Current Third Circuit Appeals Court judge and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove made it clear — on more than one occasion — that DOJ lawyers should tell the courts “fuck you” if they tried to shut down any anti-migrant operations.
That message apparently reached several receptive ears. Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the administration to halt flights to El Salvador and to return immigrants who hadn’t been given access to their due process rights. The government went on to pretend this had never happened. It did at least not continue to send planes to El Salvador, but it refused to order those already in the air to turn around and return to the United States.
Thanks to a filing by the DOJ, we now know who made the final call to say “fuck you” to Judge James Boasberg, who issued both a verbal and written order demanding the flights to El Salvador be halted.
This is the angle the administration is taking to pretend it didn’t need to recall flights it had hastily sent aloft in anticipation of Boasberg’s ruling:
At approximately 6:45 PM on March 15, 2025, the Court orally directed counsel for the Government to inform his clients of the Court’s oral directives at the hearing, including statements directing that any removed class members “need to be returned to the United States.” By that point, two flights carrying individuals designated under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) had already departed from the United States and were outside United States territory and airspace.
At approximately 7:25 PM, the Court memorialized its temporary restraining order in a written order, as the Court had indicated at the hearing it would do. The written order enjoined Defendants “from removing” class members pursuant to the AEA. The written order, unlike the oral directives, said nothing about returning class members who had already been removed.
A government acting in good faith might have taken steps to return the planes already in the air as a precautionary step to avoid generating contempt of court allegations. This government never acts in good faith. It allowed the planes to continue heading towards El Salvador even though it had received a verbal order “directing that any removed [migrants] need[ed] to be returned to the United States.”
It instead let the planes continued to fly until it had received a written order, which it then decided to interpret as permission to allow these flights to continue.
But someone had to make the final call to blow off Judge Boasberg’s first order and pretend the second order wasn’t meant to be read in the spirit of his first order. And that person would be Kristi Noem, who is now defending her actions with the usual Trump admin horseshit about keeping America safe from dangerous brown people:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday confirmed that she instructed the federal government to carry out the deportation and transferring Venezuelan detainees to El Salvador despite a court order halting the flights.
“The decisions that are made on deportations, where flights go, and when they go are my decision at the Department of Homeland Security,” Noem told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.” “And we will continue to do the right thing and ensure that dangerous criminals are removed.”
Bullshit. That was never the case. The Trump administration doesn’t care whether or not the migrants it’s ejecting as as fast as it can are actually “dangerous criminals.” The latest data shows only 5% of those detained by ICE have criminal records that contain violent crimes. 73% of those detained have no criminal record at all.
Rather than err on the side of caution when confronted with a discrepancy between what was said and what was written by the judge, Kristi Noem signed off on the interpretation that allowed the administration to do what it was always going to do anyway. And in doing so, she’s made it clear this government will engage in actionable contempt that springs from its literal contempt for the system of checks and balances.
Boasberg previously found probable cause to start contempt proceedings over the administration’s deportations, an action that was paused for months until an appeals court last week cleared the way for him to charge forward.
This is something, at least. Its usefulness in forcing the administration to play by the rules has yet to be seen. So far, nothing really has had any deterrent effect on an administration that continues to expand the boundaries of executive power on a daily basis.
The Courses Digest, Labs Digest, and Exams Digest Bundle gives you unlimited access to expertly crafted online courses, interactive labs and study tools. Whether you’re aiming for industry-recognized certifications or expanding your tech expertise, this bundle will help you get there with courses on CompTIA, AWS, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, and more. It’s on sale for $72.97.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
If you’ve been following along, you know why independent voices matter right now. The administration has been attacking institutions left and right. News orgs, law firms, philanthropic funders, universities, you name it. Many are capitulating. But not us. Someone needs to step up and keep doing this work without flinching and without compromising.
That’s where you come in.
We need your support to keep going. And because we wanted to try something different—and because we’re genuinely grateful—we’re offering everyone who backs us at $100 or more by January 5th our very first commemorative coin celebrating 30 years of Section 230.
This is an experiment inspired by Hank Green’s brilliant Crash Course yearly fundraiser, where they sell a limited edition coin. For years here at Techdirt, supporters at any level have gotten an “Insider” badge on their Techdirt account. Think of this coin as that badge’s physical form. If it goes well, we’ll make this an annual thing with a new design each year—so don’t miss the first edition.
