You know, there’s stupid, and then there’s stupid on a level that is unbelievably dangerous. While RFK Jr. is very busy attempting to ensure that America loses its measles elimination status through a combination of vaccine skepticism, pushing alternative treatments, and generally being unable to present a solid message around the current outbreak, you will recall that he also recently traveled to Texas to visit the family of a child that recently died from measles. In turning that visit into a grotesque photo opp for his social media account, Kennedy also lauded the work of what he called two “extraordinary healers” that had “treated and healed” hundreds of children infected with measles.
At the same time, he continued to promote medically unsound treatments for the viral disease. In a separate post, he stated that he met with two doctors, Richard Bartlett and Ben Edwards, and claimed that they had “treated and healed” some 300 Mennonite children using a combination of aerosolized budesonide (a steroid) and clarithromycin (an antibiotic).
One of those doctors, Ben Edwards, is back in the news. Not because his so-called treatments healed even more children, mind you, but rather because he managed to get a breakthrough case of the measles himself. And, because these are deeply unserious, wildly dangerous people, Edwards kept showing up to work at health facilities and continued to treat measles cases while he was infected.
The doctor’s infection was revealed in a video posted online by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the rabid anti-vaccine advocacy organization founded and previously run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time anti-vaccine advocate who is now the US secretary of health. Kennedy headed CHD until January, when he stepped down in anticipation of his Senate confirmation.
In the video, the doctor, Ben Edwards, can be seen with mild spots on his face. Someone asks him if he caught measles himself, and he responds, “Yeah,” saying he was “pretty achy yesterday.” He went on to say that he had developed the rash the day before but woke up that day feeling “pretty good.” The video was posted by CHD on March 31, and the Associated Press was the first to report it.
It’s hard to overstate just how insidiously ignorant this is. Edwards told the AP that he only worked with patients already infected with measles, apparently attempting to suggest that he wasn’t putting anyone at danger with his own infection. Unfortunately for that claim of his, the video he appeared in showed him in rooms with groups of people who don’t appear to have been patients, all while he conversed with them unmasked.
He shouldn’t even have been there. Walking into a healthcare facility while infected with measles carries all kinds of risk and is the exact type action that prolongs or furthers an outbreak of an infectious disease. In this case, one of the most infectious diseases.
And, of course, Kennedy’s advocacy for this kind of quackery from the seat of federal healthcare oversight is absolutely bonkers.
Edwards and his unproven treatments have garnered direct praise from Kennedy, who in a social media post called Edwards and another controversial doctor working in the area, Richard Bartlett, “extraordinary healers.” In 2003, Bartlett was disciplined by the Texas Medical Board for “unusual use of risk-filled medications” in multiple patients, including children. The risky treatments included intravenous antibiotics and hefty doses of glucocorticoids.
Edwards will be fine, most likely. He got the MMR vaccine as a child, though he cannot recall whether he received one shot or the recommended two shots. That may explain the breakthrough infection, as a single shot only offers something like 93% lifetime protection.
But the people in the facility he waltzed into may not be so lucky.
The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a “politician” with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”
Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly’s youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program “Succession” (without the obscenities).
At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he’s the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department.
In early 2015, Schlafly had selected Martin to succeed her as head of the Eagle Forum, a crowning moment in Martin’s career. Yet after just a year in charge, the group’s board fired Martin. Schlafly’s youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, and a majority of the Eagle Forum board filed a lawsuit to bar Martin from any association with the organization.
After Barberis dealt Martin a major setback in the case in October 2016, the attacks began. The Facebook user who posted them, Priscilla Gray, had worked in several roles for Schlafly but was not a party to the case, and her comments read like those of an aggrieved outsider.
Almost two years later, the truth emerged as Cori’s lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit: Behind the posts about the judge was none other than Martin.
ProPublica obtained previously unreported documents filed in the case that show Martin had bought a laptop for Gray and that she subsequently offered to “happily write something to attack this judge.” And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use and coached her on how to make her comments look more “organic.”
Ed Martin exchanged emails with Priscilla Gray, who had worked in various roles for Phyllis Schlafly, about how to attack Judge John Barberis. Credit:Documents obtained, formatted and highlighted by ProPublica
“That is not justice but a rigged system,” he urged her to write. “Shame on you and this broken legal system.”
“Call what he did unfair and rigged over and over,” Martin continued.
Martin even urged Gray to message the judge privately. “Go slow and steady,” he advised. “Make it organic.”
Gray appeared to take Martin’s advice. “Private messaging him that sweet line,” she wrote. It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture.
Gray told Martin she would direct message Barberis after she was blocked from commenting on his Facebook page. Credit:Documents obtained, formatted and highlighted by ProPublica
Legal experts told ProPublica that Martin’s conduct in the Eagle Forum case was a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules. Martin’s behavior, they said, was especially egregious because he was both a defendant in the case and a licensed attorney.
Martin appeared to be “deliberately interfering with a judicial proceeding with the intent to undermine the integrity of the outcome,” said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law. “That’s not OK.”
Martin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Martin’s legal and political career is dotted with questions about his professional and ethical conduct. But for all his years in the spotlight, some of the most serious concerns about his conduct have remained in the shadows — buried in court filings, overlooked by the press or never reported at all.
His actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers in a handful of cases. In the Eagle Forum lawsuit, another judge found him in civil contempt, citing his “willful disregard” of a court order, and a jury found him liable for defamation and false light against Cori.
Cori also tried to have Martin charged with criminal contempt for his role in orchestrating the posts about Barberis, but a judge declined to take up the request and said she could take the case to the county prosecutor. Cori said her attorney met with a detective; Martin was never charged.
