Everything is awful again this morning. Trump’s coup is advancing rapidly as he increases his control of Washington DC, attempts to take over the Fed, and threatens Chicago and other large cities. He has already politicized the Department of Justice, and now his goons are working to destroy the Social Security Administration and the Department of Defense. He is even speaking openly about wanting to be a dictator.
Here’s the latest:
I’ve been briefed on a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School and will continue to provide updates as we get more information. The BCA and State Patrol are on scene.I’m praying for our kids and teachers whose first week of school was marred by this horrific act of violence.
A shooting occurred Wednesday morning during the first week of classes at a Minneapolis Catholic school, Minnesota governor’s said. Authorities gave no immediate information on the number of injuries, but Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “horrific.”
The Minneapolis city government said the shooter had been “contained” after the gunfire at Annunciation Catholic School and there was no longer any “active threat” to residents.
A spokesperson for Hennepin Healthcare, which has Minnesota’s largest emergency department, said in a text message that it was actively dealing with an emergency and provided no additional details. A social media post from the company said it was caring for patients from the shooting.
This is a developing story.
Yesterday Trump escalated his efforts to take over control of the Federal Reserve.
President Trump’s bid to fire a member of the Federal Reserve board is a new escalation of his efforts to amass more power over American government and society: Congress generations ago structured the agency, crucial to the health of the economy, to be independent of White House control.
In purporting to fire the board member, Lisa D. Cook, Mr. Trump is setting up another test of how far the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court will let him go in eroding the checks and balances Congress has long imposed on executive power.
His attempt to fire Ms. Cook presents a new twist. It raises the question of whether he alone can decide whether there is cause to fire an official at an independent agency whose leaders are protected by law from arbitrary removal — or whether courts will be willing and able to intervene if judges believe his justification is a pretext.
But the move to oust Ms. Cook, whom the Senate confirmed for a term that ends in 2038, also fits into a now familiar arc, joining the various ways Mr. Trump has systematically accumulated greater authority.
Trump is drunk with power. Can anyone stop him?
Mr. Trump has stretched the bounds of some legal authorities, like prolifically declaring emergencies to unlock more expansive power, sendingtroops into the streets of American cities, unilaterally raising import taxes and blocking spending Congress had directed. In this case, he is pushing at the limits of a statute that says Fed board members serve 14-year terms unless removed “for cause” by a president.
But in telling Ms. Cook he was firing her, Mr. Trump invoked a provision Congress wrote into the Federal Reserve Act that says Fed board members may only be removed before their terms are up for cause. He said he had determined that sufficient cause existed to remove her.
That provision does not define what counts as a sufficient reason. In general, such provisions have been understood to mean something like significant misconduct or neglect of office.
Use the gift link to read the rest.
This is a true emergency. Fortunately, Cook plans to fight back by suing Trump.
President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, said Wednesday that Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook should go on leave from the central bank even as she plans to file a lawsuit challenging her removal by Trump.
“If I were her in her circumstance, I would take leave,” Hassett told reporters outside the White House.
Lisa M. Cook
“I think it’s the honorable thing to do,” he continued, after a reporter asked about whether Cook should be presumed innocent of allegations of mortgage fraud raised by another Trump-appointed official….
Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, is expected to soon file a lawsuit over Trump’s move, her attorney, Abbe Lowell, said Tuesday.
Trump’s “attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis,” Lowell said in a statement.
The Fed said Tuesday that “Cook has indicated through her personal attorney that she will promptly challenge this action in court and seek a judicial decision that would confirm her ability to continue to fulfill her responsibilities as a Senate-confirmed member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.”
The battle over Cook’s removal could end with the Supreme Court issuing a final decision on the matter.
Would the Supreme Court allow Trump to take control of the Federal Reserve? I’m not sure they will challenge Trump over any of his power grabs.
As President Donald Trump continues to stand behind his decision to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, one former leader at the agency warns that the consequences of the firing, should it ultimately go through, could be catastrophic.
Trump announced on Monday that Cook would be fired “effective immediately,” alleging the Biden-appointee of mortgage fraud, claims that have yet to be litigated in court. Cook immediately rebuked Trump in declaring her intention to continue to serve out the remainder of her 14-year term.
Bill Dudley, a former president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, however, warned that should Cook ultimately be fired, the new makeup of the agency’s board could set off a series of “standoffs, showdowns, chaos and uncertainty” that he said “would be truly frightening,” in an op-ed published in Bloomberg Wednesday.
“The attack on Cook represents a major escalation that could end very badly,” Dudley wrote. “Never before has a president tried to fire a Fed governor, and there’s much more at stake than one person’s job.”
Dudley went on to note that, should Cook be removed from her position, Trump would then have appointed four of the central bank’s seven governors, granting him a powerful majority that would grant the president far more leverage at the Fed.
“The Board of Governors could, for example, refuse to reappoint some or all of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents, whose five-year terms come up for renewal in February 2026 – and five of whom vote on the FOMC on a rotating basis. In theory, this could be a way to populate the (Federal Open Market Committee) with members that would do Trump’s bidding, empowering the president to get the big rate cuts he seeks.”
US President Donald Trump’s claim that he has “fired” Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook “for cause” is not only unlawful. It is profoundly dangerous.
It represents a direct attempt to politicise the Fed, intimidate its leadership and bend monetary policy to the president’s will. This action threatens to end the independence of the Federal Reserve — and with it, the credibility of the US’s monetary policy both at home and abroad.
Janet Yellen
The law is clear: Federal Reserve governors serve 14-year terms precisely so they cannot be tossed aside by presidents who dislike their views or who seek their allegiance. Removal “for cause” is intended for documented misconduct. “Accusations” are not “cause”.
Cook has done her job with integrity — weighing evidence and voting for policies designed to achieve the Fed’s dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment. For Trump to invoke cause here is a fiction; it is a pretext to justify an autocratic power grab.
This is not about one Federal Reserve governor. It is about intimidation. By targeting Cook, Trump is sending a chilling message to every member of the Federal Reserve board and to the regional reserve bank presidents who take part in the Federal Open Market Committee: express disagreement with the president’s views and you are next.
Such threats could stifle these Federal Reserve leaders in their duty to offer honest, professional and independent views on monetary policy to the public. It could alter their voting behaviour. It would turn an institution renowned for its independence and strong record of accomplishment into a puppet stage for presidential whims and priorities.
A bit more:
At the moment, a key Trump administration priority is for the Fed to substantially cut interest rates to reduce the cost of servicing the US government’s $37tn debt. The consequences are likely to be catastrophic.
History offers a blunt lesson: chaos follows when leaders capture their central banks and force them to buy government debt or cut interest rates to hold down debt service expense. Germany in the 1920s, Hungary after the second world war. Likewise, Argentina and Turkey quite recently — the names change, but the story is the same.
Politicised central banks deliver higher inflation, volatile growth and weakened currencies. Such a road cannot be good for the US. We took this road once before: during the second world war, when the Fed was obliged to hold interest rates down to help the Treasury finance the war. The result was high inflation.
In other news, what is happening at the Social Security Administration is terrifying. A whistleblower has accused former DOGE staffer Edward “Big Balls” Coristine of endangering every American’s Social Security data.
Members of the Department of Government Efficiency uploaded a copy of a crucial Social Security database in June to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk of being leaked or hacked, according to a whistle-blower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer.
The database contains records of all Social Security numbers issued by the federal government. It includes individuals’ full names, addresses and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation’s most sensitive repositories of personal information.
Edward “Big Balls” Coristine
The account by the whistle-blower, Charles Borges, underscores concerns that have led to lawsuits seeking to block young software engineers at the agency built by Elon Musk from having access to confidential government data. In his complaint, Mr. Borges said DOGE members copied the data to an internal agency server that only DOGE could access, forgoing the type of “independent security monitoring” normally required under agency policy for such sensitive data and creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”
Mr. Borges did not indicate that the database had been breached or used inappropriately.
But his disclosure stated that as of late June, “no verified audit or oversight mechanisms” existed to monitor what DOGE was using the data for or whether it was being shared outside the agency. That kind of oversight would typically be provided by the agency’s career information security professionals, Mr. Borges said in his account.
And his complaint cites an official agency security assessment that described the project as “high risk” and that warned of “catastrophic impact” to Social Security beneficiaries and programs if the database were to be compromised.
“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital health care and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for reissuing every American a new Social Security number at great cost,” Mr. Borges’s complaint said. He alleged that DOGE did not involve him in discussions about the project, despite his role as chief data officer, leaving him to piece together evidence of what had happened after the fact.
