodity. It’s even more powerful for Trump as a defensive weapon. When something isn’t going great he’s always creating some new drama, some new thing to change the subject to. But what we’re seeing now is that Trump simply cannot change the subject. The whole Iran War story is devastatingly bad for him. And he simply has no way to stop it from being the big, dominating story. He can’t make any shiny object take its place. He’s stuck, not just militarily but politically as well.
Two of Michigan’s top officials, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, both Democrats, fired back at the Justice Department after the DOJ expanded its baseless investigation of past elections into Michigan.
Update: Kash Patel has filed this morning a defamation lawsuit against the Atlantic and staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick in federal court in D.C.
On Friday evening, The Atlantic published a devastating account of Kash Patel’s first year as FBI director.
The gist of the piece is this: “the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.”
Most of the piece focused on Patel’s alleged drinking on the job. The anecdotes were numerous … and astounding:
“On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for ‘breaching equipment’—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.”
“Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.”
“FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk.”
Patel responded to the story pre-publication by threatening to sue The Atlantic: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.” Post-publication, he threatened to sue as soon as today and posted this quite memorable, though legally inaccurate, statement on X regarding defamation law: “actual malice standard is now what some would call a legal lay up.”
As has become a pattern among on-the-outs officials during Trump II, Patel tried to save his own neck by redoubling his efforts to go after Trump’s political foes during a round of appearances on the Sunday morning TV shows:
BARTIROMO: Do you have anything to tell us about the 2020 election being rigged against President Trump?PATEL: Absolutely. I'm never going to let this go. They tried to rig the entire system. That's something I'm not going to allow. We are going to be making arrests. I promise you it's coming soon
UNITED STATES – NOVEMBER 19: Joseph diGenova, attorney for President Donald Trump, concludes a news conference at the Republican National Committee on lawsuits regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election on Thursday, November 19, 2020. Trump attorneys Rudolph Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, also attended. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
After a bunch of rapid-fire reporting from multiple news outlets from Friday afternoon into Saturday, the shuffling of the deck chairs in the mother of all Trump vindictive prosecutions in south Florida looks like this:
Career DOJer Maria Medetis Long is out as the lead prosecutor in the case “after she resisted pressure to quickly bring charges” against former CIA director John Brennan, CNN reports. Her boss, Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, had told DOJ “officials that charges could still be months away, sources say, which top Justice officials told him was not acceptable.”
Former D.C. U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, 81, who represented Trump’s 2020 campaign and Trump during the earlier Russia investigation, is now leading the “grand conspiracy” investigation, with the title of counselor to the attorney general. DiGenova starts today.
Also assigned to the case: Christopher-James DeLorenz, a former clerk to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon during the Mar-a-Lago investigation who was transferred to south Florida from Main Justice, where he’d been an aide to then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The south Florida case, some of which is happening in Ft. Pierce, where Cannon is the only judge, is supposedly pursuing a grand-unifying conspiracy theory that the federal government was out to get Trump across multiple investigations that spanned nearly a decade.
Trump DOJ Watch
In a letter last week signed by Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump DOJ demanded that Detroit-area ballots from the 2024 federal election be turned over, escalating its bogus scrutiny of spurious election fraud claims, which judges continue to reject en masse.
HuffPo: “As legal claims against the Trump administration stack up, several federal lawyers defending the U.S. government — and its repeated failures to follow court orders — have regularly fallen back on the same argument: They simply have no idea what’s going on.”
WSJ: In a letter that uses highly politicized language, the Trump DOJ is refusing to cooperate with the French investigation into Elon Musk’s X.
Todd Blanche Auditions for AG Post
Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman: “In Todd Blanche’s three weeks as Acting AG, he has taken screws that seemed fully turned and tightened them another notch. His initial moves suggest that, hard as it is to conceive, he will be even more vicious, more slavish toward Trump, and more willing to jettison the public interest and the rule of law than was his consummately servile predecessor.”
Extraordinary Glimpse Inside SCOTUS
In a well-packaged blockbuster, the NYT obtained a tranche of internal Supreme Court memos from the 2016 case that ushered in the shadow docket as we know it today:
Shadow docket expert Steve Vladeck has a very accessible column this morning on the upshot of the NYT’s remarkable reporting.
No SCOTUS Retirements This Year
Contrary to all the speculation, Justice Samuel Alito doesn’t plan to retire this year, Fox News reports. Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t going anywhere either, according to CBS News’ Jan Crawford.
Sorry, Aileen Cannon, Neomi Rao, James Ho, et al.
Good Read
Madiba K. Dennie: Neomi Rao Understands What It Means to Be a Trump Judge
Latest From the Middle East …
After declaring on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was open to navigation, Iran quickly moved to shut it down again on Saturday until, it said, the United States lifts its blockade of Iranian ports. Two India-flagged ships were fired on after the new Iranian announcement and forced to turn around.
On Sunday, the U.S. Navy disabled then boarded an Iranian-flagged cargo ship that allegedly tried to run the U.S. blockade.
Vice President J.D. Vance is leading the U.S. delegation in expected talks this week with Iran in Pakistan, though Iran is making noises about not participating following the weekend’s events in the Strait of Hormuz.
Thread of the Day
A recap of the unusual maneuvering over FISA Section 702 late last week on the Hill:
In a dramatic scene that unfolded in the wee hours this morning, members of the House defeated a ploy by the administration and Speaker Johnson to ram through a 5-year reauthorization of FISA Section 702. Here’s what happened, and what will/should happen next. 1/20
Three people were killed Sunday in the Caribbean Sea in the 52nd lawless U.S. strike against suspected drug-smuggling boats, bringing the campaign’s death toll to at least 180 people.
Mass Deportation Watch
Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, the pro-Palestinian Tufts University student whose detention by masked federal agents for her political views was caught on camera, completed her Ph.D. in February and returned home to Turkey as part of a settlement agreement with the Trump administration.
Marcy Wheeler: Minnesota Still Cleaning Up after Pam Bondi’s Trophy Stunt
Politico: They’ve been detained by ICE and ordered deported. Judges are releasing them from custody.
The Corruption: Bogus Settlements
A new court filing confirmed that — how else to put it? — the Trump administration is in settlement talks with President Trump and his family about their $10 billion lawsuit over the leak of their tax information to news organizations.
In related news: Lawfare obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit a copy of the $1.25 million settlement agreement between the Trump administration and former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn to settle his bogus malicious prosecution claims.
The Corruption: Trump Library Edition
As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent reports, Democrats have been chasing down what happened to the corporate donations to Trump’s presidential library that were part of corrupt lawsuit settlement agreements with him — especially since the fund created to receive donations was dissolved last year.
ABC, Paramount, Meta, and X have now all confirmed they made the settlement payments, but it’s not clear where the monies ended up going.
“Not one of these companies can say with any clarity where their multi-million-dollar donations to Donald Trump’s library slush fund are, or where they will go,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told TNR.
Appeals Court Lets Ballroom Continue
The D.C. Circuit is playing with fire by allowing construction of President Trump’s vanity ballroom to continue until at least June while it hears his appeal of a lower court order halting the project. The administrative stay sets the stage for Trump to rush construction along so that he can present courts with a fait accompli they’ll be more reluctant to order torn down. This was the exact scenario U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C. warned the administration about in the very first hearing in the case, but the panel of Judges Patricia Millett (Obama), Neomi Rao (Trump), and Brad Garcia (Biden) are opening the barn door at least until oral arguments on June 5.
Headline of the Day
I didn’t expect to see this headline in my lifetime: “Germany Is Reinventing Itself as a Weapons Factory.”
Thanks, President Trump.
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