I’ll take my joy where I can. And this iteration of the Trump DOJ continues to provide bright bursts of schadenfreude-tinted sunshine.
Any competent DOJ can close cases. Any barely competent prosecutor can push a case past a grand jury. Any sufficiently slippery solicitor (mixing in some British for the sheer alliteration of it all) can convince a judge that the lies told by officers were merely good faith blunders not worthy of anything more than a judicial “no one’s perfect” shrug.
This DOJ fails at every single level. It can’t secure indictments. It can’t convince grand juries that vindictive prosecutions are legitimate prosecutions. And its prosecutors are constantly undermined by (1) prejudicial, fact-free social media posts and public statements by administration officials, (2) the illegal actions of federal officers, (3) their own ineptitude, (4) the lies told by federal officers, and (5) any or all of the above.
High-level prosecutors keep getting sidelined because they’ve been illegally appointed. Other prosecutors have refused to engage with the administration’s vindictive plans, resulting in most of them retiring or being fired. Consequently, there’s a shortage of qualified, experienced prosecutors. The void is being constantly refilled by some of the emptiest people ever to leverage MAGA loyalty into federal employment.
It took less than a year for the Trump DOJ to almost completely destroy the “presumption of regularity” — the legal concept that the government is acting in good faith, even if its legal arguments aren’t the best. It took less than a year for the Trump DOJ to turn grand juries into coin flips.
In 2016, the most recent year for which the Justice Department has published data, federal prosecutors concluded more than 155,000 prosecutions and declined over 25,000 cases presented by investigators. In only six instances was a grand jury’s refusal to indict listed as the reason for dropping the matter.
Six times in a one year over 25,000 declined cases. Trump’s loyalist US Attorney pick, Lindsey Halligan, put her insurance law background to work and… managed to do this twice during a single (attempted) prosecution.
When prosecutors aren’t shooting themselves in the foot (or being shot in the foot by their employer), they’re losing cases because the people they expect to back up their cases — the federal officers claiming to have been assaulted, etc. — can’t even back up their own narratives when testifying in court.
The most recent significant fumble came from Minneapolis prosecutors, who last week dismissed felony assault charges they had filed against two Venezuelan men accused of “violently beating” an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer “with weapons” on 14 January.
According to the early government narrative, federal officers were assaulted by “violent criminal illegal aliens” during a stop of an undocumented Venezuelan. The officers claimed two other men came out of a nearby apartment and attacked an officer with a “snow shovel and broom handle.” That case is now dead because… well, the testifying officers lied.
[O]n 12 February, prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss both men’s cases, saying: “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the complaint affidavit.”
[…]
ICE director Todd Lyons said ICE and the DoJ had opened an investigation into the case after videos revealed “sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements”, marking a rare acknowledgement of possible wrongdoing by DHS officials.
It’s extremely rare for the government to dismiss its own prosecution with prejudice, meaning it can’t ever seek to refile these criminal charges against the alleged perpetrators. And I don’t know if Todd Lyons just misspoke or if he actually tried to use the exonerative tense while simultaneously stating these officers lied. “Sworn testimony… appears to have made untruthful statements” sounds like the courtroom version of a government official discussing a shooting by an officer with the phrase “the officer’s weapon discharged,” suggesting no one actually pulled the trigger.
Whatever the case, there’s definitely a trend here.
In Chicago, of 92 people arrested for assaulting or impeding officers last fall, 74 cases have resulted in no charges; in 13 cases, charges were filed and dismissed; and five charged cases were still pending, a recent investigation by Fox 9, a Minneapolis-based station, showed. As of the end of January, there have been no convictions.
In LA, the federal public defenders have won all six cases filed against ICE protesters that have gone to trial since June, the LA Times recently reported. Fewer than 1% of federal criminal defendants were acquitted across the US in fiscal year 2024, with US prosecutors traditionally having a roughly 90% conviction rate, the paper noted.
I assume the DOJ bloodshed will continue. Trump hates losing and he hates people who lose in his name even more. But replacing talent with loyalists isn’t going to end this losing streak. If nothing else, this iteration of the DOJ has the chance to go down in history as one of the worst ever assembled, even if we consider nothing else but its win-loss record.
It doesn’t mean the DOJ is harmless, however. It’s still more than willing to engage in vindictive prosecutions, ignore court orders, and take bite after bite of the apple (so to speak) until it finally manages to at least pierce the skin. And that means a lot of people are going to have their lives upended, even if only temporarily, just to please a tyrant who thinks anything or anyone presenting even the most minimal of opposition should be subjected to punishment.
We wrote recently about the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was not accused of any crime. She was not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her that much while they were busy carting away basically everything she uses to do her job.
The raid was connected to the prosecution of Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor charged with retaining classified information. The DOJ wanted to rummage through a journalist’s entire digital life to find evidence against someone else. And they got a warrant to do it by, among other things, simply never mentioning to the magistrate judge that there’s a federal law—the Privacy Protection Act of 1980—that exists specifically to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening.
Last week, at a hearing on the Washington Post’s motion to get the devices back, Magistrate Judge William Porter let the DOJ attorneys have it. And then on Tuesday, he issued his ruling, blocking the government from searching Natanson’s devices and rescinding the portion of the warrant that would have let them do so.
The ruling is worth reading in full. Porter doesn’t mince words about what happened, even as he accepts some responsibility for his own failure to catch the omission:
Before reaching the merits, the Court addresses a matter of significant concern: the government’s failure to identify and analyze the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000aa et seq. (“PPA”), in its search warrant application.As the judge who found probable cause and approved the search warrant, the Court acknowledges that it did not independently identify the PPA when reviewing the warrant application.As far as this Court knows, courts have approved search warrants directed at members of the press in only a handful of instances. This Court had never received such an application and, at the time it approved the warrant, was unaware of the PPA. This Court’s review was limited to probable cause, andthe Court accepts that gap in its own analysis. But the government’s failure to identify the PPA as applicable to a request for a search warrant on a member of the press—and to analyze it in its warrant application—is another matter. This omission has seriously undermined the Court’s confidence in the government’s disclosures in this proceeding.
Credit to the judge for admitting his own gap in knowledge. But, come on: EDVA handles more national security cases than practically any other jurisdiction in the country. That a magistrate judge there could be unaware of the Privacy Protection Act—a statute that exists specifically to prevent the government from doing exactly what it was asking him to authorize—seems bizarre. Though, it also suggests how rarely the DOJ even bothers to seek these warrants, and how heavily the system depends on prosecutors acting in good faith. Which brings us to the far bigger problem: the DOJ’s deliberate decision to never bring it up.
And it wasn’t just some overworked junior attorney who “forgot.” As Porter notes in his ruling, lawyers at the highest levels of the DOJ were involved in getting this warrant approved:
The Court’s communications with the government over two days were not limited to the local AUSA. Counsel from the highest levels of the DOJ participated in at least one of those calls. Many government lawyers had multiple opportunities to identify the PPA as controlling authority and to include an analysis of it in the warrant application. None of them did.
None of them. Not the assistant US attorney who filed the application. Not the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division who was on the phone. Not anyone in the chain that apparently went all the way up to Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose approval is required by the DOJ’s own regulations before you can seek a warrant against a member of the press.
The attorney who submitted the application, Gordon Kromberg, is no novice. He’s a veteran national security prosecutor who worked on the Julian Assange case—a case built almost entirely around the intersection of the Espionage Act and journalism. The idea that he just didn’t think of the Privacy Protection Act while applying for a warrant to search a reporter’s home for evidence related to an Espionage Act prosecution beggars belief. (Kromberg was also accused of political shenanigans in that case too.)
The Freedom of the Press Foundation apparently agrees: they’ve filed a bar complaint against Kromberg with the Virginia State Bar, arguing that his failure to disclose the PPA violated Rule 3.3—the “Candor Toward the Tribunal” rule. As the complaint notes, this “could not have been a mere oversight” given that the warrant “predictably” became national news and should have required authorization from the highest levels of the DOJ, including the Attorney General.
