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2 hours ago
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Trump White House Hires Harvard Law Review ‘Whistleblower'
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. The remarkable reporting by the NYT that the Trump White House hired a disgruntled Harvard Law student who was also serving as a would-be 'whistleblower' in the Justice Department's investigation of the law review is a little hard to follow, but a quick timeline helps to bring it into better focus. Briefly, the Trump DOJ 'appeared eager,' as the Times put it, to escalate its bogus civil investigation of the Harvard Law Review for allegedly discriminating against white men into a criminal probe with allegations of obstruction of justice. Even though the law review is independent of the university, top DOJ civil rights officials tried to use the investigation to put added pressure on Harvard as part of its broader attack on the school, the NYT reports, relying on previously unreported letters. Those letters disclosed that the government had a cooperating witness on the law review. The witness is Daniel Wasserman, who is now working under Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy. Here's the timeline culled from the NYT piece: April 25: Wasserman is offered a job at the White House, the same day the conservative Washington Free Beacon publishes a story with the headline: 'Exclusive: Internal Documents Reveal Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Review' April 28: The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services announce a civil rights investigation citing the Washington Free Beacon story. May 13: The first Trump DOJ letter is sent to Harvard regarding the law review allegations. May 21: In the second letter to Harvard, the Trump DOJ first discloses that Wasserman was providing information to the government and accuses the law review of retaliating against him and ordering him to destroy evidence. May 22: Wasserman's first day of work at the White House May 23: The third Trump DOJ letter is sent to to Harvard regarding the law review. May 28: Wasserman graduates from Harvard Law School. A senior administration official told the Times that Wasserman's hiring was unrelated to the government investigation and that Miller was not involved in hiring him and did not meet him until he started working at the White House. 'Legal experts said it was highly unusual for an administration to give a cooperating witness in an ongoing investigation a White House job.'–the NYT, on the Trump White House's hiring of Daniel Wasserman 'The Trump administration failed on Monday in its effort to avert a trial next month to determine whether a federal judge should block the government from retaliating against pro-Palestinian students based on speech,' All Rise News reports. Abrego Garcia: In a new filing opposing the Trump administration's motion to dismiss the case, the lawyers for the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia framed up the stakes starkly: 'The Government asks this Court to accept a shocking proposition: that federal officers may snatch residents of this country and deposit them in foreign prisons in admitted violation of federal law, while no court in the United States has jurisdiction to do anything about it.' South Sudan: In the third country deportations case out of Massachusetts, the Trump administration told the court that the eight detainees who were originally bound for South Sudan remain in Djibouti and that DHS has provided Microsoft Teams, a satellite phone, and a private interview room for the detainees to speak with their attorneys. Cristian: Two related developments in the Maryland case of the wrongfully deported Cristian: His lawyers took the judge's invitation and in a new filing say they are likely to file a motion for contempt of court and other sanctions against the Trump administration for 'blatant violations' of the court's orders. As a prelude to that move, they are asking U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher to order expedited discovery similar to that undertaken in the Abrego Garcia case. The Trump administration attempted to cure last week's violation of the judge's order by filing an updated declaration by an ICE official on the steps the government has and will take to facilitate Cristian's return. The updated declaration is still remarkably thin and not based on personal knowledge of the government's actions, as the judge ordered. It also appears to be an attempt to place the entire case more firmly in the foreign policy realm and out of the reach of the judiciary by highlighting Secretary of State Marco Rubio's personal involvement in 'handling the discussions' with the government of El Salvador: Greg Sargent interviewed an at times tearful Carol Hui, the woman originally from Hong Kong whose detention by the Trump administration shocked the deep-red Missouri town where she has lived and worked for 20 years. The Trump administration's use of state power to target minorities and marginalized groups continues apace, but it's almost become background noise in the Trump II presidency. A few examples from just the past 24 hours: In a little-noticed memo in March, the Trump administration ordered federal border agents and customs officers not to attend events hosted by organizations that support women or minority groups in law enforcement, a senior border official who retired over the policy told the NYT. Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, sent a letter Monday to public school districts in California threatening legal action if they continue to allow trans athletes to compete in high school sports. On what is clearly a pretextual basis, the National Park Service has denied next weekend's WorldPride celebration access to D.C.'s Dupont Circle park, which is the center of the city's historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood. The new acting chief of the Trump DOJ's voting section is Maureen Riordan, who until recently was a lawyer for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, Democracy Docket reports. PILF has been a leading group in the voter fraud bamboozlement movement and has succeeded in purging voter roles, introducing new voter restrictions, and limiting the reach of voting rights laws. Voter suppression luminaries Hans von Spakovsky, J. Christian Adam, and John Eastman either are or have been associated with the group. FEMA: Acting FEMA Director David Richardson – in the role since May, when the previous director was forced out for defending FEMA's existence before Congress – told his staff Monday that he didn't know there was a hurricane season, remarks a FEMA spokesperson dismissed as meant to be a joke. NWS: After downsizing some 600 workers, decimating its operational capabilities, the National Weather Service is now planning to hire 100 new people. Forest Service: Tech billionaire Michael Boren is alleged to have built an airstrip on protected land without a permit, flown a helicopter dangerously close to a crew building a Forest Service trail, and constructed a cabin on federal property. Today the Senate Agriculture Committee holds a hearing on his confirmation to be the under secretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment, which oversees the Forest Service. Under new FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson, the commission is continuing the bogus right-wing crusade against censorship of conservatives on social media by targeting watchdog groups and other organizations in a new investigation into whether they improperly colluded by coordinating boycotts among advertisers. Among the targeted groups are Media Matters, Ad Fontes Media, and at least a dozen other groups, the NYT reports. The FTC's letters of inquiry into the internal operations of the groups and their business practices. In a symbolic but aggressive move, the Pentagon under Donald Trump is preparing to shift Greenland from the jurisdiction of the European Command to U.S. Northern Command. The former Yale historian, with some reluctance, wades into the public discourse around his decision to leave New Haven for Toronto: Last Year's Move to Toronto by Timothy Snyder And This Year's Politics (video and commentary) Read on Substack
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a day ago
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Appeals Court Tries To Get To The Bottom Of A 4th Wrongful Deportation
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. On May 7, just 28 minutes after a U.S. appeals court ordered that a Salvadoran man not be removed from the United States, the Trump administration deported him to El Salvador. The Trump administration told the Second Circuit in a filing last week that the wrongful deportation was the result of 'a confluence of administrative errors.' The fourth known wrongful deportation in the opening months of Trump's anti-immigration jihad was first reported by the nonprofit news outlet Investigative Post. The Trump administration's admission that the deportation of Jordin Alexander Melgar-Salmeron was in error came only after the appeals court had ordered the government to respond to a list of nine questions about what had happened in the case. Among the pointed questions posed by the appeals court: 8. What is the Government's overall understanding as to why Petitioner was removed on May 7, 2025 despite an express assurance made to this Court that the Government would forbear from removing Petitioner until May 8, 2025? 9. What is the Government's overall understanding as to why Petitioner was removed at 10:20 a.m. EST on May 7, 2025 despite an existing order from this Court staying removal pending consideration of his Petition for Review? Politico has a good rundown on the specific details of the underlying case. But for our purposes, the apparent violation of the appeals court order (the administration argues it was not a violation because it was an error …) is front and center. The appeals court has given both sides additional time to propose what the next steps in the case should be. A lawyer for Melgar-Salmeron told Politico that he intends to ask the court to order his client's return from El Salvador and to hold Trump administration officials in contempt. With the Kash Patel era at the FBI in full swing, the bureau is shifting significant resources to immigration enforcement and away from other high priority cases, but agents have been told by higher-ups not to document the shift in order to avoid creating a paper trail, CNN reports. AP: Kristi Noem said an immigrant threatened to kill Trump. The story quickly fell apart NYU law professor Ryan Goodman goes deep on the Trump administration's invocation of the state secrets privilege. The TL;DR: 'It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Trump administration is invoking the doctrine here to impede accountability and judicial remedies for official conduct that courts have found unlawful.' As the House GOP megabill that enshrines the Trump II agenda heads to the Senate, a closer look at the provision that appears intended to weaken the federal judiciary by making it harder to enforce contempt of court violations. Henry Farrell, on the apparent rupture between President Trump and the Federalist Society: I am not the kind of expert who can provide plausible predictions