Look, if you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know we basically never do this kind of direct ask. Most sites—even good independent ones—are drowning you in ads, paywalls, registration walls, or those guilt-trip popups that make you feel like you’re personally bankrupting a journalist every time you open an article. We’ve avoided all that because those tactics are fundamentally hostile to the community we’re trying to build. We want you here because our work matters to you, not because we made reading anything else impossible.
But we also know that often independent news sites need to do those things to build enough support to survive. We’d really prefer to stay away from those kinds of anti-community gimmicks. We want people to read and share our articles. We want people to be able to read our site without feeling like we’re just looking to make money off your attention.
The trade-off: if we’re not going to manipulate you into paying, we need to actually convince you that this work is worth supporting. And this year, that case basically makes itself.
This year has been the toughest in Techdirt’s history. We’ve taken an uncompromising position on democracy. And we think that’s the right stance. But it’s certainly harmed the bottom line. Historically, Techdirt has always been a bit of a loss leader for other work: events, research, games, and more that we seek out grants and sponsors for in order to support our ongoing work.
This year, we had multiple organizations pull back on planned work. They were candid about why: the administration’s focus on punishing dissent meant they couldn’t risk putting a target on their backs by sponsoring us. Which, frankly, tells you everything you need to know about the current environment—and exactly why voices that won’t cower are critical right now. We made a choice to cover what matters over what’s safe. That choice has real costs.
And so we need your help. Techdirt has long had some really cool ways to support us, even if we’re not as in-your-face about promoting it. Donating any amount via the Friend of Techdirt donation page gets you an Insider badge on your profile and comments, and if you give over $100 before January 5th, we’ll send you this amazing coin next year!
Our Insider Shop also offers subscription options from the Crystal Ball (which gets you early access to some of our articles) to the Behind the Curtain option, our premium package of Techdirt perks. And we’ve got a bunch of other ideas lined up for next year to bring supporters even more value that isn’t about walling off our key stories that you come to Techdirt for.
The path forward is clear: we need to build direct support from readers to a level that makes us less dependent on sponsors who can be pressured into silence. Other independent sites have proven this model works. We just need to get there.
If you think this kind of coverage matters—especially right now—back us. Get the coin if you want. Or don’t. But help us keep doing this work without compromise.
“Senior White House officials recently discussed antitrust concerns surrounding Netflix’s interest in acquiring the Warner Bros. studio and the HBO Max streaming service – raising doubts whether such a deal would give Netflix too much power over Hollywood, The Post has learned.
The high-level meeting that took place about 10 days ago hasn’t been previously reported. Several White House officials also suggested during the sitdown that a broader investigation is necessary focusing on Netflix’s market power, a government official who attended the confab said.”
Most media coverage of these rival bids won’t have the backbone to make it clear that while Netflix ownership of Warner Brothers would most certainly probably be bad for the market, the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about that. It cares about helping billionaire allies and punishing “woke” companies that platform too many minorities and gay people for their liking.
Netflix ownership of HBO likely wouldn’t be good for the brand, but it’s not like Warner Brothers Discovery or AT&T were good for the brand (or market health) either. David Zaslav has been notorious for mismanaging the home of CNN and HBO. And Netflix, as the New York Times noted last September, is possibly the least overtly compromised of the three companies when it comes to kissing MAGA ass (which isn’t saying much, and certainly isn’t guaranteed to last).
In this case, the options here are all bad. The other bidders for Warner Brothers, HBO, and CNN include Comcast (NBC Universal) and Larry Ellison (CBS). Neither would be good stewards of the HBO brand, clearly don’t give much of a shit about healthy market competition, and have shown they’re more than willing to throw any remaining principles in the trash to curry favor with the administration.
The best and correct play for a government that actually cared about antitrust reform, consumer protection, and healthy markets would be no additional consolidation at all. But good faith media reform is not, and has never been, what the Trump administration is after.
I suppose we might all be tiring of the whole “the leopard you voted for eventually comes to eat your face” cliche at this point, but when the allegory fits you have to use it. And in this case, it fits so well that it would be comical if not for just how heartbreaking this all is.
Jose Ceballos, who now goes by Joe Ceballos, is the Mayor of Coldwater, Kansas. By all accounts, he is an American success story. He was brought to America, undocumented, when he was four years old. As a student later in life, he was asked while on a field trip for school if he’d like to register to vote. At that point, he had obtained a green card, which denotes at the top of the card that he is a “PERMANENT RESIDENT.”
