You’re never safe when you’re working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump’s first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump.
This time around even die-hard MAGA loyalists are being fired. DHS head Kristi Noem was dismissed from her position, despite being the enthusiastic figurehead of anti-migrant cruelty Trump definitely wanted in that position. Now, she’s cooling her heels and watching the dust settle on her political hopes as the doesn’t-sound-made-up-at-all “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.”
In recent weeks, Ms. Bondi tried to shore up her position by moving more aggressively against investigative targets singled out by Mr. Trump, including the former Obama official John O. Brennan and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials briefed on the effort.
It is not entirely clear if any specific action or event finally tipped the balance for Mr. Trump, who had been reluctant to fire senior officials to avoid reprising the chaotic turnstile personnel turnover of his first administration.
But with the dismissal of Ms. Noem and now Ms. Bondi, that might be changing. His calculus appears to have shifted after the quick confirmation of Markwayne Mullin as Ms. Noem’s replacement.
Bondi’s head may have been destined for the chopping block months ago, when Trump (in what appeared to be a personal message accidentally posted on main) berated Bondi for not doing all the impossible stuff he wanted done right now, like engaging in vindictive prosecutions that were (1) obviously vindictive, and (2) didn’t have enough evidence to support the hallucinatory charges dreamed up by Trump and his DOJ enablers.
Nothing has improved since then. Lots of prosecutors have left the DOJ, refusing to engage in Trump’s overt politicization of the department. Others have been dismissed for the same reason. A handful of handpicked prosecutors have been sidelined by judges because they were never formally appointed. And grand juries are frequently refusing to buy what the government’s selling, terminating prosecutions before they can even get off the ground.
Not that we should expect anything better (or more ethical) from her replacement. Todd Blanche is a true Trump loyalist. But he’s taking over a DOJ that’s short on experience, long on MAGA loyalty, and whose reputation has been completely destroyed by this administration and its actions.
The stuff Bondi failed to get done will continue to not happen. Anyone stepping into this position should know it’s only going to be temporary. The president who thinks he’s a king will continue to see courts stifle his worst impulses. Changing the name on the letterhead isn’t suddenly going to make vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions any more legal or feasible.
But I don’t have any sympathy for anyone being shit-canned for failing to satisfy the whims of a megalomaniac who thinks he’s a king, rather than a temporarily elevated politician. They’re far more than merely complicit. They’re fully supportive of destroying America and its institutions to usher in a new age of white Christian nationalism. So, fuck ’em. They got what they deserved.
After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who’d recently moved to Minneapolis, local law enforcement officials requested a partnership with the federal government to investigate the case, as they’d done in past shootings involving federal agents.
When the Trump administration refused to cooperate, Minnesota prosecutors ratcheted up their efforts. They sent a series of strongly worded legal letters demanding evidence in the Good shooting as well as the shootings of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant who was wounded a week after Good was shot, and Alex Pretti, who was killed on Jan. 24.
Still, the administration rebuffed the requests.
This week, prosecutors from Hennepin County and the state of Minnesota took the next step to force the Trump administration’s hand. They filed a federal lawsuit against the departments of Homeland Security and Justice over the evidence in the shootings, an action that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, whose jurisdiction covers Minneapolis, characterized as “unprecedented in American history.”
The Trump administration has declined to release the names of the agents involved in the shootings, even after the Minnesota Star Tribune and ProPublica identified the officers involved in the Good and Pretti incidents.
“The federal government has refused to cooperate with state law enforcement, which is unique, rare and simply cannot be tolerated,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told reporters. “[We] can’t sit around and let them do it.”
In the standoff over evidence, the case has already become a game of constitutional chicken over states’ rights versus federal immunity, a battle that will have implications for others who wish to hold agents in the president’s immigration surge criminally accountable.
So far, neither side is showing signs of backing down, foreshadowing a fight that could take years. If prosecutors do eventually file charges against federal agents involved in the shootings, legal experts said the path to trial, much less winning convictions, will be filled with legal and procedural challenges.
“State prosecutors across the country are going to be watching what happens in Minnesota really closely,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.
The first test for prosecutors, if they file charges, would be to prove the agents don’t qualify for immunity through the Constitution’s supremacy clause, a rarely invoked legal doctrine that protects federal officers from state prosecutions if they’re acting lawfully and within the scope of their duties.
Failing to pass that test would likely end the case.
The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t taken up a case involving supremacy clause immunity in over 100 years, Bannon said, and judges have come down differently on legal issues related to its application.
There’s no easy answer as to whether Minnesota will be able to get past a supremacy clause defense, said Jill Hasday, a constitutional law professor at the University of Minnesota.
“That depends on the facts, but probably the odds are stacked against it,” she said.
Even if they survive such a fight, the cases could be dogged by a series of logistical challenges. Moriarty, who has been leading the investigations, has decided not to seek reelection and will leave office at the end of the year. That means whoever wins the election for her seat in November could inherit the prosecutions.
In addition to not having the names of the agents, prosecutors don’t know where those agents are now. Minnesota may need to extradite them, potentially from a MAGA-leaning state that may balk at sending them to Hennepin County to stand trial.
“Will the federal government or other states cooperate with that? I think the answer to that is sort of iffy,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia. (Indeed, in a case involving a doctor charged with illegally mailing abortion medication to a Louisiana woman, the state of California has rejected an extradition request, citing its own laws protecting doctors from prosecution elsewhere.)
The fight is focused on three shootings. But Moriarty’s office has opened criminal investigations into 14 additional cases of potentially unlawful behavior by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, which started in early December and has wound down over the past few weeks.
The other cases Moriarty is examining involve allegations of excessive force or other misconduct by federal agents, such as an incident in early January in which agents allegedly used force on staff and students on the grounds of a high school.
