For a while now we’ve been mocking the Trump White House’s plans for an “AI framework” that would have the frontier AI labs hand over their top models for an initial review. After all, this was more or less the exact same plan that the Biden admin worked out in 2023, but it was done in a thoughtful and careful manner. And it caused a bunch of the VC bros in Silicon Valley to come out in support of fascism, while claiming it was a necessary defense against Biden’s attack on supposedly open innovation. Of course, all of that was bullshit, and that’s made even more clear by every step the Trump White House has taken to reinvent a similar “voluntary” AI review plan, but dumber.
The White House does not plan to publicly release its new framework for evaluating advanced AI models, three sources familiar with the discussions told Axios.
The Trump administration invited staffers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and other leading AI companies to the White House on Tuesday to share an overview of its new AI oversight framework, the people said. AI developers will have the ability to voluntarily submit new models to the federal government up to 30 days ahead of their public release. The White House will then vet their cyber capabilities according to a classified benchmarking system and share the AI models with federal agencies and trusted corporate partners.
The White House isn’t sharing more information about its testing criteria or which AI models will be covered by the framework, though open models will reportedly be excluded, according to Axios. That has left smaller AI startups, safety advocates, and third-party researchers in the dark about crucial aspects of how the federal government is addressing the cyber risks posed by advanced AI systems. Some argue that the secretive process will give an advantage to larger companies.
Considering that the likes of Andreessen Horowitz (investors in OpenAI) claimed they had to support Donald Trump over Joe Biden because they would support anyone who agreed with their “little tech agenda,” I’m curious how they can possibly square that with the fact that this new framework is significantly worse than the Biden framework, specifically for the “little tech” companies that a16z has used as a shield to defend their support for authoritarian politics?
Of course, the other reason why the White House is probably keeping the framework a secret is because it would show how incompetent they are. All the reporting so far suggests the entire process has been a clusterfuck, which is much more about which companies get to set up which regulatory moats to protect their own business models, rather than what’s best for either innovation or the American public.
At Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and Meta, executives grew increasingly concerned that Anthropic and OpenAI would win over the White House with their arguments for tighter restrictions, according to two of the people. That would potentially cement the A.I. start-ups’ positions as market leaders,
Other A.I. labs were at risk of falling permanently behind, the people added. And because several of the companies make their own open-source models or supply hardware to businesses that use open-source technology, they worried the restrictions could harm them.
Over private texts, phone calls and video conferences, executives quietly built an argument that open-source models were good for the world and for American innovation, according to three of the people familiar with the talks.
But, of course, that’s just the way things work when you have a White House that makes decisions entirely based on transactional motives, rather than anything involving principles.
As we discussed last week, so much of this is all about whose vision of the AI world wins out — whether a handful of giant companies get to lock in the regulatory moat they’ve built for themselves, or an actually competitive market lets people make their own decisions and keep control over their own experiences. Maybe that’s the real reason nobody’s allowed to see the rulebook: because it would reveal who the administration agreed to let write the rules.
Donald Trump took possession of a $400 million “gift” plane from the Qatari government earlier this year. Trump claimed it was a coup for taxpayers and a boon for America, even as he made it clear this was all about him. According to Trump, no plane was more luxurious than this graft-y replacement for the Air Force One. He bragged about how much it reflected his own taste in upmarket products, which meant the plane’s interior was undoubtedly festooned in gold leaf and stocked with steak-grade ketchup.
But was it secure? That’s kind of a big deal when it comes to presidential transport. Turns out it wasn’t. Trump rode his graft jet to Turkey for a diplomatic meeting but was forced to ride the old Air Force One out of the country when it was discovered his new gaudy aircraft didn’t possess the necessary security measures/counter-measures.
In response to this reporting of the Air Force One Mk. II’s failure, the Trump administration behaved like the Trump administration: it subpoenaed the New York Times reporters, demanding all sort of information in hopes of uncovering the reporters’ government sources.
That’s not how this is supposed to work. The FBI and DOJ both have extensive guidelines that are meant to discourage open attacks on the First Amendment. All of these appear to have been ignored in the administration’s haste to find out who needed to be punished for telling the truth about Trump and his Qatari luxury jet.
Fortunately, the court curb-stomped the DOJ when the New York Times challenged the subpoenas. The DOJ really had no answer for the court’s questions, given that the court had plenty of precedent to work with while the DOJ was limited to being a nominally prehensile Trump appendage. Faced with the (admittedly slim) prospect of being sanctioned by a thoroughly irritated federal judge, the DOJ withdrew the subpoenas.
