As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) has had a front row seat to the process for funding President Donald Trump’s ongoing war in Iran.
Continue reading “A Member of a Key House Committee Explains How Iran War Funding Has Become an Almost $1 Trillion ‘Mess’”Another Top Trump Official Won’t Directly Answer the ICE-At-Polling-Places Question
Concerned About Arrest Quotas
On Tuesday’s episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, co-hosts Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff spoke with Trump administration border czar Tom Homan about their fears surrounding President Trump’s decision to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports, a move that is supposedly meant to support Transportation Security Administration staff while the Department of Homeland Security is shut down.
Continue reading “Another Top Trump Official Won’t Directly Answer the ICE-At-Polling-Places Question”Five Questions About Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s DHS-and-Reconciliation Nightmare
Negotiations to try to end the ongoing Department of Homeland Security-specific shutdown — and, critically, fund the TSA — picked up earlier this week. After supposedly convincing President Donald Trump to jump onboard during a White House meeting, Senate Republicans said they were sending a proposal to Senate Democrats that would fund all parts of DHS except ICE’s removal operations.
Republicans said they have convinced Trump to drop his demand that they pass the SAVE America Act before making any deal with Democrats on DHS. The senators present at the meeting, in part, did this, they said, by committing to passing the SAVE America Act — in addition to funding for ICE’s removal operations — later this year using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process. Reconciliation allows budget-related legislation to pass with only 51 votes, meaning Republicans would not need help from Democrats.
Continue reading “Five Questions About Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s DHS-and-Reconciliation Nightmare”Not So Fast
Following up on the question we posed yesterday — will right-wingers actually buy an attempt to “pass” “the SAVE America Act” through budget reconciliation? — we are beginning to have some indications that, no, they will not.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has been on a tweeting spree, campaigning against the idea by, for example, comparing the voter suppression legislation to a fine cut of beef, urging his colleagues not to “settle for cheap imitations” of the sort necessitated by budget reconciliation. It is perhaps an imperfect metaphor.
Continue reading “Not So Fast”Minnesota Sues Feds for Evidence in Operation Metro Surge Shootings
FBI ‘Shrink-Wrapped’ Good’s Car
In what may turn into a constitutional showdown over the 10th Amendment and whether the federal government can proactively shield its officers from state prosecutions by withholding evidence, the state of Minnesota sued the Trump DOJ and DHS to get evidence in the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.
State investigators have been blocked by the Trump administration from investigating the three shootings by federal officers during Operation Metro Surge. In all three cases, federal officials wildly mischaracterized and misled the public about the circumstances of the incidents and made false accusations of wrongdoing against the victims. In each case, video evidence proved the government’s accounts to either be false or deeply strained. In the case of Sosa-Celis, criminal charges against him and a friend were later dropped, and the officers involved in the shooting are under criminal investigation for possible perjury.
In addition to Minnesota, represented by Attorney General Keith Ellison, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. In addition to DOJ and DHS, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security are named defendants.
The four-count lawsuit alleges that Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act (Counts I-III) and the 10th Amendment (Count IV). Among the allegations:
- Good: The car which she was driving when she was shot and killed, is sitting “shrink-wrapped” in an FBI storage facility in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota and “has never been examined or processed.” On March 18, the FBI told state investigators that it has been instructed to turn over evidence in the Good killing only to the DOJ inspector general and would not be providing them with any of the evidence it had collected.
- Pretti: The feds have not provided state investigators with “the identities of the masked federal agents,” Pretti’s cellphone, “which likely captures his interactions with federal agents in the moments before his death,” or the firearm taken off of him before he was shot.
- Sosa-Celis: The feds have denied state investigators the “names and statements from involved federal officials, the gun used in the incident, and the federal vehicle used in the incident.”
The lawsuit, which was filed not in Minnesota but in D.C., alleges that the decisions to cease routine cooperation and joint investigations was made at the highest levels of the DOJ and involved senior DOJ officials, and that DHS largely deferred to DOJ on gathering and sharing evidence.
“That’s where decisions not to share evidence are being made,” Ellison said at a Tuesday press conference in explaining why the lawsuit was filed in D.C.
Mass Deportation Watch
- NPR: It is already the deadliest year for immigrants in U.S. detention in more than two decades.
- NYT: A total of 125 former U.S. service members were arrested for immigration violations over the past year, and 34 of them were put into removal proceedings.
