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خلاصہ: Inside the Secret Network Offering Sanctuary to Immigrants Amid Trump’s ICE OnslaughtThey call them the “forgotten migrants.” Of the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, over two thirds of them come from Mexico and South America, according to data compiled by the Pew Research Center last year. However, the population from other regions is growing sharply. Pew found that, as of 2022, there were 375,000 unauthorized immigrants from Africa living in the U.S., which was a striking 36% increase over three years. Estimates show New York is home to nearly 8% of the nation’s undocumented African immigrants. The community was the primary focus of ICE’s Canal Street raid in late October. As TPM spent nearly two months examining the fallout from that sweep and Trump’s deportation machine in the city, we found that African migrants have faced threats and unique challenges. They’re also receiving help from a growing network of activists and advocates. At a weekly “Welcome Center” located inside the sanctuary of one New York City church, the majority of visitors are African men who hold the low-paying and dangerous food delivery jobs that are one of the only options for people without work permits in New York. Outside, the only sign of the lifeline being offered at the church is a line of delivery bikes parked on the street. Inside, there is a vibrant, bustling scene. One corner of the room is lined with prayer mats for Muslim worship. Pews that line the side of the chapel have been turned into an impromptu barber shop where three men provide a steady stream of free shaves and fades. The center of the room is open and filled with tables offering food, assistance with court paperwork, job and house hunting, English lessons, and GED tutoring. On a second floor balcony, there is a supply of donated clothing. One of the two lead volunteers who run the center told TPM they are a parishioner at the church, and that providing services for migrants has become their “full-time second job.” They said the vast majority of people who visit the welcome center are West African men ranging from teenagers to those in their early forties. According to the volunteer, it can be difficult for these men “to navigate and just even find translations” since most services in New York are designed for migrant families and Spanish speakers. “The people from West Africa are sometimes referred to as the forgotten migrants or the hidden migrants,” the volunteer said. “They don’t speak Spanish. They come from countries where their primary language is either Wolof or Fulani. Most of them speak French. Some of them speak Arabic as well. And the city’s not set up for them.” The “Welcome Center” began in January 2023. In the previous months, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican state leaders began sending busloads of undocumented migrants to New York and other cities led by Democrats to protest President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. Protections from deportation, including avenues to asylum, that were offered by the Biden administration contributed to a spike in the undocumented population, which climbed to record levels in 2022 and 2023. After Abbott began busing migrants to the city, parishioners at the church noticed large gatherings of West African men in one of the neighborhood’s parks. The church decided to offer some services for these people who had “nowhere to go,” the volunteer said. “They had no footwear for the winter. They were in sandals. They didn’t have coats. They didn’t have a place to stay. They didn’t have anything,” the volunteer explained. On that first day, the volunteers distributed flyers in the park. They sat ready with food. Initially, no one showed up. However, within 15 minutes of another nearby facility closing up shop for the day, crowds began pouring through the door. “We looked up and there were about a hundred, 120 guys outside who were starting to come in,” the volunteer said. “We were just completely overwhelmed and blown away.” Working with some of the men who spoke English, the church began to assess their needs and expand the welcome center’s offerings to include educational programs, legal services, and haircuts. “We had no plan. We were really meeting the need. So we would figure out by being in community with these guys,” the volunteer said. “Being there on the margins with them is where we live.” Through their work with the migrants, the welcome center volunteers also learned about the “enormous hardship” that caused them to leave their homes and seek a new life in the U.S. “Nobody wants to leave their country,” the volunteer said. Much of the momentum behind African migration is driven by the political instability, crushing poverty, and large number of armed conflicts that are roiling the continent. The volunteer specifically cited the situation in Guinea where people have been living under a repressive military junta since a 2021 coup d’etat. “The young kids are fleeing terrible, terrible abuse in their home. And almost all of them have been abandoned in some way by their parents. Either through death … but more likely their parents just leave,” the volunteer said. “With the older guys, we see a lot of political persecution. The guys from Guinea, a lot of that is political as well. So, they got on the wrong side of the rebels. They got on the wrong side of the law. They were arrested. They’ve seen their friend shot.” Now that they have arrived in the United States, these migrants have new fears. The ICE raid on Canal Street largely targeted unlicensed African vendors who operate there. That week, attendance at the welcome center was down dramatically. Normally, about 100 people visit each week. Along with the “heartbreaking stories of abandonment and abuse” that brought them to America, the volunteer noted many visitors to the welcome center are part of the LGBTQ community, which is often subject to intense prejudice in...

خلاصہ: Life Inside the Undocumented UndergroundDuring President Donald Trump’s second term, dramatic raids staged by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have become a part of life. We want to show you what that looks like up close and on the ground in one American city. It’s a story of fear, resilience, and resistance. TPM has spent the past two months reporting on the effect of Trump’s mass deportation agenda in New York, one of the cities facing the prospect of a large-scale ICE invasion. We went inside the courts where Trump’s deportation machine is firing judges and snatching migrants from the halls. We walked those same corridors with masked agents and a growing network of volunteers, activists, and advocates who are determined to fight this new system. We also spent time with the immigrants who described the dangers that led them to leave their homes, the new fears they face in this country, and their drive to keep going despite these long odds. The wave of ICE raids are part of the “bloody” vision for mass deportation that Trump promised as he campaigned to return to the White House. Since taking office, he has joined with the Republican-controlled Congress to build up a deportation and detention infrastructure through a $170 billion spending surge to the ICE budget. That cash is aimed at removing one million migrants from the country each year. While the actual annual number of deportations is well below that goal, it is higher than it has been in decades . The number of people in ICE detention has also increased dramatically, soaring to an unprecedented 65,000. While the Trump administration has maintained that its immigration efforts are focused on removing the “worst of the worst” from the country, the data shows that is simply not true. An analysis conducted by the Marshall Project that was based on documentation obtained from ICE through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that , in the first five months of this year, two thirds of the over 120,000 people deported from the U.S. had no criminal convictions at all. The Marshall Project further found that most of those deported with criminal records had committed minor offenses and only 12% of them “were convicted of a crime that was either violent or potentially violent.” A CBS investigation found that nearly half of the migrants in