But that’s not the end of the story, apparently. The administration is targeting anyone remotely related to the New York Times and/or reporting that doesn’t please Donald. The New York Times is now going to bat for one its freelancers, who has also been targeted by this vindictive administration.
In February, F.B.I. agents showed up at the New York home of the reporter, Matthew Cole, to deliver the grand jury subpoena, which was issued by prosecutors in Newport News, Va., according to the people familiar with the matter, who described the private conversations on the condition of anonymity.
The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.
This is apparently related to Cole’s reporting about a failed surveillance operation authorized by Trump during his first term in office — one that was carried out in hopes of planting a recording device capable of intercepting Kim Jong-un’s communications.
For the operation, the military chose SEAL Team 6’s Red Squadron — the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden. The SEALs rehearsed for months, aware that every move needed to be perfect. But when they reached what they thought was a deserted shore that night, wearing black wet suits and night-vision goggles, the mission swiftly unraveled.
A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North Korean boat was dead.
The SEALs retreated into the sea without planting the listening device.
No one likes discussing a failed operation, so understandably this one hadn’t been publicly discussed prior to Cole’s report (with an assist by Dave Philipps). But this attempt to pressure Cole into revealing his sources seems more motivated by Trump’s unwillingness to discuss this mission with the people he’s supposed to be discussing these things with.
The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission. The lack of notification may have violated the law.
What’s inexplicable in normal terms is why this wasn’t a problem until now. This article was published last September. The underlying incident occurred in 2019. But it took until February 2026 for the administration to do anything about it. The Trump administration is far more aggressive and far less respectful of the law this time around, which explains why it would move against this reporting now. However, the delay between the reporting and revenge suggests this was a reaction to Trump seeing something on social media, rather than his administration engaging in a thorough internal investigation for months before deciding it needed to do damage to the First Amendment to move this forward.
Hopefully, this subpoena will soon be tossed into the Trump DOJ discard pile. But losing all the time won’t stop this administration from going after journalists for reporting on Trump’s failures. This administration is incapable of learning from its mistakes because it thinks it’s never wrong. The war on journalists will continue as long as Trump — and the GOP he’s turned into a MAGA puppet — holds power.
Some intelligence analysts have declined to brief on antifa at interagency meetings because they do not regard it as a serious counterterrorism threat.
As a terrorism scholar who spent a decade running the State Department office that designates terrorist organizations, I understand their confusion. The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it.
There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa.
Groups like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida have killed tens of thousands of people and have a documented chain of command. Antifa does not. You cannot decapitate a movement with no head, and you cannot sanction an organization that does not exist.
As such, the Trump administration created one.
Trump administration targets antifa
The construction project began on Sept. 22, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The order describes antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” It directs every relevant agency to investigate and dismantle its operations.
Two problems are immediately apparent. First, no legal authority exists to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups. It’s a gap that Congress has deliberately preserved for First Amendment reasons.
Second, the order designates as an organization something the FBI’s past leadership has described as an ideology. Trump’s executive order asserts an antifa enterprise into existence and then declares war on it.
Three days after the executive order, the White House implemented the order through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which converts the fiction into machinery. The memorandum directs the Treasury Department to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund what it deems domestic terrorism. The memorandum instructs banks to file suspicious activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government’s financial intelligence unit.
That means the government’s financial surveillance apparatus, built to trace al-Qaida’s money in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is being pointed at Americans that the administration considers left-wing.
The memorandum likewise directs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals. That harnesses a network of roughly 200 task forces comprising over 4,000 personnel from federal, state and local agencies.
The wording of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 gives away the administration’s true intent. It identifies the markers of this supposed terrorist movement as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity. It criticizes the movement for its hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.
Those are not indicators of terrorism. They are political positions.
State Department targets groups overseas
The foreign component of the campaign arrived in November 2025. That’s when the State Department designated four European groups – one each from Germany and Italy and two from Greece – as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and Foreign Terrorist Organizations pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The State Department-designated groups are real. And some of their members have committed genuine crimes, including assaults and small-scale bombings.
But as I have noted, the designations are very peculiar. These groups have committed vandalism and harmed people, but not one of the four has carried out an attack that led to any fatalities.
German leaders have said the threat from one of the designated groups, Antifa Ost, or Antifa East, had recently decreased significantly.