Nonetheless, the emails unearthed by ProPublica were evidence that he had violated Missouri rules for lawyers, according to Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She said lawyers are prohibited from trying to contact a judge outside of court in a case they are involved in, and they are barred from using a proxy to do something they are barred from doing themselves.
Such a track record might have derailed another lawyer’s career. Not so for Martin.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to use the Justice Department to reward his allies and seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Since taking office, Trump and his appointees have made good on those pledges, pardoning Jan. 6 rioters while targeting Democratic politicians, media critics and private law firms.
As one of its first personnel picks, the Trump administration chose Martin to be interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the premier jobs for a federal prosecutor.
A wide array of former prosecutors, legal observers and others have raised questions about his qualifications for an office known for handling high-profile cases. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor. He has never taken a case to trial, according to his public disclosures. As the acting leader of the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country, he directs the work of hundreds of lawyers who appear in court on a vast array of subjects, including legal disputes arising out of Congress, national security matters, public corruption and civil rights, as well as homicides, drug trafficking and many other local crimes.
Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases.
Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University’s law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or “chase” people in the federal government “discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.”
Martin “has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration,” says an open letter signed by more than 100 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia under Democratic and Republican presidents.
Already, Martin has been the subject of at least fourdisciplinarycomplaints with the D.C. and Missouri bars, of which one was dismissed and the other three appear to be pending. Two of the complaints came after he moved to dismiss charges against a Jan. 6 rioter whom he had previously represented and for whom he was still listed as counsel of record. (The first complaint was dismissed after the D.C. bar’s disciplinary panel concluded that Martin had dismissed the case as a result of Trump’s pardons and so did not violate any rules.) The third was filed in March by a group of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The fourth was submitted last week by a group of former Jan. 6 prosecutors and members of the conservative-leaning Society for the Rule of Law. It argues that Martin’s actions so far “threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the legal profession in the District of Columbia.” If Martin has responded to any of the complaints, those responses have not been made public.
Trump has nominated Martin to run the office permanently. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have vowed to drag out Martin’s confirmation, demanding a hearing and setting up a fight over one of Trump’s most controversial nominees.
Martin stepped off the elevator into the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. He was angry at a reporter named Jo Mannies, one of the city’s top political journalists. At a conference table with Mannies and her senior editors, he accused Mannies of being unethical and pressed the paper’s leadership to spike her stories about him, according to interviews.
Mannies said later she believed he was trying to get her fired.
“He was attacking her,” said Pam Maples, who was managing editor at the time. “He was implying she had an ax to grind, that she wanted to get some big story and that she was not being ethical. And when that didn’t get traction, it was more like ‘this isn’t a story.’ It wasn’t that he said anything about a fact being inaccurate, or he wanted to retract a story; he wanted the reporting to stop.”
Mannies had been covering a scandal dubbed “Memogate” that started to unfold in 2007 while Martin was chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt. In that role, Martin was using his government email to undermine Democratic rivals and rally anti-abortion groups. But when reporters requested emails from Blunt’s staff, the governor’s office denied they existed. Media organizations joined a lawsuit to preserve the messages and recover them from backup tapes.
An attorney for the governor, Scott Eckersley, later said in a deposition that Martin tried to block the release of government emails and told employees to delete their messages. After Eckersley warned that doing so might violate state law, he was fired. He sued the state for wrongful termination and defamation and settled for $500,000. Martin resigned as chief of staff in 2007 after just over a year on the job, and Blunt’s office would eventually hand over 22 boxes of internal emails.
In a 2008 email to the Associated Press, Martin dismissed Eckersley’s lawsuit as a “desperate attempt” to revise his story after he was fired, citing Eckersley’s own testimony that not all emails are public records.
The Memogate incident was telling — and Martin’s efforts to have Mannies fired were never reported. “His claim was we were misrepresenting what the law was and what he was doing,” she told ProPublica. “I mean, he can get very hyper. He can get very emotional.”
When Martin launched a bid for Congress in 2010, he acted as if Memogate was ancient history. He made himself available to Mannies, she recalled, always taking her calls. Years later, he even appeared, lighthearted and bantering, on a St. Louis Public Radio podcast Mannies co-hosted. She said Martin could be outlandish and aggressive, but he could also be disarmingly passionate about whatever cause he was pursuing at the moment, often speaking in a frenetic rush. “He just wore people down with his enthusiasm,” she said.
Martin allowed a different St. Louis reporter to shadow him during his 2010 run for Congress. The reporter asked about the St. Louis election board, a dysfunctional organization that, by all accounts, Martin had helped turn around in the mid-2000s. Martin had fired an employee there named Jeanne Bergfeld, and she later sued for wrongful termination. The board settled the lawsuit.
As part of the settlement, Martin agreed not to talk about the case and the board paid Bergfeld $55,000. Martin and two others issued a letter saying she had been a “conscientious and dedicated professional.”
But talking to the reporter covering his campaign, Martin said Bergfeld enjoyed “not having to do anything” and “wasn’t interested in changing.” The day after the story was published, Bergfeld sued Martin again, this time for violating the settlement agreement. Martin denied making the comments, but the Riverfront Times released audio that proved he had.
Martin agreed to pay Bergfeld another $15,000 but delayed signing the settlement for a few months. The judge then ordered Martin to pay some of her legal costs, citing his “obstinacy.”
Martin lost his 2010 congressional bid. He ran for Missouri attorney general two years later and lost again. After his stint as chair of the Missouri Republican Party, he went to work as Schlafly’s right-hand man. Martin grew so attached to Schlafly that a lawyer for the Eagle Forum jokingly called him “Ed Martin Schlafly.”