ICE detention as of Nov. 2025 lacked any criminal charges or convictions. In other words, rather than major criminals, the majority of people targeted by Trump’s deportation complex are simply members of the community. For much of the last year, Chicago and Los Angeles played host to some of the most prominent ICE raids and counterprotests. More recently, rumblings from Washington and the election of progressive mayor Zohran Mamdani have left many activists and immigrants in New York expecting they will be next and preparing for the worst. The first sign those predictions might be coming true came in late October when the city had its most high-profile immigration enforcement sweep so far as personnel from five different federal agencies descended on Canal Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood to round up street vendors. Over the next day, during widespread protests, migrants and activists were detained . In the weeks since the Canal Street raid, TPM has surveyed the fallout. We found deep fear, but also something less expected. Across the city, there is something of a modern underground railroad with programs offering services to migrants including food, clothing, and free clinics that provide advice and assistance with legal proceedings. Volunteers are also accompanying migrants as they face the gauntlet of masked ICE agents waiting in the halls of the courts downtown. Due to the fear of raids and detentions, many of the programs offering services to migrants have stepped up their security measures. They guard their doors and do not advertise their locations. As we gained access to these spaces and spoke with the migrants and activists inside, we often agreed not to use peoples’ real names or to identify precise locations. In the coming days, we will share a series based on this reporting, which is based on conversations with dozens of sources. It’s a deep look at some of the extralegal excesses of the current administration and the lengths people are going to fight back.Source InformationPublisher: Talking Points MemoOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: SHOWTIME: Boasberg Summons Key DOJ Witnesses in Contempt InquiryDOJ Whistleblower to Take Center Stage U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has ordered testimony next week from Justice Department whistleblower Erez Reuveni and deputy assistant attorney general Drew Ensign in the criminal contempt of court inquiry in the original Alien Enemies Act case. Not satisfied with what he called the “ cursory declarations ” from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top DOJ officials involved in the decision to continue with the AEA deportations in March despite his court order, Boasberg is taking his inquiry to the next level with the first live testimony. Testimony from Reuveni is likely to be especially probative as he as already gone public with his account of his efforts to urge DOJ and DHS to abide by Boasberg’s order to stop the AEA deportations of Venezuelan nationals and turn around the planes en route to El Salvador. Reuveni also produced extensive internal DOJ communications that buttressed his account of that fateful weekend in mid-March that quickly became a flashpoint between the executive and judicial branches. It was Reuveni who famously quoted then-DOJ official Emil Bove as telling attorneys under him that they might have to tell the courts “ fuck you ” if they tried to block the AEA deportations. Bove — now a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeal — unexpectedly filed his own declaration yesterday in the contempt of court inquiry. Like the others filed Friday, Bove’s declaration was cursory and raised the prospect of using attorney-client privilege as a shield to block further inquiry from Boasberg. For his part, Ensign has been a willing pawn in an ongoing DOJ effort to stonewall, obfuscate, and mislead judges in some of the key Trump II deportation cases. Ensign was the lead DOJ attorney in front of Boasberg as the AEA deportations unfolded and much of Boasberg’s initial ire was directed at him. The Trump DOJ may yet rush to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to try to avoid allowing Reuveni and Ensign to testify, citing various privileges, including attorney-client privilege, but the appeals court in a muddled opinion last month already seemed to clear the way for Boasberg to proceed with his inquiry, after it delayed him for seven months. Boasberg is zeroing in on whether Noem’s decision to continue with the AEA deportations despite his order was willful, a necessary element of a finding probable cause for criminal contempt. GOP Congress Has Had Its Fill of Hegseth In perhaps the most robust oversight this GOP-controlled Congress has yet conducted, the must-pass annual defense policy bill contains a new provision compelling the Pentagon to turn over (i) the specific orders for the U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats; and (ii) unedited video of the attacks. The provision includes some teeth, too, the NYT reports : “It would withhold 25 percent of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget if he failed to give the congressional national security committees a copy of the execute orders behind the strikes, or to outline how he planned to facilitate future briefings about the operation with lawmakers in accordance with federal law.” SCOTUS Might Surprise on Birthright Citizenship Steve Vladeck , on the way in which the Roberts Court accepted the birthright citizenship case last week: “That particular tea leaf is significant because it reinforces something I’ve believed since the Court first ruled on the emergency applications relating to the birthright citizenship cases back in June—that a majority of the justices are likely to rule against the administration on the merits and invalidate Trump’s executive order.” No More Habba to Kick Around in New Jersey Alina Habba has dropped her claim to be the U.S. attorney for New Jersey after a federal appeals court upheld a lower court decision that she was invalidly appointed. Habba will move to a new position as an advisor to Attorney General Pam Bondi on U.S. attorneys. Bondi indicated that she would continue to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. An EDVA Clash Seems Inevitable With the Trump DOJ continuing to pretend that Lindsey Halligan is the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia despite a court ruling that she was invalidly appointed, I don’t know how the district judges can continue not to appoint an interim U.S. attorney, especially with ongoing public attacks on them like this from Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche: A statement from @AGPamBondi and @DAGToddBlanche : Certain district court and magistrate judges in the Eastern District of Virginia are engaging in an unconscionable campaign of bias and hostility against U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan and her line AUSAs. Lindsey and our… — U.S. Department of Justice (@TheJusticeDept) December 8, 2025 Reax to SCOTUS The Roberts Court gleefully took a sledgehammer not just to independent agencies yesterday in oral arguments, but to the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence. For help sorting through the implications of the historic case: Kate Shaw, William Baude and Stephen I. Vladeck chew over the oral arguments under the clever headline: “Looks Like the Supreme Court Will Continue to Overturn the 20th Century.” Public policy professor Don Moynihan looks at the bigger political picture: he risks of a partisan public personnel system is not just poor public services, but that it worsens our democracy. Many of the points of friction between Trump and federal employees are about democratic values: the rule of law, how Congressional statute is to be interpreted, avoiding abuses of the power, and transparency. Again and again, the logic for Trump’s personnel actions is the logic of a personalist regime: loyalty to the leader above all else, removing individuals or downgrading agencies that are disfavored. Sandwich Thrower Jurors Recount Deliberations While they expected it to be an open-and-shut case, three jurors in the case of the D.C. sandwich thrower Sean Dunn told CBS News that they had to overcome an initial 10-2 split that led to some seven hours of deliberations...