“How could you miss it? How could you think it doesn’t apply?” Magistrate Judge William Porter asked a DOJ lawyer during a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia.
“I find it hard to believe that in any way this law did not apply,” Porter added later.
[….]
“You don’t think you have an obligation to say that?” Porter said at one point. “I’m a little frustrated with how the process went down.”
When DOJ attorney Christian Dibblee tried to argue that the decision was made by officials above him and that he understood the judge’s “frustration,” Porter shot back: “That’s minimizing it!”
Dibblee also tried the remarkable argument that the Privacy Protection Act wasn’t the kind of “adverse authority” that lawyers are typically required to disclose when making requests for warrants. A federal statute specifically governing searches of journalists’ materials somehow doesn’t count as relevant law when you’re applying for a warrant to search a journalist’s materials? Sure. That’s believable.
Porter’s ruling addresses this attempted dodge in a footnote that is quietly devastating. Kromberg claimed at the hearing that he didn’t mention the PPA because he believed the statute’s “suspect exception” applied—the narrow carve-out for when the journalist herself has committed a crime. But Porter dismantles that excuse:
The Court finds this explanation inadequate and only highlights why the AUSA should have analyzed the PPA in the application. The government cannot pretextually label a reporter a suspect simply to gather evidence against the actual target. DOJ’s governing guidelines between 2013 and 2020 prohibited invoking the suspect exception “if the sole purpose is to further the investigation of a person other than the member of the news media.” See 28 C.F.R. § 50.10(d)(5) (2016),https://perma.cc/S52Q-BKGD. Such a rule would mean that any invocation of the Espionage Act’s receipt provision, see 18 U.S.C. § 793(c), would automatically strip a reporter of PPA protection—an interpretation that would render the statute a nullity and cannot be reconciled with Congress’s purpose in enacting it. That the AUSA claims to have received contrary advice during the very period when DOJ policy reflected this limitation only underscores the inadequacy of the government’s analysis here.
In other words: Kromberg’s excuse for not mentioning the law actually makes it worse, because it suggests the DOJ’s position is that any time a journalist receives classified information—which is what investigative national security journalists do—the PPA just evaporates. Which would make the statute entirely meaningless. Which is exactly how this DOJ would prefer to treat it.
The ruling also highlights just how much the DOJ took from Natanson beyond what it had any conceivable right to. According to the CNN report linked above, at the hearing, the DOJ “quickly conceded ‘there is more information that was received than what was pursuant to the warrant,’ drawing a scoffing laugh from the judge.” Porter’s written opinion is blunt about the scope of the damage:
No easy remedy exists here. Movants’ First Amendment rights have been restrained. The government seized all of Ms. Natanson’s work product, documentary material, and devices, terminating her access to the confidential sources she developed and to all the tools she needs as a working journalist. The government’s proposed remedy—that she simply buy a new phone and laptop, set up new accounts, and start from scratch—is unjust and unreasonable.
The DOJ’s argument that Natanson could just “start from scratch” is the kind of thing that sounds reasonable only if you’ve never thought about journalism for more than thirty seconds. Or, I guess, if you’re being deliberately obtuse in court while trying to create chilling effects for journalists. Which is just part of the reason this is a clear First Amendment violation:
The government has seized the entirety of Ms. Natanson’s work product: her active stories, her notes on future investigations, and her background and confidential source material that, once compromised, cannot be replaced. The government’s suggestion that she can simply start from scratch fails to recognize the realities of modern journalism and the value of confidential source relationships cultivated over time. The Court finds that seizing the totality of a reporter’s electronic work product, including tools essential to ongoing newsgathering,constitutes a restraint on the exercise of First Amendment rights.
Separately, Porter refused to let the government’s own filter team conduct the review of the seized materials, citing a Fourth Circuit precedent that directly applies here. The government wanted its own people to sift through all of Natanson’s data. Porter said no, invoking language from the circuit court that captures the absurdity of the DOJ’s proposal perfectly:
Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product—most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources—is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse…. The concern that a filter team may err by neglect, by malice, or by honest difference of opinion is heightened where its institutional interests are so directly at odds with the press freedom values at stake.
Instead, Porter will conduct the review himself, which is the right call under the circumstances, even if it means the process will take significantly longer.
Porter also explains how the DOJ’s conduct has changed the way he will approach their representations going forward. A federal judge, explaining on the record that he can no longer take the government at its word:
In its day-to-day workings, this Court affords government attorneys a presumption of regularity, including by assuming that federal prosecutors have satisfied their obligation to disclose controlling and relevant authority…..
The government’s conduct has disturbed that baseline posture of deference.
That phrase—”disturbed that baseline posture of deference”—is doing a lot of work. It’s a judge admitting, as diplomatically as the federal judiciary allows, that the DOJ exploited his trust. Porter mentioned in passing that the week he received this warrant request there were 45 other such requests.
It feels a bit late for Porter to notice this, but the federal judiciary can be slow. For years we’ve called out how the DOJ frequently lies to judges, especially in any case they can slap a “national security” label on. And it’s been a long-term Techdirt complaint that judges give them a tremendous amount of unearned deference.
The DOJ lies. But this DOJ is so over the top in its misrepresentations, it appears judges are finally learning that.
The “presumption of regularity” that Porter describes is supposed to be earned through consistent good-faith conduct, and this DOJ has burned through whatever reserves of credibility it had.
The bar complaint and the judge’s frustration are both welcome. But what has already happened cannot be undone. Natanson’s 1,200 confidential sources—federal employees who reached out to her because they were afraid of retaliation from this administration—now know that their communications may be sitting in government hands. The fact that a judge eventually blocked the search doesn’t un-ring that bell. Every source who has ever talked to Natanson, and every source thinking about talking to any journalist covering this administration, has received the message loud and clear.
Porter seems to understand this. His closing paragraph carries what you might charitably call restrained skepticism:
The Court’s genuine hope is that this search was conducted—as the government contends—to gather evidence of a crime in a single case, not to collect information about confidential sources from a reporter who has published articles critical of the administration. The Court further hopes the record ultimately bears out the government’s representations
“Genuine hope.” A federal judge—bound by norms of restraint, writing in a judicial opinion—is telling us that the best he can offer is that he hopes the DOJ didn’t exploit his courtroom to target a journalist’s sources. He’s not saying he believes them. He’s not saying the evidence supports their claims. He’s saying he hopes. That’s as close as a sitting federal judge can come to calling the government liars without actually using the word. And he’s not alone—we’re hearing more and more judges feeling the need to speak out.
The outcome here is not the worst case scenario. Porter blocked the search, rescinded the review authorization, and will conduct the review himself rather than letting the DOJ’s own team paw through a reporter’s entire professional life. But the damage from the raid itself—the seizure, the chilling effect, the signal sent to every government employee who might consider talking to a reporter—was baked in the moment the FBI knocked on Natanson’s door at six in the morning.
If federal judges want this to stop, “frustration” expressed in hearings and “disturbed” confidence described in memorandum opinions aren’t going to cut it. Judges need to start imposing real consequences—sanctions, referrals, contempt—on individual DOJ lawyers who treat “candor toward the tribunal” as an optional courtesy rather than a professional obligation. Because right now, the DOJ has learned that the price for misleading a court to execute an unconstitutional raid on a journalist is a stern talking-to and a slightly more complicated review process a month later. Omit the inconvenient law. Exploit the judge’s trust. Execute the raid. Deal with the consequences later.
Judges used to “trust” DOJ representations. Now we’ve blown right past “trust, but verify” all the way to “never trust, always verify.”
Judge Porter has now learned, painfully and publicly, that this DOJ is not acting in good faith. He’s unlikely to be the last such judge.