Reportedly, Ceballos misunderstood the meaning of that residency and thought he was authorized to register to vote. And vote he did, in several elections, and always as a staunch Republican. He voted for Donald Trump in all of the last three Presidential elections. He believes he also voted for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach all four times he ran for election in the state as well. But holding a green card does not authorize him to participate in voting and now the 54 year old is facing both felony charges for fraud brought by Kobach himself, as well as deportation from the Trump administration that he and most of his town voted into office.
An honest mistake, he said. But now he’s found himself in legal trouble that threatens to upend the life he’s spent half a century building. What’s worse than Kobach’s charges, he said, is that the Department of Homeland Security is now threatening him with starting that legal process called deportation.
“I haven’t seen Mexico since I was four,” Ceballos said. “I don’t speak Spanish anymore. If I get deported it would wreck my life.”
The leopard has come to eat Ceballos’ face, it seems.
To be clear, I take no pleasure in this. People are allowed to vote Republican, obviously. They are allowed to have voted for Donald Trump, equally obviously. I have family and friends that did likewise and doing so doesn’t mean that I want their lives upended or, frankly, even moderately inconvenienced as a result. But it’s long past time that people understand precisely what they’re voting for because Trump and Republicans are simply not fucking around when it comes to visiting cruelty upon their perceived enemies and it won’t stop with some small subset of people the way people seem to think it will.
Ceballos is beloved in his community. The same town that voted for exactly this sort of thing is now very pissed off that it’s happening.
“If deportation happens, I can tell you that Kobach will have trouble showing up here, especially if he asks to stay with us for a while,” said Dennis Swayze, an 80-year-old Comanche County rancher and a Republican voter. Swayze decades ago took Joe under his wing to hire and mentor him as a mostly penniless but eager calf-roping kid ranch hand. And he says he’s partly to blame for Ceballos’s trouble.
And it’s real trouble. In that news conference on Nov. 5, Kobach said Ceballos could spend as much as five and a half years in prison and pay a $200,000 fine — for voter fraud and election perjury, all felonies.
Ceballos said he now understands that he broke the law — but he and others in his community wonder what’s a fair consequence. The town of 693, in southwest Kansas, might lose their mayor. After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.
He’s so popular in Coldwater, in fact, that his defense attorney is practically begging for this to go before a jury, believing that no jury in town will convict him. I expect Kobach to try some trickery for a trial more favorable to his preferred outcome, because it’s very clear that he plans on digging his heels in.
“Voting by noncitizens, including both legal and illegal aliens, is a very real problem,” Kobach said in his written statement on Nov. 5. “It happens. Every time a noncitizen votes, it effectively cancels out a U.S. citizen’s vote.”
And: “This alien committed a felony by voting in American elections,” Homeland Security officials said in a statement on Nov. 13. “If convicted, he will be placed in removal proceedings.”
Coldwater voted for this. Kansas voted for this. And even if a jury essentially engages in nullification, given that Ceballos very much broke the law in his naivete, that not guilty verdict wouldn’t preclude DHS from deporting him anyway.
This only goes one of two ways. The slightly less likely way, I believe, is that DHS deports Ceballos whatever the outcome of his case is. If that happens, the Trump administration will have solidified the point that cruelty is the only meal on the menu, the desire of the serfs be damned. The slightly more likely outcome is that Trump gets wind that Ceballos was a staunch Republican voter and, more importantly, a Trump voter/supporter, and will figure out a way to not enforce the deportation order that, by all rights, should be carried out based on all the things that this administration has said about illegal immigrants and its plans for them.
And if that happens, it puts the lie to all of Trump’s bullshit. It won’t be about law, and it sure as shit isn’t about order. It will purely be about who is willing to bend the knee to the mad king and who is not.
And then we’ll see if the leopard allegory holds true, because leopards don’t actually care who thinks they’re pretty and who does not. In the leopard’s place will be something much, much worse.
One can never predict how a court will rule after oral argument. But I do fear that in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment we are on the precipice of getting yet another major copyright decision from the Supreme Court where the words “First Amendment” are not uttered even once—unless, of course, someone like Justice Alito has something to say about it, because he was basically the only justice whose questions addressed the practical effect on people’s ability to speak online should Sony’s arguments prevail. (“That doesn’t sound workable to me,” he said at one point, recognizing how many people would effectively end up losing their Internet access if Sony were right and providers were required to terminate accounts upon receiving an infringement notice.)