خلاصہ: It’s Time to Govern, and Republicans in Congress Can’t Remember HowRepublicans Try to Remember a World in Which Not All Policy Came From Trump We’re seeing a phenomenon play out right now that has cropped up repeatedly during both Trump terms. At the heart of the phenomenon is this: in almost all areas of governance, the Republican Party stands for Trump. Nothing more, nothing less. Members of Congress have accepted this rebranding, or left government entirely. Occasionally, Republicans in Congress muster the ability to buck the president’s demands, but that is a rarity. At this point, they have little they want to accomplish that is not a Trump priority. This creates an issue whenever an urgent need for a new policy proposal arrises, and we’re seeing that on multiple fronts right now. First, Republicans in Congress have spent months flailing, trying to figure out a policy to coalesce behind to deal with increasing Obamacare premiums. This problem was not a surprise. It had loomed ever since the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in 2022, extended enhanced premium tax credits through the end of 2025. Democrats shut down the government for a month and a half, demanding a solution to the looming health care price hikes. It’s not the kind of thing GOP health care policy wonks could miss — yet there are few such people left with influence. Reporting indicates that congressional Republicans have this week finally decided to thrust forth a deeply uninspired policy — or perhaps a set of them . It’s still unclear they’ll have the votes to pass anything. Then there’s the whole fad of “affordability,” a term for cost-of-living issues that has been championed on the left and sent Republicans scrambling since Democrats’ show of strength on Election Day. Trump initially embraced the need to address affordability, then determined it to be a critique of his own government and rejected it. And, so, Republicans have little to offer here , too. Trump is president, and he says “affordability” is a Democratic “hoax.” What can be done? Perhaps more assertions that Trump has already fixed the problem: “We haven’t probably messaged as effectively as we should,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune offered Politico in an interview, describing the need to redouble efforts to sell Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed in July. The phenomenon of a GOP that stands for little beyond Trump is nearly a decade old at this point, perhaps older. An early instance of it rearing its head was the floundering GOP effort to “replace” Obamacare in 2017, which ultimately ended with John McCain’s dramatic thumbs down. But it has worsened as the power centers that fuel the Trump-era GOP have become clearer. First, there’s Trump himself. What he wants, he usually gets. Then there’s the billionaires — increasingly, Silicon Valley billionaires — who get to splatter their pet policies and authoritarian proclivities throughout administration documents and orders, even when it cuts against Trump’s populist image (for example: Trump promises an executive order to ban state laws on AI will arrive this week ). Then there is the furious and conspiratorial base, who must be tended by servicing what Josh Marshall has called the nonsense debt . This servicing, in Trump II, has taken a new, violent turn, with widespread attacks on immigrants and a clampdown on dissent. Policy documents like Project 2025 channel and interweave each of the threads that make up Trump-era Republican ideology. Yet it’s only by accident that these objectives sometimes intersect with the needs of governing a country, leaving Republicans in Congress bereft of policies to draw on when confronted with the challenges of any particular moment. The movement’s intellectuals, such as they are, have been preoccupied with grafting an intellectual and policy framework onto Trump’s whims. In 2020, the party didn’t even publish a platform. In 2024, it did: Titled “ Make America Great Again! ” it promised to bring down prices through slashing government spending, curbing immigration, and opening up more oil and gas drilling — all ideas the administration has put into effect, and all ideas that have done little for the cost of living. In 2016, writer William Saletan suggested that, for the reasons I’ve just described, the GOP was a “failed state.” It still is — more so now than then. And while there’s some schadenfreude in watching Republican members of Congress attempt, and struggle, to exercise their atrophied policy muscles, there’s little solace in knowing that a failed-state party controls … the actual state. — John Light Provision to Expand IVF Access To Military Families Is Out The text of the National Defense Authorization Act — which lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have had some last-minute negotiations on over the past week — was released late Sunday. Despite being included in the earlier House and Senate versions of the annual defense policy bill, a proposed provision that would expand in vitro fertilization coverage for all active service members and their families was left out of the final text. That comes as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was reportedly working behind the scenes to get rid of the provision. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) accused the Speaker of being the driving force behind the change. “There’s nobody opposing this other than Speaker Johnson and his religious views,” Duckworth told CNN. “The president of the United States promised on the campaign trail to make IVF available to all Americans,” she added. “And I can’t think of a better place to make it available than the men and women who wear the uniform of this great nation.” Tricare insurance, the health care program for service members, currently only covers fertility services for members whose infertility was caused by an illness or injury while on active duty. — Emine Yücel Indiana Senate Gets to Work on Trump’s Redistricting Demands The Indiana Senate convened on Monday for a hearing on a redistricting bill that passed the Republican-controlled House late last week....

خلاصہ: Roberts on Cleanup Duty as Court Prepares to Kill Independent Government AgenciesChief Justice John Roberts scrambled around with a verbal broom and dustpan Monday, reflexively jumping into the arguments to downplay the obvious dangers his majority will soon unleash in its seemingly imminent decision to destroy independent agencies. The case stems from President Trump’s early-term bloodletting at the Federal Trade Commission (and several other protected agencies), and is expected to end with a major victory for the all-powerful presidency that the right-wing legal world has been working towards for decades. When Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that the Trump administration’s logic for making the leaders of until-now independent agencies subject to at-will firing extends to other entities including the tax court, military courts and the entire civil service, Roberts dutifully offered a rebuttal. He suggested that a case that reaffirmed Humphrey’s Executor , the one the majority will likely overturn (and which he referred to as a “dried husk” on Monday), could still stand as good precedent and somehow be contorted to protect those select institutions. He later proposed a different fix, emphasizing the judicial (rather than executive) functions of some agencies and bodies the conservatives are okay with, and letting them continue to exist with a degree of independence that way. While the liberals sounded the alarm, he countered that overturning Humphrey’s would not be so cataclysmic, implying that the Court would find some logically inconsistent way to protect the independence of the agencies it cares about (chief among them, the Federal Reserve). And in the second half of the arguments, he led the attack in the other direction. The Court’s right wing, as a bloc, countered the realistic fears about a compromised Fed or Article I courts with dramatic hypotheticals about removal protections so robust that no one can ever be fired. “Are there some Cabinet departments that you say Congress could just take over?” Roberts asked the lawyer for the fired FTC commissioner. “Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Education, they think, well, experts can do a better job of it so we’re going to say there is now an agency, the agency for education…and its authorities will be everything the current Department of Education has except it will be run by a commission and they can only be removed for cause.” Justice Elena Kagan, seemingly tiring of the performance, quipped that a more “realistic” fear at this point is an Education Department that exists in name, but is staffed by zero employees. The chorus of fearmongering about out-of-control agencies is old-school Republican politics. The right has opposed muscular executive branch agencies and their regulations for decades, and Roberts grew out of that tradition. So did his allies on the Court, including Justice Neil Gorsuch, who at one point suggested ameliorating the liberals’ concern about runaway presidential power by declaring that Congress can’t outsource any of its legislative power at all, rendering agencies unable to create rules and all but powerless (this is the nondelegation theory recently embraced by the right). “Is the water warm?” Gorsuch asked giddily. It’s not surprising to watch the right-wing justices feign concern about a tyrannical Education Department — but it feels of a time gone by, as agencies are as weak as they’ve ever been. Trump unilaterally advanced the project of hobbling the greatest source of protections for workers, the environment, students and veterans beyond the Federalist Society’s greatest dreams. Assuming that the Supreme Court would rubber stamp his federal government massacre, he and Elon Musk trampled removal protections, killing whole agencies and running experienced civil servants out of the government in droves. He installed toadies in the roles of experts, weaponizing some agencies against his enemies and hollowing out those that do work he considers unimportant (global aid, corruption prevention). The conservatives’ bleating about the big bad bureaucracy gets harder to stomach when juxtaposed with the monarchical presidency they’ve created, making him immune from prosecution for his