As the 2016 presidential campaign ramped up, Martin supported Trump even though Eagle Forum board members, including Cori, supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Cori described Trump at the time as an “egomaniacal dictator.” (Today, she said she supports him.) Cori and other board members were stunned when Schlafly endorsed Trump, with Martin standing by her side.
A few weeks later, a majority of the Eagle Forum’s board voted to oust Martin as president; a lawsuit filed by the board cited mismanagement and poor leadership and described his tenure as “deplorable.” Martin has maintained that he was Schlafly’s “hand-picked successor” and has characterized his removal as a hostile takeover.
“Every day, they are diminishing the reputation and value of Phyllis,” he said in a 2017 statement. She died in September 2016.
Cori and the board’s lawsuit sought to enforce Martin’s removal and demand an accounting of the forum’s assets. That’s the case that wound up before Barberis.
On top of his efforts to direct Gray’s posts on Barberis’ Facebook page, Martin prepared a separate statement, according to previously unreported records from the case. The statement called Barberis’ ruling to remove him as Eagle Forum president “judicial activism at its worst” that “shows what happens when the law is undermined by judges who think they can do whatever they want.”
Martin emailed the statement, which said it was from “Bruce Schlafly, M.D.” — the name of one of Schlafly’s sons — to himself, then sent it to two of her other sons, John and Andy, court filings show. Martin said the statement was a “declaration of war” and urged the Schlaflys to “put something like this out to our biggest list.” (It’s unclear if the message was ever sent.) Bruce Schlafly did not respond to requests for comment.
In a 2019 sworn deposition, Cori’s lawyer asked Martin questions about the posts on Barberis’ Facebook page and the letter he drafted for Bruce Schlafly. Because of the possibility that he could be charged with criminal contempt of court, Martin declined to comment, on the advice of his own lawyer, though he acknowledged that lawyers are barred from communicating with judges outside of court or engaging in conduct meant to disrupt proceedings.
Andy Schlafly, a lawyer and former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin in the leadership fight, said “no court has ever sanctioned Ed for his engagement of First Amendment advocacy” and likened the controversy to liberal attacks on conservative judges. He dismissed concerns about Martin directing Gray to contact the judge, saying she “speaks for herself” and had every right to voice her outrage. He compared Martin’s style — then and now — to Trump’s. He said he did not believe the email Martin drafted for his brother Bruce had ever been sent, but if it had been, it would have been no different from Trump posting on Truth Social, which he considered normal behavior in political battles.
“What would Trump do in that position?” Andy Schlafly said of Martin’s current role in Washington. “I would say Trump would be doing just what Ed’s doing. Elections do have consequences.”
Gray declined to comment. She was not part of the lawsuit.
When Cori’s lawyers uncovered the emails, they asked a new judge, David Dugan — who had taken over the case after Barberis was elected to a higher court — why Martin should not be held in criminal contempt for “an underhanded scheme” to “attack the integrity and authority” of the court with the Facebook comments about Barberis, according to court records.
Dugan declined to take up the criminal contempt motion. But he later found Martin and John Schlafly in civil contempt of court for having interfered with Eagle Forum after Barberis had removed them from the group. John Schlafly appealed the contempt finding and mostly lost. He did not respond to requests for comment. It’s unclear if Martin appealed.
Cori told ProPublica she also filed an ethics complaint against Martin with the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates ethics complaints against lawyers. She said she was told her complaint would have to wait until her lawsuit concluded. The office said it could neither confirm nor deny it had received a complaint.
In 2022, when part of Cori’s lawsuit went to trial, a jury found Martin liable for defaming her and casting her in a false light — including by sharing a Facebook post suggesting that she should be charged with manslaughter for her mother’s death. It awarded her $57,000 in damages and also found Martin liable for $25,500 against another Eagle Forum board member.
Martin argued that the statute of limitations had expired on the defamation claims and that many of his statements were either true or vague hyperbole not subject to proof. He also claimed he could not be held liable because he didn’t write the offending post — he had merely shared something written by someone else.
In a post-trial motion, he also leaned into protections that make it harder for public figures to win defamation cases. Under that higher legal standard, it’s not enough for a plaintiff to show that a statement was false. Cori also had to prove that Martin knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, and he said she didn’t prove it.
But while he’s wrapped himself in First Amendment protections when defending his own speech, he’s taken the opposite stance since being named interim U.S. attorney by Trump, threatening legal action against people when they criticize the administration.
For instance, after Rep. Robert Garcia called DOGE leader Elon Musk a “dick” and urged Democrats to “bring weapons” to a political fight, Martin sent Garcia a letter warning his comments could be seen as threats and demanding an explanation.
With the start of Trump’s first presidency, Martin and his family moved to the Northern Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. Martin had no formal role in the new administration, but he turned himself into one of the president’s most prolific and unfiltered surrogates.
CNN hired him in September 2017 to be a pro-Trump on-air commentator, only to fire him five months later after a string of controversial on-air remarks. He attacked a woman who had accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her as a child, praised Trump for denigrating Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” and described some of his CNN co-panelists as “rabid feminists” and “Black racists.”
Unbowed, Martin went on to make more than 150 appearances on the Russia Today TV channel and Sputnik radio, both Russian state-owned media outlets, first reported by The Washington Post. On RT and Sputnik, Martin railed against the “Russia hoax,” criticized the DOJ investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller and questioned American support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion by saying the U.S. was “wasting money in Kiev for Zelensky and his corrupt guys.” The State Department would later say RT and Sputnik were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.” The Treasury Department sanctioned RT employees in 2024. The DOJ indicted two RT employees for conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to fail to register as foreign agents.