This case is one where Cox—and, by extension, EVERY Internet platform and provider—faces showstopping liability for how its users are alleged to use their Internet service. As we pointed out in the Copia Institute’s amicus brief, the rule that comes out of this case, governing whether Cox can be secondarily liable for its users’ alleged wrongdoings, is by no means limited to just copyright liability. But that was the form of liability at issue here, because Cox’s users were alleged to have fileshared works infringing copyrights Sony claimed the right to enforce. Sony has argued that Cox should share in that liability because it did not do anything to stop those users from filesharing, and, indeed, let these users keep using their service even after allegedly being told they were infringing—although, as Cox argued, it’s not clear that Cox actually had enough knowledge of actual infringement to act on, because there were never any notices alleging that any specific person had committed any specific wrongful act (and, as we also noted in our brief, there was never any judicial finding that such wrongfulness had indeed been committed; at most there were accusations, which, as this overall litigation revealed, were often unfounded).
Cox, for its part, opted to litigate this case essentially as a pure tort case: what are the rules for when a third party can be liable for the actions of another? And it’s possible that this strategy might pay off because the justices did not seem comfortable with the idea that secondary liability could be picked up too casually, in any context. What they will wrangle with is whether knowing that someone they are providing a tool to is using it for bad purpose is enough to share in liability, or whether there needs to be something more, like an intent that the tool be used for that bad purpose. (“Intent” and “purpose” were terms that came up a lot; expect the decision to invoke them, even if the result is a remand back to the Fourth Circuit to reconsider Cox’s liability under a standard referencing them.) Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh also expressed concern that because the copyright statute itself did not create a cause of action for secondary liability the Court should be wary about creating such liability itself when the decision whether or not to do so, or how, should be in Congress’s purview.
But it also was a big risk to be so singularly focused on this argument, because it obfuscated what’s really at stake.
Part of the problem with Cox’s strategy is that this was a copyright case, and copyright tends to make otherwise reasonable people lose their minds. Which is how the Supreme Court managed to produce a decision in the Warhol case where even though it was a fair use case, and fair use is all about protecting expression from copyright’s power, the decision never even mentioned, let alone grappled with, how the First Amendment and copyright law need to play together. That decision was written by Justice Sotomayor, who seemed to have the coldest reception to Cox’s arguments here. After all, she seemed to think, Cox had reason to know their users were filesharing! How can it be fair they escape trouble for that???
The answer: because of what would happen to all their user expression if they had done what Sony wanted and terminated the accounts it had accused, or if it could even have been liable for simply having provided a service all their users needed for all their online activities—including their completely innocent and expressive ones. As we pointed out in our brief, there are a number of threats to free expression if Sony’s legal theory could succeed: it would (1) leave online expression subject to prior restraint, which the First Amendment forbids, by giving an un-adjudicated infringement notice the power to cause speech (and speakers) to be removed; (2) make online speakers subject to being kicked off the Internet, which the Supreme Court said was not Constitutional in the earlier Packingham v. North Carolina case; and (3) make it possible to censor speakers by pressuring the intermediary providers they depend on, which the Court itself quite recently pointed out is not something the First Amendment allows in the NRA v. Vullo case.
Yet, strangely, none of these issues really made it into the oral argument, save for a bit mumbled by the Solicitor General, also arguing on the side of Cox, who tried to point out (before largely being cut off by Justice Sotomayor) that it would be inequitable to ban someone from using the Internet as a penalty for filesharing. But, for some reason, Cox itself steered clear of these issues, even though it made Cox stand alone, and despite the fact that its fate here will shape the fate of every other Internet platform, and even though making the stakes so apparent would be likely to help Cox, especially if some of the justices do not like some of the facts specific to Cox (like its infamous “f__ the DMCA” email produced during discovery in an earlier round of this litigation). The more the Court thinks this case is just about Cox, the worse off everyone will be, because it is a case that impacts everyone who uses the Internet, for any purpose, including all those that are expressive and innocent.
And even though these free speech issues provide the antidote to the very copyright exceptionalism that prompts people to want to throw the book at them for what their users allegedly had done. How dare people disrespect the rights of others, that thinking goes. But that’s exactly the problem: it’s the rights of others, including their constitutionally-protected rights to express themselves, that are what is truly being threatened by law that unduly protects the power of others to silence them.