It’s all well and good that we have a system of laws and rules in place. For the most part, the bumpers on the bowling lane help keep a lot of stuff on the field of play (to mix metaphors), even if powerful politicians would rather have the rules apply to everyone else but them.
This simply isn’t working during Trump’s second term in office. The rules and laws (and the oft-referenced “rule of law”) are still in place. But they don’t mean much when there are no meaningful methods of enforcement.
Trump continues to staff the DOJ with prosecutors who have never been subjected to the legally required confirmation process. To be fair, it’s always been a struggle to staff Trump’s DOJ. Those who haven’t quit because they refuse to engage in vindictive prosecutions are being fired because they either won’t engage in vindictive prosecutions or they’re simply not doing it as hard and as fast as Trump would like.
Plenty of people who used to serve Trump personally as his attorneys have been elevated into top-level prosecution roles, despite their complete lack of relevant experience. None of these people have been appointed legally.
Judges have been pushing back, which has led to Trump’s former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan being unceremoniously ousted from her role as a US attorney. Alina Habba spent most of a year generating massive conflicts of interest after being quasi-appointed to the position of US Attorney. She did this while still employed by Trump as his personal lawyer. Last December, she resigned from the position she never held legally and is now just another Trump lawyer who gets to hang around in the West Wing.
John Sarcone — Trump’s former campaign lawyer — was disqualified by a judge in January because he, too, had not been legally appointed to his position because Trump (and AG Pam Bondi) decided anyone who Trump wanted to be a US attorney could be one, even if that meant skipping the confirmation process entirely.
That didn’t bode well for Trump’s revenge fantasies. Sarcone being benched by the bench meant that all of his subpoenas targeting NY state attorney general Letitia James were no longer valid.
If the president decides he doesn’t want to subject his prosecutorial appointees to the confirmation process, that’s fine. But they only get to serve for so long (120 days) before they have to be replaced with a confirmed nominee. If that doesn’t happen, the court system gets to appoint a prosecutor to the now-open position.
The White House on Wednesday evening fired a new interim U.S. attorney in New York’s Northern District less than five hours after a panel of federal judges had appointed Donald T. Kinsella to the position.
The swift termination of Kinsella, a former longtime federal prosecutor, underscored the ongoing tensions in federal districts where the administration of President Donald J. Trump has clashed with judges who have declined to appoint his interim appointments of U.S. attorneys who have not been confirmed by the Senate.
That’s insane. It probably took more time to discuss the appointment than it did for Trump to fire Kinsella. Kinsella was the court-appointed placeholder — one that could only be replaced by a nominee confirmed by the Senate.
But that’s not happening here. Not only did the administration fire Kinsella, but it immediately declared John Sarcone was still the acting US Attorney, no matter what the court had declared. And rather than caution the administration against ritually abusing the process to keep former Trump lawyers in positions of government power, Trump’s high-level officials got up on the socials to make sure everyone knew this president is actually a king.
On Wednesday evening, after the Times Union first reported Kinsella’s appointment as well as his subsequent firing by the White House, the U.S. deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, posted on X: “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella.”
Hopefully, the court will just appoint someone else and force the administration to keep showing its autocratic ass until one of the White House bumblefucks says or does something that can’t be walked back. Attrition is the name of the game here. And I think there are more than enough qualified prosecutors available to outlast Trump’s revolving door of personal lawyers willing to accept government positions in lieu of a personal check from Trump.
Sarcone ran for Westchester County district attorney as a Republican in 2024 but lost to eventual winner Susan Cacace, a Democrat. He was later nominated by the Trump Administration to be U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, which covers the Capital region, North Country, Central New York and parts of the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley. But neither the U.S. Senate nor federal judges confirmed him, so the Trump Administration made him a special attorney for the region, devoid of term limits and traditional oversight.
Questions were eventually raised about his residence, since he had lived and campaigned in Westchester just a year before being named U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York. The Times Union reported that Sarcone’s listed address was a boarded-up building. Following that report, Sarcone ordered his staff to remove Times Union journalists from the office’s press distribution list.
That’s who Sarcone is. And that’s who he is going to be. If the courts are serious about standing up to abuses of executive power, it might be time to engage in a war of attrition.
The ICE surge in Minneapolis, Minnesota was instigated by a far-right click bait artist and encouraged by the president’s portrayal of Somali immigrants as “garbage” people from a “garbage” country. And those were some of the nicer words Trump used to describe the people his agencies would be hunting down first.
Several weeks later, a draw-down has begun, prompted by two murders committed by federal officers, an inability to obtain indictments against protesters, and every narrative about violence perpetrated by federal officers disintegrating the moment the government was asked to provide some evidence of its claims to the court.
Hundreds of judges in hundreds of immigration cases have found that the government has routinely violated the due process rights of the immigrants it has arrested. This dates all the way back to the beginning of Trump’s second term, but months of roving patrols by masked men with guns has created a massive influx of cases courts are still trying to sort out. But one thing is clear: the government will do anything it can to keep the people it arrests from availing themselves of their constitutional rights.
This starts with the arrests themselves, which most often occur without a judicial warrant. The same goes for the invasion of people’s houses and places of business. With the Supreme Court giving its tacit blessing to casual racism (the so-called “Kavanaugh stops”), anyone who looks less than white or whose English has a bit of an accent is considered reasonably suspicious enough to detain.
The government has been on the losing end of hundreds of cases involving due process rights. This decision [PDF], coming to us via Politico’s Kyle Cheney, details the massive amount of constant movement this government engages in to keep people separated from their rights and physical freedom.
It opens with this:
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) recognizes that noncitizen detainees have a constitutional right to access counsel. But in recent weeks, ICE has isolated thousands of people—most of them detained at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building—from their attorneys. Plaintiffs, who are noncitizen detainees and a nonprofit that represents noncitizens, have presented substantial, specific evidence detailing these alleged violations of the United States Constitution. In response, Defendants offer threadbare declarations generally asserting, without examples or evidence, that ICE provides telephone access to counsel for noncitizens in its custody. The Plaintiffs’ declarations provide specifics of the opposite. The gulf between the parties’ evidence is simply too wide and too deep for Defendants to overcome.
It’s not like ICE can’t provide detainees with access to attorneys or respect their due process rights. It’s that they choose not to, now that Trump is in charge. The access is theoretically possible. It’s just being purposefully denied. And it’s not even just being denied in the sense that phone call requests are being refused. People detained by ICE are placed into a constant state of flux for the sole purpose of making it as difficult as possible for them to avail themselves of their rights.
The devil is in the details. And the court brings plenty of those, all relating to the administration’s “Operation Metro Surge” that targeted Minneapolis, Minnesota:
Detainees are moved frequently, quickly, without notice,and often with no way for attorneys to know where or how long they will be at a given facility. (ECF No. 20 (“Boche Decl.”) ¶¶ 9, 13, 18; ECF No. 24 (“Edin Decl.”) ¶ 6; Heinz Decl. ¶ 5 (explaining that of eleven clients initially detained at Whipple, ten were transferred out of the state within twenty-four hours); Kelley Decl. ¶ 19.) Once a person has been transferred out of Minnesota, “representation becomes substantially more difficult”—attorneys must secure local counsel to sponsor a pro hac vice application and navigate additional barriers.
This is a key part of the administration’s deliberate destruction of constitutional rights. Moving people quickly helps prevent habeas corpus motions from being filed, since they need to be filed in the jurisdiction where they’re being held. If detainees are shifted from place to place quickly enough, their counsel needs to figure out where they’re being held and hope that their challenge lands in court before their clients are moved again. And with the Fifth Circuit basically codifying the denial of due process to migrants, more and more people arrested elsewhere in the nation are being sent to detainment centers in Texas as quickly as possible.