about whether the Federalist Society will prevail over the Trump administration, or vice-versa, or what terms they might meet if they find some compromise. My best guess – and it is just a guess – is that Emil Bove's confirmation process will tell us a lot about what happens afterwards. But which side wins and which loses in the bigger contest will have important consequences for the kind of conservatism that prevails, and for the kind of America that we're going to live in. WSJ: 'At least 11 big companies are moving work away from law firms that settled with the administration or are giving—or intend to give—more business to firms that have been targeted but refused to strike deals, according to general counsels at those companies and other people familiar with those decisions.' CNN: The White House is looking to strike a deal with a high-profile school, said the first source, who is involved in the higher education response. 'They want a name-brand university to make a deal like the law firms made a deal that covers not just antisemitism and protests, but DEI and intellectual diversity,' this person said. 'They want Trump to be able to stand up and say he made a deal with so-and-so – an Ivy League school, some sort of name-brand school that gives them cover so they can say, 'We don't want to destroy higher education.'' Asked if any of the schools are inclined to make such a deal, the source said, 'Nobody wants to be the first, but the financial pressures are getting real.' We always knew the Trump purges were merely the first step in a plan to install loyalists throughout government, though 'loyalist' doesn't fully capture the mix of unqualified, deeply compromised, and/or unfit candidates Trump is selecting: Inspectors General: After his mass purge of inspectors general, President Trump is turning to people like former Rep. Anthony D'Esposito (R-NY), who was defeated for re-election in 2024 after he was accused of putting his mistress and his fiancée's daughter on his payroll. D'Esposito is Trump's nominee for Labor Department inspector general. State: 'If you want to know who's running the State Department these days, it helps to peruse the website of a relatively new, conservative-leaning organization called the Ben Franklin Fellowship,' Politico reports. U.S. Office of Special Counsel: After terminating the U.S. special counsel without cause, Trump has nominated conservative lawyer Paul Ingrassia, 30, who has ties to antisemitic extremists. A thoughtful reflection by M. Gessen as we settle in for the long haul: 'As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.' The COVID vaccine remained on the CDC's schedule for healthy children 6 months to 17 years old despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s earlier public announcement. The Guardian: 'Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered that VA physicians and scientists not publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned.' After her epic town hall face plant dismissing concerns about Republican Medicaid cuts with the memorable line – 'Well, we all are going to die.' – Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) doubled down with a creepy af video shot in a cemetery:
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4 days ago
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New Details Emerge On Trump Administration's Defiance Of The Courts
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. New details about the extent of the Trump administration's stonewalling in the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia were revealed in a court filing Thursday. After six weeks of what was originally supposed to be two weeks of expedited discovery, the government has provided virtually no meaningful discovery responses, Abrego Garcia's lawyers report. Normal discovery disputes would not usually be newsworthy, but this comes in the context of a contempt of court inquiry. The administration's defiance on discovery and the associated gamesmanship cut against its already-dubious claims that it has complied with the order by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return – an order endorsed and echoed by the Supreme Court. Judge Xinis had ordered the discovery into Abrego Garcia's status and what the government had done and planned to do to facilitate his release from imprisonment in his native El Salvador for two reasons: (i) to pressure the Trump administration to abide by her Supreme Court-backed order to facilitate his return; and (ii) to determine whether the administration had violated her order with sufficient bad faith to constitute contempt of court. After the Trump administration late Wednesday asked for an extension of the May 30 deadline by which all discovery is to be completed, Abrego Garcia's lawyers filed a blistering response demonstrating how little discovery the government has produced so far. It was already clear from public filings that the government had offered witnesses for deposition who had little or no personal knowledge of the facts of the case, in contravention of the judge's order. The precise details of that defiance are unclear because many filings remain under seal. The new details show how desultory the government's document production has been, too. As of two weeks ago, the government had only produced 34 actual documents. In the subsequent two weeks it was given in which to produce rolling discovery, it coughed up a total of one additional partial document, according to Abrego Garcia's filing. 'This is far from a good faith effort to comply with court ordered discovery. It is reflective of a pattern of deliberate delay and bad faith refusal to comply with court orders,' Abrego Garcia's lawyers argued in opposing the extension request. 