Martin’s flair for fealty set him apart even from fellow Trump supporters. He cheered the Maine Republican Party for considering whether to censure Sen. Susan Collins for her vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. He singled out Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in a radio segment titled “America Needs to Go on a RINO Hunt.” He accused Sen. John Cornyn of going “soft” on gun rights after Cornyn endorsed a bipartisan gun-safety law after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Martin joined the throngs of Trump supporters who marched in protest of the 2020 election outcome. He compared the scene that day to a Mardi Gras celebration and later said the prosecution of Jan. 6 defendants was “an op” orchestrated by former Rep. Liz Cheney and law enforcement agencies to “damage Trump and Trumpism.”
During an appearance on Russia Today, Martin said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “weaponized” Congress’ response to the Jan. 6 riots by ramping up security on Capitol Hill, comparing her to the Nazis. “Not since the Reichstag fire that was engineered by the Nazis have we seen behavior like what Nancy Pelosi did,” he said.
As an attorney, he represented Jan. 6 defendants, helped raise money for their families and championed their cause. Last summer, Martin gave an award to a convicted Jan. 6 rioter named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. According to court records, Hale-Cusanelli held “long-standing white supremacist and Nazi beliefs,” wore a “Hitler mustache” and allegedly told his co-workers that “Hitler should have finished the job.” (In court, Hale’s attorney said his client “makes no excuses for his derogatory language,” but the government’s description of him was “simply misleading.”)
After hugging and thanking Hale-Cusanelli at the ceremony, Martin told the audience that one of his goals was “to make sure that the world — and especially America — hears more from Tim Hale, because he’s extraordinary.”
In his three months as interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Martin has used his position to issue a series of threats. He’s vowed not to hire anyone affiliated with Georgetown Law unless the school drops any DEI policies. He vowed to Musk that he would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” He publicly told former special counsel Jack Smith and Smith’s lawyers to “[s]ave your receipts.” And in another open letter addressed to Musk and Musk’s deputy, Martin wrote that “if people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”
More often than not, Martin’s threats have gone nowhere.
A month into the job, he announced “Operation Whirlwind,” an initiative to “hold accountable those who threaten” public officials, whether they’re DOGE workers or judges. One of the “most abhorrent examples” of such threats, he said, were Sen. Chuck Schumer’s 2020 remarks that conservative Supreme Court justices had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price” if they weakened abortion rights.
Even though Schumer walked back his incendiary comments the next day, Martin said he was investigating Schumer’s nearly 5-year-old remarks as part of Operation Whirlwind. Despite Martin’s bravado, the investigation went nowhere. No grand jury investigation was opened. No charges were filed. That the probe fizzled out came as little surprise. Legal experts said Schumer’s remarks, while ill advised, fell well short of criminal conduct.
In another instance, when one of Martin’s top deputies refused to open a criminal investigation into clean-energy grants issued by the Biden administration, Martin demanded the deputy’s resignation and advanced the investigation himself. When a subpoena arrived at one of the targeted environmental groups, Martin’s was the only name on it, according to documents obtained by ProPublica.
Kevin Flynn, a former federal prosecutor who served in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office for 35 years, told ProPublica that he did not know of a single case in which the U.S. attorney was the sole authorizing official on a grand jury subpoena. Flynn said he could think of only two reasons why this could happen: The matter was of “such extraordinary sensitivity” that the office’s leader took exclusive control over it, or no other supervisor or line prosecutor was willing to sign off on the subpoena “out of concern that it wasn’t legally or ethically appropriate.”
And when the dispute between the environmental groups and the Justice Department reached a courtroom, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan asked a DOJ lawyer defending the administration’s actions for any evidence of possible crimes or violations — evidence, in other words, that could have justified the probe initiated by Martin. The DOJ lawyer said he had none. “You can’t even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,” Chutkan said. “There are still rules that even the government has to follow, last I checked.”
Martin’s tenure has caused so much consternation that in early April, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., put a hold on Martin’s nomination. Typically, the Senate Judiciary Committee approves U.S. attorney picks by voice vote without a hearing. But in Martin’s case, all 10 Democrats on the committee have asked for a public hearing to debate the nomination, calling Martin “a nominee whose objectionable record merits heightened scrutiny by this Committee.”
Even the process of submitting the requisite paperwork for Senate confirmation has tripped him up. According to documents obtained by ProPublica, he has sent the Judiciary Committee three supplemental letters that correct omissions about his background. In an earlier submission, Martin did not disclose any of his appearances on Russian state-owned media. But just before The Washington Post reported that Martin had, in fact, made more than 150 such appearances, he sent yet another letter correcting his previous statements.
“I regret the errors and apologize for any inconvenience,” he wrote.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom.
According to a 13-page complaint, Dugan, 65, is accused of obstructing a U.S. agency and concealing an individual to prevent an arrest. The two charges carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $350,000 fine, but sentences in cases involving nonviolent offenses typically are much shorter.
Arresting a judge is an extremely rare occurrence. If it does happen, it usually follows months of investigation and massive amounts of evidence of criminal activity. In this case, it took less than a week and mostly hinges on the statements of a single court deputy and the allegations of federal officers who were free to assume the worst about the few things they did manage to witness first-hand. On top of that, the arrest was made at the courthouse, as though the judge posed some sort of a flight risk if she wasn’t apprehended in public at her place of government employment.
All very shitty. And all too familiar. There’s some precedent for this. Guess when that happened.
A Massachusetts judge who allegedly gave a “reasonable impression” that she was allowing an immigrant to evade federal custody was “less than fully candid” when asked about the incident, according to an ethics complaint filed Monday.
The judge, Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph of Massachusetts, is accused of willful misconduct in the ethics complaint.
[…]
Joseph had once faced federal charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice over the April 2018 incident in the Newton, Massachusetts, courthouse.