- Politico: In a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins of Sacramento ordered the Trump administration to return a DACA recipient who was deported to Mexico last month.
- NYT: The newspaper reviewed confidential State Department correspondence and a funding memo to get an inside look at how the Trump administration used financial pressure and political incentives to coax Cameroon into accepting third-country deportees — while looking the other way as strongman Paul Biya won a disputed election and cracked down on protestors.
Must Read
The lawless U.S. military campaign on drug cartels has moved from the high seas to the interior of Ecuador, where a coordinated joint strike scored a direct hit on a … dairy farm, the NYT reports from on the ground.
Not only does the new reporting suggest that Ecuadoran forces supported by the U.S. military hit the wrong target, but also that they staged elements of the attack for propaganda purposes:
[I]n early March, U.S. officials released a video of a massive explosion — capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador. …
Village residents said Ecuadorean helicopters returned to the farm three days later, on March 6, and appeared to drop explosives on the farm’s smoldering remains. It was at that point, they said, that Ecuadorean soldiers recorded the footage that U.S. and Ecuadorean officials said captured the bombing of a traffickers’ compound.
Latest From the Middle East …
- WSJ: Saudi Arabia, U.A.E. Balk at Trump’s Peace Efforts
- WaPo: The Pentagon is deploying elements of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East. The reported number of paratroopers involved ranges from 1,000–3,000.
- WSJ: Israel Hits Russian-Iranian Weapons Smuggling Route in the Caspian Sea
Quote of the Day
“We’ve not seen anything like this — there’s been no disruption of this scale in the past. It’s every oil analyst’s study piece or worst nightmare — one that we never thought would happen.”—Gareth Ramsay, chief economist for BP, on the Iran war’s impact on energy markets
Trump Admin Downplays Anthropic Ban
In a hearing in federal court in San Francisco on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s existential attack on Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk,” U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin seemed poised to rule that banning the Pentagon from using its AI models appeared to be an effort to “punish” and “cripple” the company in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
Government lawyers made an effort to minimize Hegseth’s sweeping declaration that no company doing business with the Pentagon can also do business with Anthropic, but the judge was skeptical of the litigation tactic.
NYT Accuses Pentagon of Defying Court
In its lawsuit against the Pentagon’s press restrictions, the NYT in a new filing accused the Trump administration of “contemptuously defying” a Friday court order in the case with a new round of retaliatory restrictions on Monday.
The Retribution: John Brennan Edition
In a closed-door session reported by Punchbowl, the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines last evening to send transcripts of its interviews with former CIA Director John Brennan to the Trump DOJ for use in the mother-of-all investigation the investigators retributive prosecutions in the Southern District of Florida. Combined with the bogus investigation’s subpoena earlier this month of former FBI Director James Comey, the latest moves suggest charging decisions could be made soon, as CNN notes.
The Retribution: Federal Reserve Edition
In a sealed hearing earlier this month, a top deputy to D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro acknowledged that the Trump DOJ did not have evidence of wrongdoing in its retributive criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve, the WaPo reports, after reviewing unsealed transcripts of the hearing.
G.A. Massucco-LaTaif, Pirro’s new criminal division chief, defended the office’s subpoenas of the Fed during the hearing in front of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ultimately quashed the subpoenas, ruling that prosecutors had provided him with “essentially zero evidence” of a crime and declined the opportunity to show him their evidence in private.
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Trump Votes by Mail But He Doesn’t Want You to Be Able To
President Trump keeps casting ballots by mail in order to vote in Florida — even though he has become monomaniacally committed to passing the SAVE America Act, legislation that outlaws most reasons one might cite for acquiring a mail-in ballot.
According to the Associated Press, Trump voted by mail in order to cast a ballot in a Tuesday special election in Florida, even though he was in the state while in-person voting was happening. Here are the details and how the White House is trying to spin it, per the AP:
Palm Beach County voter records show the president voted by mail in a Tuesday special election for state legislative seats and that his ballot has been counted. Early in-person voting in the contest ran through Sunday, when Trump was still at his south Florida estate.
The White House said Tuesday that Trump’s ire is at states using universal mail-in voting, not individual instances of voters needing accommodations to vote by mail. A spokeswoman pushed back specifically at the idea that his voting practice contradicts his push for new federal voting rules.