'The patina of promises by Government lawyers to do tomorrow that which they were already obligated to do yesterday has worn thin.' Abrego Garcia's lawyers say the government document production has included what they characterize as 'makeweight,' non-responsive copies of existing filings in the case and of other publicly available materials that aren't new or pertinent. 'Zero documents produced to Plaintiffs to date reflect any efforts made to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release and return to the United States,' they say (emphasis theirs). Judge Xinis wasn't buying it either. 'Assertions of diligence notwithstanding, Defendants have offered no explanation as to why they could not produce any additional documents on a rolling basis, as they had agreed could be accomplished during the May 16, 2025 hearing,' Xinis wrote yesterday when she denied the administration's request to extend the discovery deadline. In addition to the paucity of document production, the government has still not fully responded to the limited set of interrogatories that the judge approved for the expedited discovery, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. The Trump DOJ lawyers have also engaged in low-rent gamesmanship, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. While the government told the court that it had attempted to confer with them about the request to extend the deadline, in fact the DOJ lawyers reached out at 11:35 p.m. and filed their request an hour later without waiting for Abrego Garcia's lawyers to respond. 'This is hardly a good faith attempt to obtain Plaintiffs' position,' Xinis observed in a footnote. Petty gamesmanship aside, the constitutional and real-world implications of the Abrego Garcia case remain enormous. The pace of the defiance has slowed since the flurry of activity in mid-March, but the constitutional clash is no less real now that it was then. '[T]he Government has engaged in a pattern of intentional stonewalling and obfuscation—all in service of delaying the inevitable conclusion, which is that it has not done anything to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return,' his lawyers concluded in their latest filing. 'More time will not change this, but it will multiply the prejudice to Abrego Garcia, who remains in unlawful custody in El Salvador.' The big constitutional clashes are happening in anti-immigration cases where the underlying facts are often less important than the Trump administration's conduct in court, which can be hard for laypeople to follow. The action (and often inaction) can devolve into complicated procedural maneuvering and legal arguments, so the challenge in covering these cases is to find ways to breathe life into them because they're so important: In one of the best pieces I've read in a while, Adam Unikowsky unpacks the Alien Enemies Act case out of Texas that the Supreme Court has already weighed in on and which appears to be a likely vehicle for the big decisions it will make on the AEA. Steve Vladeck unravels the third country deportations case out of Massachusetts which didn't seem nearly as urgent as the AEA cases until the Trump administration started its extreme shenanigans. President Trump has gone after the courts, his own judicial appointees, the Federalist Society, and now his Supreme Court whisperer Leonard Leo. NYT: Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans Passing through Nashville last night, I caught a freewheeling set of mostly Beatles covers by the bluegrass band Greenwood Rye. Here's a recent sampling (with a different lineup of musicians):
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5 days ago
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Trump Admin Signals It Will Return One Wrongfully Deported Man
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. In what could be a major breakthrough, the Trump administration told a federal court Wednesday that it has taken affirmative steps to retrieve an unlawfully deported Guatemalan man and return him to the United States so that he can receive the due process he was initially denied. It was the first concession of its kind that the Trump administration has made in the handful of cases where courts have ordered it to facilitate the return of wrongfully deported foreign nationals and which have become the focal point of a constitutional clash between President Trump and the judiciary. The concession comes in the case of O.C.G., a gay man who had succeeded in U.S. immigration court at not being deported to his home country but whom the Trump administration them immediately deported to Mexico., which in turn sent him to Guatemala. In his immigration court hearing, the man claimed to have been previously kidnapped and raped in Mexico, but the immigration judge (probably correctly, under current law) said the case at hand was limited to Guatemala. O.C.G.'s situation emerged in a larger case in federal court in Massachusetts challenging third country deportations without notice and hearing. It's the same case where the Trump administration tried to get around a court order with last week's deportation flight to South Sudan. The government alerted the court of its efforts to return O.C.G. in a filing that said certain paperwork had already been completed and that the administration 'is currently working with ICE Air to bring O.C.G. back to the United States on an Air Charter Operations (ACO) flight return leg.' A few words of caution about what this means for O.C.G. and the other 'facilitate' cases: O.C.G. is not back yet. Throughout his business and political life President