All of this is intentional:
Defendants transfer people so quickly that even Defendants struggle to locate detainees. Often, Defendants do not accurately or timely input information into the Online Detainee Locator System. This prevents Minnesota-based attorneys from locating and speaking with their clients.The locator either produces no search results or instructs attorneys to call for details, referencing a phone number that ICE does not answer. Often, Defendants do not update the locator until after detainees areout of state. Attorneys frequently learn of their client’s location for the first time when the government responds to a habeas petition.
These are not the good faith efforts of a government just trying to get a grasp on the immigration situation. These are the bad faith efforts of government hoping to violate rights quickly enough that the people it doesn’t like will be remanded to the nearest war-torn nation/foreign torture prison before the judicial branch has a chance to catch up.
There’s more. There’s the phone that detainees supposedly have access to for their one phone call. It’s the same line used to receive calls for inmates, so that means lawyers calling clients back either run into a busy signal or a ringing phone that detainees aren’t allowed to answer and ICE officers certainly aren’t interested in answering.
Lawyers seeking access to their clients have been refused access. In some cases, they’ve been threatened with arrest by officers simply for showing up. Even if they happen to make it inside the Whipple Detention Center, ICE officers and detention center employees usually refuse them access to their clients.
And when people try to work within the unconstitutional limitations of this deliberately broken system, they’re mocked for even bothering to avail themselves of their rights.
When an attorney told an agent that she sent a copy of a releaseorder to the specified email address, the agent laughed and said “something to the effect of ‘yeah we really need to get someone to check that email.’”
To sum up, the government is exactly what the court thinks it is: a set of deliberate rights violations pretending it’s a legitimate government operation that’s just trying to do the best it can in these troubling times:
It appears that in planning for Operation Metro Surge, the government failed to plan for the constitutional rights of its civil detainees. The government suggests—with minimal explanation and even less evidence—that doing so would result in “chaos.” The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights.
The administration has long lost the “presumption of regularity” that courts have utilized for years while handling lawsuits and legal challenges against the government. It no longer is considered to be acting in good faith in much of the country (Fifth Circuit excluded, for the most part). This is the “rule of law” party making it clear that it will only follow the rules and laws it likes. And it will continue to do so because courts can’t actually physically free people or force the government to respect their rights. The Trump administration is fine with losing in court and losing the hearts and minds of most of America as long as those in power keep getting to do what they want.
The Trump administration has fired one of the few remaining members of the administration that had even a passing interest in antitrust enforcement. DOJ antitrust boss Gail Slater has been fired from the administration after having repeated contentious run ins with key officials. It’s the final nail in the coffin of the log-running lie that MAGA ever seriously cared about reining in unchecked corporate power.
Slater’s post to Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website was amicable:
But numerous media reports indicate that Slater’s sporadic efforts to actually engage in antitrust enforcement consistently angered a “den of vipers” (including AG Pam Bondi and JD Vance). Some of the friction purportedly involved Bondi being angry Slater was directing merging companies to deal directly with DOJ officials and not Trump’s weird corruption colorguard. Other disputes were more petty:
“Tensions between Bondi and Slater extended beyond the merger. Last year, Slater planned to go to a conference in Paris – as her predecessors had done and as is required under a treaty to which the United States is a party.
But Bondi denied Slater’s request to travel on account of the cost. When Slater went to the conference anyway, Bondi cancelled her government credit cards, the people said.”
Mike and I had both noted that there had been signs of this fracture for a while. Slater was still a MAGA true believer. Before Google’s antitrust trial last year, she gave a speech full of MAGA culture war nonsense about how Google was trying to censor conservatives. She seemed happy to use the power of the government to punish those deemed enemies of the MAGA movement for the sake of the culture war. However, what she seemed opposed to was the growing trend within the MAGA movement of deciding antitrust questions based on which side hired more of Trump’s friends to work on their behalf.
First when the DOJ rubber stamped a T-Mobile merger some officials clearly didn’t want to approve (the approval was full of passive aggressive language making it very clear the deal wasn’t good for consumers or markets) there were signs of friction. Later when Slater wanted to block a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks, it was clear that the Trump admin’s antitrust policy was entirely pay for play, which was apparently a step too far for Slater. I’ve also heard some insiders haven’t been thrilled with the Trump administration’s plan to destroy whatever’s left of media consolidation limits to the benefit of right wing broadcasters.
Amusingly and curiously, there are apparently people surprised by the fact that an actual antitrust-supporting Republican couldn’t survive the grotesque pay-to-play corruption of the Trump administration. Including Politico, an outlet that spent much of the last two years propping up the lie that Trump and MAGA Republicans had done a good faith 180 on antitrust:
When I read that headline my eyes rolled out of my fucking head.
I had tried to warn people repeatedly over the last four years that the Trump support for “antitrust reform” was always a lie. Even nominally pro-antitrust reform officials like Slater tend to inhabit the “free market Libertarian” part of the spectrum where their interest in reining in unchecked corporate power is inconsistent at best. And even these folks were never going to align with Trump’s self-serving corruption.
Yet one of the larger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be “serious about antitrust,” and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. There were endless lies about how MAGA was going to “rein in big tech,” and how the administration’s purportedly legitimate populism would guarantee somewhat of a continuation of the Lina Khan efforts at the FTC.
In reality MAGA was always about one thing: Donald Trump’s power and wealth. These sorts of egomaniacal autocrats exploit existing corruption and institutional failure to ride into office on the back of fake populism pretending they alone can fix it, then once entrenched introduce something far worse. The administration’s “anti-war,” “anti-corporate,” “anti-corruption” rhetoric are all part of the same lie.
It’s worth reminding folks that MAGA’s phony antitrust bonafides wasn’t just a lie pushed by MAGA.
It was propped up by countless major media outlets (including Reuters, CNN, and Politico) that claimed the GOP had suddenly taken a 180 on things like monopolization. Even purportedly “progressive antitrust experts” like Matt Stoller tried to push this narrative, routinely hyping the nonexistent trust-busting bonafides of obvious hollow opportunists like JD Vance and Josh Hawley.
Under Trump 2.0, it’s effectively impossible to hold large corporations and our increasingly unhinged oligarchs accountable for literally anything (outside of ruffling Donald’s gargantuan ego, or occasionally trying to implement less sexist or racist hiring practices). This reality as a backdrop to these fleeting, flimsy media-supported pretenses about the legitimacy of “MAGA antitrust” is as dystopian as it gets.
Anybody who enabled (or was surprised by) any of this, especially the journalists at Politico, should probably be sentenced to mandatory community service.
Trump’s FCC has finished demolishing whatever was left of already saggy media ownership limits, and are eyeing eliminating rules that would prevent the big four (Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC) from merging (a major reason why these networks have been such feckless authoritarian appeasers).
They’re also working hard to let all of our local right wing broadcast companies merge into one, even larger, shittier company, something Donald Trump is very excited about!
More specifically Nexstar (a very Republican friendly company that also owns The Hill), is asking the FCC for permission to acquire Tegna in a $6.2 billion deal that is illegal under current rules (you might recall that Nexstar-owned The Hill recently fired a journalist whose reporting angered Trump).
The deal would give Nexstar ownership of 265 stations in 44 states and the District of Columbia and 132 of the country’s 210 television Designated Market Areas (or DMAs). Nexstar appears to have beaten out rival bids by Sinclair, which has also long-been criticized as Republican propaganda posing as local news. It wouldn’t be surprising if Nexstar and Sinclair are the next to merge.
Keep in mind, this is an industry that was already terrible agitprop, as this now seven-year-old Deadspin video helped everyone realize:
You might be inclined to say: “but Karl, local TV broadcasters are irrelevant. Who cares if they consolidate a dying industry.” But the consolidation won’t stop here. The goal isn’t just the consolidation of local broadcasters, it’s the consolidation of national and local media giants, telecoms, tech companies, and social media companies. All under the thumb of terrible unethical people.
Trump’s rise to power couldn’t have been made possible without the Republican domination of media. For the better part of a generation Republicans have dominated AM radio, local broadcast TV, and cable news, and have since done a remarkable job hoovering up what’s left of both major media companies (CBS, FOX) and modern social media empires (TikTok, Twitter). The impact is everywhere you look.