crimes, shielding him from lower courts more inclined to block his maximal exercises of power, and now, likely putting the entire executive branch under his thrall. “Neither the king nor parliament nor prime ministers, England at the time of the founding, ever had an unqualified removal power,” Sotomayor said Monday, adding: “You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government.”Source InformationPublisher: Talking Points MemoOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: Rough Seas Abroad Under Trump III’ve written a number of times over the years about the fact that Americans mostly believe that the post-World War II world order is the normal state of things. Of course, it is not. The last 80 years are unparalleled in global history for their general prosperity, lack of great power wars, a fairly predictable system of global rules. One has to say the obligatory caveats about all the ways the United States honored its values and rules in the breach, the slow run of proxy conflicts it participated in or fomented around the world. But these caveats only serve to illustrate the larger point in a paradoxical way. Things can always get worse and getting worse — conflict, instability, mass death — are the normal order of things in world history. Even a thin appraisal of the American ascendency shows its close to uniqueness in this regard. It’s a great stroke of luck to find yourself in an island of history in which this basic order of things is put on hold, held in relative abeyance, even more to be part of the great power which undergirds these social goods and inflects the whole system — subtly but decisively — in its own favor. But for the last decade we’ve been actively dismantling that system. The middling attempt to reassert or rebuild it in the Biden years of course proved ephemeral and nostalgic, an unintentional demonstration of the American republic’s inability to defend the system it had built almost a century earlier. I note this because just over this last week we are seeing this work of dismantlement both accelerating and entrenching itself. The new national security strategy document the administration released last week essentially says the United States will retreat to the Western Hemisphere and focus on a kind of neo-Yankee imperialism in which it seeks to dominate the countries of its own hemisphere while leaving western Eurasia to Russia and Asia to China. Yet the most revealing parts of the document comes in the animus expressed toward Europe. The content is dressed up as part of a larger geostrategy. But beneath this thin sheen is an open statement of great replacement ideology: Europe is an unreliable ally because it risks “civilizational erasure” and a near future when it will no longer be white. There’s not much fig leaf. At the beginning of the Trump era, 2015-16, the truth was that I was always more personally worried about the impact of Trumpism abroad than at home. (I didn’t say this a lot because it sounds like it contains an indifferent privilege to things that happen at home. To me, thinking otherwise shows an easy obliviousness to how rapidly the world abroad can upend our security and brass tacks physical safety at home.) Even with the turbocharged Trumpism of the second term, I still largely feel that way. This is an incomplete and partly notional analysis. But things we screw up at home we can at least in theory undo. When the public puts its mind to something, things can change quickly. It’s not the same with the global state system. We can’t simply put trends we’re unleashing into the world today back into their bottles or their boxes. Once the chaos is unleashed, you can’t just undo it because you decide unleashing it wasn’t a hot idea. To add to the litany of doom, even the most unpopular president retains his vast powers abroad. At best we’re only one year into this, with three to go.Source InformationPublisher: Talking Points MemoOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: Trump DOJ Stonewalls Criminal Contempt InquiryWill Emil Bove Have to Testify? A lot of weekend news to cover this morning, but I want to continue to keep front and center the contempt of court proceedings in the original Alien Enemies Act case. The Trump DOJ faced a Friday deadline set by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. to submit sworn declarations by the officials involved in the decision to continue with the AEA deportation flights in mid-March even after Boasberg ordered the deportations stopped and the planes turned around. The Trump DOJ acknowledged that it was taking a narrow view of what Boasberg meant by “involved in the decision” and submitted declarations from only three senior officials: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche DHS Acting General Counsel Joseph Mazzara Of note, Blanche explicitly mentioned former DOJ official and now appeals court Judge Emil Bove has having been involved in providing what he asserts is “privileged legal advice” to DHS in the matter. It remains to be seen whether Boasberg will demand either a declaration or testimony from a sitting judge whose potential contempt of court occurred prior to taking the bench. In its filing accompanying the declarations, DOJ pulled back from having earlier identified Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign as involved in the decision and didn’t submit a declaration from him, saying he only relayed Boasberg’s oral and written orders. In filing the declarations, the Justice Department remained defiant. Among other arguments, it told Boasberg that: given the declarations, there is no basis for witness testimony in the contempt inquiry; attorney-client privilege would prevent the lawyers (Blanche, Bove, and Mazzara) from testifying; he could be in for a constitutional fight over compelling the testimony of Noem; no criminal contempt occurred because his order was not “clear and reasonably specific.” Seizing on the muddled mess that the laggardly D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals made of Boasberg’s contempt inquiry, the Justice Department leaned heavily on the concurring opinion of Appeals Court Judge Gregory Katsas: “f a leading jurist like Judge Katsas concluded that Defendants’ interpretation of the TRO is legally correct , it is impossible to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Defendants’ interpretation is so unreasonable as to make their conduct criminally contumacious .” Boasberg has moved the criminal contempt inquiry along as fast as the D.C. Circuit has allowed him to, so I would expect we’ll know what he wants to do next in the case as soon as today. Another Wrongful Deportation Case The Trump administration deported a Guatemalan man back to his home country despite an immigration judge order barring his removal to Guatemala because of fears he would face torture there. U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama of El Paso accused the Trump administration of “blatant lawlessness” in the case and ordered it to facilitate the return of Faustino Pablo Pablo to the United States by Dec. 12. SCOTUS Takes Up Birthright Citizenship The invented right-wing legal theory that birthright citizenship is not guaranteed by the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is going to get decided by the Supreme Court in its current term. Pam Bondi Needs to Talk to Pam Bondi Last year, before she became attorney general, Pam Bondi wrote a Supreme Court brief for the America First Policy Institute in which she argued: “Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders.” Venezuela Boat Watch Among the new developments: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continues to deny that he ordered Special Operations forces to kill everyone aboard an alleged drug-smuggling boat during a Sept. 2 attack, but in a new twist NBC News reports that Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley told lawmakers in a classified briefing last week that Hegseth ordered everyone killed “because they were on an internal list of narco-terrorists who U.S. intelligence and military officials determined could be lethally targeted.” The second strike of the boat killed the two survivors of the first strike, Bradley told lawmakers, but he ordered a third and fourth strike to sink the boat, according to the NBC News report . Despite administration claims, the boat was not bound for the United States but to rendezvous with a larger vessel bound for Suriname, CNN reports . Clash Over Halligan Looms The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has ratified keeping Lindsey Halligan in place as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia despite a judge’s ruling that she was invalidly appointed to the position, the NYT reports : The office has told department officials that because Judge Currie’s order did not require a specific measure to be taken, like removing Ms. Halligan, she could stay even though the judge declared her appointment invalid, the people said. In other words, the administration’s position was that since the court order did not explicitly remove Ms. Halligan from the job, she could keep it. Under Judge Currie’s ruling, only the judges in that district may now appoint an interim U.S. attorney — but they have not publicly moved to do so. New Ruling Thwarts Re-Indictment of Comey Over the weekend, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of D.C. issued a temporary restraining order barring prosecutors from accessing material seized years ago that belong to Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman, a close friend of and attorney for James Comey. Because the materials at issue largely formed the basis for the now-dismissed indictment of Comey, the ruling may delay any effort by the Trump DOJ to re-indict him. Trump DOJ Leads Attack on Voting Rights Mother Jones : “Over the last six months, has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from dozens of states in an effort to create the federal government’s first-ever national database of registered voters, accompanied by their private information: party affiliation, voting history, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, even physical characteristics.” The Death of Independent Agencies Ahead of Supreme Court oral arguments today over whether President Trump can unilaterally fire a FTC commissioner, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals...