Prosecutors are also investigating Gregory Bovino, the outgoing Border Patrol commander who helped to lead immigration surges into several American cities and who was seen on video lobbing green-smoke canisters into crowds at a park in Minneapolis. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said at the time that Bovino and other agents were responding to a “hostile crowd.”
The tension has played out in a series of demand letters sent by Moriarty to the Justice and Homeland Security departments. “Public transparency is vitally important in these cases — not just for the people of Hennepin County and Minnesota, but for the public nationwide,” Moriarty wrote in one of the letters. “The only way to achieve transparency is through investigation conducted at a local level.”
In January, after the shooting of Good, federal officials had agreed to participate in a joint investigation with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension — Minnesota’s state police agency tasked with examining use of deadly force cases — according to the letters signed by Moriarty.
State officials presumed they’d be able to examine evidence, such as the car Good was driving and the guns used to shoot her and the other victims. But the investigators later learned through public statements by high-ranking Trump administration officials that federal agents were no longer planning to share evidence, the letter states.
Local and state prosecutors don’t have the authority to subpoena them for evidence like in a typical criminal investigation. The demand letters, called Touhy letters, are formal written requests, used as an alternative to a subpoena, asking a federal agency to provide evidence or testimony in a case in which the government is not a party. Moriarty sought an extensive list of evidence in the shootings, from the guns fired by the agents in all three cases to official reports, agent GPS devices and witness statements. The Touhy letters asked for a response by Feb. 17.
Normally, the federal government complies with Touhy letters as a matter of protocol, as long as releasing the information doesn’t violate an internal policy, said Timothy Johnson, a political science and law professor at the University of Minnesota.
But on Feb. 13, the FBI told BCA investigators that it won’t share investigative materials in the Pretti case, BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said in a statement. Evans said the police agency had reiterated its requests for evidence in the Good and Sosa-Celis cases.
More than a month after the deadline set by prosecutors, the Trump administration still hasn’t turned over the materials.
“There has been no cooperation from federal authorities,” BCA spokesperson Michael Ernster said.
The agents involved in the shootings have not spoken publicly, but a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security defended Good’s shooting, saying the agent acted in self-defense. They said the Pretti shooting was under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, with the Border Patrol conducting its own investigation. Those investigations could result in discipline or charges, including for civil rights violations.
The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said federal officials found that, after Sosa-Celis’ shooting, officers made false statements. But the agency did not say whether it would cooperate with the local authorities or follow a court ruling requiring it to do so.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment or to questions. Neither agency has responded to the lawsuit.
Moriarty called the lawsuit “critically important” to investigating the shooting cases but also said she had not made any decisions on whether her office will file charges.
“There has to be an investigation anytime a federal agent or a state agent takes the life of a person in our community,” she said. “And ultimately the decision may be it was lawful. You don’t know, but that’s why you do the investigation. You are transparent with the results of that investigation, and you are public with your transparency about the decision and how you got there.”
But a lawsuit does not guarantee that prosecutors will get all they want. “The question then becomes, even if Hennepin County or Minneapolis wins the suit, will they comply then?” Johnson asked. “And the answer is probably no.”
If the Trump administration did eventually defy a judge’s order, he said, prosecutors could try to appeal up to the U.S. Supreme Court. As far as what could happen next: “It’s anyone’s guess.”
Trump’s do everything all at once approach to immigration enforcement is starting to go off the rails. Trump’s plainly stated hatred of “shithole countries” and their inhabitants manifested in early wins for his bigoted “remove the brown people” programs. Then Stephen Miller (the man who answers the “what if a lightbulb had eyebrows and was also a white nationalist” question no one asked) showed up and amped things up. 3,000 arrests per day! he screamed into the void. (The void did not respond to our request for comment before press time.)
A lot of wrenches approached the anti-migrant works and immediately threw themselves into it. First, ICE didn’t have enough officers to staff a surge. No problem, said the administration. Here’s $50,000 and almost no training to get you started! Here’s several (more!) billion dollars to keep it going! Here’s everyone we actually can’t spare from multiple federal agencies!
Bang! Into the blue cities they went, kidnapping and murdering their way towards Miller’s arrest quota. All well and good but at the end of the day, you’ve still got to have some lawyers left to fight the lawsuits these surges generated, as well as to handle challenges against detentions, removals, and direct flights to foreign torture prisons.
Well, the Trump administration no longer has enough lawyers left to do its dirty work. Whoever hasn’t been purged for not being loyal enough or exited ahead of the purges has been asked to clean up a mess with extremely limited amounts of resources and manpower. To make things worse, Trump’s handpicked prosecutors keep being kicked out of court because Trump bypassed the appointment process essential to them remaining employed.
Then there’s the self-inflicted reputational damage Trump’s DOJ has done. The government, for the most part, is no longer granted the presumption of good faith. Courts across the land are not only aware this government isn’t acting in good faith, but they’re refusing to pretend it is, no matter how much copy-pasted boilerplate appears in DOJ filings.
Hundreds of adverse rulings have already been handed down. Hundreds more are on the horizon, especially now that the DOJ has admitted pretty much every arrest that took place in an immigration court was illegal.
It all adds up to the long tail of “flooding the zone.” If you can’t bail water fast enough, you’re going to drown. Here’s how this is working out for the DOJ now, as reported by Kyle Cheney for Politico:
In dozens of cases over the past several weeks, Justice Department lawyers have declined to push back on detainees’ claims that they’re owed a chance to make a case for their release. In those cases, the administration has simply agreed to provide a bond hearing, or even outright release, telling judges that officials “do not have an opposition argument to present” or saying they couldn’t cobble together enough information to mount a defense.