Over on Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda platform, Brendan Carr was quick to praise President’s Trump bold support for more media consolidation. And, as he has done previously, he openly lied and trying to pretend that local broadcast consolidation is something that aids competition:
I’ve covered Brendan Carr professionally since he joined the FCC in 2012. This is a man who has coddled media and telecom giants (and their anti-competitive behavior) at literally every opportunity. One of his only functions in government has been to rubber stamp shitty mergers. Here, he’s pretending to “protect competition” with a cute little antisemitic dog whistle about the folks in “Hollywood and New York.”
There’s a reason the Trump administration is destroying media consolidation limits, murdering public media, harassing media companies, threatening late night comedians (or having them fired), and ushering forth all this mindless and dangerous consolidation. There’s a reason Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are buying all the key social media platforms and fiddling with the algorithms.
They very openly (and so far semi-successfully) are trying to build a state media apparatus akin to what they have in Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. Our corporate press is already so broken and captured it’s incapable of communicating that to anybody. It simply wouldn’t be in their best financial interests for existing media conglomerates to be honest about this sort of thing.
One plus side, nobody involved in any of this — from CBS’s News boss Bari Weiss to Sinclair Broadcasting — appear to have any competent idea of what they’re doing. They’re not good at journalism (because they’re trying to destroy it), but they’re generally not good at ratings-grabbing propaganda. As a result it’s entirely possible they destroy U.S. media before their dream of state media comes to fruition.
Still, it might be nice if Democrats could stop waiting for “the left’s Joe Rogan” and finally start embracing some meaningful media reforms for the modern era, whether that’s the restoration of media consolidation limits, the creation of media ownership diversity requirements, an evolution in school media literacy training, support for public media, or creative new funding models for real journalism.
Because the trajectory we are on in terms of right wing domination of media heads to some very fucking grim places, and it’s not like any of that has been subtle.
The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) says it has initiated a broad investigation of Netflix’s business practices and it’s planned $82.7 billion merger with Warner Brothers. The Trump DOJ’s pretense is that they’re just suddenly really concerned about media consolidation and monopoly power (you’re to ignore the U.S. right wing’s generational and indisputable quest to coddle and protect monopoly power across telecom, energy, air travel, banking, and countless other industries):
“Questioning how Netflix competes with rivals suggests the department is looking at whether its planned Warner deal could entrench its market power, or lead to a monopoly in the future. U.S. law gives enforcers broad power to oppose mergers that could lead to a monopoly.”
In reality, the Trump administration has made it extremely clear they’re hoping to scuttle the Netflix deal to help Larry Ellison acquire Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. If they can’t kill the deal, they aspire to at least leverage the merger approval process to force Netflix executives to further debase themselves before the Trump administration, which I suspect they’ll all be happy to do.
It’s part of a longstanding trend by Trumpism to pretend that they’re engaged in populist antitrust reform, claims historically propped up by a long list of useful idiots across the partisan spectrum, and parroted by a growing coalition of right wing propaganda outlets. This bogus populism helps obfuscate what’s really just some of the worst corruption America has ever seen (which is really saying something).
The original (paywalled) Wall Street Journal report (and this aggregated Reuters recap) dutifully help sell the claim that the DOJ is also “investigating” Ellison’s Paramount/Skydance, whose Warner Brothers acquisition bid was repeatedly rejected by the Warner board over worries about dodgy financing and Saudi money involvement:
“The WSJ reported that the DOJ is also reviewing Paramount’s proposed acquisition bid, which Warner Bros’ board unanimously rejected by labeling it “inadequate” and “not in the best interests” of shareholders.”
After Warner Brothers balked at Larry’s competing bid and a hostile takeover attempt, Larry tried to sue Warner Brothers. With that not going anywhere, Larry, MAGA, and the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 fame) have since joined forces to try and attack the Netflix merger across right wing media, falsely claiming that “woke” Netflix is attempting a “cultural takeover” that must be stopped for the good of humanity:
As we keep noting, ideally a functional regulator would block all additional media consolidation, since these megadeals are consistently terrible for labor, consumers, and product quality (see: Warner Brothers entire corporate history since 2000).
That’s clearly not happening under a Trump administration that has lobotomized all key regulators. So ideally, while not great, Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers is the best of a bunch of bad options. It’s arguably notably better than furthering Larry Ellison’s obvious plan to gobble up CBS, TikTok, and CNN, and turn what’s left of America’s already dodgy corporate media into Hungary-esque state television that lavishes hollow praise on our mad idiot king.
Because we’ve already let media consolidation run amok (thanks to the Trump administration’s attack on bipartisan media consolidation limits), our shitty corporate press is incapable of explaining to the public that the Trump DOJ inquiry into Netflix isn’t being conducted in good faith. It’s a perfect circle of greed, regulatory capture, and corruption that will ramp up in the weeks to come.
Back in August, we wrote about the Department of Justice’s unprecedented decision to file a judicial misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg. The complaint, which Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted about in what was itself likely a violation of the law governing such complaints, accused Boasberg of violating judicial ethics by… privately expressing concerns to other judges that the Trump administration might not comply with court orders.
Concerns that, as we noted at the time, turned out to beentirely justified.
Let’s back up and explain what happened. The DOJ’s complaint centered on comments Boasberg allegedly made at a private Judicial Conference meeting on March 11, 2025, where he supposedly “push[ed] a wholly unsolicited discussion about ‘concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts, leading to a constitutional crisis.'” The complaint cited “Attachment A” as evidence of what Boasberg said.
There was just one small problem: the DOJ never actually provided Attachment A with the complaint. Actually, there were many, many problems, but we’ll get to those.
The complaint has now been fully resolved, and it went about as well for the DOJ as you might expect. Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, to whom Chief Justice Roberts transferred the complaint, dismissed it in a brusque seven-page ruling that reads like a judge who is deeply unimpressed with having his time wasted.
Chief Judge Sutton’s ruling is not just a tour de force in how a judicial ruling can persuasively give the back of its hand to a claim; it is, or at least ought to be, a humiliating smackdown for the Department of Justice—which bungled every single aspect of its misconduct complaint, from publicly announcing it to making spurious arguments about what the alleged misconduct actually was (the distinction between “public” and “private” really shouldn’t be hard, nor should the fact that March 11 is prior to March 15) to refusing to provide the very evidence on which the complaint purported to rest.
Vladeck also noted, in discussing how the DOJ never actually followed through on the steps it would obviously take if it were a legitimate complaint,that this proved how it was all political in the first place:
It turns out, it was never about adjudicating Boasberg’s behavior; it was about making splashy headlines and fueling right-wing attacks on the judiciary without regard to whether DOJ’s specious charges would withstand meaningful scrutiny.
Besmirching a long-time judge… for the memes.
The problems with the DOJ’s complaint were numerous, but let’s start with the most embarrassing one mentioned above: the DOJ never actually provided the evidence it claimed supported its accusations.
The Department identified one source of evidence, Attachment A, for the judge’s statement and for the setting in which it occurred. The complaint, however, did not include the attachment. The D.C. Circuit contacted the Department about the missing attachment and explained that, if it failed to submit the attachment, the circuit would consider the complaint as submitted. The Department did not supply the attachment.
In the absence of the attachment, the complaint offers no source for what, if anything, the subject judge said during the Conference, when he said it, whether he said it in response to a question, whether he said it during the Conference or at another meeting, and whether he expressed these concerns as his own or as those of other judges.Later in the complaint, to be sure, the Department refers to a Fox News clip discussing the same allegation. But it does not identify any source, contain any specifics, or answer any of the above questions. A recycling of unadorned allegations with no reference to a source does not corroborate them. And a repetition of uncorroborated statements rarely supplies a basis for a valid misconduct complaint
So the DOJ filed an unprecedented misconduct complaint against a sitting federal judge, made a huge public spectacle of it, and then when asked to actually produce the evidence supposedly supporting its claims… just didn’t. Vladeck’s assessment is appropriately blunt:
DOJ’s failure to produce Attachment A is, frankly, mind-boggling…
But even putting aside the DOJ’s failure to provide any actual evidence, Sutton methodically demolished every other theory in the complaint.