It was important to make clear to the justices that what is at stake is not just a run-of-the-mill tort case. No, providing Internet access is not just like providing someone a gun, as Justice Sotomayor analogized. We’re talking about the very ability for the Internet to work as a communications medium by making it legally and practically possible for platforms to provide the technical ability for users to express themselves online, in any of the infinite ways they might do so. That the fundamental ability of the Internet to continue to operate was at stake should have been the headline in this case, but it was barely an afterthought, if that.
Instead we got to see Justices Sotomayor and Jackson display a very dubious grasp of the statutory history of the DMCA. They seemed to read it as a law that was designed to ensure that platforms would have liability for what their users did, instead of as a statute designed to do the exact opposite and make sure we didn’t crush the nascent Internet by making it legally impossible for platforms to provide services to their users. They also couldn’t seem to understand what incentive platforms would have to respond to infringement notices if they couldn’t be liable for secondary liability anyway. But as we also noted in our amicus brief, the Shelter Capital case illustrates the incentive, because there the Veoh Network platform got financially bled into bankruptcy in the process of successfully winning its liability case. The DMCA is intended to protect platforms from obliteration-by-litigation because when they disappear, so do the avenues people need to speak online. Wouldn’t it be nice if we still had Veoh Networks as an alternative to YouTube? Too bad, the copyright industry sued them out of existence, even though it turned out they weren’t liable after all.
What the DMCA is for, and why it needs to not be stripped from platforms like Cox (or Veoh) so easily, is to make sure such injustice doesn’t happen and online expression isn’t harmed as a result. Because that is what is at stake in this case: if Cox can be held liable for its users’ online activities by simply having provided them the means for engaging with them, or even simply have to answer a case raising the prospect of liability, then it will not be possible for any platforms to ever provide anyone the means to engage online, no matter how expressively and innocently. That silenced future is what will arise if Cox were to lose, and we can only hope at least five justices see it and choose for us all another path.
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”
Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.
The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.
No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.
The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.
Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.
“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.
“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.
Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”
“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.
Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”
“I don’t know who they’re a subcontractor with, but I don’t work with them because I have a conflict of interest and I fully recused myself,” she said. “My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them.” Her husband, Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho, didn’t respond to questions.
In a written statement, DHS said, “DHS has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors.” They added that the Strategy Group does not have a direct contract with the agency, saying “DHS cannot and does not determine, control, or weigh in on who contractors hire.”
Contracting experts said that agencies can and do sometimes require that subcontractors be approved by officials. It’s not clear how much the Strategy Group has been paid.
This is not the first time that the Strategy Group has gotten public money through a Noem contract. As governor of South Dakota in 2023, her administration set off a scandal by hiring the Ohio-based company to do a different ad campaign, paying it $8.5 million in state funds. While the state said the contract was done by the book, a former Noem administration official told ProPublica that Noem quietly intervened to ensure the Strategy Group got the deal. ProPublica granted some people anonymity to discuss the deals because of their sensitivity.
The firm also paid up to $25,000 to one of Noem’s closest advisers in South Dakota, previously unreported records show. (The adviser, 28-year-old Madison Sheahan, now serves at DHS as the second-in-command of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sheahan didn’t respond to questions about why she was paid.)
The DHS ad that the company filmed at Mount Rushmore has aired during “Fox & Friends” in recent days. Executives from the Strategy Group traveled to the shoot and hired subcontractors to fill out the film crew, according to records and a person involved in the campaign. The ad’s aesthetic sits somewhere between a political campaign ad and a Jeep commercial as Noem tells would-be immigrants to “come here the right way.”
“From the cowboys who tamed the West to the titans who built our cities,” Noem says, as images of Trump Tower in Chicago and Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt last year flash on the screen, “America has always rewarded vision and grit.” Noem continues: “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you.”
Watch the DHS Ad Filmed at Mount Rushmore
The ad is the latest in a campaign that Noem debuted in February, just a few weeks after she took charge of DHS. “Any delay in providing these critical communications to the public will increase the spread of misinformation, especially misinformation by smugglers,” the agency wrote, explaining why it was skipping the competitive bidding process normally required for government contracts. The initial ads featured Noem thanking Trump for securing the border.
The contracts total $220 million so far, leading the DHS ad budget to triple in the most recent fiscal year, according to Bloomberg. The lion’s share of ad contracts is typically used to buy TV airtime or spots on social media. Advertising firms make money by taking an often-hefty commission. Federal records show the contracts have gone to two firms. One is a Republican ad company in Louisiana called People Who Think, which has been awarded $77 million.