As the former head of the State Department’s office that recommended to the secretary of state which groups to designate, I’ve been involved in the designations of hundreds of individuals and organizations. The bar was never this low. That’s because the Foreign Terrorist Organization list loses its meaning, and its deterrent power, when it includes groups whose body count is zero while genuinely lethal movements go unlisted.
The foreign nexus
That brings us back to the State Department’s ministerial. The sequence of events leading up to it matter:
Invent the organization by executive order; build the enforcement machinery by presidential memorandum; manufacture the foreign nexus through the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designations; and then convene the world to ratify the story. Each step launders the previous one.
Behind it all, Trump administration officials have discussed using the foreign terrorism labels to justify going after Americans with links to the movement. That is the point of the exercise, and U.S allies like the Netherlands have explained how antifa could not be designated as a terrorist group under their laws.
Counterterrorism tools are among the most powerful instruments the U.S. government possesses. I don’t believe that using them against an ideology, one defined by opposition to fascism, makes America safer. I believe it tells every ally the U.S. asks for help that the world’s leading counterterrorism power can no longer tell the difference between a threat and an opponent.
Implications of the ministerial meeting
This is not just an issue of semantics and rhetoric – each action by the Trump administration against a strawman enemy creates risks. And the push to internationalize the antifa threat could have dire consequences at home.
First, if the State Department leaves the July 16 meeting with pliable allies willing to brand antifa a terrorist organization, it will embolden the administration to point to a supposed global conspiracy of the far left.
That path leads to a State Department foreign terrorist designation. Such a designation means Americans could have their bank accounts frozen and quite possibly find themselves rounded up for providing material support to a movement rather than an organization. This would be more dangerous than Trump’s earlier executive order.
Second, it could chill freedom of speech and assembly. Once other governments treat antifa as a terrorist entity, the U.S. government gains cover to shut down protests under the guise of exposing global left-wing plotting.
Third, it could justify the revival of projects like the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, resurrecting the surveillance, infiltration and disruption of lawful political activity that the bureau was supposed to have abandoned after the abuses of the 1970s.
Fourth, as one European counterterrorism scholar recently warned, the summit lays bare a widening split between American and European counterterrorism priorities and the Trump administration’s willingness to bend counterterrorism policy to partisan ends.
That divergence is the real hazard, far more than any phantom left-wing terrorism group, because European counterterrorism leans so heavily on U.S. intelligence. As such, transatlantic counterterrorism cooperation could be in for turbulent times.
Whatever the outcome of the ministerial meeting, there is no version that will make Americans safer.
I believe one result is certain: Genuine threats – from groups with leaders, actual funding and malicious intent – will get less attention from the U.S. and any ally co-opted to take action against antifa.
Jason M. Blazakis is Professor of Practice and Director of Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College
I don’t know but when your best argument is “we got locked out of our accounts for supporting violent insurrectionists,” maybe it’s time to stop arguing.
But if there’s anything Trump likes, it’s being a plaintiff in a lawsuit. So, that’s exactly what the Trump Organization argued, in hopes of pressuring Capital One into a presumably hefty settlement.
The case centers on roughly 385 accounts tied to the Trump Organization, Eric Trump and a collection of affiliated businesses — including a winery, a bottled-water company and a golf course developer — that banked with Capital One for more than a decade before the accounts were shut down in mid-2021.
In an amended complaint filed earlier in July, the Trump-affiliated companies insisted the closures had nothing to do with financial crime or money-laundering, but everything to do with politics.
The Trump Organization alleges Capital One moved to distance itself from Donald Trump after the Capitol riot and that the bank’s cited anti-money-laundering rationale was invented after the fact to cover for that decision.
If you need a reason to “distance” your company from persons or organizations, that’s a pretty good reason. If you’ve chosen to align yourself with violent insurrectionists and rely on them for financial support, then it’s pretty much “you’ve made your bed, now please take your business elsewhere.”
But what Capital One is alleging in its response to the Trump Organization’s lawsuit somehow makes the Trump Organization look even worse than it did when it first filed its lawsuit alleging some weird form of political persecution.
According to Capital One’s motion to dismiss [PDF], this had nothing to do with acts that were unsavory (buddying up with violent insurrectionists) and everything to do with stuff that is indisputably illegal, rather than merely unseemly.
The SAC [second amended complaint] concedes that Capital One’s decision to terminate the accounts was expressly permitted by the governing agreement and instead rests on vague allegations of political discrimination that are not supported by any of the documents attached to the SAC. To the contrary, those documents and Plaintiffs’ own allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (“AML”) reasons. The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance. Capital One never publicized the termination decision nor its confidential internal process giving rise to the closure, and it permitted Plaintiffs several months (and granted several extensions) to find new banking services, which they did.