Prosecutors had alleged that Joseph allowed Medina-Perez to go downstairs to the lockup, supposedly to retrieve property. The immigrant was then allowed to leave through a back door by a court officer. The charges were dropped in September 2022 after Joseph agreed to report herself to the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct.
[Strokes chin thoughtfully] What could be the details that connect these two anomalies? What indeed. Allegedly helping an immigrant avoid interloping federal officers looking to make their jobs easier by poaching people outside courtrooms following court appearances? Check. President Trump in office? Check.
As noted in the above report, the felony obstruction charges were dropped and replaced with an ethics complaint. We’ll have to wait and see how this one goes, but so far, Trump Administration officials are treating it like a law and order win. The head of the FBI, Kash Patel, tweeted, de-tweeted, and tweeted again about how proud he was his agency was right there to bring an obstructionist judge to heel. Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed this report on xTwitter, pretending this was just good government business, rather than the KGB-esque removal of, shall we say, a competing viewpoint in the marketplace of mass deportation ideas.
There’s a 13-page charging document [PDF] written by FBI Special Agent Lindsay Schloemer that portrays this as some sort of criminal conspiracy, rather than just a sympathetic judge being unwilling to let federal agents use her court as some sort of temporary holding cell for immigration arrests. It’s all written in accordance with the FBI Charging Document Style Guide — something capable of portraying someone pointing someone to an alternate exit as the equivalent to being the driver in a bank robbery getaway car.
But before we dip into that a bit, I must highlight one of most hilarious “training and experience” assertions I’ve ever seen in a warrant affidavit:
I am a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) and have been so employed since 2014. I am currently assigned to the Milwaukee Field Office. As such, I am an investigative or law enforcement agent of the United States authorized under Title 18, United States Code, Section 3052, that is, an officer of the United States who is empowered by law to conduct investigations, to make arrests, and to collect evidence for various violations of federal law. I am also a Certified Public Accountant (“CPA”) and worked as a CPA for seven years before my employment with the FBI.
Nice. Useless in this specific situation, but one should always have a fall-back career. Apparently, arresting judges is the agent’s fall-back career, because Schloemer goes on to point out their white collar crime bona fides before getting around to justifying the arrest of a county judge just because federal agents (including a DEA agent because that’s what we’re doing these days) were forced to run an extra 50-100 feet to apprehend Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, whose main evasive effort was (and this is all in the charging document!) using an elevator that was further away than the one federal agents assumed made more sense to use. I am not kidding.
After leaving the Chief Judge’s vestibule and returning to the public hallway, DEA Agent A reported that Flores-Ruiz and his attorney were in the public hallway. DEA Agent B also observed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney in the hallway near Courtroom 615 and noted that Flores. Ruiz was looking around the hallway. From different vantage points, both agents observed Flores- Ruiz and his counsel walk briskly towards the elevator bank on the south end of the sixth floor. | am familiar with the layout of the sixth floor of the courthouse and know that the south elevators are not the closest elevators to Courtroom 615, and therefore it appears that Flores-Ruiz and his counsel elected not to use the closest elevator bank to Courtroom 615.
Whatever. It really doesn’t matter. The allegations claim the judge diverted officers, ushered Flores-Ruiz out through the jury exit, and otherwise tried to impede this arrest. The chief judge also seemed a little concerned about the swarm of federal officers trying to poach exiting court attendees and expressed a desire to formalize where in the courthouse it was appropriate to make these arrests. In the end, the agents were momentarily inconvenienced.
Even if all of claims are factual, the FBI had several options to use, including the one that left it up to the DOJ to file an ethics complaint, rather than expedite a felony complaint against a judge — an action that’s just as inexcusable as it was back in 2018. But this administration is dead set on proving to everyone it will go after anyone and anything that even momentarily halts the progress of its fascist designs. And in doing so, it’s adding yet another black eye to US history, one it can only hope it remains in power long enough to retcon.
Here’s a puzzle: How do you write a law that’s so badly designed that (1) the people it’s meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act.
The bill started with the entirely reasonable goal of addressing non-consensual intimate imagery online. But then something went wrong. Instead of building on existing successful systems, or within the parameters of the First Amendment, Congress decided to create a new framework combining vague “duty of care” requirements with harsh criminal penalties — a combination that, as we’ve previously detailed, practically begs to be weaponized for censorship.
Most tellingly, Donald Trump — in endorsing the bill during his address to Congress — openly bragged about how he plans to abuse its provisions to censor content he personally dislikes. When the person championing your anti-abuse legislation is promising to use it for abuse, you might have a problem.
The bill is so bad that even the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims of NCII and passing bills similar to the Take It Down Act, has come out with a statement saying that, while it supports laws to address such imagery, it cannot support this bill due to its many, many inherent problems.
While supportive of the bill’s criminal provision relating to authentic nonconsensual intimate images, which closely resemblesCCRI’s model federal lawand state laws that havesurvivedconstitutional challenge, CCRI has serious reservations about S. 146’s reporting and removal requirements. Encouraging speedy removal of nonconsensual intimate imagery from platforms is laudable, but the provision as written is unconstitutionally vague, making it difficult for individuals and platforms to understand what conduct is prohibited or required. The provision is also unconstitutionally overbroad, extending well beyond unlawful imagery. Finally, the provision lacks adequate safeguards against abuse, increasing the likelihood of bad faith reports and chilling protected expression. Such flaws would be alarming under any circumstances; in light of the current administration’sexplicitcommitment to selectively enforcing laws for political purposes, they are fatal. CCRI cannot support legislation that risks endangering the very communities it is dedicated to protecting, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of color, and other vulnerable groups.
These warnings echo what digital rights groups like the Center for Democracy & Technology and EFF have been shouting for months — only to be completely ignored by Congress. The concerns are not theoretical: the bill’s vague standards combined with harsh criminal penalties create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse.