But the majority of the money — $143 million — has gone to a mysterious LLC in Delaware. The company was created just days before it was awarded the deal.
Little is known about the Delaware company, which is called Safe America Media and lists its address as the Virginia home of a veteran Republican operative, Michael McElwain. McElwain has long had his own advertising company (separate from the Delaware one), but there’s little evidence that firm could handle a nine-figure federal contract on its own: It reported just five employees when it received COVID-19 relief money a few years ago.
How, where and to whom Safe America Media doled out the $143 million is unknown. Any subcontractors hired to do work on the DHS ads are not disclosed in federal contracting databases.
The office funding the ad contracts is listed as the DHS Office of Public Affairs, which is run by McLaughlin, contract records show. McLaughlin married Yoho, the Strategy Group CEO, earlier this year.
In its statement, DHS said the agency does its contracting “by the book” and the process is run by career officials. “It is very sad that Pro Publica would seek to defame these public servants,” DHS added.
Asked about why the agency chose Safe America Media, DHS said, “The results speak for themselves: the most secure border in American history and over 2 million illegal aliens exiting the United States.” McElwain and People Who Think didn’t respond to questions.
Yoho was still in college when he first served as campaign manager for a U.S. congressman. Now, at 38 years old, he’s a national player in the cutthroat industry of political advertising. Federal election records show tens of millions in payments to his firm during the 2024 election cycle, coming from dozens of Republican congressional candidates. And Noem has proved a particularly lucrative client.
Lewandowski brought Yoho into Noem’s inner circle back in South Dakota, according to two people familiar with the matter, putting the young consultant in charge of the ad side of her 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign. Noem had a more than $5 million advertising budget for the race, records show. After she won in a landslide, Yoho, who has called Noem a friend, came to South Dakota to attend her inauguration ceremony. He sat off to the side of the stage, next to Lewandowski. (Lewandowski didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
By then, Yoho’s next big project with Noem was already in the works. In late 2022, Noem was quietly preparing to launch another sprawling ad campaign — only this time, the money would come from state coffers. The stated goal was to encourage workers to move to South Dakota. The upcoming contract opportunity wasn’t public yet, but Yoho was already involved in planning the campaign, according to records first reported by Sioux Falls Live.
Then on Jan. 12, 2023, Yoho’s company registered to do business in South Dakota under the name Go West Media. The next day, the contract opportunity went live.
Seven companies submitted proposals for the project. Then the pressure from above set in, according to a former Noem administration official involved in the process.
The former official said a top Noem aide told them the governor would be angry if Yoho’s company didn’t win the contract. “He was very direct: ‘She wants to do it,’” they said. Contemporaneous text messages reviewed by ProPublica corroborate that senior Noem administration officials pushed for Yoho to get the contract. Eventually, he did. (In its statement, DHS denied that Noem influenced the process.)
Noem starred in Yoho’s ads herself, dressing up as a dentist, a plumber and a state trooper as she touted her state’s growing economy. Exactly how much Yoho and the Strategy Group made off the $8.5 million deal is unclear. Some of the money was used to purchase spots on Fox News, including one during a Republican presidential debate. Some of the money appears to have gone back to South Dakota — into the bank account of another of Noem’s top advisers.
Sheahan, now the second-in-command at ICE, was paid up to $25,000 by Go West in 2023 for “consulting,” according to a financial disclosure document Sheahan later filed. At the time, Sheahan was serving as both the operations director for Noem as governor and the political director for Noem’s campaign work, according to a copy of her 2023 resume obtained by ProPublica. Her responsibilities included coordinating “daily logistics and operations” for Noem and her team, the resume said. She also managed the “relationship with high level donors” to American Resolve, Noem’s network of outside political groups.
As his firm received millions from the South Dakota state government, Yoho separately continued to work for Noem in other capacities. He worked under Lewandowski on the publicity campaign for Noem’s 2024 memoir, according to a person familiar with the matter. (The book became famous for including an anecdote about Noem shooting her dog.)
The Strategy Group also received a stream of payments for social media consulting and media production work over the last few years from Noem’s American Resolve PAC. Federal election records show the PAC made its last payment to Yoho’s company this February, a couple weeks after Noem took her post as the head of DHS.