خلاصہ: Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records RevealThis story first appeared at ProPublica , a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories as soon as they’re published. For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence. President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “ CROOKED ” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action. But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show. In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence. In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud. At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.” Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud. “Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.” Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms, like lower interest rates, than mortgages for a second home or an investment rental property. Legal experts said that having more than one primary-residence mortgage can sometimes be legitimate, like when someone has to move for a new job, and other times can be caused by clerical error. Determining ill intent on the part of the borrower is key to proving fraud, and the experts said lenders have significant discretion in what loans they offer clients. (In this case, Trump used the same lender to buy the two Florida homes.) But in recent months, the Trump administration has asserted that merely having two primary-residence mortgages is evidence of criminality. Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director who has led the charge, said earlier this year: “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.” Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud. In response to questions, a White House spokesperson told ProPublica: “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.” The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” and said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.” The White House did not respond to questions about any other documents related to the transactions, such as loan applications, that could shed light on what Trump told the lender or if the lender made any exceptions for him. At the time Trump bought the two Florida properties, he was dealing with the wreckage of high-profile failures at his casinos and hotels in the early 1990s. (He famously recounted seeing a panhandler on Fifth Avenue around this time and telling his companion: “You know, right now that man is worth $900 million more than I am.”) In December 1993, he married the model Marla Maples in an opulent ceremony at The Plaza Hotel. And in Florida, he was pushing local authorities to let him turn Mar-a-Lago, then a residence, into a private club. Trump bought the two homes, which both sit on Woodbridge Road directly north of Mar-a-Lago, and got mortgages in quick succession in December 1993 and January 1994. The lender on both mortgages, one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000, was Merrill Lynch. Each of the mortgage documents signed by Trump contain the standard occupancy requirement — that he must make the property his principal residence within 60 days and live there for at least a year, unless the lender agreed otherwise or there were extenuating circumstances. But ProPublica could not find evidence Trump ever lived in either of the properties. Legal documents and federal election records from the period give his address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. (Trump would officially change his permanent residence to Florida only decades later, in 2019.) A Vanity Fair profile published in March 1994 describes Trump spending time in Manhattan and at Mar-a-Lago itself. Trump’s real estate agent, who told the local press that the plan from the beginning was to rent out the two satellite homes, was quoted as saying, “Mr. Trump, in effect, is in a position to approve who his...

خلاصہ: Court Reform, Breaking the Corrupt Rule of the Six GOPs is EverythingI’ve become something of a broken record on this . But repetition sometimes serves a critical purpose. Supreme Court reform is now the sine qua non of any reformist program in the United States, any program to re-implant/re-secure civic democracy in the United States. Filibuster reform, abolition of the filibuster, is comparably important. In fact, the two are interwoven with each other in such a way as to be almost indistinguishably joined together. But a lot of people know the filibuster has to go. Reforming the Supreme Court, which involves one of several ways of breaking the power of the six corrupt Republican appointees, is a much harder lift. It’s not a harder lift in voting terms. It can be done by passing an ordinary law (once you’ve done away with the filibuster) and having a president to sign it. But for many in the political class, for many elected officials, it remains unthinkable. On the plus side, Democratic voters and opinion leaders have some time to lay the groundwork. The soonest anything can happen is January 2029. (You need Congress and the White House.) But there’s a huge amount of work to do. Because my sense is that Democratic officeholders, party elites, aren’t even close to being there. And there’s really no future without it.Source InformationPublisher: Talking Points MemoOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: Supreme Court Just Okayed One Neat Trick to Illegally Gerrymander Your State The Supreme Court was simply hamstrung, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, unable to knock down Texas’ hyper-partisan, likely racial gerrymander because the election it would govern is so close. Said election, though, is a whopping 11 months away. Yet that near year of time — plus a March primary, which Texas could delay — counts as the “eve of an election,” Alito wrote in his concurrence, so close to voting that changing the maps risks confusing voters. He’s referring to the Purcell principle, which stems from a 2006 case that concerned a change in Arizona photo ID laws “weeks away” from the election. This isn’t the first time the Supreme Court’s right wing has invoked Purcell to uphold Republican maps, even when they’re being litigated comically far out from the election. In 2022, the Court blocked a district court order requiring that Alabama draw new maps, even though the state had nine months to draw new ones before the general elections.  Making the invocation of Purcell even flimsier in Thursday’s case — Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens — Texas only produced its new maps in August, under pressure from the Trump administration to eke out a few more Republican seats. The plaintiffs challenging the maps and the district court, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, worked as quickly as they possibly could — meaning that the Court just wrote a roadmap for illegal gerrymanders. Just wait to pass them until the “eve” of the election, and no one can stop you. “And even supposing it is now the ninth or tenth hour, whose choice was that?” she wrote. “It was of course the Texas legislature that decided to change its map six months before a March primary.” The status quo, she added, isn’t the new maximal gerrymander Texas passed in late summer. It’s the 2021 maps that were used for the past two election cycles, were expected to govern the 2026 elections until August and will even be used for a special election in January. Alito’s — and presumably the unsigned majority’s — interpretation of Purcell “gives every State the opportunity to hold an unlawful election,” Kagan wrote. Such signals from the high court are all the more useful, as red states (and blue states in response) race to contort their legislative districts, the better to stack the deck for a House majority before any voter has cast a ballot.Source InformationPublisher: Talking Points MemoOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: Are Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson Democratic Socialists or FDR Democrats? They Are Both This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.  