Yet despite these clear red flags, Ted Cruz announced that the House will take up the Senate’s fatally flawed version of the bill. This comes after leadership dismissed substantive criticisms during markup, including explicit warnings from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the bill’s potential for abuse.
That’s Cruz saying:
I am thrilled that the TAKE IT DOWN Act will be getting a vote on the House Floor early next week.
Thank you to [Speaker Johnson, Steve Scalise, and Brett Gurthrie] for their leadership and action to protect victims of revenge and deepfake pornography and give them the power to reclaim their privacy and dignity.
When this bill is signed into law, those who knowingly spread this vile material will face criminal charges, and Big Tech companies must remove exploitative content without delay.
The weird thing about this bill is that we already have systems to handle non-consensual intimate imagery online. There’s NCMEC’s “Take It Down” system, which helps platforms identify and remove this content. There’s StopNCII.org, a non-profit effort that’s gotten virtually every major platform — from Meta to TikTok to Pornhub — to participate in coordinated removal efforts. These systems work because they’re precise, transparent, and focused on the actual problem.
But apparently working solutions aren’t exciting enough for Congress. Instead of building on these proven approaches, they’ve decided to create an entirely new system that somehow manages to be both weaker at addressing the real problem and more dangerous for everyone else.
The problem here is pretty simple: If you give people a way to demand content be taken down, they will abuse it. We already have a perfect case study in the DMCA. Even with built-in safeguards like counternotices and (theoretical) penalties for false claims, the DMCA sees thousands of bogus takedown notices used to censor legitimate speech.
The Take It Down Act looks at this evidence of widespread abuse and says “hold my beer.” Not only does it strip away the DMCA’s already-inadequate protections, it adds criminal penalties that make false claims even more attractive as a censorship weapon. After all, if people are willing to file bogus copyright claims just to temporarily inconvenience their opponents, imagine what they’ll do when they can threaten prison time.
And imagine what the current Trump administration would do with those threats of criminal charges over content removals.
CDT’s Beeca Branum put out a statement this morning about how stupid all of this is:
“The TAKE IT DOWN Act is a missed opportunity for Congress to meaningfully help victims of nonconsensual intimate imagery. The best of intentions can’t make up for the bill’s dangerous implications for constitutional speech and privacy online. Empowering a partisan FTC to enforce ambiguous legislation is a recipe for weaponized enforcement that risks durable progress in the fight against image-based sexual abuse.”
“The TAKE IT DOWN Act, while well-intentioned, was written without appropriate safeguards to prevent the mandated removal of content that is not nonconsensual intimate imagery, making it vulnerable to constitutional challenge and abusive takedown requests. Moreover, its ambiguous text can be read to create an impossible requirement for end-to-end encrypted platforms to remove content to which they have no access.”
The most baffling aspect of this debacle is watching self-proclaimed progressive voices like Tim Wu and Zephyr Teachout champion a bill that hands unprecedented censorship power to an administration they claim to oppose. This morning, both of them appeared at a weird press conference in support of the bill. While their recent embrace of various unconstitutional and censorial internet regulations is disappointing, their willingness to hand Donald Trump a censorship weapon he’s openly bragging about abusing is genuinely shocking.
The Take It Down Act will likely become law, and then we’ll get to watch as the Trump administration — which has already announced its plans to abuse it — gets handed a shiny new censorship weapon with “totally not for political persecution” written on the side in extremely small print. The courts might save us, but they’re already drowning in unconstitutional nonsense from this administration. Perhaps not the best time to add “government-enabled censorship framework” to their to-do list.
Update: Welp, late today this passed the House overwhelmingly, 409-2. The only two nay vote were from Republicans Thomas Massie and Eric Burlison.
When Trump officials want to censor speech, they don’t quite say “we want to censor speech” (after all, they pretend to be the party that “brought free speech back.”) Instead, they find ways to threaten organizations by pretending it’s got nothing to do with the content, even as they can’t hide their true intentions and motives. And so we have DC US Attorney Ed Martin, who has decided that the real problem with Wikipedia isn’t its content — it’s its tax status… based on its content.
But his attack on Wikipedia represents something even more dangerous: a federal prosecutor attempting to control how the internet’s largest collaborative knowledge platform manages its content.
The way this works is pretty straightforward: First, you find some pretext to investigate. Then you write a threatening letter. Then you leak that letter to a friendly media outlet. In this case, Martin sent his letter to The Free Press, a publication that has spent years warning about government censorship — at least when they pretend Democrats do it. The letter reads in part:
It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public. Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.
In addition, Wikipedia’s operations are directed by its board that is composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers. Again, educational content is directionally neutral; but information received by my Office demonstrates that Wikipedia’s informational management policies benefit foreign powers
There’s more in there, including complaints about how AI tools train on Wikipedia, suggesting (ridiculously) that this might implicate Wikipedia if “foreign actors” are able to “launder information” into AI systems. And the letter threatens to revoke Wikpedia’s non-profit status (something the IRS would normally investigate, not the US Attorney for DC).
There are also demands to know details about Wikpedia’s editorial processes and how it handles trust & safety. Just imagine the freakout that would occur (probably led by The Free Press) if a US Attorney during the Biden admin had demanded to know Fox News’ editorial policies and standards and practices, while claiming that they were letting too much propaganda online. The screaming would never stop.
Indeed, what Martin is doing here represents exactly the kind of government interference in editorial decisions that free speech advocates have been warning about. But where are those voices now?
During the Biden administration, we were told over and over again by the MAGA faithful that literally any communication between an internet platform and federal law enforcement, especially regarding trust & safety practices, was the biggest threat to free speech ever.