[…]
The new phenomenon is the latest manifestation of the extraordinary strain that the administration’s mass deportation effort — compounded by the mass detention of people who have lived for years without incident in the U.S. interior — has exacted on the justice system.
While ICE bathes in newly awarded billions, the problems its efforts have created are being attended to by a skeleton crew that can’t keep up with Trump’s rights-violating fire hose. That’s created some pretty gaudy numbers, which certainly isn’t a compliment.
Federal judges have ruled more than 7,000 times in recent months that ICE has illegally locked people up without — at the very least — a chance to prove they can live safely in the community.
That’s a lot. This administration is setting judicial records that hopefully will never be broken. It’s not just the government losing cases on the merits. Many of these losses are the result of the DOJ simply being unable to respond at all to legal challenges by people ICE has arrested, detained, or deported.
If there’s a silver lining in this bigoted war on non-white people, it’s everything listed above. Trump’s administration may be evil and stupid in equal measures, but those aspects are being held in check by its inability or unwillingness to anticipate the natural side effects of sending wave after wave of masked goons into cities to kidnap anyone who looks a little bit foreign. The administration is a defective centrifuge that edges closer to disintegration with every rotation. What remains to be seen is who’s going to get hit with the majority of the shrapnel when it finally falls apart. We can only hope it’s the people that started it spinning in the first place.
Last election season the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would “rein in big tech,” and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time, that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway by a lazy U.S. press and a long line of useful idiots (including some purported “antitrust experts“.)
The Wall Street Journal last week published a new interesting story about that last bit. Specifically, it’s about how Mike Davis, a radical Trump loyalist and corporate lobbyist, found it relatively trivial to oust the small handful of actual antitrust reformers embedded within the MAGA coalition who occasionally cared about the public interest (Gail Slater and Mark Hamer):
“A Journal investigation found that Davis pushed antitrust officials at the Justice Department to approve his deals—and he went over their heads when they wouldn’t comply, according to interviews with more than three dozen DOJ employees, lobbyists, lawyers and others familiar with the antitrust division.”
Davis, who opportunistically pivoted to pseudo-big-tech criticism after being refused a job in the industry, is a transactional bully who was very excited about Trump’s plan to put minority children in cages last election season. He’s also, according to the Journal, been pivotal in elbowing out any remaining real antitrust enforcers to help Trump operate an even more “pay to play” government:
“Davis, despite having little experience practicing antitrust law, is one of the most visible practitioners of a change playing out across the division. Current and former antitrust officials said some mergers now get approval or draw mild settlements based on political ties rather than public interest. The new dynamic casts a shadow over the Justice Department’s integrity, they said, and has alarmed even some Trump loyalists in the department.”
And this is the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal; not exactly the bastion of progressive left wing thought. In Davis’ head, he’s not easily exploiting the comical levels of corruption in the Trump White House, he’s just exceptional, according to comments he made to the Journal:
“I’m the best fixer in Washington, period. Full stop,” said the 48-year-old Iowan. “I know the people. I know the process. I know their pressure points. I know how to win.”
That Trump 2.0 was going to be a corrupt shitshow–and that the movement’s fake dedication to “reining in big tech” and “antitrust reform would be completely hollow–was one of the easier election season predictions I’d ever had to make. It should have been particularly and abundantly obvious to the ostensible fans of antitrust still peppered within the administration.
Even these “antitrust enforcers” within MAGA weren’t what you’d call remotely consistent when it comes to reining in corporate power. And while the Journal sort of romanticizes the first Trump term for “having guardrails,” it too was full of all manner of mindless rubber stamping of harmful deals that eroded competition and drove up costs (like the Sprint T-Mobile merger).
Yet, again, there were no shortage of press outlets (and supposed progressive antitrust experts like Matt Stoller) that spent much of last election season insisting that while Trump 2.0 might be problematic, it would feature ample populist checks on corporate power. You were to believe a sizeable chunk of the GOP had suddenly and uncharacteristically seen the light on antitrust reform.
Building meaningful and productive alliances with authoritarians is like trying to cultivate an intimate relationship with a running chainsaw. And the act of treating them as serious actors on antitrust reform (something Stoller and the press broadly did, repeatedly, with everyone from JD Vance to Josh Hawley) gave them press and policy credibility they never had to earn.
MAGA leadership is largely comprised of transactional bullies whose primary interest is in wealth accumulation and power. Everything else, whether it’s MAHA, or the administration’s purported antiwar stance, or its love of “antitrust reform” was an obvious populist lie, designed to convince a broadly befuddled electorate that dim, violent, and corrupt autocracy would be good for them.
This is big. This is going to cause a whole lot of problems for the administration in the hundreds of ICE-related lawsuits it’s defending itself against. It’s a Perry Mason moment, albeit one that implicates the entity delivering it, rather than the other way around. (h/t Chris Geidner on Bluesky)
As we are all painfully aware, ICE operations since Trump returned to office have immediately strayed from the stated “worst of the worst” purpose to going after pretty much anyone who isn’t white. That means ICE officers are staking out any place day laborers might be hanging out, raiding any business that might employ migrant labor, roaming the streets in unmarked cars and masks to snatch up foreign-looking people, and — in what has always been extremely controversial — hanging around immigration courts to arrest migrants engaging in their court-ordered check-ins.
All of it is awful, but deliberately targeting people who are following all of the rules that allow them to remain in the US is particularly despicable. That’s what ICE and other DHS components have been doing: making the easiest, laziest arrests possible to satisfy White House advisor Stephen Miller’s ever-escalating arrest quota.
The administration has spent the last year claiming immigration court arrests are not only legal, but fully supported by ICE policy. Officials (and DOJ lawyers) have said this despite this never being the case before Trump’s return to office.