Between now and next year’s midterm elections, the “S” word, and even the “C” word, are going to get a workout. President Trump and his allies have called New York’s socialist mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a Communist, a Marxist, a terrorist, and even a jihadist. They’re warning that the U.S. is experiencing a wave of “socialism,” a term that they hope still carries its hoary Cold War connotations. They hope to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party, a tactic intended to discredit its candidates in swing races. During the Red Scare hysteria of the 1950s, American socialism fell on hard times. Few Americans distinguished between the European social-welfare systems and the communism of the Soviet Union or China. Across the nation, universities, labor unions, public schools, movie studios and other major institutions purged themselves of their left-wingers. Even many liberals were afraid to speak out for fear of being called a Communist and losing their jobs. Through the Obama administration, the use of the term “socialism” as a kind of political epithet was on full display, with the president’s opponents — the Republican Party, the Tea Party, the right-wing blogosphere, the Chamber of Commerce, and conservative media figures such as Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh — labeling anything he proposed, including his modest health-care reform law, “socialism.” Over the last decade, however, something has started to shift. Republicans have not stopped red-baiting, and they will continue to shout “socialism” as they attempt to defeat Democrats next year and in 2028. But the political climate has dramatically changed. Americans, particularly those under 50, are more open to candidates who call themselves socialists, so long as they have practical ideas for solving their problems. They are reassessing their understanding of socialism, and its place within American identity. This is fitting: For more than a century, socialism has been integral to American progressivism, championing early many of the reforms that would eventually come into vogue on the center left. We are seeing that dynamic play out again today. From the margins to the mainstream Mamdani is a member of Democratic Socialists of America, but most of the one million New Yorkers who voted for him would likely not describe themselves as “socialists.” The same is true of those who voted for Katie Wilson, the socialist community organizer who will become Seattle’s new mayor, or for the other dozen socialists who were elected to office for the first time in November. There are few self-identified socialists among the voters who supported the more than 250 people now serving in office who are DSA members, were endorsed by local DSA chapters, or, like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, call themselves democratic socialists but have never joined the organization. There are now at least 135 DSAers and DSA-affiliated city council members, 64 state legislators, 21 school board members, 6 mayors, and three members of Congress. In November, voters in Atlanta; Detroit; Tucson; Greenbelt, Maryland; Troy and Poughkeepsie, New York; Hamden, New London and New Britain, Connecticut; and Amherst, Massachusetts elected democratic socialists on their city councils. Minneapolis added one new democratic socialist to its city council, bringing the total to five. Ithaca, New York, added two, bringing the total to three. Five DSAers serve on the Chicago city council and four serve on its counterpart in Portland, Oregon. In Los Angeles, four of the 15 city council members are affiliated with DSA, and two others are currently running for council seats that will be decided next year. Voters have elected eight DSAers to the New York state legislature and three to Pennsylvania’s. Last year, voters in Eau Claire, Wisconsin elected socialist Christian Phelps, a freelance journalist and organizer for Wisconsin Public Education Network, to the state assembly, replacing a Republican. To put that all in perspective, we haven’t seen so many socialist office holders since, roughly, 1912. That year, Eugene V. Debs — the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate — won more than 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the total (and fewer than the votes Mamdani got for mayor). Debs might have garnered even more, but two other candidates — Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Progressive Party candidate (and former president) Theodore Roosevelt — stole some of the Socialists’ thunder, winning the support of workers, women and consumers with promises of such progressive reforms as women’s suffrage, child labor laws and workers’ right to organize unions — policies the socialists helped to mainstream. Debs lost, but that year 1,200 members of the Socialist Party held public office, from school boards to Congress, including 79 mayors in cities such as Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Reading and Schenectady. In office, they pushed for the expansion of parks, libraries, playgrounds and other services, including public ownership of utilities and transportation facilities, free meals for poor schoolchildren, a living wage for workers, and a friendlier attitude toward unions, especially during strikes. This has been the pattern with American socialists. For more than a century, their role has been to move so-called “radical” ideas — proposals to make society more humane, more livable, and more fair, and to give everyday people a stronger voice in their democracy and workplaces — from the margins to the mainstream. In 1916, Congressman Victor Berger, a Milwaukee socialist, sponsored the first bill to create “old age pensions.” The bill didn’t get very far, but two decades later, in the midst of the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Congress to enact Social Security. Conservative critics and big business groups denounced it as un-American, even Communistic. But today, most Americans, even conservatives, believe that Social Security is a good idea. What had once seemed radical has become common sense. In fact, much of FDR’s other New Deal legislation — the minimum wage, workers’ right to form unions and public works programs to create jobs for the unemployed — was first espoused by American socialists. A crisis of capitalism The DSA was...