It wasn’t because you guys wanted to destroy democracy! It’s because you seemed like you were engaged in actual crimes!
In any event, as Trump and his Trumpians surely know, private companies can terminate accounts at a moment’s notice for any reason they choose to do so. That’s the bargain consumers agree to when utilizing corporate services. Just because it happens to you doesn’t make it immediately actionable. If you don’t like the terms of the agreement, don’t agree to it. Take your business elsewhere. Otherwise, deal with it and take your business elsewhere when you’re told this particular place of business is no longer an option.
But let’s not lose sight of the main thing here. The Trump Organization walked into court insisting it was the victim of “political discrimination.” Now, the organization is facing the considerable possibility of limping out of court looking like the grifters we’ve always assumed them to be.
And claiming Capital One had a legal obligation to tell the Trump Organization it was being investigated for suspected money laundering does nothing but allow Capital One to permanently link the organization to money-laundering allegations on the public record. No one suspected of criminal activity is due a head’s up, whether it’s from a private entity or a government agency.
As Capital One points out, no matter whose name is on the letterhead, the institution’s obligations during this money laundering investigation were to the government, not to the aggrieved party hoping to turn this into a paycheck.
Plaintiffs’ argument that Capital One should have proceeded with the contractually-permitted termination process differently and given Plaintiffs an opportunity to explain suspicious transactions fails for the additional reason that Capital One had no duty to do so. As a federally regulated financial institution, Capital One is subject to the Bank Secrecy Act (“BSA”) and its implementing regulations, under which a bank’s BSA-mandated compliance obligations are “owed to the United States and not private bank customers.”
The Trump Organization now has multiple self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. It could stop the bleeding by conceding defeat and agreeing to the dismissal. But if history has proven anything, it’s that Trump never knows when to stop. And while this isn’t Trump himself suing, it’s safe to assume the Trump Organization won’t accept defeat. But it probably should. If it insists on keeping this case alive, there’s a good chance some more rounds of discovery will be necessary. And when that happens, all the details supporting Capital One’s money laundering investigation are going to come out. I, for one, hope this litigation survives this motion to dismiss.
Hail to the Chief. Our country is being run by paranoid conspiracy theorist megalomaniac who openly wishes to kick-start America’s first autocracy. Nothing that goes wrong is ever the president’s fault. It’s always the fault of officials with insufficient loyalty or the criminal acts of people out to get him.
Trump decided the Lincoln Reflecting Pool needed a makeover. Not because it had several long-term issues that had been inadequately addressed over the years but because Trump wanted to make it look more Trump-y. That meant draining the entire thing to apply a layer of “American flag blue,” a hue Trump made up on the spot to demonstrate he was more American than any American who had come before him.
Rather than turn this over to the people best qualified to do the job via a bidding/vetting process, Trump handed out a no-bid contract to an entity that called Mar-a-Lago home and whose owner had thrown some money Trump’s way in the past. The company hired to do this is headed by a long-term Trump donor and sports a name that would become eerily prescient once it was through botching the job: Greenwater Solutions.
Shortly after the refurb, the water in the pool turned a bright shade of green, due to the wholly expected explosion of algae, thanks to the conditions created by the pool shutdown/startup and vastly encouraged by the “American flag blue” now coating the bottom of the reflecting pool.
Shortly after that, the pool sealant began floating to the surface, prompting curious visitors to grab chunks of the “American flag blue” material that bubbled up as Interior Department personnel tried to beat science at its own game by flooding the “Greenwater Green” pool with hydrogen peroxide.
Trump then claimed — without facts in evidence — that the green tint and floating sealant were the actions of vandals, presumably related to the antifa or whatever. In the space of a single press conference, Trump turned a 150-foot flaw in the sealant into a 350-foot “gash” that could only have been created by anti-Trump vandals.
Then the arrests began. US Attorney Jeanine Pirro promised to punish anyone caught “vandalizing” the pool to the full effect of the law. Department of Interior boss Doug Burgum mindlessly repeated Trump’s wild speculation, claiming he too was in possession of “evidence” of criminal pool fuckery. Trump continued to do what Trump always does: engage in stream-of-consciousness responses when asked to provide proof of his accusations.
Former US Olympics team member David Hearn was the first to be officially indicted for daring to touch pieces of the broken pool. That case fell apart almost immediately. First, the government’s own witness testified during the grand jury proceedings that anything Hearn grabbed from the pool was the result of defective workmanship, rather than evidence of malicious vandalism.