Included in his account, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, are more than two dozen pages of internal emails, memos and other records to document his claims. Mr. Borges’s complaint said that DOGE’s actions “potentially violated multiple federal statutes” designed to protect government data.
Unbelievable. Use the gift link to read the rest.
Trump’s crackdown on Washington DC continues. A couple of updates:
According to officials, the military was deployed as part of a “beautification and restoration mission” in Lafayette Square, the National Mall, and the Tidal Basin.
At least 2,234 active guardsmen are on duty throughout the city; 929 of those are from the D.C. National Guard, while 1,305 come from Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia, say the Joint Task Force-DC Office.
Trump previously said he’d deployed the National Guard to grapple with “complete and total lawlessness” in the city, despite crime rates hitting a 30-year low earlier this year
BY DONALD TRUMP’S TELLING, WASHINGTON, D.C.’s restaurants are doing great. And, naturally, it’s all because of him.
“Friends of mine are going out to dinner,” Trump told reporters Monday, claiming that his deployment of federal forces brought unaccustomed tranquility to the streets of the nation’s capital. “They haven’t gone out to dinner in four years, they were petrified. Half the restaurants closed because nobody could go because they’re afraid to go outside. Now those restaurants are opening, and new restaurants are opening up, it’s like a boomtown.”
Hold up. We’re supposed to believe that “half the restaurants” in the city were closed? Because Washingtonians were cowering at home, peeking through their blinds? Famed chef and humanitarian José Andrés fired back in a tweet:
I understand why you are confused…all your time in DC you haven’t eaten ONCE outside the White House or your own hotel. I’ve lived here for 33 years, and it’s a flat out lie that half the restaurants have closed because of safety…but restaurants will close because you have troops with guns and federal agents harassing people…making people afraid to go out. Cities and towns and rural areas of America need policies that allow small business to thrive and all people including immigrants to live and work with dignity. People shouldn’t be afraid of their government…government should have respect for its people, not terrorize them.
Andrés is right. Trump’s deployment of 2,300 National Guard troops and 500 federal law enforcement agents has hurt foot traffic, chilled business, and made people cancel trips and nights out. It is slowly choking the life out of Washington, D.C. restaurants, which were still struggling to gain their post-pandemic footing just as Trump returned to town and started firing tens of thousands of their customers.
Shawn Townsend, head of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, announced that the city’s annual Restaurant Week is being extended because of the business-dampening effects of Trump’s actions, noting that “reservations were down in restaurants pretty significantly” the week after Trump launched his federal takeover. Data from OpenTable shows restaurant reservations down 24 percent from last year’s Restaurant Week, the New York Timesreported.
But numbers tell only part of the story. In interviews with restaurant owners, chefs, and workers, another picture emerged: that of small businesses being harmed by a president who was elected because of his purported business acumen; of a man whose obsession with appearing tough on crime now threatens to sabotage urban economies across the country.
“People used to say Washington is recession-proof. Today Washington is a recession magnet,” Immigrant Food cofounder and “Restaurateur of the Year” candidate Peter Schechter told me. “We’re back to a very pandemic-feeling city. There are fewer people going to work, fewer people walking around, fewer cars, reservations are down, events have been canceled.”
“Everything Trump touches dies” — Rick Wilson
Another potential disaster is in the making. Trump and Kristy Noem have decimated FEMA and it has gotten worse.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday suspended around 30 employees after those workers wrote to Congress warning that the Trump administration had gutted the nation’s ability to handle hurricanes, floods and other extreme weather disasters.
Of the 182 FEMA employees who signed the letter to Congress, 36 attached their names, while the rest withheld their identities for fear of retaliation.
Those who used their names received emails on Tuesday night saying they had been placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately, and continuing until further notice,” according to copies of the emails reviewed by The New York Times.
The emails did not provide a reason for the decision. Representatives for FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Colette Delawalla, the executive director of Stand Up for Science, an advocacy group that helped publicize the letter, said the move appeared to be an act of retaliation.
“Once again, we are seeing the federal government retaliate against our civil servants for whistle-blowing — which is both illegal and a deep betrayal of the most dedicated among us,” Ms. Delawalla said in a statement.
The letter to Congress rebuked President Trump’s plan to drastically scale down FEMA and shift more responsibility for disaster response — and more costs — to the states. It was sent on Monday, days before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest and costliest storms ever to strike the United States.
As I said, everything is awful. Here are a few more stories to check out if you can bear it:
The Texas flooding this weekend was shocking and sad. Aren’t there people, equipment, and methods to mitigate and alert people to these things in this country? Shouldn’t there be people on the ground who can handle the rescue and recovery at least? Well, first, remember this is Abbot’s and Paxton’s Texas, and this is America’s MAGA/Doge experiment. While there was nothing that could stop the flood, Texas and American Republicans failed the people on the ground. Texas is still early in the investigation process and is still in search and rescue mode. Mexican Firefighters came to the rescue yesterday, while I read about how Texas tanked a bill that would’ve made a big difference. NOAA did a Yeoman’s job as both predicting and alerting the area about dangerous flash flooding. However, cuts by Doge and the Trump administration had an impact. I have to say I’m getting progressively worried about peak hurricane season next month, as Tropical Storm Chantal created problems in the Carolinas.
If you look at what’s still standing on the FEMA website, you’ll see the substantial benefits of mitigation planning. The first deadly mistake in this catastrophe was the biggest, and it sits on the shoulders of the Texas Legislature. This is from the station KSAT. You’ll notice the comments by the idiot who represents this area. He couldn’t recall why he voted against it, but thought it was likely the cost. Well, now look at the costs they’ve incurred to date. You want a start a spreadsheet and try to quantify the loss of all those little girls? “Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster warning systems this year.”
For the last three days, state Rep. Wes Virdell has been out with first responders in Kerr County as they searched for victims and survivors from the devastating floods that swept through Central Texas early Friday morning.
“All the focus right now is let’s save all the lives we can,” Virdell, who was still on the scene in Kerrville, told The Texas Tribune on Sunday.
Virdell’s closeup view of the havoc wreaked on his district has made a lasting impression, he said, and left him reconsidering a vote he made just a few months ago against a bill that would have established a statewide plan to improve Texas’ disaster response, including better alert systems, along with a grant program for counties to buy new emergency communication equipment and build new infrastructure like radio towers.
“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” said Virdell, a freshman GOP lawmaker from Brady.
The measure, House Bill 13, would have created a new government council to establish the emergency response plan and administer the grant program, both of which would have been aimed at facilitating better communication between first responders. The bill also called for the plan to include “the use of outdoor warning sirens,” like those used in tornado-prone Texas counties, and develop new “emergency alert systems.”
Authored by Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, the legislation was inspired by last year’s devastating wildfires in the Panhandle, where more than 1 million acres burned — including part of King’s property — and three people died. The bill failed in the Texas Senate, prompting newfound questions about whether lawmakers should have done more to help rural, cash-strapped counties stave off the deadly effects of future natural disasters.
As of Sunday evening, at least 79 people had died in the floods. Of those, 68 were in Kerr County, many of them camping or attending a private summer camp along the Guadalupe River.
Virdell, a Hill Country native who lives about 100 miles away, made his way to Kerrville early Friday after seeing news that rains raised the Guadalupe more than two feet, swamping its banks in Hunt and other river communities that host thousands of holiday vacationers.
He stressed an alarm system may not have helped much in this instance because the floodwaters came so quickly. Between 2 and 7 a.m., the Guadalupe River in Kerrville rose from 1 to more than 34 feet in height, according to a flood gauge in the area.
“I don’t think there was enough evidence to even suspect something like this was going to happen,” he said. ”I think even if you had a warning system there, this came in so fast and early in the morning it’s very unlikely the warning system would have had much effect.”
Virdell said he doesn’t recall the specifics of the bill or why he opposed it, though he guessed ”it had to do with how much funding” was tied to the measure.
What’s that old saying about an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? It makes me believe that some people really do not want to be taught the basics of reality. My first experience with meteorologists came when I was hired by the Global Weather Wings of the Navy and Air Force to help them improve their process of making forecasts and getting them out way back in the early 1990s. The motivation was the death of soldiers and the accompanying loss of equipment of troops in a huge sandstorm in the Middle East, and a look back on the loss of helicopters and troops trying to rescue the Iran Hostages. A lot came out of that effort, including looking for better types of radar, mitigation, forecasting in general, and then alert systems. My clearance only went so far, so the Birds in the Back did a lot of work I never really saw. I just know the systematic approach to it all caused a lot more success in avoiding weather in the Gulf Wars that followed.