خلاصہ: Site Access IssuesUPDATE: The wider issue seems resolved, and we’ve restored member services. Original post: An internet-wide Cloudflare issue has made access to TPM a bit shaky this morning. While the wider issue is being resolved and to ensure you can access TPM, we’ve disabled member services temporarily. Don’t be alarmed if you can’t sign in to TPM; you should still be able to read TPM. We’ll restore member services as soon as the underlying issue, which is outside of our control, is resolved.Source InformationPublisher: Talking Points MemoOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: Inside the GOP’s Assault on Youth Voting Rights This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.  The accelerating efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to unwind the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement have the hallmarks of a new Redemption, the counter-revolution that stripped African-Americans of the civil and political rights they had gained in the Civil War and Reconstruction which ushered in nearly a century of Jim Crow. Nowhere is this more marked than in the area of voting rights. Just as the myth of the war’s “noble cause” legitimated the end of Black representation in Congress and the systematic disenfranchisement of Black men, the myth of a “stolen” 2020 election is used to justify “election integrity” efforts that are stripping Americans, particularly vulnerable populations, of their essential democratic rights. The ongoing targeting of voting rights, including the potential evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, limits on mail-in ballots, and the imposition of radical mid-decade racial and partisan gerrymandering, has also included an assault on youth voting rights, a lesser known outcome of the Second Reconstruction. Youth voting rights were part of the post-war expansion of democratic inclusion and were realized most notably through the 1971 passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and banned discrimination based on age in ballot access. The quickest amendment to be ratified in our nation’s history, it was adopted with near unanimity in the Senate and overwhelming support in the House. Even President Richard Nixon chimed in, declaring that “America’s new voters, America’s young generation” would bring “moral courage” and “a spirit of high idealism” to the country. Courage and idealism were also essential to the amendment’s passage. A wide coalition of national student and youth organizations, labor, faith organizations, and Democratic and Republican party youth leaders mobilized on college campuses and in the halls of Congress to press for the youth vote.  That same spirit has been in evidence since the amendment’s ratification nearly 55 years ago, as we outline in our new book, YOUTH VOTING RIGHTS: Civil Rights, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses. The book explores how different constituencies at four institutions — Tuskegee Institute (now University), North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU, in Texas), and Bard College (in New York) — often in coordination with non-profit community organizations, organized to promote and defend the right to vote.   “Voter integrity” laws hit college students particularly hard. Students are particularly vulnerable because they are often first-time registrants — only 58% of 18-24 year olds are registered — and student voters often live far from home, including in other states. They often lack transportation. Our research shows that college students experience unique and disproportionate obstacles in almost every step of the election administration process. That is only getting worse. New state laws restrict convenient, basic election modernization tools that a new generation of voters expects, such as online voter registration or curing — i.e. correcting minor errors — on vote-by-mail ballots. An increasing number of states require that strict identification be presented in-person for registering and voting. Moreover, states like Indiana explicitly exclude college-issued identity cards while others, like Georgia and Wyoming, restrict them to state institutions. In Wisconsin, student voter identification is only valid for voter identification if issued by a state institution, and expires every two years — impacting over 300,000 undergraduate students across the state. Poll sites are often at great distance from college campuses, which particularly impacts student voters who often do not have their own transportation, and state legislators and local officials target on-campus locations. For example, at Purdue University in Indiana, an on-campus polling site that was available to student voters for four previous presidential cycles was suddenly moved off campus in 2024, impacting the largest student body of any individual university campus in the state.  Voting absentee is getting more difficult, and President Trump has promised on Truth Social to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just announced that it will review the constitutionality of a Mississippi vote-by-mail law which allows for ballots to be counted if postmarked before or on Election Day, but received by the state within five business days after Election Day. The ruling may implicate 15 other states with similar laws, and the treatment of military and overseas ballots by 28 other states, potentially adding chaos to the 2026 election. To make matters worse, states such as Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida have also placed limits on, and threatened sanctions against, third-party voter registration organizations, many of which have worked on college campuses for years.   College students are also disproportionately affected by heretofore unthinkable attempts to retroactively disenfranchise voters who have already lawfully cast ballots. Amidst the unprecedented challenges raised in the 2024 election for North Carolina Supreme Court race, in which a Republican candidate attempted to disqualify the already-cast votes of 60,000 citizens, young voters were 3.4 times more likely to be targeted than those over 65, and Black youth, including those enrolled at HBCUs, were disproportionately impacted. The Trump administration is directly targeting colleges and their role in the voting process. In August, the Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” guidance letter to college administrators prohibiting institutions from using federal work-study funds to pay students for non-partisan activities, like voter registration, get out the vote efforts, and service as poll workers. The letter also encourages institutions to balance a “good faith effort” to provide voter registration materials to students, mandated by prior legislation, with a series of stark warnings about who is eligible to vote and the consequences of voting illegally. The warnings include reference to the vexing issue of residency, which was seemingly resolved decades ago by the Symm v. United States decision, the sole US Supreme Court case decided on the basis of the 26th Amendment, that affirmed the right of students to register from their college addresses. This occurs in a context in which institutions of...

خلاصہ: The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation This story first appeared at ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States. “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” Tate posted on X before the trip in February — one of many times he has sung the president’s praises to his fans. But when the Tate brothers arrived by private plane in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they immediately found themselves in the crosshairs of law enforcement once more, as Customs and Border Protection officials seized their electronic devices. This time, they had a powerful ally come to their aid. Behind the scenes, the White House intervened on their behalf. Interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica show a White House official told senior Department of Homeland Security officials to return the devices to the brothers several days after they were seized. The official who delivered the message, Paul Ingrassia, is a lawyer who previously represented the Tate brothers before joining the White House, where he was working as its DHS liaison. In his written request, a copy of which was reviewed by ProPublica, Ingrassia chided authorities for taking the action, saying the seizure of the Tates’ devices was not a good use of time or resources. The request to return the electronics to the Tates, he emphasized, was coming from the White House. The incident is the latest in a string of law enforcement matters where the Trump White House has inserted itself to help friends and target foes. Since entering office for a second term, Trump has urged the Justice Department to go after elected officials who investigated him and his businesses, and he pardoned a string of political allies. Andrew Tate is one of the most prominent members of the so-called manosphere, a collection of influencers, podcasters and content creators who helped deliver young male voters to Trump. And news of the White House intervention on behalf of the accused sex traffickers comes as Trump is under fire over his ties to notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s recent efforts to stop the public release of the so-called Epstein files. Ingrassia’s intervention on behalf of Tate and his brother, Tristan, caused alarm among DHS officials that they could be interfering with a federal investigation if they followed through with the instruction, according to interviews and screenshots of contemporaneous communications between officials. One official who was involved and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid facing retribution said they were disgusted by the request’s “brazenness and the high-handed expectation of complicity.” “It was so offensive to what we’re all here to do, to uphold the law and protect the American people,” the person said. “We don’t want to be seen as handing out favors.” It’s unclear why law enforcement wanted to examine the devices, what their analysis found or whether Ingrassia’s intervention hindered any investigation. The White House and DHS declined to answer questions about the incident. But law enforcement experts said it is highly unusual for the White House to get involved in particular border seizures or to demand authorities give up custody of potential evidence in an investigation. “I’ve never heard of anything like that in my 30 years working,” said John F. Tobon, a retired assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations, which typically analyzes the contents of electronic devices after they’re seized by Customs and Border Protection. “For anyone to say this request is from the White House, it feels like an intimidation tactic.” Tobon said that even if authorities resisted the request from Ingrassia, knowledge that the White House opposed their actions could cause them to be less aggressive than they would normally be: “Anytime somebody feels intimidated or as if they’re not free to follow procedure, that’s going to stay in the back of their mind because of the consequences. In this administration the consequences are different, people are getting fired.” Samuel Buell, a Duke University law school professor and former federal prosecutor, called the pressure on behalf of the Tates “another data point” in the White House politicizing law enforcement. “This is not something that would have been viewed as appropriate or acceptable prior to 2025,” Buell said. “There’s a pattern here of severe departure from preexisting norms … that are being tossed aside left and right.” The Tate brothers’ lawyer, Joseph McBride, said he didn’t know what happened to the devices but that his clients have still not had them returned. He said it’s unclear whether any investigation into their contents is continuing. His clients, he said, are innocent and there was no illicit materials on their electronics. “There have been multiple investigations against them and nothing has come of it,” McBride said. Ingrassia worked at McBride’s firm before joining the White House, and McBride acknowledged speaking “to Paul from time to time” but couldn’t recall discussing the seized devices with him. Ingrassia, he said, has never given the Tates special treatment since joining the Trump administration. The White House declined to answer questions about whether Ingrassia was acting on his own or representing the White House’s wishes. In a brief interview with ProPublica, Ingrassia denied trying to help the Tates, before hanging up. “There was no intervention. Nothing happened,” he said. “There was nothing.” Ingrassia’s lawyer, Edward Paltzik, said in a text message: “Mr. Ingrassia never ordered that the Tate Brothers’ devices be returned to them, nor did he say — and nor would he have ever said — that such a directive came from the White House. This story is fiction, simply not true.” When questioned about whether Ingrassia had asked authorities to return the devices, even if he did not order them to, Paltzik declined to comment, explaining that “the word ‘ask’ is inappropriate because...