Now, we know it isn’t true. Bizarrely, this revelation isn’t the result of FOIA requests or court discovery orders. It comes from the DOJ itself, which delivered this unexpected twist in the mass deportation saga in a March 24 filing in a case being handled by the Southern District of New York.
Here’s the essence of the admission made by the DOJ in its letter to the court [PDF]:
We write respectfully and regrettably to correct a material mistaken statement of fact that the Government made to the Court and Plaintiffs. Specifically, this morning, counsel from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) informed the undersigned of the following: the memorandum entitled Civil Immigration Enforcement Actions in or Near Courthouses, dated May 27, 2025 – which the Government relied on in presenting its arguments in this case and referred to as the “2025 ICE Guidance” – does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR”) immigration courts.
Holy shit. That’s huge. And the DOJ knows it. The letter goes on to inform the court that the DOJ will be reversing the stance it took in several filings in this case. It also acknowledges that the court opinion based on its previous (and perhaps unknowing) misrepresentations will need to rescinded and re-briefed.
The ACLU’s response to the DOJ’s filing drives the point home further:
[T]he government now concedes the May 2025 ICE memorandum—which it previously asserted authorized arrests at immigration courthouses, provided guidance minimizing the harms of such arrests, and explained the agency’s reasoning for abandoning a prior policy largely prohibiting such arrests—in fact has never applied to such arrests. Accordingly, it further concedes the government’s primary defense to Plaintiffs’ claim that the Immigration Court Arrest Policy is arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act must be “withdraw[n]…”
[…]
The implications of this development are far-reaching. In the months since the Court relied on the government’s representation to deny Plaintiffs preliminary relief, Defendants have continued arresting noncitizens at their immigration court hearings, resulting in their detention—often in facilities hundreds of miles away.
The email cited in the DOJ’s letter was issued by Liana J. Castano, the assistant direct of ICE field operations on March 19. In bold print, the memo says this:
This broadcast serves as a reminder that the May 27, 2025, Guidance does not apply to Executive Office for Immigration Review (Immigration) courts, regardless of their location. As stated in the Guidance, it also does not apply to criminal immigration enforcement actions inside courthouses.
Out of context, “does not apply” might seem like it contradicts the DOJ’s assertion. It doesn’t. Here’s the context, provided by the original memo [PDF], which has been posted to ICE’s website:
ICE officers or agents may conduct civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses when they have credible information that leads them to believe the targeted alien(s) is or will be present at a specific location.
Additionally, civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses should, to the extent practicable, continue to take place in non-public areas of the courthouse, be conducted in collaboration with court security staff, and utilize the court building’s non-public entrances and exits. When practicable, ICE officers and agents will conduct civil immigration enforcement actions against targeted aliens discreetly to minimize their impact on court proceedings.
You can see the problem here: the original memo (issued May 27, 2025) says ICE officers can engage in enforcement efforts “in or near courthouses.” There’s a single caveat, but not one that specifically says immigration courts are off-limits:
ICE officers and agents should generally avoid enforcement actions in or near courthouses, or areas within courthouses that are wholly dedicated to non-criminal proceedings (e.g., family court, small claims court).
That doesn’t specifically exclude immigration courts, although those courts only handle non-criminal proceedings because immigration law violations are civil violations. There’s other language in the memo that further muddies the water:
Other aliens encountered during a civil immigration enforcement action in or near a courthouse, such as family members or friends accompanying the target alien to court appearances or serving as a witness in a proceeding, may be subject to civil immigration enforcement action on a case-by-case basis considering the totality of the circumstances.
This doesn’t specify whether these court appearances are criminal or civil. It just says ICE officers can take advantage of the situation to rack up some ancillary arrests.
I’m not sure what happened recently that would have prompted this clarification. Maybe there’s been an internal change of heart by ICE leadership. Maybe ICE’s legal team was unable to find a way to make these courthouse arrests legally defensible. In any event, the clarification was issued, well after tons of damage has already been done.
While it kind of looks like ICE leadership is throwing front line officers under the bus by issuing after-the-fact clarification of a vaguely worded memo issued 10 months ago, I wouldn’t worry about the ICE officers. It’s mostly an imaginary bus, since it’s almost impossible to sue federal officers and the original memo provides enough plausible deniability that qualified immunity would foreclose any lawsuit that managed to make its way past the initial Bivens barrier.
As irritating as that is, the important thing is that the DOJ has stated, in court, that pretty much any immigration courthouse arrest performed by federal officers was illegal. And that’s going to make it way easier to sue the government itself over its mass deportation program.
Call me a sicko, but I’m almost always happy when a top-level government official’s communications get hacked. That’s because — in almost every case — either the official seems to be a bit shady, or holds a high-level position in an agency involved in some shady stuff. I mean, it’s not like hackers are targeting the head of HUD or the transportation secretary. They’re targeting people like Kash Patel, who’s currently mismanaging the FBI.
Sure, the reason these people are targeted is because their information is more useful to hackers and foreign adversaries. But there are plenty of hackers not tied to foreign entities that go after the same people with the goal of forcing the sort of transparency and accountability these people and the agencies they lead persistently resist.
(And I have no love for hackers targeting entire government agencies just to harvest sensitive info to engage in identity fraud or hold the data for ransom. Government agencies serve the public. Most top-level government officials — especially in this administration — are only serving themselves.)
Iran-linked hackers have broken into FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet, the hackers and the bureau said on Friday.
On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel “will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims.” The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum.
A picture is worth a thousand words. And I don’t mean to malign the messenger, but perhaps some better words might have been chosen to describe the photos seen by Reuters reporters. “Selfie with a bottle of rum” maybe doesn’t quite capture the entire essence of this photo, but it’s far less unwieldy than “making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum.”