I’m still a volunteer storm and weather spotter with my local NWS. Having grown up in Tornado Alley and now in Hurricane Central, my wonderment about weather continues. I just reported and talked to a NOAA forecaster about some severe lightning we had in the hood last month. They love their equipment, but they love the reports from the ground too. It helps them to look back and determine if they could’ve seen that coming by radar patterns. I wish FARTUS and Elon had a strong fascination with weather. It would be more useful than a fascination with a Mars colony and shark attacks. Their impact on NOAA is and will cause the loss of lives as well as damage to families and communities. I’ve lived it and hope you never have to.
This is from Wired. “Meteorologists Say the National Weather Service Did Its Job in Texas. DOGE cut hundreds of jobs at the NWS, but experts who spoke to WIRED say the agency accurately predicted the state’s weekend flood risk.” We were lucky this time. We won’t be so lucky if it’s a wind event because that takes the best radar to determine the subtleties of wind shift, and Hegesth has cut their access to the military satellites. I got hammered on Facebook by some folks wanting to point fingers at the NWS. I know we all want them to get back to peak operations, but NOAA did its job despite the chaos, and I do not want to see them taking a hit they don’t deserve. They’re missing staff, and that really good winds aloft satellite information that’s best got from the military, but this was a rain event. The exact location of the worst of it can’t be predicted. They just put out a get the fuck to high ground to folks where it’s likely to be worse.
Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.
But meteorologists who spoke to WIRED say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm. What’s more, they say that what the NWS did forecast this week underscores the need to sustain funding to the crucial agency.
Meteorologists first had an idea that a storm may be coming for this part of Texas last weekend, after Tropical Storm Barry made landfall in Mexico. “When you have a tropical system, it’s just pumping moisture northward,” says Chris Vagasky, an American Meteorological Society-certified digital meteorologist based in Wisconsin. “It starts setting the stage for heavy rainfall events.”
The NWS office in San Antonio on Monday predicted a potential for “downpours”—as well as heavy rain specifically at nighttime—later on in the week as the result of these conditions. By Thursday, it forecast up to 7 inches of rainfall in isolated areas.
The San Antonio and Hill Country regions of Texas are no stranger to floods. But Friday morning’s storm was particularly catastrophic. The Guadalupe River surged more than 20 feet in just a few hours to its second-highest level in recorded history. Kerr County judge Rob Kelly told media Friday morning that the county “didn’t know this flood was coming.”
“We have floods all the time… we deal with floods on a regular basis,” he said. “When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.”
W. Nim Kidd, the Chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), echoed Kelly’s comments at a press conference with Governor Greg Abbott on Friday. Kidd said that TDEM worked with its meteorologist to “refine” NWS forecasts. “The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,” he said.
Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” Vagasky says. A number of unpredictable factors—including some element of chance—go into determining the amount of rainfall in a specific area, he says.
“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”
The moral of the story is to make sure your phone will send you emergency alerts from NOAA and from your local emergency center. Then, take it seriously. I lived my entire young life with Tornado Sirens. Each state needs to be prepared and Texas screwed up. The last perspective I want to share is from the Substack of Heather Cox Richardson. Massive floods have been known to be historical events that can change the course of things. ”
All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts “[leave] the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
But former NWS officials maintain the forecasts were as accurate as possible and noted the storm escalated abruptly. They told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times that the problem appeared to be that NWS had lost the staffers who would typically communicate with local authorities to spread the word of dangerous conditions. Molly Taft at Wired confirmed that NWS published flash flood warnings but safety officials didn’t send out public warnings until hours later.
Meanwhile, Kerr County’s most senior elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, focused on local officials, telling Flavelle that the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive and “[t]axpayers won’t pay for it.”
Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas but, coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts. Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices—including the National Weather Service—“form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” by which it meant the fossil fuel industry.
CNN’s Andrew Freedman, Emma Tucker, and Mary Gilbert note that several NWS offices across the country are so understaffed they can no longer operate around the clock, and many are no longer able to launch the weather balloons that provide critical data. The journalists also note that the Trump administration’s 2026 budget calls for eliminating “all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs along with institutes jointly run with universities around the country.”
Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week and signed into law on Friday boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports.
When a reporter asked Trump, “Are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the national weather service or the emergency coordination?” he responded: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup. But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”
The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government, but it is not the only one.
ICE Barbie made a quick photo op trip to Texas to prop up #FARTUS during his Golf Weekend. She’s not going to escape the glare on this one.
HAPPENING NOW: Greetings from the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, where Judge Paula Xinis is set to hold a motions hearing in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s civil case against the Trump administration over his wrongful removal to El Salvador. I’m here for @lawfaremedia.org. Follow along 🧵⬇️
I’ll try to post updates as they come out. If you go to the above links, you’ll see the number of items to be adjudicated. There are several motions. Judge Paula Xinis is up for the job! There are several articles up today about Trump’s ICE. Jason Zengerle has a Guest Op Ed up today in the New York Times on the horrible Steven Miller entitled “The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller.” In short, he hates everyone.
Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.
This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.
There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy.
Mr. Miller, 39, is both a committed ideologue and a ruthless bureaucratic operator — and he has cast himself as the only person capable of fully carrying out Mr. Trump’s radical policy vision. “Stephen Miller translates Trump’s instinctual politics into a coherent ideological program,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, said, “and he is the man for the moment in the second term.”
It’s a long article, and it basically starts with his family background. Maybe BB can give us some hints as to why he turned into such a monster. This concluding paragraph shows what a monster this man became.
For the moment, though, it seems Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump are aligned — and that means Mr. Miller has achieved a level of success, and satisfaction, that he didn’t dream of during Mr. Trump’s first term. Last year, in another podcast interview with Mr. Travis and Mr. Sexton, Mr. Miller told the two hosts what to expect if Mr. Trump returned to the White House. “You will wake up every morning so excited to get out of bed to see what’s happening on the border, to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement, you’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen,” he said. “That’s how excited you’ll be. That’s how wonderful this will be.”
I continue to wonder if we’ve become so broken that we won’t be able to put ourselves back together again. I was heartened by my North Shore neighbors who had a slightly bigger parade in their neighborhood in Covington than Temple and I did in the Bywater. The small town is beautiful, and what started out as a cool getaway from New Orleans’ heat became a white flight zone. They had a MAGA approach them on the 4th, who attacked someone and also damaged a truck. The Covington Police came to their rescue, arresting this guy for attacking people who were just exercising their right to Free Speech.
“Covington police make arrest after person attacked while exercising right to free speech.” The guy has a face that only a mother could love, and if he shaved, he could possibly pass as Steven Miller.
The Covington Police Department has made an arrest after it says someone was attacked for exercising their right to free speech on July 4.
According to police, Jeremy Judice was arrested and is facing a charge of simple battery and criminal damage to property.
Police did not disclose details surrounding the attack; however, they issued the following statement saying they take a zero-tolerance approach to violence in the community:
“This kind of behavior will not be tolerated in the City of Covington, regardless of anyone’s political ideology. We are committed to upholding the rights and safety of all individuals in our city and will take decisive action against those who seek to undermine them,” said Chief Michael Ferrell.
WDSU has reached out to the police department for more information on the incident.
Well, he’d better have enough money for a good lawyer. There are a lot of them that live in that neighborhood.
I hope your Independence Weekend brought you some relief and peace.
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
If it wasn’t for you I’d be happy If it wasn’t for lies you’d be true I know that you could be just like you should If it wasn’t for bad you’d be good
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I hope this post will make some kind of sense, but I’m not that confident about it. I’m completely stressed out and exhausted. Last night I did not sleep at all. Now I’ll have to try to make it up with naps today.
I’ve had insomnia for years now, beginning after menopause. It got worse after Trump was elected in 2016, and now we’ve had nearly 10 years of this horrible man and his endless stupidity, my sleepless nights come more often.
Obviously, Trump’s second term has been much much worse than the first. He’s now surrounded by sycophants and not the so-called “adults in the room” who tried to check some of his worst impulses in his first term. He is openly enriching himself and his fellow billionaires. He’s pardoning violent criminals. Everything is awful. We are beginning to resemble Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. I don’t see how we ever repair this country’s reputation in the free world.
France’s gift to America has stood majestically in New York harbor since 1886. The original idea for the Statue of Liberty grew out of the desire to exemplify the American ideals of liberty and freedom. Lady Liberty’s spiked crown was meant to symbolize rays of sun beaming out to the world. Her tablet was inscribed with July 4, 1776. Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi placed a broken shackle and chains at her feet to represent the end of slavery.