خلاصہ: Trump Gives Himself an Enormous Out on the Epstein Files Epstein Politics Shift on the Hill President Trump’s absurd effort to avoid an appearance of defeat by suddenly backing today’s expected House vote to force the Justice Department to turn over the Epstein files — that Trump already has the power to release — has changed the political calculus on the Hill, especially on the Senate side. Not only has Trump’s move made it acceptable for GOP House members to vote yes to releasing the files, but new reporting makes it look likely that Senate Republicans will no longer bottle up the legislation to protect Trump. “Now a growing number of GOP senators are open to giving the bill a vote,” Politico reports, “and some are wondering whether it might simply be sent to Trump’s desk by unanimous consent.” Punchbowl has similar reporting: “Many Senate Republicans now believe the bill will ultimately pass. The question is how — and whether senators will be forced to take a roll-call vote.” Trump himself even declared yesterday that he would sign the measure if it came to his desk. Believe him at your own risk. But here’s the thing: Even if Trump is forced to sign it to keep up the appearance of having dodged a stinging defeat, there’s no reason to think the Justice Department will release anything damaging about Trump. In the short term, no enforcing mechanism exists that would incentivize Justice Department officials or the Trump White House to abide by Congress’ demand. The Trump DOJ certainly won’t prosecute anyone for defying Congress. It’s not clear that the GOP-controlled Congress itself could enforce its demand, either legally or politically. Practically, there’s no real way for Congress to know if the Trump administration buries damaging documents or files. Trump and the White House also seem to be leaving themselves a pretty big out. In his social media post suddenly declaring he didn’t care if the House Oversight Committee got the Epstein files, Trump caveated it by saying they “can have whatever they are legally entitled to.” “Legally entitled to” is doing a lot of work there. The Trump White House and his DOJ will make that determination and can use it to throw a broad protective blanket over any evidence damaging to Trump. That language was echoed to Politico by an unnamed White House official: “This idea that the federal government is in possession of documents that they can legally hand over with respect to Jeffrey Epstein, and we’re keeping them from the public is a fallacy, like, it’s not true.” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) is defending the White House using similar language: “the Department of Justice has turned over what they’re legally allowed to turn over.” All of which suggests managing expectations in this lawless new world where accountability and enforcement mechanisms have been removed. No need to throw one’s hands up and surrender, but the Epstein files scandal isn’t likely to have the denouement we’ve become conditioned to expect, not so long as the Justice Department is sidelined and Republicans control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Quote of the Day There’s no small amount of schadenfreude in watching the Trump White House, hoisted on the petard of its own conspiracy-mongering, fretting that even releasing all the Epstein files won’t quiet the mob it whipped up: “Are people ever going to be satisfied? No, because people in this country genuinely believe that the federal government is in possession of a list of pedophiles who work with Jeffrey Epstein. And that is just not true.”–unnamed White House official I Sense a Trend Here … TPM’s Josh Marshall: Trump Has the Look of the Weak Horse; People Are Acting Accordingly WaPo: Trump faces a splintering GOP — and rare dissent from his party Politico: 7 signs Trump is losing his groove WSJ: Trump’s Grip on Republicans Shows First Signs of Slipping Michelle Goldberg: The MAGA Crackup Might Finally Be Here Trump Uses DOJ for Epstein Damage Control The NYT, on the 217 minutes between President Trump’s demand on Friday that the Justice Department investigate Democrats for the connections to Jeffrey Epstein and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s public acquiescence: Ms. Bondi’s statement was an unmistakable demonstration of Mr. Trump’s near-total success in subordinating the Justice Department’s post-Watergate independence to his will. Friday was a milestone of sorts. The department was deployed, in effect, as an arm of the president’s rapid-response operation to help him muscle through a damaging news cycle, current and former officials said. The Retribution: Jim Comey Edition The prosecution of James Comey took multiple torpedoes below the waterline yesterday when a magistrate judge found an extraordinary number of examples of potential misconduct by investigators and prosecutors both in the current case against Comey and in a adjacent but different investigation during the Trump I presidency. At issue was whether Comey should have access to the grand jury recordings and transcripts in his case. Comey completely prevailed in reaching the high bar he had to clear when the the magistrate judge found 11 independent bases for Comey to have access to the grand jury material. Comey predicated his ask for the materials mostly on what he asserted were potential violations of attorney-client privilege, but the judge found startling incidents of alleged errors by interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer who previously represented Trump personally and had no prosecutorial experience when she was installed as a dutiful loyalist after Trump ousted her predecessor for not seeking charges against Comey. I have the full rundown on the judge’s remarkable ruling here. Only the Best People Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones — who is spearheading the most sweeping of the Trump “investigate the investigators” retribution schemes — got such poor marks back when was an entry-level prosecutor in the same office that when he was nominated for the top spot in March, two of his former supervisors “quickly resigned, fearful that their new boss would push them out,” the WaPo reports. … Crickets … Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck revisits Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s “war on judges” speech to the Federalist Society...