That bit of mild criticism aside, the report is a bit of a blockbuster. First, the FBI has already confirmed this hack by Handala, which seems counter to its usual insistence on pretending things didn’t happen and/or insulting the press for reporting on it.
Second, while it probably contains some juicy stuff from Patel’s Gmail account, it doesn’t contain the stuff we really want to see: his communications since being elevated to FBI director.
Alongside the photographs of Patel, the hackers published a sample of more than 300 emails, which appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019.
The FBI’s statement is correct in the fact that this breach seems to contain nothing more than “historical” communications. But the second part of the statement — that this “involves no government information” — cannot possibly be true.
We used a tool to verify several emails in the leaked cache of files that were sent by Patel from his Gmail account. These emails contained cryptographic signatures that matched the messages, which strongly suggests that the emails we checked are authentic. In some cases, Patel appears to have sent emails from his former Justice Department email address in 2014 to his Gmail account. TechCrunch found that the emails sent from Patel’s DOJ account also appeared to be authentic.
Sure looks like “government information” to me. And it’s especially notable because Patel decided OpSec is for other people by routing DOJ email to his personal inbox. If he had just done the sort of stuff he would logically be expected to do as (in running order) a federal prosecutor and the goddamn deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, none of that would have ended up exposed by the Handala hack.
All of this makes it very difficult to believe the FBI’s assertion. Either it has already managed to look through everything accessed by the hackers (maybe?) or it’s just taking it’s boss’s word for it (probably). Either way, not a great look. But if we’ve learned anything from the multiple OpSec failures that have defined Trump’s second term, nothing will happen to Patel for violating internal rules governing official US email account security. No one will learn anything from this directly. But if there’s anything Iran can use against us slid between the cigar-sniffing and rum selfies, we — as a nation — might learn a few things indirectly.
This judge ain’t fucking around. Earlier this month, we covered New Jersey federal judge Zahid Qurashi’s response to the actions of Trump’s DOJ, which begins with lots of illegal appointments of prosecutors and runs right through these prosecutors’ inability to defend the administration’s actions.
To wit:
The Government’s handling of Petitioner’s detention is emblematic of its approach to immigration enforcement in this state. On the merits, its detentions are illegal. The Government knows this. Its reliance on Section 1225 has been roundly rejected.
And:
Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office is now a presumption that “has been sadly eroded.” The Government’s continued actions after being called to task can now only be deemed intentional.
Courts have been flooded with immigration cases and vindictive prosecutions targeting Trump’s enemies. They’re fighting back, but even a massive consensus seems incapable of slowing Trump’s roll.
This case — brought to our attention by Owen Barcala — involves the sort of serious crimes the administration has put on the back burner so it can flood the immigration enforcement zone. While the administration focuses on ejecting all non-white foreigners from this country while claiming they’re simply seeking out the “worst of worst,” the (alleged) worst of the worst are pretty much being ignored.
Thanks to the massive amount of turnover at the DOJ, there are not a whole lot of qualified prosecutors left to do the government’s (increasingly) dirty work. In New Jersey, (illegal) appointee Alina Habba (a former Trump PAC spokesperson/advisor) has already voluntarily stepped down, proving she’s more capable of reading the writing on the wall than her former employer.
In her place, Mark Coyne (in a made-up position meant to shield him from being booted for being illegally appointed) has stepped up to wrap up a child pornography prosecution. It’s not going well for Coyne, as the New York Times reports:
A federal judge threw a top prosecutor from the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office out of his courtroom during a sentencing hearing this week and demanded that the office’s leadership testify about who had authority over their actions, according to court documents.
The rapid sequence of events on Monday in the courtroom of Judge Zahid N. Quraishi was the latest indication of growing tensions between the Justice Department and the federal judiciary in New Jersey. It came during the scheduled sentencing of a man who last year agreed to plead guilty to possession of child pornography.
The hearing did not go as prosecutors had planned. Judge Quraishi grew frustrated with the office’s head of appeals, Mark Coyne, who had not formally disclosed that he would appear, and fiercely interrogated a more junior prosecutor about whether the former interim U.S. attorney, Alina Habba, still had some role in operating the office.
Judge Qurashi referenced an order issued by federal judge Matthew Brann earlier this month, which declared the three-prosecutor hydra cobbled together by Pam Bondi to be a trio of unlawfully elevated prosecutors. That decision made the court’s displeasure explicit, using emphasis in the ruling to point out that the Trump administration cared more about who was running the New Jersey prosecutors’ office, rather than whether it was legally capable of running at all.
There are plenty of wonderfully quotable moments in the transcript of the hearing that ended with the government’s prosecutor being removed from the proceedings by the court.
It starts like this:
THE COURT: Mr. Coyne, did you file a notice of appearance in this case? MR. COYNE: I did not. THE COURT: Are you here for moral support? Because you’re not going to speak. MR. COYNE: I would ask — THE COURT: No. MR. COYNE: — that the Court allow me to speak. THE COURT: Nope. That’s not the representation made by the Government.
And then the court continues to riddle his body with bullets:
THE COURT: I’m not going to hear from you, Mr. Coyne. If you want to sit there for moral support or hand Mr. Rosenblum Post-its or whisper in his ear, I’ll let you do that as supervisor.
You’d think a corpse would keep its mouth shut. But Mr. Coyne apparently didn’t realize he was already dead.