Countless reports have shown that mail-in voting fraud is incredibly rare, including a 2025 Brookings Institute analysis that found fraud occurs in “only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast, or about four cases out of every 10 million mail votes.”
Trump’s recent visit to Florida suggests that, whatever his reason for voting by mail may have been, it was not included in the SAVE America Act’s list of acceptable reasons why one might do so: illness, disability, military service or travel during Election Day. Trump called mail-in voting “corrupt as hell” just days ago.
Trump has struggled with how exactly to position himself on vote by mail ever since he spent months in the aftermath of the 2020 election railing against the practice, casting it as a sweeping mechanism for voter fraud that supposedly cost him the election. While the total segment of the electorate that voted by mail in 2020 was much higher than usual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump’s own attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, said there was no evidence that there was any widespread fraud that could have impacted the election results.
As the Republican Party tried to move away from the election denial myths, at least in the aftermath of the 2020 election, one of the areas on which it has tried to change its tune was the party’s position on voting by mail — especially after analyses suggesting that the conspiracy theories Trump embraced in the days before the election mostly suppressed turnout among Republicans, who took the president at his word that the election was hopelessly rigged.
Leading up to the 2024 election, Republican primary candidates like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley began campaigning on the idea that Republicans needed to change their tune on certain types of early voting, beyond just encouraging Republican voters to show up in-person on Election Day. Trump’s campaign tried to follow suit, but the candidate himself made it difficult.
I’ve written about the Republican Party’s struggles with mail-in voting and Trump’s bad attitude about it during this specific post-2020 moment a few times. Here’s an excerpt from a March 2024 edition of Where Things Stand:
In February 2023, the Trump campaign first signaled the Republican Party’s revised thinking on the issue of early voting with a fundraising email letting supporters know that Trump was going to start looking into “harvesting ballots in every state we can.”
Shortly after, the RNC launched a Bank Your Vote initiative, designed to encourage Republican voters to take advantage of early-voting opportunities in any state where such actions were legal. To give the new initiative some credibility, the RNC released a video in July of Trump announcing his support for such an endeavor. The hostage-style video featured a docile Trump who both demonized early voting practices as some sort of menacing threat to elections, while also encouraging Republicans to use them.
“Democrats and dangerous groups funded by the far left have simply focused on collecting ballots,” he said. “That’s all they wanted to do, collecting ballots.”
“But you know what? It turned out to be not such a bad idea,” he continued.
— Nicole LaFond
Trump Keeps Rejecting Disaster Aid to Blue States and Approving It for Red Ones
President Trump has approved only 23 percent of disaster aid requests from states that have a Democratic governor plus two senators that are Democrats since the start of his second term, according to new reporting from Politico’s E&E News. Compare that to the fact that he has approved 89 percent of the requests for similiar disaster aid when its made by a state with a Republican governor and two Republican senators.
Per Politico:
There has never been such a sharp partisan disparity in the approval of federal disaster funds since FEMA was created in 1979, according to a review of 2,500 natural disaster declarations by POLITICO’s E&E News.
The denials have blocked Democratic-led states from getting a total of $250 million in disaster aid that would have been approved by every previous president including Trump in his first term, E&E News found.
During his first term, there were no such discrepancies in the aid request approvals for Republican versus Democratic-run states.
— Nicole LaFond
Minnesota Sues Trump Admin
After the Trump administration boxed local and state investigators out of its probe of shootings by federal officers in the state — which include the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — Minnesota officials are suing the Trump administration for access to the information they need to conduct their own investigations. Per the AP:
The lawsuit claims that the federal government reneged on its promise to cooperate with state investigations after the surge of federal law enforcement in Minneapolis, and are seeking a court order demanding that the Trump administration comply.
“We are prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters.
— Nicole LaFond
Schumer Says Dems Need ICE Reforms in Any DHS Funding Deal
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters on Tuesday that Senate Democrats continue to be united in their calls for ICE reform — which they have been calling for since before the ongoing Department of Homeland Security-specific shutdown began in February.
“We need reforms to ICE. We need to rein in the violence. We have never changed our position,” Schumer said when asked about Republicans’ latest offer to restore funding to the majority of the agencies that fall under the DHS including FEMA and TSA. “This does not have any reforms in ICE.”