Trump has dragged his feet at every step of litigation, including later stages after concessions have been made or a settlement reached. While this is a significant step compared to the previous defiance, it's not a done deal yet. Unlike Kilmar Abrego Garcia and 'Cristian,' the other two major 'facilitate' cases, O.C.G. was not incarcerated after his deportation. He has remained in hiding in Guatemala, not in prison. That distinction is one that the administration may use to justify not similarly returning other wrongfully deported migrants. Unlike Cristian and the dozens of others incarcerated at CECOT in El Salvador, O.C.G. wasn't deported under the Alien Enemies Act, which the Trump administration has sought to use as an entirely separate legal basis for removals and will likely use to distinguish O.C.G.'s case. All of which is to say that while the administration's signal that it will abide by the court order to facilitate O.C.G.'s return is a potential breakthrough that undermines its legal position in other cases, I'd caution against leaping to the conclusion that it is the beginning of a wholesale walk-back of the administration's outrageous conduct in these key anti-immigration cases. In one of the most obtuse judicial opinions you'll ever encounter, U.S. District Judge Michael E. Farbiarz of New Jersey ruled that the Trump administration's attempt to deport Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist, was likely unconstitutional, but stopped short of ordering Khalil's release until both parties can file further briefs. Education Secretary Linda McMahon provided valuable evidence on national TV that the Trump administration is targeting universities for illegitimate political reasons: President Trump announced his plan to nominate his former criminal defense attorney, now serving as the No. 3 at the Justice Department to a coveted seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit (which covers PA, NJ, DE, and the USVI). Bove has been a leading figure in rapidly bringing the Justice Department firmly under Trump White House control, erasing its storied independence and eroding its professional reputation. Trump's social media post announcing Bove's nomination to the lifetime seat on the appeals court described the job in startling political terms: 'He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.' Following on remarks from U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin, President Trump confirmed he is considering pardoning the violent extremists convicted in the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), falsely claiming that they 'got railroaded.' President Trump pardoned former Rep. Michael Grimm, the Staten Island Republican who resigned from Congress in 2015 and did prison time for tax fraud. Grimm was paralyzed last year in a horseback riding accident. Trump has now pardoned a total of nine members of Congress convicted of corruption and/or tax crimes. Grimm wasn't the only corrupt politician among the more than two dozen people Trump pardoned yesterday, a list that included political allies of his. The kicker to Trump's pardonpalooza: Trump is exacting retribution against more than three dozen former death row inmates whose sentences President Biden commuted by sending them to the nation's only 'supermax' prison. A judge has cleared the way for those transfers, saying the inmates had not yet exhausted their administrative remedies with the Bureau of Prisons, a necessary predicate to filing their federal lawsuits. Nancy Marks, one-time campaign manager to ousted Rep. George Santos (R-NY), avoided jail time for her role in his campaign finance schemes. The ousted fabulist congressman was sentenced last month to seven years in prison. Her possible cooperation with investigators against Santos has never been confirmed. 'I'm going to leave that an enigma,' her lawyer said. CBS News parent Paramount has offered $15 million to settle Donald Trump's bogus lawsuit against it for how it edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. Trump is holding out for $25 million and an apology, but Paramount executive are leery of paying more than the going rate for these corrupt settlements of spurious Trump lawsuits because it might expose them to legal liability, the WSJ reports: During the Trump-suit negotiations, one sticking point for Paramount executives has been whether a settlement could expose directors and officers to liability in potential future shareholder litigation or criminal charges for bribing a public official, according to people familiar with the conversations. By settling within the range of what other companies have paid to end litigation with Trump, some Paramount executives hope to minimize such liability, some of the people said. Paramount is eager to settle for its own corrupt purpose: winning government approval for a planned merger. The Court of International Trade blocked major elements of President Trump's regimen of massive tariffs, ruling that he had exceeded his statutory authority and usurped Congress' role. HHS has undermined the county's capacity to fight future influenza pandemics by cancelling a $600 million contract with Moderna to develop flu vaccines. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blindsided CDC officials with his surprise announcement on social media that he was unilaterally changing the government's guidance on who should get COVID vaccines and when. A massive chunk of Switzerland's Birch Glacier – destabilized by climate change – came loose, unleashing a debris flow that almost completely wiped out an already-evacuated Alpine village. The BBC has video of the shock wave advancing across the valley floor.