The judge asked whether or not the three people Judge Brann had ruled were appointed unlawfully were still running the NJ US Attorney’s office. Mr. Rosenblum claimed he only knew what he’d been told by Mark Coyne, which apparently was nothing more than to shut up and claim ignorance. Unsatisfied with these non-answers and dodgy quasi-denials, Judge Quraishi pressed Rosenblum hard enough that Coyne — who had been directly ordered to sit this one out — felt compelled to respond:
THE COURT: What role does Alina Habba have currently in operating your office? MR. ROSENBLUM: None that I’m aware of. THE COURT: None that you’re aware of. MR. ROSENBLUM: None. THE COURT: All right. So she could be operating the office. MR. COYNE: She is not. MR. ROSENBLUM: She’s not. MR. COYNE: She is not. THE COURT: Sit down, Mr. Coyne. If you speak again, I’m going to have you removed. I already told you not to speak. MR. COYNE: Your Honor — THE COURT: You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to blindside the Court and do whatever it is you guys want to do. So if you continue to speak, you can leave. MR. COYNE: Your Honor — THE COURT: Sit down. MR. COYNE: — if — THE COURT: Sit down. MR. COYNE: If a notice of appeal– THE COURT: Sit down. MR. COYNE: -is entered– THE COURT: I’m directing the court security officers to remove Mr. Coyne.
And with that, Mr. Coyne exits the court. Voluntarily, according to the transcript, but only voluntarily in the sense that court officers didn’t have to physically restrain him and remove him from the court.
But it’s not like the DOJ prosecutor left in the court room gets to skate by just by being less of an ass that Mark Coyne. Judge Quraishi refers to the order from Judge Brann from earlier in the month — one that specifically warned that if the DOJ kept the same “triumvirate” of illegally appointed US attorneys in that office, that it did so at its own peril.
The closing of the transcript says what so many federal judges think, but have also said in hearings and on the record in rulings and orders: the Trump DOJ has managed to completely destroy the reputation of the Department of Justice, despite having controlled it fully for barely over a year.
THE COURT: Here is your risk. This is your risk.
So your authority to operate is while [Judge Brann] has stayed the opinion, when he says literally on the last page, you don’t even have to go through all of this. All you have to do is turn to the back and it says “If the government chooses to leave the triumvirate in place, it does so at its own risk.”
What you’ve told me today, what your representation is, which I don’t believe by the way. I won’t believe it until you testify. That is what happened to the credibility of your office.Generations of U.S. Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy within a year.
This damnation isn’t unique. The DOJ is painting itself into a corner all over the nation. Hundreds of judges are no longer willing to take the government at its word. And that gives the government a handful of choices, none of which could be considered “wins.” The DOJ is going to have to dump prosecutions. Or it’s going to have to send its top prosecutors to testify under oath in court (which is way different than simply submitting sworn declarations). Or it’s going to have to go back to respecting the law, starting with the ousting of every illegally appointed US attorney.
The final option, however, isn’t generally considered viable, but it’s the one the administration is most likely to put in motion: ignoring every entity that opposes it while simultaneously telling Americans whose rights it’s trampling that this is the only way to make America great again.
By any means, necessary or not: that’s how this administration gets its bigoted version of immigration enforcement done. The surges targeting cities and states that Trump doesn’t feel are loyal enough are a double-edged sword. They punish states run by Democratic party members simply for being run by Democratic party members. And they flood courts with more cases than they can possibly handle, allowing the government to deny rights/deport people at scale.
The government doesn’t always get away with it. But given the scale, the government generally doesn’t get reined in until long after massive amounts of damage has been done.
That’s the case here in Maryland, where a lawsuit, that was initiated shortly after Trump began sending Venezuelans to El Salvador’s hellhole prison for purely punitive reasons, continues to play out. It involves a Venezuelan asylum seeker who was ejected from the country via Trump’s non-wartime invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to excuse the government’s refusal to respect due process rights.
As is the case with many federal judges dealing with Trump’s war on migrants, Maryland federal judge Stephanie Gallagher no longer takes the government at its word. That’s why she has been ordering immigration officials to testify in court, where they can be cross-examined and/or questioned by the judge herself.
And that’s the last thing this government wants, because it can’t even survive the minimal judicial scrutiny of its filed motions, which are usually crafted by teams of lawyers and not by the front-line employees and supervisors judges are ordering to testify.
David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo attended a recent hearing hosted by Judge Gallagher in this long-running case. Gallagher and the plaintiff’s attorney wanted to know why the government seemed to be violating an existing court order when it wrongfully removed two other asylum seekers in February.
What they heard instead was the perhaps inadvertent admission by the government that the three known (and potentially illegal removals) being discussed were pretty much just a rounding error:
Before today, the number of wrongfully deported asylum seekers in the case was thought to be less than a dozen. But under persistent questioning from plaintiff’s counsel, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer Kimberly Sicard testified that in the past three to four weeks it had come to her attention that more than 100 asylum seekers covered by the settlement agreement have been removed. She put the number in the “low 100s.”
That’s insane. Those are the actions of a government that truly does not care what illegal acts it engages in so long as they contribute to the end goal of subtracting non-white people from this nation.
And it’s obviously intentional. That much was made clear in Sicard’s testimony.
Asked how the additional removals had come to her attention, Sicard said she wasn’t sure of the exact process but that officials had “queried systems.” As part of the process of notifying ICE of the wrongful removals, the matter went to the office of chief counsel at USCIS three to four weeks ago, Sicard said.
That means the government can query its detention databases in order to prevent possibly illegal removals. It also means the government can find out how many illegal removals it might have engaged in. The “three or four weeks” just means the USCIS chief counsel spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to legally justify illegal removals that now total in the “low hundreds.” And it means all of these things are either rarely used (or, more likely, deliberately ignored) by government agencies that have all been tasked with respecting rights first and carrying out their missions second.