This prompted Hearn’s legal team to demand transcripts of the grand jury proceedings. After all, if the unnamed government employee had testified that the pool would have been falling apart with or without Hearn’s brief interaction, the resulting indictment meant government prosecutors seemingly ignored the fact that it takes at least $1,000 of damage to support a federal vandalism charge.
Well, it’s all over now, at least in terms of prosecution. (The government will likely be contending with a civil rights lawsuit in the near future.) None other than lead prosecutor Jeanine Pirro has admitted there’s no basis for the criminal charges against Hearn.
Not only that, but the DOJ’s dismissal [PDF] specifically calls out the botched pool repair job performed by another one of Trump’s no-bid buddies (Greenwater Solutions did the filtration/drainage, while Atlantic Industrial Coatings redid the pool surface). It does this as it seeks to purge itself of any blame for pursuing yet another transparently vindictive prosecution to appease the president.
[I]t was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn…
This is US Attorney Jeanine Pirro throwing the Interior Department under the bus in hopes of saving her job. That’s not going to work.
First of all, even after this filing Trump still insists the damage was due to vandalism, despite all evidence on the record showing otherwise.
That’s Donald Trump “truthing” the untruth:
I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT
Nothing to see here, just the President of the United States insisting that his made up fantasy, that no one ever believed was true, is true in the face of a filing from his own hand-picked attorneys at the Justice Department. One would think that the president accusing a US Attorney of lying to a federal court would be a big deal, except everyone let’s it pass because they know he’s full of shit.
The same goes for Doug Burgum, the current Interior Secretary, who similarly insists this is vandalism despite evidence to the contrary, much of it produced by his own agency.
That’s Burgum tweeting:
The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera. We also provided the U.S. Attorney’s office expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool.
The Reflecting Pool is part of the Lincoln Memorial and dates back to 1922.
@POTUS cares deeply about protecting our sacred national monuments and his leadership has led the restoration of our Nation’s Capital by Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Again.
Intentional damage done to the Reflecting Pool is no different than defacing any one of our other national monuments.
We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments.
So the US Attorney is saying that the Interior Department provided the DOJ with evidence that it was the shoddy workmanship of Trump’s hand-picked contractors. And the Secretary of the Interior makes a public statement saying that’s false?
This administration can’t get its story straight, and that’s going to come back to haunt them in court.
Finally, Pirro’s still likely to face some bench-slapping over this case because she can’t pretend to have just heard of it now when her office definitely heard the damage was due to a “botched installation” from a government witness and yet still charged ahead with securing an indictment against David Hearn.
The DOJ says it’s wrong. But it won’t dismiss the charges against Hearn with prejudice, which means it can still take another swing at this if Trump makes it clear that needs to happen. But what’s admitted here means it will most likely need to abandon any pending criminal cases against alleged vandals if it expects the court to grant it any form of good faith going forward.
Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.
That’s the DOJ’s own admission, which is now on the public record. If it continues to pursue criminal charges, it can’t possibly expect any subsequent indictments to survive a cursory review in court. Pirro’s office needs to cut and run ASAP. And Pirro should know that it’s too late to save her job. She fucked up when she decided to tell the court the truth. And that’s something Trump will see as unforgivable.
But now any American who actually wants to know the truth about the Reflecting Pool debacle can read for themselves what the administration itself has to say about the matter when it came time to actually reveal to the court what they knew. If they’d rather believe Trump and Burgum, they can. But they can’t pretend the only evidence on the record shows the Reflecting Pool fell apart because Trump handed millions of tax dollars to donors and personal friends, rather than actually try to get the job done right the first time.
Sometimes it helps to just write out everything that happened leading up to a situation so we don’t lose sight of just how ridiculous it is.
I mean, would you believe that a President would sue his own IRS for something that happened under his own watch and did him no harm, demand $10 billion, and when a judge calls into question how that’s possible, come up with a “settlement” between the two “parties” that grants himself, his family, and his far-flung businesses (already under investigation for tax fraud) a complete get-out-of-jail-free card from tax audits along with a special $1.776 billion slush fund which he can hand out to insurrectionists who tried to overturn an election he had lost?
And then, his Acting Attorney General seeking the permanent job (who had been the President’s personal lawyer in early criminal cases, including one where the President was convicted of 34 felonies), would tell inquiring Senators that the slush fund wasn’t moving forward, but refuse to put that in writing?