On the claim that Boasberg’s comments at the Judicial Conference were somehow improper, Sutton pointed out that this is literally what the Judicial Conference is for:
A key point of the Judicial Conference and the related meetings is to facilitate candid conversations about judicial administration among leaders of the federal judiciary about matters of common concern. In these settings, a judge’s expression of anxiety about executive-branch compliance with judicial orders, whether rightly feared or not, is not so far afield from customary topics at these meetings—judicial independence, judicial security, and inter-branch relations—as to violate the Codes of Judicial Conduct. Confirming the point, the Chief Justice’s 2024 year-end report raised general concerns about threats to judicial independence, security concerns for judges, and respect for court orders throughout American history
(For what it’s worth, as someone who had the privilege a couple years back of being invited to a judicial conference to give a talk, I can confirm firsthand that there were many fascinating informal conversations that occurred over the course of a few days among judges comparing notes and thinking through larger issues that might impact the judiciary).
On the DOJ’s claim that Boasberg’s comments constituted an improper “public comment” on a pending case, Sutton noted two rather obvious problems: the comments were private, not public, and the case the DOJ was concerned about hadn’t even been filed yet:
The alleged comment does not refer to a case, and the J.G.G. action was not filed until four days later: March 15, 2025. Because the judge did not refer to a case, that all but guarantees that his comments did not “violate[] Canon 3A(6), Canon 2A, or the Judicial–Conduct Rules.” In re Charges of Jud. Misconduct, 769 F.3d 762, 788 (D.C. Cir. 2014). The comment at any rate was not a “public” one, as it was made in a closed-door meeting in which the communications are off the record and confidential. The complaint, notably, does not claim that the judge made public what was said in private at the Conference or its related meetings.
As for the DOJ’s argument that Boasberg’s subsequent handling of the J.G.G. case (involving the shipping of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran concentration camp) somehow proved bias, Sutton wasn’t having that either. The complaint, he noted, “does not explain how a Supreme Court ruling about a prior action by the judge necessarily shows willful indifference when the judge addresses a distinct set of circumstances in a later ruling.”
Furthermore, Sutton points out that if the DOJ doesn’t like Boasberg’s rulings in a particular case, its remedy is… to appeal. Not claim misconduct:
When the executive branch’s deep convictions about the law meet the judicial branch’s deep convictions about the law in a trial court, the answer is to invoke the appellate process, not the misconduct process, to resolve the dispute.
And then, almost as an afterthought, Sutton reminded the DOJ that even if it had prevailed, the judicial misconduct process can’t do what the DOJ apparently wanted it to do:
To the extent the complaint asks that the underlying case be reassigned to another judge, that is not a form of relief available through the complaint process.
In other words:
the DOJ filed a complaint
that was based on misleading evidence
which it never produced
alleging misconduct that (even if true) wasn’t actually misconduct
propped up with claims of bias based on actions that occurred later
which could not be signs of bias, and finally
sought relief that wasn’t even available.
If the DOJ were capable of embarrassment, this would be the time for it.
In his initial post on the complaint last year when it was filed, Vladeck had noted that the entire complaint was supposed to be a warning to other judges to shut up about any concerns about the Trump admin. One hopes that this ruling by Judge Sutton will reverse that and embolden more judges to do what’s right.
But wait, there’s more.
Because we now have even more evidence of just how absurd this whole episode was, thanks to a FOIA lawsuit seeking the mysterious Attachment A that the DOJ never produced. And thanks to that lawsuit, we’ve learned something remarkable: neither the DOJ nor the judiciary can actually explain how the DOJ came to possess this document in the first place.
In a declaration filed in that case, DOJ Senior Counsel Vanessa Brinkmann reveals some truly remarkable details about this document that was supposedly central to the DOJ’s case against Boasberg. First, the DOJ confirms the document exists and describes what it is:
Upon initial review of the document identified in this action as “Attachment A,” OIP observed that the document is a memorandum that bears the markings of a United States Court, is authored by a Federal Judge, and discusses matters internal to the Judicial Conference of the United States.
So it’s a document created by the judiciary, for the judiciary, about internal judiciary matters. And what does the judiciary think about the DOJ having this document? They’re not happy:
AOUSC Counsel conveyed to OIP, in no uncertain terms, the Federal Judiciary’s strenuous objection to the Department’s release of “Attachment A.” AOUSC Counsel further articulated that “Attachment A” was created to be an internal Judiciary document, for a specific Judiciary audience, concerning confidential Judiciary matters and is not now, nor was it ever an Executive Branch document. In sum, AOUSC Counsel advised OIP that it is the position of the AOUSC that “Attachment A” remains under the control of the Judicial Branch, is confidential, and is not subject to disclosure pursuant to the FOIA.
But here’s where it gets really interesting. How did the DOJ get this internal judiciary document in the first place? Apparently, nobody knows:
AOUSC Counsel further stated that the Judiciary made efforts to identify how “Attachment A” ended up in the possession of the Department and has not been able to identify a source of transmission of “Attachment A” from within the Judiciary to the Department. AOUSC Counsel additionally articulated that the Judiciary did not officially transmit or authorize the transmission of “Attachment A” to the Department or any external recipient. Specifically, AOUSC Counsel explained that, given the privileged nature of the document, the Judicial Conference at large would be the only entity that could approve its official release, and that it is the view of the AOUSC that the document is not an Executive Branch record subject to FOIA disclosure, but rather, a judicial record that remains under the control of the Judicial Branch.
And the DOJ’s own investigation into how it acquired this document?
Searches conducted of DOJ leadership office officials’ Departmental email accounts using e-discovery software revealed no electronic trail indicating transmission of “Attachment A” into the Department, nor has OIP’s point of contact within OAG been able to identify how “Attachment A” was received by the Department.
So let’s recap again:
the DOJ filed an unprecedented judicial misconduct complaint against a sitting federal judge based on a document that
it never actually provided as evidence
was created by the judiciary for internal purposes
the judiciary never authorized to be shared with the DOJ, and
neither the DOJ nor the judiciary can explain how the DOJ obtained in the first place.
This is the same DOJ that Attorney General Bondi claimed was acting to protect “the integrity of the judiciary.”
All of this suggests that perhaps one of Vladeck’s theories for why the DOJ refused to hand over Attachment A may have some weight behind it. He theorized that either Attachment A doesn’t actually say what the DOJ claims or that they got it “through means that it’s unwilling to have to identify—even confidentially as part of the judicial misconduct process.” The declaration in the FOIA case would seem to bolster that last point.
As Vladeck notes, Sutton’s dismissal should be the final word on this matter:
The outcome here should be seen for what it is: how a sober-minded jurist actually views these charges, versus how they’re manipulated and broadcast by the Department of Justice and right-wing mouthpieces to serve partisan political ends.
As for the less sober-minded among the commentariat:
Anyone who continues to claim at this point that Chief Judge Boasberg has done anything worthy of further investigation and/or impeachment is telling on themselves.
But of course, that would require the people pushing this narrative to care about things like facts, evidence, and the rule of law. Based on the DOJ’s conduct in this case, that seems like a lot to ask.
Days into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted a video on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “Please Donald Trump, I need your help,” he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. “I am an American. … Help me come home.”
The speaker, 46-year-old Roger Ver, was in fact no longer a U.S. citizen. Nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus” for his early evangelism for digital currency, Ver had renounced his citizenship more than a decade earlier. At the time of his video, Ver was under criminal indictment for millions in tax evasion and living on the Spanish island of Mallorca. His top-flight legal defense team had failed around half a dozen times to persuade the Justice Department to back down. The U.S., considering him a fugitive, was seeking his extradition from Spain, and he was likely looking at prison.