For more than 140 years, she has held her torch high, providing a beacon to the world, an expression of freedom and a welcome to those in trouble. So has been the inspiring poem of Emma Lazarus, “The New Collossus,” etched in bronze and placed at the pedestal: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Millions of arriving immigrants saw this symbol of compassion and hope for a better life with their own eyes. Millions more yearned to see it and experience its promise for themselves.
I have always taken pride in America’s commitment to immigration and its burgeoning diversity. I have done so knowing that our history has been fraught with conflict as bigotry and competition have often pitted Americans against newcomers. I’m still moved by Hakeem Jeffries’ first speech after becoming House Minority Leader in 2023. “We believe that in America our diversity is a strength. It is not a weakness. An economic strength, a competitive strength, a cultural strength,” he said, adding, “Out of many we are one. That’s what makes America a great country.”
I won’t recount now the myriad ways the current cruel and hostile regime is exploiting its power to try and force millions of migrants out of the country without due process. The daily stories of masked men without proper identification grabbing people off the streets and taking them away in unmarked cars is an intolerable horror.
Add to this the Supreme Court ruling yesterday, enabling the Trump administration to revoke temporary legal status for more than 530,000 immigrants from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela—a humanitarian program created by the Biden administration in 2023 to address the peril they faced in their home countries. It’s hard to overstate the heartbreak and fear this ruling will cause, as all the previously protected people (adults and children) now face the possibility of being deported back to danger. We are all paying for decades of failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, which has provided the conditions for a hateful demagogue to target migrants as a key reason for all that ails us.
Beschloss urges us to hold on to hope and not to give in to fear and despair. He asks us to think about what we hope for America.
…it’s important that we don’t lose sight of what we’re fighting for; this tyrannical regime is hoping to replace our dreams with their nightmares. The more we keep alive the vision of the future we want, the more we will be motivated to make it happen.
I’m trying to hold on to hope. I really am. But it’s hard.
Here’s what I’m thinking about today: Elon Musk is leaving government and politics–supposedly.
Yesterday Elon Musk appeared in the Oval Office with a black eye and several other small bruises on his face. He appeared to be stoned on something–he was doing that weird thing where he rolls his head around over and over again. He was also wearing a t-shire and rumpled jacket and a DOGE baseball cap. He was there because he is supposedly ending his role in the government and returning to running his own companies.
During an Oval Office send-off Friday marking the end of his formal role with the Trump administration, Elon Musk lashed out when asked about a New York Times report alleging he was a frequent user of the drug ketamine during the 2024 campaign.
“The New York Times. Is that the same publication that got a Pulitzer Prize for false reporting on the Russiagate?” Musk asked while standing alongside President Trump, cutting off a question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy about the Times. “Let’s move on.”
Musk’s remarks came on the same day that the Times reported he used ketamine — which can be used both recreationally and medically — as often as once a day in 2024. Musk has told people he took ketamine so frequently that it affected his bladder, and he has also used ecstasy and magic mushrooms at times, the paper said, citing unnamed sources….
Musk has said publicly he has a prescription for ketamine. But he told journalist Don Lemon last year he uses it infrequently, taking a “small amount once every other week” to help him get out of a “depressive mindstate.” He told Lemon he doesn’t feel he’s abused the drug, saying, “if you use too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done…and I have a lot of work.”
Yeah, right. He talks like every addict under the sun: “I can quit any time…”
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that some Musk associates worry his reported drug use could harm his businesses, which include Tesla, SpaceX, social network X and several other firms. The billionaire has brushed off any concerns about the impact on his companies, telling Lemon, “what matters is execution.”
After 130 days spent fighting the federal government, Elon Musk turned up with a black eye at the White House on Friday for his last day as a “special government employee.” If you squinted, you could see it: His right eye socket was puffy and empurpled. No doubt about it, that was a big, fat shiner.
His project in Washington more or less finished, he never came close to cutting the $1 trillion from the federal government he had promised. His businesses and his public image got somewhat battered, and now, apparently, so had his face.
Did somebody beat him up?
The list of possible suspects seemed long. An abridged lineup of people and constituencies currently unhappy with Mr. Musk includes: at least two of the many women with whom he has fathered children; pretty much the entire federal bureaucracy; his neighbors in a suburb of Austin, Texas; Tesla shareholders; old friends of his; Republicans on Capitol Hill; his 20-year-old daughter; all those people who have lit Teslas on fire; and even some Trump voters.
But Musk claimed his 5-year-old son did it.
“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’ and he did,” Mr. Musk explained after a reporter asked him if he was OK.
It was an odd moment in a news conference that was quite odd to begin with. Moments earlier, Mr. Musk had angrily refused to engage with a question put to him about a new report in The New York Times detailing his drug use. Mr. Trump remained mostly mute as Mr. Musk batted back that question. Now the tech mogul was explaining why he looked beaten up….
Mr. Trump has spent a considerable amount of time around the little slugger over these last 130 days. He and Mr. Musk have even brought the child to sit ringside with them at Ultimate Fighting Championship matches. Mr. Trump thought about the explanation that was being offered for the black eye. “X could do it,” he concluded, sounding almost impressed. “If you knew X, he could do it.” The way the president said this, you’d never guess he was talking about a 5-year-old.
Elon Musk‘s swift departure from his signature Department of Government Efficiency and the White House was escalated by an outburst that turned violent, according to a high-profile insider.
Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told DailyMail.com that Musk’s turbulent time in the White House was marred when he physically ‘shoved’ 62-year-old Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent after he was confronted over wild promises to save the administration ‘a trillion dollars’.
‘Scott Bessent called him out and said, ‘You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you’re at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?” the prominent MAGA figure revealed.
‘And that’s when Elon got physical. It’s a sore subject with him.
‘It wasn’t an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him.’
Catzilla
Bannon said the physical altercation came as the two billionaires moved from the Oval Office to outside Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ office, and then outside the office of the then National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz.
‘Trump 100%’ sided with Bessent after the clash, he added. ‘I don’t think Bessent has any bad blood, but he’s got a job to do and he’s going to do it’.
The revelation of a confrontation between the pair was confirmed by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday….
The revelations of the Musk-Bessant clash follow an explosive New York Times report that alleged Musk was using a cocktail of drugs on the campaign trail including ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
he former chief strategist in Trump’s first administration said the mounting issues with DOGE and the China briefings led to Musk losing face in the White House.
I can’t believe that Elon Musk is leaving Doge, the government department he named after a tired and basic meme that most of the internet had moved on from around a decade ago. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end,” Musk wrote this week (capital letters: model’s own), “I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful government spending.” Oh man. “Thank you for the opportunity”?! At some level you have to salute Donald Trump’s ability to turn even the world’s richest man into an Apprentice candidate who leaves in week four after completely wiping out in the hotdog stand task.
Musk arrived in government promising to slash spending by $2tn. He leaves it a mere $1.86tn short of that target, even by his own estimations. Meanwhile, the president’s new tax bill is set to add $2.3tn to the deficit. I imagine Musk thought his government finale would be a spectacular extravaganza – “you’re welcome, Washington!” – involving 2,000 chainsaw-wielding chorus girls. Instead, it’s a tweet. And yes – we DO all still call them tweets.
Ironically, the thing that Musk has been most stunningly effective at slashing is his own reputation. Think about it. He arrived in Trump’s orbit as a somewhat mysterious man, widely regarded as a tech genius, and a titan of the age. He leaves it with vast numbers of people woken up to the fact he’s a weird and creepy breeding fetishist, who desperately pretends to be good at video games, and wasn’t remotely as key to SpaceX or Tesla’s engineering prowess as they’d vaguely thought. Also, with a number of them apparently convinced he had a botched penile implant. Rightly or wrongly convinced – sure. I’m just asking questions.