A Republican offer that would reportedly fund all parts of DHS except ICE’s removal operations — which Republicans say they plan to address later with a new reconciliation bill — gained support overnight within the Republican caucus. That came shortly after a group of Senate Republicans managed to convince President Donald Trump that they can also address the SAVE America Act, which currently does not have the votes to overcome a Dem filibuster, in the same party-line reconciliation bill. Whether that will actually be possible in practice is a toss up.
“They’ve sent us an offer. We’ll be sending them an offer back, and I can assure you it’ll contain significant reform in it,” Schumer added when pressed on if the Democrats are a “no” on the GOP’s offer.
Schumer also pointed out that Senate Democrats have repeatedly tried to get Republicans on board with a bill that would fund all agencies under the DHS umbrella, except ICE and CBP, and they have refused every time. After a weekend of concerning incidents at airports across the nation, Republicans proposed the measure that, while similar to what Democrats have been trying to pass, would only carve out funding for ICE removal operations.
— Emine Yücel
In Case You Missed It
More from Emine Yücel: Senators Are Talking About a New Deal to Partially End the DHS Shutdown
Morning Memo: Pam Bondi Finally Relents in US Attorney Fiasco
Josh Marshall: Iran Has Trump Over a (Oil) Barrel. Sad.
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail
What We Are Reading
Missouri Supreme Court hands GOP a win in redistricting battle
Delta suspends special treatment for Congress as shutdown sows chaos in airports
Iran Has Trump Over a (Oil) Barrel. Sad.
This post follows up on the previous two posts about President Trump’s weak hand in trying to end his Iran War with something short of a humiliating climb-down from his demands for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender.” Trump’s claim yesterday of “very, very strong talks” with Tehran turn out, predictably, to be third-party talks aimed at coaxing Tehran into talking at all. As Reuters reports in this new (paywalled) story, Iran is actually dramatically upping its demands since the start of the war. Those include guarantees of no future attacks, reparations for war damage and formal control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Continue reading “Iran Has Trump Over a (Oil) Barrel. Sad.”Pam Bondi Finally Relents in US Attorney Fiasco
Judges Appoint Interim NJ US Attorney
After a monthslong saga in which the Trump DOJ put at risk dozens of criminal prosecutions with brazenly unlawful efforts to install an interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Attorney General Pam Bondi finally stood down.
After conferring with DOJ leadership, the local federal judges exercised their statutory authority to name Robert Frazer, a longtime career federal prosecutor in New Jersey, as the interim U.S. attorney.
Bondi had immediately fired the previous interim U.S. attorney named by the judges there, and had quickly fired similar judge-appointed prosecutors in the Northern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia. But this time, the two sides worked out an arrangement of some kind, though it wasn’t clear why Bondi finally capitulated.
U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, brought in from outside the district, had previously ruled that Trump’s original nominee for the permanent position, Alina Habba, was unlawfully serving as interim U.S. attorney and that Bondi’s naming of a “triumvirate” of three DOJ lawyers to jointly run the office was similarly unlawful. Brann had warned that Bondi’s shenanigans were putting federal criminal prosecutions across the state in jeopardy because criminal defendants were succeeding in challenging the legality of the actions by the leaderless U.S. Attorney’s Office.
In a notice to Brann of his appointment, Frazer said it “followed consultations between the District Court and the Department of Justice’s senior leadership.” Importantly, Frazer told Brann that the Justice Department “is prepared to seek superseding indictments” in cases where the unlawful leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s Office has called into question the legal viability of the prosecutions. A do-over, basically.
An absolutely blistering decision last week by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi in one of the jeopardized prosecutions — a child porn case — may have been the final straw that forced Bondi to relent. Among other things, Quraishi’s ruling ordered the trio of lawyers purporting to lead the office to appear in court in the coming weeks to defend the legality of arrangement.
“You have lost the confidence and the trust of this court,” Quraishi told a DOJ lawyer. “You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public.”
A week later, Bondi stopped the effort to bypass Senate confirmation and federal judges, and a legitimate U.S. attorney was appointed by the judges — at least in New Jersey. It’s not yet clear if this means Bondi is also relenting in other districts where interim U.S. attorneys have been contested.
SCOTUS Tackles Late-Arriving Ballots
- TPM’s Kate Riga: Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail
- Politico: Supreme Court worries Trump’s attack on late ballots could also threaten early voting
- Chris Geidner: The case “likely will come down to how Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett decide they would like to resolve the case.”