Speaking of ignoring things, this revelation may never have occurred if the government had even attempted to comply with the judge’s previous court order:
The revelation was the pinnacle of a day of frustration for Gallagher. She had listed in her order calling the hearing five topics on which she expected the Trump administration to produce witnesses “with personal knowledge” to testify. The government failed to produce such witnesses.
“Failed” just means “refused” under Trump and his bigoted sidekicks. Because this administration felt this was just another court order it could ignore, someone without “personal knowledge” of the topics under discussion was sent to court to take the heat. And because she wasn’t expected to offer anything but shrugs, the USCIS lawyer responded honestly to questions that apparently weren’t covered by whatever minimal guidance DHS offered before she was put on the stand.
It’s this sort of sloppy arrogance that’s going to continue to derail some of the worst things this administration wants to do. And we’re safe to assume the arrogance and sloppiness will continue, because Trump has made absolutely no effort to rid himself of loyalists, no matter how sloppy, stupid, and undeservedly arrogant they are.
The DOJ is filled with grossly incompetent prosecutors these days. It’s a bunch of subservients acting in obeisance to the zenith of gross incompetence: the current President of the United States.
When not being sidelined by judges for not being legally appointed, the handpicked losers of Trump’s DOJ Revenge Squad are being shut out by the grandest of juries: grand juries. Asked only to hear the government’s side and nod obediently, grand juries have been rejecting a record number of presentations, leaving prosecutors scrambling to find something anything! to charge Trump’s enemies with.
More of the same is happening here. On two non-consecutive occasions, the Trump administration has attempted to equate unaffiliated people with a shared worldview to domestic terrorist organizations. It didn’t work with Black Lives Matter. And, for the most part, it hasn’t worked with Antifa, which is a semi-acronym that means nothing more than “anti-fascist.”
Not to go all Jeff Foxworthy years past his sell-by date, but you might be a fascist if you think people opposed to fascism are terrorists. So, of course, this administration firmly believes people opposed to fascism are terrorists.
In Texas, following a protest that ultimately resulted in the shooting of a law enforcement officer, the DOJ has somehow made terrorism charges stick against a bunch of protesters, despite its reliance on things that should never have been considered evidence.
A group of protesters in Texas was found guilty of providing support for terrorism and other charges on Friday in a closely watched case in which prosecutors alleged anti-ICE activists were actually part of an antifa cell.
Imagine how much credulity you’d have to hope for if you trotted out the phrase “antifa cell” in open court. It’s a lot. Lots of actual terrorist groups may have “cells,” but antifa is pretty much anything but organized or centralized. It’s just people cohering around a central concept: an opposition to fascism.
The government charged and tried nine defendants following a protest that involved the setting off of fireworks and culminated in Benjamin Song (now convicted on attempted murder charges) shooting an officer in the shoulder. The government claimed the fireworks were part of distraction attempt in hopes of setting up an ambush. But it failed to connect enough dots to get any of the other protesters nailed on murder charges.
However, it did manage to convince a jury that some of the nine arrested were providing material support for terrorism. The rationale? Antifa is a terrorist group and people that represent as antifa (mainly through the wearing of black clothing) or act in support of its goals (opposing fascism) are engaged in material support of the kind of terrorism that… opposes fascism?
It’s all deeply stupid. And yet it has real consequences. While the jury wasn’t sold on most of the government’s wilder claims, it still sided with enough of them to net five protesters with terrorism-related charges that mean they’ll likely spend at least 10 years in prison if their convictions aren’t overturned.
For instance, there’s this nonsense, which managed to rope in someone who wasn’t even there when this all went down:
Sanchez-Estrada was the only defendant not at the protest, and was only charged with corruptly concealing a document or record, after prosecutors say he moved leftwing zines following the arrest of his wife…
That is fucking wild. Someone moved stuff written by someone else and the government claims its concealment.
That’s not even the worst/stupidest part of the government’s evidence presentations. This is:
During the trial, the government offered a slew of circumstantial evidence aimed at convincing the jury that the defendants were part of an antifa terror cell. They showed the jury zines and reading lists with incendiary titles that were seized from the defendants. One zine seized was titled The satanic death cult is real. The zine is an essay analyzing the films Hereditary and Midsommar.They also displayed anti-Trump stickers seized from one of the defendants that said “Make America not Exist Again” and a pamphlet from the Socialist Rifle Association that showed someone putting a swastika into a garbage can.
A magazine discussing films is evidence. Anti-Trump stickers are evidence. Someone putting a swastika into a trash can is evidence. This is shit even Lionel Hutz might consider too unreasonable to present to a judge, much less a jury.
Even if the zine dealt with an alleged, real-life US satanic death cult, how is that evidence of anything… unless the government is tacitly admitting it’s possibly the satanic death cult these antifas are informing each other about?
Everything here is easily covered by the First Amendment and is evidence of nothing but the administration’s desire to illegally punish people for not supporting Trump. And the government should know better than to claim a picture of someone literally trashing a swastika is evidence of criminal intent, because when it does make that claim, it’s admitting that it views speech against Nazis as something that must be met with criminal charges.
Then there’s the Second Amendment. Prosecutors insisted that the mere possession of legally obtained weapons by some of the arrestees was evidence of their malicious intent. But this DOJ in particular has never made that accusation against Trump supporters who wear/brandish weapons. They only pretend it’s unlawful when it involves people opposed to this administration.
With any luck, these convictions will be overturned. While it’s unlikely a review of the convictions will erase the charges facing the person who actually shot an officer, everything else included here is so far beyond the pale (no pun intended?) that it can’t possibly survive judicial review. Even the judge handling this prosecution made it clear he felt the government was seeking to punish protesters merely because they opposed the same administration that appointed him.