When you write it all out that way, it sounds kinda crazy.
Last month Judge Kathleen Williams nuked the fund and alerted various state bars to the ethical lapses of all the government lawyers involved, including Todd Blanche, the President’s personal criminal defense lawyer-turned Acting Attorney General-turned nominee for the permanent Attorney General position.
Blanche’s nomination had stalled out, in part because two Republican Senators (Cornyn and Tillis, both of whom are leaving office after Trump refused to support their attempts to stay) have questioned the slush fund. Blanche refused to put it in writing that the fund was going away, leading to this strained exchange with Cornyn:
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, reading from the settlement on Wednesday, noted that it says the terms of the deal “may be modified only upon the written agreement of the parties.”
“Has there been a written agreement of the parties to modify the settlement fund?” he asked.
“No, the settlement fund is just not moving forward,” Blanche responded. “There’s no modification. It never started. No money went from the Treasury to any other account.”
When pressed, however, as to whether the settlement agreement may be enforceable by the parties, Blanche conceded that the president could challenge it down the road.
“Yes, it’s an enforceable document, so I suppose if President Trump’s counsel sought to enforce it, that they potentially could … try to enforce the contract. They can’t force the Department of Justice to move forward with the weaponization fund. They could potentially say that we breached by not moving forward,” Blanche said. “They haven’t done that, and I’m not aware that they’re planning on doing that.”
Given all of that, you would think that, perhaps, Trump wouldn’t make any public effort to say that the fund should still exist.
But, again, we live in the upside down world, where if Donald Trump wants something, he just throws a temper tantrum until he gets it. Three new developments have happened regarding all this in the past few days.
First, on Friday, Donald Trump appealed Williams’ order and filed a long, rambling motion about how unfair the order was. That doesn’t sound like someone who is willing to accept that the fund is dead. Second, on Saturday, Trump posted a rant to his personal social media site about how mad he was at Cornyn and Tillis, and how he still needed the fund, and even hoped Congress would pass a separate law giving him the slush fund. Finally, despite these two things making it abundantly clear that Trump still plans to create a slush fund for his cosplay militia, on Sunday, Blanche finally signed a letter claiming the slush fund was dead.
Let’s take these each in order.
First the appeal and the whiny motion about it. The most incredible thing about it is that, even though it was filed by lawyers hired by Donald Trump (the person), as I was reading it, it read like it was filed by the Justice Department. Remember, the entire reason that Williams killed the “settlement” of Trump’s lawsuit against his own IRS was that there appeared to be no adversarial parties in the case, and it was just Donald Trump suing himself in order to give the “settlement” the stamp of authenticity that it was part of a federal case.
While, to their credit, this new filing at least brings in real lawyers from an actual serious law firm, DLA Piper, alongside Trump’s original two-bit lawyer Alejandro Brito, the argument itself is still a mess. Again, you could totally picture either Donald Trump or his DOJ/IRS filing this since the original ruling applies to both. Because they’re not adverse parties. They’re all on the same side.
The ruling rests on a grievous legal error: that, because President Trump supervises the Executive Branch, he and the United States necessarily possess the same legal interest and cannot be adverse to each other. That is wrong. President Trump asserted a personal claim arising from the theft of his own tax information. The IRS and the U.S. Department of the Treasury (“Treasury”) represented the sovereign’s interests in public funds and federal law. Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and The Trump Organization asserted their own independent claims. Presidential supervision did not erase those rights or merge those interests.
The Sanctions Order nevertheless erroneously treated its novel theory of adversity as the starting point and then refracted the facts through that mistaken lens. Settlement became proof of collusion, even though there was none, potential (weak) defenses became proof that the claims were fictitious, which they were not, and ordinary professional relationships became proof of coordination, which did not exist. But the Sanctions Order identified no pre-filing sub rosa agreement, no false allegation, and no specific direction by President Trump controlling Defendants’ litigation decisions. The predicate legal error thus supplied the conclusion, causing the Sanctions Order to incorrectly recast entirely innocuous facts as misconduct.
The danger posed by the Sanctions Order is profound. The Court called the Article III question “unprecedented,” appointed six amici, and devoted nearly thirty pages to resolving it— yet it then declared the contrary position “so obvious and so insurmountable” that advancing it warranted career-altering sanctions. Id. at 9-38, 53 n.69. That mistake converts disagreement into professional punishment, and strikes at the integrity of the adjudicative process itself. A system that sanctions lawyers for advancing positions on constitutional questions cannot sustain fearless advocacy or principled legal development.