Catzilla
But look, it’s good news for Tesla investors, who have managed to end Musk’s practice of WFWH (working from White House), and are now demanding he puts in a 40-hour week to save the company whose stock he has spent the past few months tanking. As the world order dramatically seeks to rearrange itself in the new era of US unreliability, no one should ever be able to unsee the president of the United States’s decision to turn the White House lawn into a car sales lot for his sad friend. Did it work? It seems not. Musk spent a lot of this week airing his hurt feelings about his brrm-brrm cars. “People were burning Teslas,” he whined to Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. “Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”
Well, one thing we will no longer have to endure is this guy’s decrees on what is or isn’t cool. The timeworn thing about money and power is that they allow nerds to reinvent themselves as cool. You see it on Wall Street, where sea-beast financiers get manscaped by trophy wives who are no longer out of their league. You see it in Hollywood, where weird little guys become alpha movie producers. You see it in Bezos’s transformation from puffy-chinos-wearing, dress-down-Friday dweeb to Bilderberg Vin Diesel impersonator. What you rarely see is the alchemy of that process in reverse, live and in real time. But we got that with Elon, and we have to take our laughs where we can. In some other businesses, Musk could have convinced himself it wasn’t happening, but politics is a place where pollsters literally ask real people what they think of public figures every single week. Elon’s approval ratings are underwater.
More at the link.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that Musk is really leaving. Even Trump kept saying that yesterday, and Musk said he’ll continue advising Trump. From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (I don’t have a link, because I gots this on my email): Don’t Fall For Elon Inc.’s Press Campaign.
We’re in the midst of a storm of articles — variously encomiums, valedictories, friendly morality tales — about Elon Musk’s purported departure from service in the federal government. I’m going to note a couple quite unflattering pieces in a moment. But for now, I want to focus on the bulk of them, which tend to portray Musk as someone who tried to tame government spending but was simply over-matched by “Washington’s ways” and finally failed. You get the image of a guy who is chastened, heading back to his regular life, no match for Sodom any more than most of us would be.
Let me take this opportunity to say that this all has the look and feel of a well-orchestrated crisis communications job. If reporters out there really want to land a story, get me that story and I will be duly impressed. The point here is to start the project and process of unwinding the brand damage Musk has done to himself and all his companies by his antics over the last six months. After all, if he’s really cut his ties to Trump … well, maybe the whole bad story is just in the rearview mirror? And if he was really “defeated” by Washington, then maybe that’s punishment enough, right? I’m not saying that anyone really pissed at Musk or who now has a super low opinion of him buys that. But good crisis communications work recognizes the limits of the craft. An effort like this is more focused on laying the groundwork for a softening of feelings and impressions over time.
Catzilla, by Catzilla Studios at Deviant Art
You see it in the carefully planted stories and apparently tossed off quotes. Elon won’t be doing any more political giving. Elon doesn’t even like the Big, Beautiful bill. Elon agrees that Elon is chastened. I mean, our boy Elon is practically a Never Trumper now, right? It’s all fairly transparent.
I don’t, for starters, buy that Musk is really leaving government service at all, though the fact that a couple of his top lieutenants are also signing out of DOGE adds a bit more credibility to the claim. (We’ll have to keep on eye on that.) Musk was always the juice behind DOGE. Fear of him was what allowed twenty-something goofs to show up at government departments and be granted the keys to each kingdom. DOGE is probably institutionalized now to some degree. But not that much. And it’s not just the good guys who oppose DOGE. There are lots of factions on Team Bad Guy who want to take a slice out of him too. Remember, he used DOGE to scoop up lots of contracts. I doubt he wants to lose those. But others would like them, too. That means he’ll have to remain involved.
The bigger problem with this storyline is the idea that Musk failed. I so wish that were true. But it’s simply not. To believe that you’d need to buy the idea that the goal was to streamline the government and save a bunch of money as opposed to gut the parts of the government that Trump world and the Silicon Valley right view as enemies and do so in an at best extra-constitutional fashion because it would never be possible through constitutional means. He succeeded at doing quite a lot of that, at least for now. He wrecked whole sections of the government and scooped up a ton of government contracts which not only further feathered his nest but advances the privatization of the government. He also engaged in a still-too-little-understood effort to create a vast store of integrated private information on U.S. citizens. He accomplished a huge amount.
That makes sense to me. I wish Musk would go off into the sunset, but I don’t think we seen or heard the last of him.
That’s my contribution for today. There’s lots of other news, so feel free to post about it in the comments.
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The U.S. has lost its last triple-A credit rating.
Moody’s Ratings downgraded the U.S. government on Friday, citing large fiscal deficits and rising interest costs.
Expanding budget deficits mean U.S. government borrowing will rise at an accelerating rate, pushing interest rates up over the long term, Moody’s said. The firm said Friday that it didn’t believe that any current budget proposals under consideration by lawmakers would do anything significant to reduce the persistent gap between government spending and revenues.
The move strips the U.S. of its last remaining triple-A credit rating from a major ratings firm, following similar cuts by Fitch Ratings in 2023 and S&P Global Ratings in 2011. Moody’s downgraded the U.S. to Aa1, a rating also held by Austria and Finland.
“Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s wrote in a statement….
The Moody’s downgrade comes as Republicans in Congress are trying to fashion a giant tax-and-spending bill that would extend expiring tax cuts, add some new tax cuts, reduce spending on Medicaid and nutrition assistance and boost border enforcement and national defense. It is expected to increase budget deficits by about $3 trillion over the next decade, compared with a scenario where the tax cuts expire as scheduled Dec. 31.
House Republican spending hawks blocked the bill on Friday, trying to accelerate spending cuts and hasten the end of clean-energy tax breaks.
A bit more:
At the margin, the Moody’s downgrade could put pressure on the market for U.S. Treasurys, which has already been hit by expectations for greater borrowing and stubbornly high inflation.
Treasurys, however, rallied after S&P’s 2011 downgrade, in part because the economy was weak, demonstrating that investors still considered the U.S. the world’s safest bet. Few expect the Moody’s downgrade to spur market turmoil this time. The U.S. remains the world’s largest economy and the benchmark against which other countries are measured.
But some investors said the downgrade could exacerbate the damage the recent trade war has done to that exceptional position. And that might compel global investors to lift the premium they demand to buy U.S. debt, which could drive benchmark yields beyond their recent level around 4.5%, likely stressing growth and market sentiment.
“That could generate an even bigger deficit because the cost of servicing our debt would also go up,” said Michael Goosay, global head of fixed income at Principal Asset Management.
Obviously, Trump couldn’t care less about what happens to the U.S. credit rating. He’s just going to bleed the country dry and grab as much has he can while doing it.
Ultra right wing members of the House budget committee voted against Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” yesterday.
The GOP-led House Budget Committee voted to reject a sweeping package for President Donald Trump’s agenda on Friday, dealing an embarrassing setback to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Republican leaders.
A glass of milk, Nataliya Bagatskaya, (Ucraina, b.1967)
The vote in the Budget Committee was 16-21, with a band of conservative hard-liners who are pushing for steeper spending cuts joining all Democrats in voting against the multitrillion-dollar legislation, leaving its fate uncertain.
The Republicans who voted “no” were Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma. Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania changed his vote from “yes” to “no,” he said, as a procedural move to allow Republicans to call the bill up again.
During the hearing, Roy fired a warning shot at Republican leaders, saying he opposes the bill as written because it will increase the deficit.
“I have to now admonish my colleagues on this side of the aisle. This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits,” Roy said. “That’s the truth. Deficits will go up in the first half of the 10-year budget window and we all know it’s true. And we shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t say that we’re doing something we’re not doing.”
“This bill has back-loaded savings and has front-loaded spending,” Roy added. “I am a no on this bill unless serious reforms are made today, tomorrow, Sunday. Something needs to change or you’re not gonna get my support.”
After the vote tally was read, Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the committee chair, adjourned the hearing and told members they would not be meeting again this weekend.
President Donald Trump blasted Walmart on Saturday after the retailer warned this week that it will raise prices because of tariffs.
“Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”
Walmart CFO John David Rainey said in an interview on Thursday that “We have not seen price increases at this magnitude, in the speed in which they’re coming at us before, and so it makes for a challenging environment.”
Rainey said he is “pleased with the progress that’s been made by the [Trump] administration on tariffs from the levels that were announced in early April, but they’re still too high.”
He said the company will “try to work with suppliers to keep prices as low as we can.”
Yesterday the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Trump administration’s deportation plans.
The Supreme Court on Friday blocked President Donald Trump from moving forward with deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act for a group of immigrants in northern Texas, siding with Venezuelans who feared they were poised for imminent removal under the sweeping wartime authority.
The decision is a significant loss for Trump, who wants to use the law to speed deportations – and avoid the kind of review normally required before removing people from the country. But the decision is also temporary and the underlying legal fight over the president’s invocation will continue in multiple federal courts across the country.
By Sandra Batoni
The justices sent the case at issue back to an appeals court to decide the underlying questions in the case, including whether the president’s move is legal and, if it is, how much notice the migrants targeted under the act should receive….