Voting Rights Watch
- Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, a Republican who is running for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots in a purported investigation of election fraud in the 2025 special election for Proposition 50, Democrats’ mid-decade redistricting vehicle.
- Republican Ben Ginsberg and Democrat Bob Bauer have launched the Bipartisan American Election Project to fight back against President Trump’s efforts to take election powers from the states and put them under federal control.
A (Exclusive) Play in Three Acts
The three-day evidentiary hearing that I covered in Baltimore over the Trump administration’s ongoing violations of a court-approved settlement agreement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum culminated yesterday with the Trump DOJ confirming to the judge that 91 additional instances of wrongful deportations had been discovered in recent days but not reported to opposing counsel or to the court.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ordered the administration to investigate the circumstances of the deportations, the timing of the discovery, who was involved, and why the government had not disclosed them immediately.
Here’s the series of three exclusives from the hearing, which was only covered by TPM:
- Thursday: Trump Admin Wrongfully Deported More Than 100 Asylum Seekers
- Friday: Judge Orders DOJ to Get Answers On Wrongful Deportations
- Monday: Trump Admin Confirms 91 Wrongful Deportations of Asylum Seeker
Big Deal
Over the weekend, the Trump-controlled Merit Service Protection Board, historically an independent agency that protects civil service workers from retaliations, embraced President Trump’s unfettered interpretation of his Article II powers to affirm the firing of executive branch immigration judges, Bloomberg reported:
The two-member MSPB panel reversed an administrative judge’s decision that reinstated the fired DOJ employees. The board determined it lacks jurisdiction to intervene in the attorney general’s constitutionally protected terminations.
The decision strips immigration judges of civil service protections, but is also provides the legal basis to approve of Trump’s mass terminations of civil service workers without cause or due process:
The MSPB, a quasi-judicial executive branch agency conducting initial review of federal employees’ wrongful termination claims, had paused other similar cases, waiting until the late Friday decision on the immigration judges to weigh in on whether Trump has such authority to override statutory removal protections.
The MSPB is down to two GOP members and one vacancy. Trump purported to fire the Democratic MSPB chair Cathy Harris last year, and she appealed her case to the Supreme Court last week.
Latest From the Middle East …
- WSJ: The back-channel diplomacy behind Trump’s U-turn on attacking Iran’s power plants
- Reuters: Trump approved joint attack on Iran after call from Netanyahu
- Maps: How the Iran Conflict Is Widening
Pentagon Continues to Harass Reporters
It sure looks like the Pentagon already had a plan in place to retaliate against journalists if its restrictive press policies lost in court. After a judge Friday blocked the press restrictions in a lawsuit brought by the NYT, the Pentagon announced on Monday a new set of restrictions that includes moving all reporters out of correspondents’ corridor to an annex on the grounds and requiring authorized escorts of journalists who wish to go inside the Pentagon.
The Corruption: SEC Edition
Strong reporting from Reuters on last week’s resignation of SEC Enforcement Division Director Margaret Ryan:
- She “clashed with agency leaders over the direction of its enforcement program, including the handling of cases with ties to President Donald Trump and his family”
- She “wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges for fraud and other misconduct including in cases that touched the president’s circle, but faced resistance from SEC chair Paul Atkins and other top Republican political appointees.”
- “One case that sparked tension involved cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a major backer of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial venture, and another involved Tesla boss Elon Musk …”
Ryan — a former Marine, military judge, and clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — had little experience in securities law, Reuters reports.
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Are Republicans Trying to Hoodwink Trump on the SAVE Act?
Emine Yücel has a report up this morning on a new “deal” being kicked around the Senate that would attempt to fix the airport situation. This proposal would fund most of DHS — including the TSA — without funding ICE enforcement operations.
Republicans would then seek to fund those operations later this year, in a reconciliation bill, which, under Senate rules, can pass with only 51 votes. That means Republicans won’t need Democrats to get it through.
The deal is similar to how one might have predicted this would end for weeks. But it includes one weird, emerging point: Republicans might also try to pass the SAVE America Act through reconciliation.
Continue reading “Are Republicans Trying to Hoodwink Trump on the SAVE Act?”Senators Are Talking About a New Deal to Partially End the DHS Shutdown
The momentum to end the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown picked up Monday evening.
Continue reading “Senators Are Talking About a New Deal to Partially End the DHS Shutdown”