Once, prosecutors hoped to make Ver a marquee example amid concerns about widespread cryptocurrency tax evasion. They had spent eight painstaking years working the case. Just nine months after his direct-to-camera appeal, however, Ver and Trump’s new Justice Department leadership cut a remarkable deal to end his prosecution. Ver wouldn’t have to plead guilty or spend a day in prison. Instead, the government accepted a payout of $49.9 million — roughly the size of the tax bill prosecutors said he dodged in the first place — and allowed him to walk away.
Ver was able to pull off this coup by taking advantage of a new dynamic inside of Trump’s Department of Justice. A cottage industry of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants with close ties to Trump has sprung up to help people and companies seek leniency, often by arguing they had been victims of political persecution by the Biden administration. In his first year, Trump issued pardons or clemency to dozens of people who were convicted of various forms of white-collar crime, including major donors and political allies. Investigations have been halted. Cases have been dropped.
Within the Justice Department, a select club of Trump’s former personal attorneys have easy access to the top appointees, some of whom also previously represented Trump. It has become a dark joke among career prosecutors to refer to these lawyers as the “Friends of Trump.”
The Ver episode, reported in detail here for the first time, reveals the extent to which white-collar criminal enforcement has eroded under the Trump administration. The account is based on interviews with current and former Justice Department officials, case records and conversations with people familiar with his case.
The Trump administration has particularly upended the way tax law violators are handled. Late last year, the administration essentially dissolved the team dedicated to criminal tax enforcement, dividing responsibility among a number of other offices and divisions. Tax prosecutions fell by more than a quarter, and more than a third of the 80 experienced prosecutors working on criminal tax cases have quit.
But even amid this turmoil, Ver’s case stands out. After Ver added several of these new power brokers to his team — most importantly, former Trump attorney Chris Kise — Trump appointees commandeered the case from career prosecutors. One newly installed Justice Department leader who had previously represented Trump’s family questioned his new subordinates on whether tax evasion should be a criminal offense. Ver’s team wielded unusual control over the final deal, down to dictating that the agreement would not include the word “fraud.”
It remains the only tax prosecution the administration has killed outright.
Ver did not reply to an extensive list of questions from ProPublica. In court filings and dealings with the Justice Department, Ver had always denied dodging his tax bill intentionally — a key distinction between a criminal and civil tax violation — and claimed to have relied on the advice of accountants and tax attorneys.
“Roger Ver took full responsibility for his gross financial misconduct to the tune of $50 million because this Department of Justice did not shy away from exposing those who cheat the system. The notion that any defendant can buy their way out of accountability under this administration is not founded in reality,” said Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokesperson.
In response to a list of detailed questions, the White House referred ProPublica to the Justice Department.“I know of no cases like this,” said Scott Schumacher, a former tax prosecutor and the director of the graduate program in taxation at the University of Washington. It is nearly unheard of for the department to abandon an indicted criminal case years in the making. “They’re basically saying you can buy your way out of a tax evasion prosecution.”
Roger Ver is not a longtime ally of Trump’s or a MAGA loyalist. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, a day he once called “the happiest day of my entire life.” In the early days of bitcoin, he controlled about 1% of the world’s supply.
Ver is clean-cut and fit — he has a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. In his early 20s, while he was a libertarian activist in California, Ver was sentenced to 10 months in prison for illegally selling explosives on eBay. He’s often characterized that first brush with the law as political persecution by the state. After his release, he left the U.S. for Japan.
Ver became a fixture in the 2010s on the budding cryptocurrency conference circuit, where he got a kick out of needling government authority and arguing that crypto was the building block of a libertarian utopia. At a 2017 blockchain conference in Aspen, Colorado, Ver announced he had raised $100 million and was seeking a location to create a new “non-country” without any central government. For years, Ver has recommended other wealthy people consider citizenship in the small Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which has no individual income tax.
“Bitcoin completely undermines the power of every single government on the entire planet to control the money supply, to tax people’s income to control them in any way,” he told a gathering of anarcho-capitalists in Acapulco, Mexico, in 2016. “It makes it so incredibly easy for people to hide their income or evade taxes.” More than one friend, he said with a smirk, had asked him how to do so: They “say, ‘Roger, I need your help. How do I use bitcoins to avoid paying taxes on it?’”
Renouncing U.S. citizenship isn’t a magic get-out-of-tax-free technique. Since 2008, the U.S. has required expatriates with assets above $2 million pay a steep “exit tax” on the appreciation of all their property.
In 2024, the Justice Department indicted Ver in one of the largest-ever cryptocurrency tax fraud cases. The government accused Ver of lying to the IRS twice. After Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014, he claimed to the IRS that he personally did not own any bitcoin. He would later admit in his deal with the government to owning at least 130,664 bitcoin worth approximately $73.7 million at the time. Then in 2017, the government alleged, Ver tried to conceal the transfer of roughly $240 million in bitcoin from U.S. companies to his personal accounts. In all, the government said he had evaded nearly $50 million in taxes.
Ver’s defense was that his failure to pay taxes arose from a lack of clarity as to how tax law treated emerging cryptocurrency, good-faith accounting errors and reliance on his advisors’ advice. He claimed it was difficult to distinguish between his personal assets and his companies’ holdings and pinpoint what the bitcoin was actually worth.
The Biden administration’s Justice Department dismissed this legal argument. Prosecutors had troves of emails that they said showed Ver misleading his own attorneys and tax preparers about the extent of his bitcoin holdings. (Ver’s team accused the government of taking his statements out of context.) The asset tracing in the case was “rock solid,” according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. A jury, prosecutors maintained, was unlikely to buy Ver’s defense that he made a good-faith error.
By the time of Trump’s election, Ver had been arrested in Spain and was fighting extradition. He was also the new owner of a sleek $70 million yacht that some law enforcement officials worried he might use to escape on the high seas.
In Trump, Ver saw a possible way out. After the 2024 election, he was “barking up every tree,” said his friend Brock Pierce, a fellow ultrawealthy crypto investor who tried to gin up sympathy for Ver in Trump’s orbit.
Ver had initially gone the orthodox route of hiring tax attorneys from a prestigious law firm, Steptoe. Like many wealthy people in legal jeopardy, Ver now also launched a media blitz seeking a pardon from the incoming president. “If anybody knows what it’s like to be the victim of lawfare it’s Trump, so I think he’ll be able to see it in this case as well,” Ver said in a December 2024 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. On Charlie Kirk’s show, Ver appeared with tape over his mouth with the word “censored” written in red ink. Laura Loomer, the Trump-friendly influencer, began posting that Ver’s prosecution was unfair. Ver paid Trump insider Roger Stone $600,000 to lobby Congress for an end to the tax provision he was accused of violating.
Ver’s pardon campaign fizzled. His public pressure campaign — in which he kept comparing himself to Trump — was not landing, according to Pierce. “You aren’t doing yourself any favors — shut up,” his friend recalled saying.
One objection in the White House, according to a person who works on pardons, may have been Ver’s flamboyant rejection of his American citizenship. Less than a week after Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk weighed in, posting on X, “Roger Ver gave up his US citizenship. No pardon for Ver. Membership has its privileges.”
But inside the Justice Department, Ver found an opening. The skeleton key proved to be one of the “Friends of Trump,” a seasoned defense lawyer named Christopher Kise. Kise is a longtime Florida Republican power player who served as the state’s solicitor general and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned a place in Trump’s inner circle as one of the first experienced criminal defenders willing to represent the president after his 2020 election loss. Kise defended Trump in the Justice Department investigation stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and against charges that Trump mishandled classified documents when leaving the White House.