Mark Pittman, a US district judge nominated to the federal bench by Donald Trump in 2019, appeared to gesture at the irrelevance of antifa in the closing moments of the trial, asking prosecutors why he should mention it in his instructions to the jury, underlining the gap between the emphasis on antifa and the technicality of the criminal charges they faced.
“Whether it’s antifa or the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter?” Pittman said.
The courts are doing what they can to hold back the daily onslaught of rights violations and vindictive prosecutions engaged in by this administration. But Trump (or, at least, his enablers) knows how limited that resistance is when the administration dares it daily to try to hold it accountable. For now, these ineptly-obtained convictions stand. And they will serve the purpose the administration intends them to: a latent threat that deters future opposition to it and its goals.
It’s not that arrest and ticket quotas don’t exist. They do. They always have. They always will. It’s that they’re illegal. Courts have repeatedly criticized quotas because they create incentives so perverse they’d make /b/ board denizens uncomfortable.
Since they’re presumptively illegal, most law enforcement agencies will use any word but “quota” to describe these. They’ll toss around words like “performance goals” or “metrics” or just simply refuse to discuss them at all until they’re forced to.
The Trump administration — in this case personified by advisor Stephen Miller — also doesn’t use the word “quota.” Miller has stated he wants to see 3,000 migrant arrests daily. He’s also made it clear that this is the minimum expected of the government’s anti-migrant storm troopers.
Trump expects the same thing. “Surges” exclusively targeting cities and states Trump lost in the last two elections have generated enough backlash that Trump has had second thoughts about leaning heavily on the first word in the phrase “brutal efficiency.” Those were swiftly replaced by Trump’s third thoughts because that’s just how his goldfish brain operates.
A few sidelinings aside, it’s business as usual in the Trump administration’s war on non-white people. Litigation was always the inevitable outcome of programs that relied on routine rights violations to accomplish the lofty goals set by Stephen Miller.
In Oregon, plenty of federal occupation activity has already occurred. Portland’s residents appear to have won, but there’s still the matter of ongoing lawsuits seeking compensation for violated rights and/or seeking injunctions forbidding any future rights violations.
While it’s true that federal officers like to lie about stuff they’ve done or will do, these lies are almost always exposed once they submit evidence or testify under oath. In an ongoing class action lawsuit being spearheaded by Innovation Law Lab, ICE officers are delivering testimony that not only exposes some aspects of its always-on surveillance efforts, but the lies told by the DHS about the supposed nonexistence of arrest quotas.
Details about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ surveillance tools and arrest goals in the state have come to light in a federal lawsuit that compelled officers to answer questions under oath, offering a rare window into opaque, internal strategies that are generally kept secret and have been driving mass detentions and chaotic raids.
[…]
Testimony in a December hearing in the case provided a remarkable acknowledgment by an ICE officer of how daily target arrest numbers played out at the local level, and appeared to contradict the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials’ repeated claims that officers didn’t have quotas. Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly said the administration’s target was 3,000 daily arrests. The hearing also appeared to be the first time that ICE disclosed in court its use of an app called Elite for operations.
The testimony was delivered last year, but the transcript [PDF] was only recently published by the court. What hasn’t been revealed is the testifying officer’s name. He’s only known as “JB,” but he did say several concerning things during his testimony, including stating that his team was given a “verbal order to target eight arrests per day.” The government’s lawyer objected to the term “quota” (when it was used by the plaintiff’s lawyer), but the judge overrode the objection.
In addition, JB stated that his team relied on an app called Elite to find supposed illegal immigrants.
JB explained that Elite was a “newer app” given to ICE agents. The app, he said, is “kind of like Google Maps” and shows how many individuals with an “immigration nexus” are believed to be in a certain area. Another officer testified that a “nexus” could mean any history of contact with immigration officials, which could include a naturalized US citizen.
[…]
JB acknowledged information generated by Elite could be inaccurate: “The app could say 100%, and it’s wrong. The person doesn’t live there. And so it’s not accurate. It’s a tool that we use that gives you probability, but there’s … no such thing as 100%.”
There’s a lot that’s unknown about this app. Even those relying on it don’t even know what sources it uses to make these determinations, although officers appear to realize it’s far from perfect. Not that it stops them from using it as an excuse to raid neighborhoods or engage in unlawful stops.
This case centers around an unlawful stop and detention, one aided and abetted not by fallible tech, but by the officers shrugging off indeterminate search results and lying about what happened in the arrest paperwork.
MJMA had entered the US with a valid temporary visa last year. Still, JB’s team wrote in their arrest records – inaccurately – that the farm worker entered the US unlawfully. The report also inaccurately described the stop of the van as “consensual”, the judge noted.
All of this has led to an injunction against federal immigration agencies, with the court saying this in the order [PDF] it handed down two weeks ago:
There is no telling how many people would have sought counsel, or would have benefited from it. It is clear that there are countless more people who have been rounded up, and who either remain in detention or have “voluntarily” deported than those, like M-J-M-A-, who were fortunate enough to find counsel at the eleventh hour. Defendants benefit from this blitz approach to immigration enforcement that takes advantage of navigating outside of the boundaries of conducting lawful arrests. For the one detainee who has the audacity to challenge the legality of her detention and gains release, several more remain detained or succumb to the threat of lengthy detention, and then instead “voluntarily” deport. Defendants win the numbers game at the cost of debasing the rule of law.
All of that adds up, now that we can read the transcript. “Debasing the law?” It’s all there, from the quotas to reliance on sketchy mass surveillance apps to the falsification of the narrative by officers hoping to lie their way into constitutionality. This is the administration, personified by a pseudonymous federal agents who are expected to make Trump’s warped dreams a reality. In the middle of all of this are thousands of people and a half-dozen civil liberties, all of which can only hope to survive the next couple of years.