Last week I wrote about how the US Patent and Trademark Office is pushing a rule change that would effectively neuter the inter partes review (IPR) system that reviews already granted patents to make sure they weren’t granted by mistake. Patent tolls and other abusers of the patent system have been screaming about this system ever since it started actually helping stop the flood of patent trolling over the last decade and a half. They’ve now convinced the USPTO to change the rules without congressional approval.
The comment period for the USPTO to consider this change closes today, so I wanted to share the comment that I submitted to the proceedings (the full PDF has footnotes, which I’m not bothering to repost here):
The Copia Institute is the think tank arm of Floor64, Inc., the privately-held California small business behind Techdirt.com. As a think tank the Copia Institute produces evidence-driven articles and papers as well as other forms of expressive output such as podcasts and games that examine the nuances and assumptions underpinning technology policy. Armed with its insights it then regularly submits advocacy instruments such as amicus briefs and regulatory comments, such as this one.
We write to oppose the US Patent & Trademark Office’s proposed rule changes for inter partes review (IPR) found in Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025. We oppose the rule changes for three broad reasons:
The policy change would directly oppose the reason and intent of the patent system, doing real damage to American innovation.
The current IPR system, though imperfect, has been a tremendously helpful tool in stopping poor quality patents from limiting innovation.
Such changes should only be directed by Congress, not the agency
The US Patent System must guard against abuse
Both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson spoke out frequently against the very idea of monopolies, including patents. And when it came time to draft the intellectual property clause of the Constitution, there was a discussion between the two founders. Jefferson apparently worried about Madison’s decision to include patent monopolies in the Constitution, writing to him in 1788:
[I]t is better to … abolish … Monopolies, in all cases, than not to do it in any …. The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression.
Madison responded, agreeing that such things are “among the greatest nuisances in government,” but convinced Jefferson that they should not be “wholly renounced” so long as they were very limited and had safety valves to protect against their abuse.
The IPR system is just such a safety valve, allowing anyone to make sure that patents that have been granted truly deserve to be. Years later, Madison summed up his thoughts on patents by saying:
Monopolies though in certain cases useful ought to be granted with caution, and guarded with strictness against abuse.
Once again, the IPR system is just such a system that helps guard against abuse.
As both Jefferson and Madison recognized, government-granted monopolies are prone to abuse without strict systems to guard against abuse. As the US learned in the late 90s and early 2000s, our patent system was being widely abused by non-practicing entities, often single lawyers who would buy up useless, overly broad patents that never should have been granted, and demanding large sums of money from companies who were actually innovating, and actually building successful products.
Congress recognized this problem and how the system of government granted monopolies must be “guarded with strictness against abuse” and created the current IPR system with the America Invents Act in 2011, creating the IPR process.
The concept is simple and straightforward. Patent examiners are already overworked, and there is evidence that mistakenly granted patents make it through our system. No system is perfect. So to make sure that patents are valid, Congress, in its wisdom created a process that enabled those who came across an improperly granted patent to challenge it, and a process to review that patent to make sure it should have been granted.
If the patents are valid, then the IPR process reinforces that, strengthening the quality of the patent. If the patent is invalid, then the IPR process does what Madison believed necessary: strictly guarding the system against abuse.
The system has worked
Over and over again, the IPR system has successfully guarded American innovators against the abuse of government granted monopolies. Over and over again, patents that were mistakenly granted, which Jefferson and Madison warned would limit innovation, have been successfully challenged, and invalidated, protecting actual innovators from having their work halted by a lawyer holding a bad patent.
A bad patent that was used to claim that all podcasting was infringing was thankfully invalidated via the IPR process. Prior to that, many of the top podcasters were sued or threatened, and some even considered stopping their podcasts. Today, we’ve seen that podcasts are an essential part of our media ecosystem. They were not actually invented by the patent holder. Indeed, prior art was found that showed the claims in the patent (which was about audio cassettes, not podcasting) was predated in practice by others.
That patent never should have been granted, and actual innovators in the podcasting space were spared thanks to the IPR process.
And this is not a rare result. In the first decade, patents reviewed by the PTAB using IPR resulted in approximately 40% of the patents challenged being ruled invalid. In other words, when the USPTO had a chance to look closely at those patents, and related prior art, in many cases, they realized that the patent never should have been granted in the first place, and then corrected that mistake.
The IPR process works. It fulfills the important function that Madison insisted any patent system needed: to zealously guard against abuse of those monopoly grants.