To understand why this matters, we need to talk about Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit that made it all the way to the Supreme Court (as Murthy v. Missouri). The case was basically about whether government officials could talk to social media companies about content moderation without violating the First Amendment. The summary, as the Supreme Court noted, affirming earlier cases, is that the government can absolutely talk to social media companies to share information. What it cannot do is threaten or coerce the platforms for their editorial decisions.
Which is exactly what Martin is doing here.
Even though the Supreme Court debunked all the lies in its ruling in the case, the MAGA universe (along with hangers-on like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger) insisted that they were evidence of a huge attack on free speech: the Biden administration sometimes talking to social media companies about their content moderation practices.
The original district court ruling in the case, by (Trump-appointed) Judge Terry Doughty, had soaring language like the following:
Plaintiffs have put forth ample evidence regarding extensive federal censorship that restricts the free flow of information on social-media platforms used by millions of Missourians and Louisianians, and very substantial segments of the populations of Missouri, Louisiana, and every other State
That “extensive federal censorship” was based off of very weak claims of federal officials sometimes reaching out to social media platforms to highlight certain content or to ask if certain things violated their policies. And it was treated as a five-alarm fire. As the Supreme Court noted, the actions of the Biden White House did not appear at all coercive or threatening.
That’s very, very different from what’s happening here. Here we have the top DC prosecutor clearly threatening Wikipedia over editorial decisions — and, not even editorial decisions of its employees, but the site’s volunteer editors. In other words, Wikipedia is clearly protected under Section 230 for such edits.
It seems likely that Martin (or someone in his office) then leaked the letter to The Free Press, a publication that has built its brand on warning about government censorship. The same publication that ran breathless stories about the Biden administration’s supposedly coercive communications with social media platforms. The same outlet whose writer, Rupa Subramanya, dramatically testified to Congress’ subcommittee on the “weaponization” of the government, about the horrors of government censorship… in Canada.
Let’s look at her testimony, which Republican Jim Jordan gleefully presented as a warning about Democratic censorship:
I’d like all of you to think of me as a time traveler from the not too distant future coming back to the present to offer you a glimpse of what could lie ahead for America.
I live in a time in which, in the name of fairness, you can’t share the stories you write for my news publication on social media.
[….]
I live in a time in which, in the name of safety, youcan be arrested for exercising your right to peaceful protestif you happen to be protesting the wrong thing.
That dystopian future she warned about? It’s here. People are not just being arrested but actually deported for peaceful protests. And The Free Press’s response to this actual censorship? Crickets.
This fits a pattern that Peter Shamshiri recently documented in his analysis of The Free Press’s selective outrage. When it comes to actual censorship from the Trump administration, The Free Press has developed a curious case of writer’s block:
The problem they face is that their brand is predicated on directing overwrought skepticism toward the left and childlike credulousness toward the right. That may have worked in 2021, when it could be pitched as a sort of half-baked contrarianism. But now, with the Trump administration embracing overt authoritarianism, it’s a little embarrassing.
He notes that while they have a “Free Speech” section, almost none of it is covering the attacks on free speech from the Trump administration. Yes, The Free Press published this story, but it didn’t put it in the “Free Speech” section and doesn’t treat it as the massive First Amendment violation it absolutely is. It quotes a “person close to Martin” multiple times, suggesting that Martin’s office leaked this directly to Weiss, knowing The Free Press wouldn’t call out what bullshit it is.
Want to see this double standard in action? Let’s play a quick game of “spot the difference” between how The Free Press covers different types of government intervention. Here’s their headline for Martin’s Wikipedia threat:
And right before the election, the Free Press published a story about “Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Our Government Censors” about the case, claiming that Kamala Harris would definitely abuse her powers as President to censor people online and holding up Musk as an example of someone who would fight for free speech.
What are the chances that a President Kamala Harris would resist pressuring social media companies into censorship? Based on her record: Not great.
Looking over that author’s writings since Trump took office, she’s written excitedly and supportively about Trump trying to harm transgender youth and the movie When Harry Met Sally. The fact that the Trump administration has been issuing censorship decrees from almost all corners of the executive branch is apparently not worth mentioning.
So here’s where we are: A federal prosecutor is directly threatening Wikipedia’s editorial independence. This is not the information sharing found in the details of the Twitter Files and the Murthy case (which the Supreme Court just said was fine), but explicit threats about their tax status and demands about their editorial policies.
This is, quite literally, the exact kind of government censorship that The Free Press had been warning about. The kind they said would inevitably come from a Democratic administration. The kind they said justified extraordinary measures to “protect free speech.”
Yet their coverage reads like a press release from Martin’s office, repeatedly citing “a person close to Martin” (which is often how media will represent the person themselves, who asks the journalist not to quote them directly):
“Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission,” Martin wrote in the letter, claiming his office received information showing that Wikipedia’s “policies benefit foreign powers.” ….
The letter did not specify which foreign actors were manipulating information on Wikipedia and did not cite examples of alleged propaganda. However, a person close to Martin said he is concerned about “edits on Wikipedia as they relate to the Israel-Hamas conflict that are clearly targeted against Israel to benefit other countries.”
They even helpfully note that Wikipedia “fundraises in the district” — as if that somehow justifies a US Attorney threatening their First Amendment rights.
But what’s clear is that this is about one thing only: Wikipedia allowing content Martin doesn’t like.
Even if Wikipedia’s content was biased (it isn’t), even if every editor was actively trying to push an anti-Israel narrative (they aren’t), that would still be protected by the First Amendment. The government doesn’t get to threaten organizations over their editorial choices, no matter how much certain prosecutors or publications might dislike those choices.