Note the tell in that last bit: the “professional punishment” landed on both sides — Trump’s lawyers and the government’s — which is exactly the point Williams was making. And, yes, courts are historically reluctant to sanction lawyers at all. But that reluctance is the problem, not evidence that the one judge willing to do it got it wrong.
As for the claims that the DOJ was actually representing the IRS’s best interests, and not Donald Trump’s, that’s belied by quotes from Donald Trump himself — who publicly admitted he was negotiating with himself — and the terms of the “settlement” which make no sense and do nothing to support the interests of the IRS, the public, or the American taxpayer. If this case was actually about Trump’s leaked tax returns, how does giving the family a release from tax audits or handing over nearly $2 billion to insurrectionists (wholly unrelated to this suit) have any of the American people’s interests in mind?
The strongest argument this filing has is that one part of the ruling is arguably prior restraint. To make sure that the settlement agreement for the slush fund was not used for improper enrichment, Judge Williams barred the parties from invoking the settlement in other proceedings. Trump’s new lawyers say that this part is prior restraint:
In addition, Rule 11 and inherent authority cannot support an order forbidding the President, private Plaintiffs, federal agencies, and sweeping categories of associated persons from “referring to” the Settlement Agreement or invoking it in any future judicial, administrative, regulatory, arbitral, or other official proceeding. D.E.106 at 47. That unprecedented injunction regulates future speech and advocacy, is unconstitutional, and is patently unlawful.
The Sanctions Order’s command is a content-based prior restraint. It singles out one subject—the Settlement Agreement—and suppresses one message, i.e., that the Settlement Agreement exists and may carry legal effect. Prior restraints carry a “heavy presumption” of constitutional invalidity, Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 70 (1963), and constitute “the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.” Nebraska Press Ass’n v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539, 559 (1976). They require findings that the threatened harm is “both great and certain and cannot be mitigated by less intrusive measures.” CBS, Inc. v. Davis, 510 U.S. 1315, 1317 (1994) (Blackmun, J., in chambers). The Sanctions Order identified no threatened unlawful speech, no resulting harm, and no reason narrower relief would be inadequate. Indeed, it did not address the First Amendment at all.
And while this is the strongest argument, that doesn’t make it actually strong. The order does not stop Trump or his lawyers from talking about the settlement. They can post about it on Truth Social, complain about it on Fox, write a book about it. What they can’t do is walk into another court, agency, or arbitration and invoke a settlement that a federal judge just voided due to the lack of adverse parties. The only “speech” being restrained is further fraud on the court.
But the fact that Trump bothered to make this argument at all is the real tell. You don’t fight for the right to invoke a settlement in future proceedings unless you’re planning to invoke it in future proceedings — which is precisely what Blanche has spent months assuring senators would never happen.
Then, even as Blanche was negotiating with Cornyn and Tillis to get them to vote in favor of his AG nomination by promising not to create the fund, on Saturday, Trump said hell yes he intends to make use of the fund — and added that he’d like Congress to pass a law establishing the same fund as a backup, in case the courts kill the one he negotiated with himself:
That’s a Trump post on Truth Social saying:
If Senators Cornyn and Tillis, both upset because I wouldn’t Endorse them (they lost, and quit, respectively!), aren’t going to approve Todd Blanche, one of the most respected professionals, according to everybody, in the Country, to be the United States Attorney General, then I will keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill, which takes care of those who have been so badly treated by the Crooked Joe Biden (and Obuma!) Administration (I get nothing, although I was treated horribly!), PASSED. Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT
Once again, Trump’s ability to shoot his allies in the back remains undefeated. Cornyn (especially) and Tillis have said that their hesitancy in approving Blanche had a lot to do with the weaponization fund. Blanche’s approval appeared contingent on a theatrical claim that the fund wasn’t going forward. To have Trump then come out and say “hell yes it’s going forward, even over the objections of Cornyn & Tillis” seems unlikely to appease those two Senators.
Tillis, for one, was not impressed:
That’s Tillis tweeting:
Despite comments as late as yesterday that the fund is dead, President Trump clearly intends to resurrect the payout pot for punks either by inappropriately establishing another bogus fund or pushing Congress to vote for a bill that the majority of Republicans in the Senate would be against.
It’s unfortunate that Todd Blanche, who I consider qualified for the job, will not be confirmed because of this reversal. Hopefully, we can resolve this by Tuesday.