Only Congress can change the system
Finally, it is important to note that this move by the Patent Office exceeds its authority. Just last year the Supreme Court made clear in Loper Bright v. Raimondo that agencies cannot reinterpret statutes to reach outcomes Congress did not authorize. The America Invents Act created IPR with specific parameters. The proposed rules would fundamentally alter that system—limiting when IPR can be used, forcing petitioners to forfeit other legal rights, and making patents effectively unchallengeable after a single review—changes that go far beyond the USPTO’s role in implementing the statute Congress actually passed.
If the USPTO believes the IPR system needs this kind of overhaul, the proper path is to ask Congress to amend the law. There have been multiple bills proposed in Congress to restrict IPR, and none has passed. Congress has repeatedly declined to make these changes through legislation. The USPTO cannot accomplish through rulemaking what Congress has refused to do through law.
This alone should end the discussion. The agency is attempting to rewrite a statutory framework that Congress deliberately chose not to change, despite years of lobbying pressure to do so. That is precisely the kind of administrative overreach that Loper Bright was meant to prevent.
Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison worried about a patent system that would be subject to abuses. Madison felt that the system must be guarded carefully against such abuses. After seeing the harm those abuses created, Congress wisely established the IPR process, which has worked well for over a decade.
It would be a massive mistake to reject that, and return us to a world in which the IPR process was limited, and abuse of the patent system against actual innovators was rampant.
Please reject this proposed rule change in order to protect innovation.
For weeks, we’ve been told the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs is indistinguishable from an outright declaration of war on the United States by foreign drug cartels. Trump and his toadies insist traffickers are bringing drugs across the border to “kill” Americans, which would be an entirely self-defeating business plan no self-respecting cartel would ever engage in. Obviously, he’s lying, as are those who speak for him.
But those lies are being used to buttress something even more awful than our usual War on Drugs: the extrajudicial murders of people only suspected to be moving drugs from Venezuela to… well, anywhere else but Venezuela. There are plenty of people between the United States and Venezuela who might be interested in purchasing/trafficking drugs. To insist that these drugs (if they exist at all) are headed to the US border with the intent of “killing” cartels’ customer bases is a lie so stupid it shouldn’t be given the dignity of a one-sentence debunking.
Trump is playing hardball in international waters, straight up murdering people simply because their boats have departed from Venezuelan shores. And while he keeps constructing his “Savior of America” facade, he’s so self-interested he can’t stop himself from undercutting his own narratives.
The man is a blend of involuntary muscle movements and brain stem-level thinking. “DRUGS ARE KILLING US” he screams into the bullhorn he owns (TruthSocial). Meanwhile, back at the Oval Office, he’s letting the drug dealers he personally likes off the hook.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
As several current and former government officials noted in that preliminary reporting, Trump’s actions were not only harmful to foreign relations and ongoing anti-drug trafficking efforts, but also made a mockery of Trump’s other statements about going hard on drugs.
A day later, nothing had changed but the status of Juan Orlando Hernandez’s pardon, which was now a fact, rather than a threat. And, of course, it was Classic Trump™, all the way down to the New York Times’ coverage of it.
Mr. Trump signaled on Saturday that he was ratcheting up his campaign against drug cartels, saying in a social media post that airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges in what was seen as a major victory for authorities in a case against a former head of state. That pardon has not yet been officially granted.
The two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.
Oh NYT, that’s not “remarkable dissonance.” And it certainly isn’t the “display” of “contradictions” claimed in the headline.
The word the NYT is looking for (in both cases) is “hypocrisy.” These are hypocritical acts performed by a president who resolutely does not care that he’s the embodiment of hypocrisy. There’s no “contradiction” or “dissonance.” This is how Trump operates. His “shut down the borders” yelling obviously clashes horribly with his decision to pardon a foreign drug trafficker, but everything about it is entirely consistent with all known Trump actions/statements to date. It may look like dissonance to someone who just emerged from a 12-year coma today, but it looks exactly like Trump business as usual to everyone else.
This doesn’t mean this hypocrisy should be ignored. It absolutely shouldn’t. It just means we shouldn’t use nicer words that suggest an error of judgment might have taken place, because that just gives a deliberately hypocritical act (one of several!) by Trump a veneer of plausible deniability it certainly goddamn doesn’t deserve.
Learn how to harness the power of Excel with the Ultimate Microsoft Excel Training Bundle. The 6 course cover power queries, macros, pivot tables, data visualization, advanced formulas, and more. The bundle is on sale for $30.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