The court’s unsigned opinion was notably pointed about how the government was attempting to handle the removals and also how US District Judge James Hendrix had dealt with the case at an earlier stage.
The court referenced another case that had reached it previously, that of the Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly removed to El Salvador. The court noted that the Trump administration has represented that it is “unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador.”
Given that, the court said, “the detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty.” In other words, the court was saying it is important to get the legal questions correct before people are removed, potentially, forever.
Way back on <checks notes> Wednesday, I wrote a long post updating the state of play in the (many) cases challenging President Trump’s attempt to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove from the United States, on a mass, summary basis, individuals the government claims to be Venezuelan members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA)….
As I noted then, the Supreme Court had yet to decide the ACLU’s pending emergency application in the case from the Northern District of Texas—with the unhelpful caption “A.A.R.P. v. Trump.” That’s the case in which the Court had temporarily blocked further removals in its after-midnight ruling early on Saturday, April 19 (which I covered here). But a full ruling on the application has been pending ever since.
Well, around 3:45 on Friday afternoon, that ruling came down. And the decision—in “A.A.R.P. II”—is a pretty big deal. So I thought I’d put together this quick post that walks through what happened—and why it matters….
What Did the Court … Hold? There’s a lot of technical stuff in the eight-page, unsigned majority opinion.1 What’s especially important are, by my count, three different holdings: First, that the Fifth Circuit did have jurisdiction to hear the plaintiffs’ appeal of the district court’s refusal to block their removal (it had concluded otherwise). Second, that the plaintiffs were entitled to more notice than they had received as of April 18. And third—and this is the quiet bombshell in the ruling—that “this Court may properly issue temporary injunctive relief to the putative class in order to preserve our jurisdiction pending appeal,” even without resolving whether full class certification is likely….
The post is pretty technical, so if you want the details, read the whole thing at the link. I’ll just quote one more section:
Is It Me, Or is the Majority Opinion … Unusually Pointed? It’s not you. There are at different passages in which the majority openly seems to be expressing … frustration … with the government; the lower courts; and Justice Alito (who wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justice Thomas), respectively.
It appears that at least some of the justices are getting sick and tired of the Trump administration’s dishonesty and refusal to obey the courts.
GREENBELT, Md. — In a contentious court hearing on Friday, Trump administration attorneys argued before a federal judge in Maryland that they should be allowed to withhold information regarding efforts to facilitate the return of a Salvadoran man to the United States.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in the Salvadoran prison system despite orders from a federal judge and the Supreme Court calling for the government to facilitate his return to the United States.
Drawing of old woman with cat, Max Leibermann
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said the government’s refusal to provide certain information in the case has been “an exercise in utter frustration.” In a back-and-forth that has continued for weeks,Xinis has ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release and provide documentation on what steps it has taken, if any, to comply with that order.
Government lawyers said the administration has not been able to answer questions about Abrego Garcia’s case because that information would be considered protected under “state secrets” or “deliberative process” privileges that should not be shared with the public.
On Friday, Xinis said the administration has not made a good-faith effort to comply with the court order. She repeatedly called on the administration to show how turning over evidence of actions it has taken or will take to return Abrego Garcia would pose a reasonable danger to foreign affairs.
“There is simply no detail. This is basically, ‘Take my word for it,’” the judge said.
From Garcia’s attorneys:
Abrego Garcia’s team said the discovery they’ve received from the government thus far has been inadequate, and Xinis appeared to agree. The plaintiffs said they received 164 documents, and 132 of them were photocopies of court filings and their own discovery requests. Rossman said that of the remaining 32 new documents, half were related to Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s recent trip to El Salvador to see Abrego Garcia.
Rossman said the government logged 1,140 documents as “privileged,” in “every manner of privilege that I’ve ever heard of.”
“My head is spinning, your honor,” he said.
Rossman also said it was “deeply disturbing” that while the administration has claimed in court that it’s complying with the order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release, high-ranking officials including Trump himself have contradicted that in public.
The administration’s claims, Xinis says, have been hampering efforts to get to the bottom of whether the government has disobeyed the court order by not facilitating the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States.
When a Guatemalan man sued the Trump administration in March for deporting him to Mexico despite a fear of persecution, immigration officials had a response: The man told them himself he was not afraid to be sent there.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials now say they have no record of anyone being told by the man, identified only by the initials O.C.G. in court papers, that he was unafraid of going to Mexico. The error, they say, was attributable to a “software tool” known as ICE’s “ENFORCE alien removal module” that tracks individual deportation cases and allows staff to insert comments.
“Upon further investigation … ICE was unable to identify an officer or officers who asked O.C.G. if he feared a return to Mexico,” said Brian Ortega, assistant field office director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, in a sworn statement to the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit.
The mistake may have been costly: The judge overseeing the lawsuit said last month he did not order the administration to facilitate O.C.G.’s immediate return from Mexico in part because of the dispute. Instead, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee based in Massachusetts, ordered expedited fact-finding, which helped unearth the mistake.
ICE’s acknowledgment is the latest in a string of errors that have led judges to fault the administration for attempting to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign at a breakneck pace — often at the expense of due process.
The U.S. DOGE Service arrived at the Social Security Administration this year determined to slash staff and root out what it claimed was widespread fraud and wasteful spending — a mission Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team has pursued across the government.
But as of this week, many of the major changes DOGE pushed at Social Security have been abandoned or are being reversed after proving ineffective, while others are yielding unintended consequences and badly damaging customer service and satisfaction. The problems come as the agency struggles to cope with a record surge of hundreds of thousands of retirement claims in recent months.
DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency but is not a Cabinet-level agency, had to cancela plan to cut phone service for retirement and disability claimsafter drawing outrage from lawmakers, seniors and advocates. Staff reductions and reassignments led by DOGE are slowing the pace of claims processingas field offices lose longtime staff and gain a smaller number of inexperienced replacements. DOGE-driven changes to the agency’s website are causing crashes almost every day, and phone customers complain about dropped calls and long wait times. A DOGE-imposed spending freeze is leading to shortages of basic office supplies, from printer cartridges to the phone headsets staff need to do their jobs.
And on Friday, Social Security leaders told employees that the agency was ending a security check, developed at DOGE’s request, that was meant to root out allegedly fraudulent claims filed over the phone, according to three employees familiar with the situation and an email obtained by The Washington Post. But the measure — which involved placing a three-day hold on all phone claims as other staffers checked into the caller’s background — had only identified a couple of potential fraud cases while causing significant delays in claims processing, two employees said.
Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official who is now at the left-leaningCenter on Budget and Policy Priorities, said there were already safeguards in place to detect fraud through the agency’s phone service. DOGE’s efforts have only delayed claims processing and, like most of the team’s attempts to reshape Social Security, placed serious stress on the agency, she said.
“So much of this is self-inflicted wounds,” Romig said.
At the National Institutes of Health, six directors — from institutes focused on infectious disease, child health, nursing research and the human genome — are leaving or being forced out.
t the Federal Aviation Administration, nearly a dozen top leaders, including the chief air traffic officer, are retiring early.
Siesta, Irina Orazio Orazi (Italian, 1848-1912)
And at the Treasury Department, more than 200 experienced managers and highly skilled technical experts who help run the government’s financial systems chose to accept the Trump administration’s resignation offer earlier this year, according to a staffer and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Across the federal government, a push for early retirement and voluntary separation is fueling a voluntary exodus of experienced, knowledgeable staffers unlike anything in living memory, according to interviews with 18 employees across 10 agencies and records reviewed by The Post. Other leaders with decades of service are being dismissed as the administration eliminates full offices or divisions at a time.
The first resignation offer, sent in January, saw 75,000 workers across government agree to quit and keep drawing pay through September, the administration has said. But a second round, rolling out agency by agency through the spring, is seeing a sustained, swelling uptick that will dwarf the first, potentially climbing into the hundreds of thousands, the employees and the records show.
There’s no way I’m trusting anything this government has to say about health and safety.
I’ll wrap this up with a couple of ridiculous stories:
Former FBI Director James Comey was interviewed by US Secret Service agents at their Washington, DC, field office on Friday afternoon, according to law enforcement sources.
Comey was interviewed by agents investigating a social media post he posted Thursdayshowing shells in the sand on a beach spelling out “86 47,” which has become a popular social media code for removing Trump from the presidency.
Comey was not in custody and appeared voluntarily, a source said.
Trump and fellow Republicans have attacked Comey for the post, demanding an investigation.
Comey “knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in a Fox News interview. “A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination.”
In explaining why he removed the post, Comey wrote on Instagram that he had “posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.”