Kise had worked shoulder-to-shoulder on Trump’s cases with two lawyers who were now leaders in the Trump 2.0 Justice Department: Todd Blanche, who runs day-to-day operations at the department as deputy attorney general, and his associate deputy attorney general, Ketan Bhirud, who oversaw the criminal tax division prosecuting Ver. Kise reportedly helped select Blanche to join Trump’s legal team in the documents case, and he and Bhirud had both worked for Trump’s family as they fought civil fraud charges brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022.
On Ver’s legal team, Kise worked the phones, pressing his old colleagues to rethink their prosecution against Ver.
Kise scored the legal team’s first big victory in years: a meeting with Bhirud that cut out the career attorneys most familiar with the merits of the case.
In that meeting, however, it wasn’t clear that the new Justice Department leadership would be willing to interfere with the trajectory of Ver’s case. While the Trump administration had backed off aggressive enforcement of white-collar crimes writ large, the administration said it was still pursuing most criminal cases that had already been charged.
Bhirudinitiallyexpressed skepticism that Ver accidentally underpaid his taxes. It was “hard to believe” that a man going by “Bitcoin Jesus” would have no idea how much bitcoin he owned, Bhirud said, according to a person familiar with the case.
Bhirud and Blanche did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.
The Justice Department stuck to its position that either Ver would plead guilty to a crime, or the case would go to trial.
But Kise would not stop lobbying his former colleagues to reconsider. Blanche and Bhirud had already demanded that career officials justify the case again and again. Over the course of the summer, Kise wore down the Trump appointees’ zeal for pursuing Ver on criminal charges.
Kise and the law firm of Steptoe did not respond to questions.
“While there were meetings and conversations with DOJ, that is not uncommon. The line attorneys remained engaged throughout the process, and the case was ultimately resolved based on the strength of the evidence,” said Bryan Skarlatos, one of Ver’s tax attorneys and a partner at Kostelanetz.
It was a chaotic moment at the Justice Department, an institution that Trump had incessantly accused of being “weaponized” against him and his supporters. After Trump took office, the department was flooded with requests to reconsider prosecutions, with defendants claiming the Biden administration had singled them out for political persecution, too.
While many cases failed to grab the administration’s attention, Kise got results. Last week, Kise’s client Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian billionaire accused of trying to bribe the former governor of Puerto Rico, received a pardon from Trump.
“Every defense attorney is running the ‘weaponization’ play. This guy gets an audience because of who he is, because his name is Chris Kise,” said a person who recently attended a high-level meeting Kise secured to talk the Justice Department down from prosecuting a client.
As Kise stepped up the pressure, Ver’s case ate up a significant share of Bhirud’s time, despite his job overseeing more than 1,000 Justice Department attorneys, according to people familiar with the matter. Ordinarily, it would be rare for a political appointee to be so involved, especially to the exclusion of career prosecutors who could weigh in on the merits.
Bhirud began to muse to coworkers about whether failure to pay one’s taxes should really be considered a crime. Wasn’t it more of a civil matter? It seemed to a colleague that Bhirud was aware Ver’s advocates could try to elevate the case to the White House.
The government ceded ground and offered to take prison time off the table. Eventually, Ver’s team and Bhirud hit on the deal that would baffle criminal tax experts. They agreed on a deferred prosecution agreement that would allow Ver to avoid criminal charges and prison in exchange for a payout and an agreement not to violate any more laws. The government usually reserves such an agreement for lawbreaking corporations to avoid putting large employers out of business — not for fugitive billionaires.
By the time fall approached, Kise and Bhirud, with Blanche’s blessing, were negotiating Ver’s extraordinary deal line by line. Once more, career prosecutors were cut out from the negotiations.
Ver’s team enjoyed a remarkable ability to dictate terms. They rejected the text of the government’s supposed final offer because it required him to admit to “fraud,” according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In the end, Ver agreed to admit only to a “willful” failure to report and pay taxes on all his bitcoin and turned over the $50 million.
The government arrived at that figure in a roundabout manner. It dropped its claim that Ver had lied on his 2017 tax return. The $50 million figure was based on how much he had evaded in taxes in 2014 alone, plus what the government asserted were interest and penalties. In the end, the deal amounted to the sum he allegedly owed in the first place. He never even had to leave Mallorca to appear in a U.S. court.
Under any previous administration, convincing the leadership of the tax division to drop an indicted criminal case and accept a monetary penalty instead would be a nonstarter. While the Justice Department settles most tax matters civilly through fines, when prosecutors do charge criminal fraud, their conviction rate is over 90%.
People “always ask you, ‘Can’t I just pay the taxes and it’ll go away?’” said Jack Townsend, a former DOJ tax attorney. “The common answer that everybody gave — until the Trump administration — was that, no, you can’t do that.”
When the Justice Department announced the resolution in October, it touted it as a victory.
“We are pleased that Mr. Ver has taken responsibility for his past misconduct and satisfied his obligations to the American public,” Bhirud said in the Justice Department’s press release announcing the deferred prosecution agreement. “This resolution sends a clear message: whether you deal in dollars or digital assets, you must file accurate tax returns and pay what you owe.”
Inside the Justice Department, the resolution was demoralizing: “He’s admitted he owes money, and we get money, but everything else about it stinks to high heaven,” said a current DOJ official familiar with the case. “We shouldn’t negotiate with people who are fugitives, as if they have power over us.”
Among the wealthy targets of white-collar criminal investigations, the Ver affair sent a different message. Lawyers who specialize in that kind of work told ProPublica that more and more clients are asking which of the “Friends of Trump” they should hire. One prominent criminal tax defense lawyer said he would give his clients a copy of Ver’s agreement and tell them, “These are the guys who got this done.”
The only one of Ver’s many lawyers to sign it was Christopher Kise.
Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump — reviewing the actions of officials who investigated him, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Almost immediately after Pam Bondi stepped into her role as attorney general last year, she established a “Weaponization Working Group”…
We all know the DOJ is fully weaponized. It’s little more than a fight promoter for Trump’s grudge matches. The DOJ continues to bleed talent as prosecutors and investigators flee the kudzu-esque corruption springing up everywhere in DC.
But naming something exactly what it is — the weaponization of the DOJ to punish Trump’s enemies — wasn’t something I ever expected to see.
I didn’t see it, which fulfills my expectations, I guess. That’s because it isn’t what it says on the tin, even though it’s exactly the thing it says it isn’t. 1984 is apparently the blueprint. It’s called the “Weaponization Working Group,” but it’s supposedly the opposite: a de-weaponization working group. Here’s the second half of the paragraph we ellipsised out of earlier:
…[t]o review law enforcement actions taken under the Biden administration for any examples of what she described as “politicized justice.”
The Ministry of Weaponization has always de-weaponized ministries. Or whatever. The memo that started this whole thing off — delivered the same day Trump returned to office — said it even more clearly:
ENDING THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Administration officials are idiots, but they’re not so stupid they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t actually want to end the weaponization. They just want to make sure all the weapons are pointing in one direction.
Trading in vindication hasn’t exactly worked well so far. Trump’s handpicked replacements for prosecutors that have either quit or been fired are a considerable downgrade from the previous office-holders. They have had their cases tossed and their careers as federal prosecutors come to an end because (1) Trump doesn’t care what the rules for political appointments are and (2) he’s pretty sure he can find other stooges to shove into the DOJ revolving door.
The lack of forward progress likely has Pam Bondi feeling more heat than she’s used to. So the deliberately misnamed working group is going to actually start grouping and working.
The Weaponization Working Group is now expected to start meeting daily with the goal of producing results in the next two months,according to the person familiar with the plan.
Nothing good will come from this. Given the haphazard nature of the DOJ’s vindictive prosecutions efforts, there’s still a chance nothing completely evil will come from this either. It’s been on the back burner for a year. Pam Bondi can’t keep this going on her own. And it’s hell trying to keep people focused on rubbing Don’s tummy when employee attrition is what the DOJ is best known for these days.