The Free Press spent years insisting that mundane communications between the Biden administration and social media companies represented an existential threat to free speech. Now faced with actual government censorship — explicit threats from a federal prosecutor over editorial decisions — they’re treating it as just another political story.
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Does anyone want to be OK with this just because it might end up barely clearing the legality bar? Is this what the US wants to be known for: the forcible expulsion of anyone originating south of our borders just because the current administration doesn’t want to share space with undocumented (but otherwise law-abiding) immigrants? Is it time to cut Lady Liberty off at the knees and shove her hulking metal carcass into the bay?
A federal judge is raising alarms that the Trump administration deported a two-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” even as the child’s father was frantically petitioning the courts to keep her in the country.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.
The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
I don’t know, judge. Your interest may be well-placed but it’s getting pretty fucking difficult to “dispel strong suspicions” that the government is just deporting people — citizens or not — with no meaningful due process. That’s why this administration has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act. That law all but eliminates due process from the equation so long as federal agents can boilerplate together stuff about tattoos and gang affiliations to pile on top of the utter bullshit that supposedly necessitates the revival of long-dormant law.
The government was no more inclined to give the US-born child due process rights than it was to extend them to her undocumented parents. Instead, ICE simply grabbed the child’s mother, along with her older sibling, during a routine compliance check-in, threw them on a jet, and sent them back to Honduras. Well, “back” except for the two-year-old, who was born in the United States.
The government hasn’t offered much in response to US resident/apparent designated legal caretaker for the 2-year-old US citizen motion for a restraining order blocking the child’s deportation. And why should it? It’s already a done deal.
What it has offered is a hand-written note allegedly written by the child’s mother declaring her intent to have her youngest child deported with her. It also claims most parents want their US-born children deported with him, an assertion that can’t possibly be true if these parents migrated to the United States to give themselves and their offspring a better life.
The child’s father (also an undocumented immigrant) clearly felt the two-year-old would be better off staying in the US with an appointed guardian. That’s why he appointed one as soon as he found out ICE had detained his child. Fearing deportation of his own if he went to claim his child, he signed paperwork making another US resident the child’s legal guardian.
ICE promised to put the guardian in touch with the child’s mother to see if she really wanted to take the child to Honduras with her. Then it blew the guardian (and the court) off until the child was already out of the US and en route to Honduras.
That’s where Terry Doughty comes in. He’s apparently a big fan of Trump and his policies, which makes him a prime landing spot for cases the administration (and other Republican legislators) want to win. But that doesn’t work here.
The short order [PDF] makes it clear this isn’t something the government is just going to be able to ignore. There’s no unsettled question of legality that requires in-depth discussion.
Of course, “It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a U.S. citizen.” See Lyttle v. United States, 2012
Open. Shut. On top of that, a handwritten note and some generalizations about deported parents aren’t the smoking guns the government seems to think they are. (Emphasis in the original.)
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.
Precisely. Then there’s the fact that the government moved as quickly as it could to carry out this miscarriage of justice before the court could tell it to stop.
Seeking the path of least resistance, the Court called counsel for the Government at 12:19 p.m. CST, so that we could speak with VML’s mother and survey her consent and custodial rights. The Court was independently aware at the time that the plane, tail number N570TA, was above the Gulf of America. The Court was then called back by counsel for the Government at 1:06 p.m. CST, informing the Court that a call with VML’s mother would not be possible, because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras.
Well, I guess he’s still a bit Trumpian. But the deliberate misgendering (or whatever) of the Gulf of Mexico aside, this chain of events doesn’t make the government look any less shady. Dispelling the “strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process” is all but impossible at this point. Of course, even if it’s shown the child was supposed to remain in the United States, it’s all but guaranteed it will take a heated, protracted legal battle to force the Trump Administration to do something it hasn’t done yet: press the undo button on an illegal deportation.
State laws attempting to make it cheaper and easier to repair your own technology continue to gain steam. With the recent introduction of a new “right to repair” law in Wisconsin, groups like U.S. PIRG note that all 50 U.S. states have now at least introduced such bills.
But so far only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon have actually passed laws. Ohio could be the latest, thanks to the support of “free market Republicans” (remember those?) who don’t like the idea of big companies monopolizing repair:
“Blessing is a Republican state senator representing Ohio’s 8th Senate district, which includes much of the area surrounding Cincinnati. In April, Blessing introduced a “right-to-repair” bill that grants consumers legal access to the parts, tools, and documents they need to fix a wide range of devices while banning restrictive practices like parts pairing. If Blessing’s bill succeeds, the Buckeye State will become the latest to enshrine the right to repair into law, after similar legislative victories in Colorado, Oregon, California, Minnesota, and New York.”
The passage of a right to repair reform in Ohio would be an ideological win for the movement given the state’s highly conservative bent. It illustrates once again that support for these reforms is hugely bipartisan. Often corporate policy guys find a way to generate partisan animus around issues (see: privacy, net neutrality), but so far they’ve yet to have that kind of success in “right to repair.”
In large part because a cornerstone of consumer annoyance at these practices have involved John Deere screwing over rural farmers with cumbersome restrictions that dramatically drive up the cost of servicing agricultural equipment.
The problem: while a lot is made of states passing right to repair laws, the press, public, and activists tend to ignore or downplay the fact that no state has actually enforced these laws yet. Most companies in most states are still just happily monopolizing repair with clunky DRM, “parts pairing,” consolidation of repair options, and making manuals and parts hard to get a hold of — with no penalties.
At some point, some of the amazing energy being put into passing these laws needs to be redirected to demanding states actually enforce them. Unfortunately during Trump’s second term, when states face unprecedented and costly legal fights on absolutely everything, I suspect that this sort of consumer protection will likely be the first to fall through the cracks among cash-strapped states without states being pressured on the daily to make it a priority.