It was expected that Comey will be asked if he intended the message as a threat, or to inspire others who might consider an act of violence against Trump, the source said. Ultimately, a decision on whether the case is chargeable as a threat against the president may lie with the US attorney in Washington.
Funny how no Trumpers were interviewed by the FBI when they posted 86 46 when Biden was president.
Figure with Black Cat, 2020 by Mary Sauer (American, b. 1986)
“I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States,” Trump wrote, glossing over the fact that he, too, is currently in a foreign country speaking badly about someone.
Trump also called Springsteen “a pushy, obnoxious JERK” without a hint of self-awareness.
Springsteen opened the first show of his tour with an unambiguous rallying cry for democracy, warning that America “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”
“Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us,” he said. “Raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
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Pope Francis has been eulogised as “a pope among the people, with an open heart towards everyone” during a funeral mass that brought 400,000 mourners to Rome, from pilgrims and refugees to powerful world leaders and royalty.
Francis, 88, died on Monday after a stroke and subsequent heart failure, setting into motion a series of centuries-old rituals and a huge, meticulously planned logistical and security operation not seen in Italy since the funeral of John Paul II in April 2005.
The crowd erupted into applause as the late pontiff’s wooden coffin was carried from the altar of the 16th-century St Peter’s Basilica, where it had laid in state for three days, by 14 white-gloved pallbearers and into the square for the open-air ceremony.
Applause also rang out when the Italian cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who presided over the funeral mass, spoke of Francis’s care for immigrants, his constant pleas for peace, the need for negotiations to end wars and the importance of the climate.
Under a blue sky, crowds stretched along Via della Conciliazione, the road connecting the Italian capital with the Vatican.
Among the pilgrims were Rosa Cirielli and her friend Pina Sanarico, who left their homes in Taranto, in southern Italy, at 5am, and managed to secure themselves a decent position in front of a huge TV screen. “When Pope Francis was alive, he gave us hope. Now we have this huge hole,” said Cirielli. “He left us during a very ugly period for the world. He was the only one who loudly called for peace.”
The pilgrims were joined by leaders from more than 150 countries, including the US president, Donald Trump, who had repeatedly clashed with Francis over immigration, and his wife Melania. A White House official said Trump had a “very productive” meeting before the ceremony with Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. A photo showed the pair sitting opposite each other on chairs inside St Peter’s Basilica. Another image showed them together with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and French president, Emmanuel Macron. Trump and Zelenskyy were also expected to meet after the mass.
Other guests included the former US president Joe Biden, who last met Francis at the G7 summit in Puglia in June 2024, the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and Prince William.
More than 2,000 journalists from around the world travelled to Rome to cover the event.
The 90-minute mass was celebrated by 220 cardinals, 750 bishops and more than 4,000 priests.
Trump did not belong at the funeral of Pope Francis, but he bulled his way in and demanded special treatment. Can you believe didn’t even wear black?
President Donald Trump, wearing a blue suit in a sea of black, was seated in a prized front-row seat for the funeral of Pope Francis.
The seating location will likely be a source of great satisfaction for the famously thin-skinned president, who mercilessly mocked Joe Biden after he was seated in the 14th row at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022.
By Jos Rian
Based on precedent, Trump was expected to have been seated in the third row, behind anointed monarchs.
In the end, however, he and Melania were seated in the front row, along with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, whose appearance triggered a spontaneous outburst of applause from the assembled crowds.
Vatican sources told Sky News that Trump met with Zelensky before the ceremony, just hours after the president talked up a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia.
The controversy over Trump’s seating would doubtless have prompted a wry reaction from the overtly humble Pope Francis, who dedicated considerable political capital to confronting Trump, denouncing his immigration policy as “un-Christian” and schooling his minion JD Vance on the issue in his final hours.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, previously told the Telegraph the ceremony would be a “masterpiece of stage management when you consider those state leaders who have high opinions of their importance.”
“They’ve been doing it since the emperors ruled Rome—they know how to deal with big egos. And I think every leader of a nation that comes here on Saturday will go home reasonably content,” he added.
President Trump met privately with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday in Vatican City, the first time the two leaders have met since their televised argument in late February in the Oval Office exacerbated the deep breach between the two countries.
The meeting took place in St. Peter’s Basilica, the two men perched on metal chairs, deep in conversation for several minutes as they waited for the funeral for Pope Francis to begin. A White House spokesman, Stephen Cheung, called it a “very productive discussion,” but gave no details.
It came at a critical moment. The United States has presented Ukraine with a plan for a cease-fire in its war with Russia, leading to a postwar plan that would give Russia de facto control over all of the lands it has illegally seized since the invasion began three years ago. The proposal also includes a major reversal of American policy: a formal recognition by the United States that Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014, is now Russian territory.
Mr. Zelensky said this past week that Ukraine would never make that concession, noting that it would violate Ukraine’s Constitution; most of the other nations in Europe would almost agree with Mr. Zelensky’s view. But the Ukrainian leader has a counterproposal of his own, Ukrainian officials said, one that would end the conflict on far less generous terms for Russia, and would include billions of dollars in reparations for Ukraine, paid by Russia.
The White House did not respond to queries about the specifics of the meeting in Vatican City. But it was a remarkable scene: an impromptu meeting between two men who have made no secret of their deep dislike and distrust for each other. In the minutes after they last saw each other, Mr. Zelensky was essentially evicted from the White House, a lunch for the two men left uneaten and an economic accord allowing the United States to help exploit much of Ukraine’s minerals left unsigned.
Some very sad news: Virginia Giuffre had died by suicide.
Her family issued a statement on Saturday confirming she took her own life at her farm in Western Australia, where she had lived for several years.
“It is with utterly broken hearts that we announce that Virginia passed away last night at her farm in Western Australia. She lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking,” the statement read.
By Nicolai Tonitza
“In the end, the toll of abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia to handle its weight.”
Giuffre was one of the most vocal victims of Epstein, alleging she had been groomed and sexually abused by him and his longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, beginning in her teens.
The family described her as a “fierce warrior” against sexual abuse and sex trafficking and a “light that lifted so many survivors”.
“Despite all the adversity she faced in her life, she shone so bright. She will be missed beyond measure,” they said.
Giuffre is survived by her three children, Christian, Noah and Emily, who her family said were the “light of her life”.
“It was when she held her newborn daughter in her arms that Virginia realised she had to fight back against those who had abused her and so many others,” they said.
“There are no words that can express the grave loss we feel today with the passing of our sweet Virginia. She was heroic and will always be remembered for her incredible courage and loving spirit.”
Giuffre, 41, died in Neergabby, Australia, where she had been living for several years.
Giuffre was one of the earliest and loudest voices calling for criminal charges against Epstein and his enablers. Other Epstein abuse survivors later credited her with giving them the courage to speak out.
She also provided critical information to law enforcement that contributed to the investigation into and later the conviction of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as other investigations by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York….
Raised primarily in Florida, Giuffre had a troubled childhood. She said she was abused by a family friend, triggering a downward spiral that led to her living on the streets for a time as a teenager.
She was attempting to rebuild her life when she met Maxwell, Epstein’s close confidant. Maxwell groomed her to be sexually abused by Epstein, and that abuse continued from 1999 to 2002, according to Giuffre. Giuffre also alleged that Epstein trafficked her to his powerful friends, including Prince Andrew and French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel.
Epstein, a wealthy financier, died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell, a former British socialite, was found guilty on five counts of sex trafficking in 2021 for her role in recruiting young girls to be abused by Epstein.
Giuffre filed a federal lawsuit against Andrew in 2021, alleging that he sexually abused her when she was 17. Andrew, who stepped back from his duties as an active royal as controversy related to Epstein swirled around him, agreed to settle the case for an undisclosed amount in 2022. He has denied having sex with her.
Brunel, who headed several modeling agencies, was charged with sexual harassment and the rape of at least one minor in December 2020. He denied wrongdoing and died by suicide in his jail cell in February 2022.
Several months prior, Giuffre testified against Brunel in a Paris courtroom in June 2021. In an interview after her daylong closed-door testimony, Giuffre said she appeared in court to be a voice for the victims and to make sure Brunel was brought to justice.
“I wanted Brunel to know that he no longer has the power over me,” Giuffre said, “that I am a grown woman now and I’ve decided to hold him accountable for what he did to me and so many others.”
Giuffre moved to Australia with her husband before Epstein’s 2019 arrest. The couple has three children.
There was quite a bit of immigration news yesterday.