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6 days ago
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Trump Stonewalls Federal Judges In New Round Of Brazen Defiance
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. In three closely watched anti-immigration cases, the Trump administration continued its slo-mo constitutional defiance of the judicial branch … After the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld her order that the Trump administration facilitate the return of a Venezuelan man deported to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act in violation of a court approved settlement agreement, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Maryland set a deadline of 5 p.m. ET yesterday for the administration to provide a status update on Cristian, a pseudonym for the man. The Trump DOJ missed the deadline, and what it did file later in the evening was largely non-responsive to the judge's questions. It mirrors the pattern in the other Maryland case, of Abrego Garcia, who has also been imprisoned in El Salvador since March 15. Gallagher had three questions for the Trump administration. Here's how it responded in a declaration by ICE official Mellissa Harper that went on at length about Cristian's January criminal conviction in Texas for cocaine possession but barely addressed, if at all, what the judge had asked for: (1) Cristian's current physical location and custodial status Gov't Response: 'It is DHS's understanding that Cristian is in the custody of El Salvador.' (2) What steps, if any, Defendants have taken to facilitate Cristian's return to the United States Gov't Response: 'DHS has informed the Department of State (DOS) of the Court's order and requested DOS assistance in complying with the Court's order. DOS has acknowledged DHS's request.' (3) What additional steps Defendants will take, and when, to facilitate Cristian's return. Gov't Response: Nada That's the full extent of the government's substantive response to the judge's questions. No dates, no place names, no next steps. No declaration from the State Department. Nothing that engages in good faith with the judge's order. I should note that because the government missed the deadline for the required filing, it had to ask the judge for leave to file late. She hasn't yet granted leave. Stay tuned. In the adjacent case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump DOJ pulled a bullshit move and was called out on it by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland. As the clock neared 5 p.m. ET yesterday on the day the administration's substantive answer to the lawsuit was due, the Trump DOJ filed a motion asking for 30 more days to file. It's not the extension request itself but the sloppiness and disrespect of asking for the extension on the day the filing was due, and late in the business day at that. Xinis denied the extension request, noting that it came on 'the very day Defendants' answer or response to the Complaint is due.' She brought the administration up short because it 'expended no effort in demonstrating good cause' and through a total of five hearings had not 'even intimated they needed more time to answer or otherwise respond.' But it was the administration's claim that expedited discovery in the case had taken up time it would have used to file a timely answer that really set Xinis off: [Defendants] vaguely complain, in two sentences, to expending 'significant resources' engaging in expedited discovery. But these self-described burdens are of their own making. The Court ordered expedited discovery because of Defendants' refusal to follow the orders of this Court as affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court. Later in the evening, the Trump DOJ met its deadline by filing a weak motion to dismiss the case, arguing the Xinis has no jurisdiction. The Trump administration took the South Sudan deportations case to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis rather than comply with a lower court order to provide the deportees due process on the ground in Africa, which it had urged the trial judge to allow it to do. Its application to the high court was deeply misleading about what had transpired in the lower court and what the administration had agreed to and been ordered to do. In a colorful opinion sprinkled with more than two dozen exclamation points and an unfortunate footnote reference to a bastardized gumbo recipe, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of DC nullified President Trump's executive order against WilmerHale as unconstitutional. The number of threats against federal judges has spiked since President Trump took office, according to data from the U.S. Marshals Service that was provided to the NYT by U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed in a 2020 attack at her New Jersey home. Trump pardoned tax cheat Paul Walczak after his mother attended a $1 million fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Trump is pardoning reality TV fraudsters Todd and Julie Chrisley. U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin has personally reviewed the pardon application of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, one of several new applications by convicted seditionist conspiracists who already had their sentences commuted by Trump to time served but are now seeking full pardons. In an interview about Trump's pardon of a convicted Virginia sheriff, Ed Martin told the WSJ: 'He's a guy that was on the right side of a lot of issues …' Treasury: U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas of New York lifted her final restrictions on DOGE staffers' access to sensitive Treasury Department payments systems after concluding that they have been properly vetted and trained. BLM: A veteran official at the Bureau of Land Management was escorted out headquarters yesterday after resisting orders from a DOGE staffer who became the Interior Department's acting chief human capital officer. Leo Terrell, the Trump DOJ official leading a bogus anti-semitism task force, went on Fox News to threaten the University of California system with 'massive lawsuits.' 'We are going to go after them where it hurts them financially,' Terrell said. In a sign that universities are still fighting the Trump administration on the terms it sets, a UC spokesperson responded to the Terrell threat by denouncing anti-semitism. The CDC will no longer recommend routine Covid shots for healthy children and pregnant women, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a post on X. RFK Jr. threatened that unless three prestigious medical journals – the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet – 'change dramatically' he would bar government scientists from publishing in them.