The federal government used brazen, heavy-handed tactics on Friday to arrest a Wisconsin state judge on obstruction charges related to an immigration case.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan received the distinction of being arrested at her courthouse. She does not appear to have been given the opportunity to surrender to law enforcement.
By Nicola Slattery
Instead, Trump administration officials immediately used the arrest to create a spectacle and broadcast to the country that state officials — including sitting judges — must cooperate with the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign or else face overbearing actions from federal law enforcement.
A U.S. Marshals Service spokesman told TPM that FBI agents arrested Dugan at around 8:30 a.m. Milwaukee time. They made the arrest, Marshals spokesman Brady McCarron told TPM, as she arrived for work on the state courthouse grounds, detaining her outside of the building.
Around half an hour after, FBI Director Kash Patel posted a tweet announcing the arrest.
“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse,” he wrote. Patel deleted the tweet minutes later, though he would later repost it.
Contrast the brazenness of Dugan’s arrest, and Patel’s efforts to manufacture publicity around it, with how a somewhat similar case proceeded during Trump’s first term. In 2019, a Massachusetts state judge was indicted on obstruction charges over allegations of blocking ICE officials from taking custody of an undocumented citizen of the Dominican Republic. In that case, itself an extremely rare federal prosecution of a state judge over a decision related to the use of her office, the defendant was allowed to surrender. The DOJ dropped the charges in September 2022.
Read the rest at TPM. This will be an important case to watch. I suspect this isn’t the last judge who will be targeted by Trump goons.
Over the course of the past three days, the Trump administration took a two-year-old U.S. citizen into custody, along with her mother and sister, and deported the child to Honduras with little to no individualized process, prompting sharp concern from a conservative federal judge on Friday.
The Justice Department does not appear to dispute the underlying facts, given its position in a filing faxed to the court about 3:45 a.m. CT Friday in response to a habeas petition filed on behalf of the child, referred to as V.M.L., on Thursday evening.
Instead, the Justice Department’s entire argument was simply that, once in custody and told she was going to be deported, V.M.L.’s mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, wrote a note stating that she would bring her two-year-old daughter with her to Honduras.
By Jos Rian
As the habeas petition made clear, however, many federal officials knew that both V.M.L.’s father, Adiel Mendez Sagastume, and provisional custodian, Trish Mack, were desperately trying to get in touch with Jenny and/or get V.M.L. released to them throughout the 70 hours between when the two of them and Jenny’s other child were taken into custody and flown to Texas before Friday’s flight to Honduras.
On Friday, in the wake of all of this information, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty issued an order setting a hearing “[i]n the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The order was first reported by Politico.
That the order came from Doughty, a far-right Trump appointee known for his harsh criticism of the Biden administration in a case about social media that was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, was yet another reminder of how alarming the Trump administration’s actions are being seen by judges of all backgrounds.
Of the deportation of a two-year-old U.S. citizen, Doughty wrote on Friday, “The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that.“
New Orleans, LA – Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.
ICE detained the first family on Tuesday, April 22, and the second family on Thursday, April 24. In both cases, ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
As a result, the families were completely isolated during critical moments when decisions were being made about the welfare of their minor children. This included decisions with serious implications for the health, safety, and legal rights of the children involved–without any opportunity to coordinate with caretakers or consult with legal representatives.
New Orleans, LA – Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.
By Alberto Morrocco
ICE detained the first family on Tuesday, April 22, and the second family on Thursday, April 24. In both cases, ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
As a result, the families were completely isolated during critical moments when decisions were being made about the welfare of their minor children. This included decisions with serious implications for the health, safety, and legal rights of the children involved–without any opportunity to coordinate with caretakers or consult with legal representatives.
These actions stand in direct violation of ICE’s own written and informal directives, which mandate coordination for the care of minor children with willing caretakers–regardless of immigration status–when deportations are being carried out.
Both families have possible immigration relief, but because ICE denied them access to their attorneys, legal counsel was unable to assist and advise them in time. With one family, government attorneys had assured legal counsel that a legal call would be arranged within 24-48 hours, as well as a call with a family member. Instead, just after close of business and after courts closed for the day, ICE suddenly reversed course and informed counsel that the family would be deported at 6am the next morning–before the court reopened.
The Justice Department quietly invoked the Alien Enemies act last month to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the power to conduct warrantless searches of people’s homes as long as they suspect them to be an “alien enemy.” USA Today obtained the memo that contained this order on Friday.
“As much as practicable, officers should follow the proactive procedures above—and have an executed Warrant of Apprehension and Removal—before contacting an Alien Enemy,” the memo reads. “However, that will not always be realistic or effective in swiftly identifying and removing Alien Enemies.… An officer may encounter a suspected Alien Enemy in the natural course of the officer’s enforcement activity, such as when apprehending other validated members of Tren de Aragua. Given the dynamic nature of enforcement operations, officers in the field are authorized to apprehend aliens upon a reasonable belief that the alien meets all four requirements to be validated as an Alien Enemy. This authority includes entering an Alien Enemy’s residence to make an AEA apprehension where circumstances render it impracticable to first obtain a signed Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal” (emphasis added).
In the memo, the Justice Department defined an “alien enemy” as anyone who is 14 years of age or older, not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, a citizen of Venezuela, and “a member of the hostile enemy Tren de Aragua,” per the Alien Enemy Validation Guide, a document that has already been slammed by immigration experts.
A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show.
The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has sought a wide swath of information from IRS employees. In particular, the office is seeking any requests for taxpayer data from the president, the Executive Office of the President, DOGE or the president’s Office of Management and Budget.
The request, spelled out in a mid-April email obtained by ProPublica, comes as watchdogs and leading Democrats question whether DOGE has overstepped its bounds in seeking information about taxpayers, public employees or federal agencies that is typically highly restricted.
By Arthur Io
The review appears to be in its early stages — one document describes staffers as “beginning preplanning” — but the email directs the IRS to turn over specific documents by Thursday, April 24. It’s not clear if that happened.
The inspector general is seeking, for instance, “All requests for taxpayer or other protected information from the President or Executive Office of the President, OMB, or DOGE. Include any information on how the requestor plans to use the information requested, the IRS’s response to the request, and the legal basis for the IRS’s response,” the email says.
The inquiry also asks for information about requests for access to IRS systems from any agency in the executive branch, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and DOGE.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration office, known as TIGTA, is led by acting Inspector General Heather M. Hill. When Trump fired 17 inspectors general across a range of federal agencies in January, those working for the Treasury Department were not among the ones axed.
Elon Musk, as a yet-unproven entrepreneur in his mid-twenties, declared himself the “reincarnation” of ancient Greek conqueror Alexander the Great, a new book on the billionaire has revealed.
Musk, now 53, made the comment around 30 years ago to a partner at one of the firms that bankrolled his first start-up, Zip2, which aimed to bring the Yellow Pages online, Washington Post reporter Faiz Siddiqui writes in Hubris Maximus, published Tuesday.
Derek Proudian, then at Mohr Davidow Ventures, recalled grabbing lunch with the young Musk to discuss how to make the company viable on a small scale.
Musk, however, insisted that he think bigger: Zip2 was “going to be the biggest company ever,” Proudian recalled him saying.
When Proudian tried to change the subject, Musk doubled down.
“No—you don’t understand,” he said. “I’m the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great.”
Incredulous, Proudian pushed back that he might not reach that level of success. Musk wasn’t willing to hear it.
“I’ve got the samurai spirit,” he said. “I’d rather commit seppuku than fail.”
Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
What’s that old saying about an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? It makes me believe that some people really do not want to be taught the basics of reality. My first experience with meteorologists came when I was hired by the Global Weather Wings of the Navy and Air Force to help them improve their process of making forecasts and getting them out way back in the early 1990s. The motivation was the death of soldiers and the accompanying loss of equipment of troops in a huge sandstorm in the Middle East, and a look back on the loss of helicopters and troops trying to rescue the Iran Hostages. A lot came out of that effort, including looking for better types of radar, mitigation, forecasting in general, and then alert systems. My clearance only went so far, so the Birds in the Back did a lot of work I never really saw. I just know the systematic approach to it all caused a lot more success in avoiding weather in the Gulf Wars that followed.
The moral of the story is to make sure your phone will send you emergency alerts from NOAA and from your local emergency center. Then, take it seriously. I lived my entire young life with Tornado Sirens. Each state needs to be prepared and Texas screwed up. The last perspective I want to share is from the
It’s a long article, and it basically starts with his family background. Maybe BB can give us some hints as to why he turned into such a monster. This concluding paragraph shows what a monster this man became.
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