It’s been quite clear that Trump has no intention of ever letting go of this slush fund, but it’s classic Trump that he couldn’t even keep his mouth shut long enough to pretend the fund wasn’t going forward and to get Blanche approved.
Which then brings us to the last bit that came out late Sunday: Blanche tweeting out that the DOJ had finally decided to “rescind” the weaponization fund in writing. Something he had refused to do over the past few weeks.
There are two separate letters there. The first “rescinds” the fund, while making an obnoxious snarky comment about “frivolous lawsuits” filed to challenge it:
A. The Attomey General’s May 18, 2026 Order establishing the Anti-Weaponization Fund (“Fund”) is rescinded and shall have no force or effect.
B. For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in this Order is intended to contradict or otherwise be contrary to prior representations by the Department of Justice that the Fund is not operative. No Members were appointed; no funds were transferred; no process for receiving claims was established; no claims were paid. Nevertheless, several frivolous lawsuits have been filed challenging the Fund, and at least one court has declined to dismiss those claims as moot. This Order establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no Fund…
If the cases were “frivolous” then why would you need to rescind the agreement?
The second, with snide shots at Congress for not believing his statements, says a bit more on the matter:
Department of Justice Rescinds Anti-Weaponization Order and Addresses the May 19 Release
The Department of Justice today announced that the Acting Attorney General rescinded the May 18, 2026 Order that established “The Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Although the Acting Attorney General has repeatedly advised Congress through testimony, including under oath, as well as in written responses, that the Fund is not moving forward, and the Department has repeatedly represented to district courts that the Fund is not moving forward, today’s Order officially rescinds the May 18, 2026 Order.
Further, the May 19, 2026 Order regarding a mutual release of claims applies by its terms only retroactively. Additionally, the terms “Lawfare and/or Weaponization” in that Order were already defined in the Settlement Agreement as the use of government power “to target individuals, groups, and entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.”
The Acting Attorney General stands by all of his July 15, 2026 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, including answers to questions asked by Senator Cornyn related to the scope and applicability of the May 19, 2026 Order. A transcript of the Acting Attorney General’s testimony is attached. He incorporates that testimony by reference, and restates that it is DOJ’s interpretation that the Order only has any effect, including on any release of claims, on the named parties in the lawsuit referenced in the Order.
This all seems pretty obviously designed to get Cornyn and Tillis off his back by saying “see?!? I’ve now put it in writing. Now shut up and vote to make me Attorney General.” And, who knows, it might work.
That’s even though nothing in there actually answers Cornyn’s actual question discussed above. The DOJ cannot single-handedly go back on this agreement. It was, we are told (including in the appeal from Trump on Friday), a private agreement between two distinct parties: Donald Trump and the Justice Department. As such “rescinding” it from just the DOJ side is meaningless since, as Blanche himself admitted to Cornyn, Trump can still try to claim in court that the settlement is valid.
And given Trump’s public statements about why he needs the fund, as well as his lawyers’ statement in the appeal that it tramples his rights to order him not to claim the settlement is valid in court… you’d have to be pretty slow not to pick up on what Trump intends here.
Also, notice what didn’t get rescinded. The May 18th order (creating the slush fund) is what he pretends is gone, but the May 19th order, which clears Trump, his family, and their businesses from IRS audits over past business practices remains. Blanche pretends that saying it “applies by its terms only retroactively” is a meaningful limitation, but that was always obviously the case. By all accounts, the Trump family books are a mess, and they likely owe the IRS a ton of money. And the Blanche announcement makes it clear that remains as is.
So, to sum it all up, Blanche has rescinded an order based on a settlement he can’t single-handedly rescind, to appease Senators whose votes he needs, while the President has made it clear he’s going to move forward with his fund no matter what.
The simple reality here is that we have a crooked President with his hand-picked henchman trying to do the bare minimum to appease a compliant GOP-run Senate, while the President himself can’t keep his own mouth shut long enough to even put up the pretend facade that there’s no corruption going on here.
Under any other President, this would be an impeachable offense. Here it was just another weekend under the Trump Presidency.
Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.
From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.
Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.
ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.
“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.
“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”
In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.
“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”
Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.
In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.
Federal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Departmentin their orders granted interviews to ProPublica.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.”
“The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,” said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows.
In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government’s persistent “sloppiness,” would have been 4 years old.
“This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers. O’Hearn accused the government of defying her orders when, instead of releasing the man, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a different facility in New York.
In Minnesota, the state’s top political leaders had publicly clashed with the administration following the violent ICE raids that led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Then the administration filed a flurry of subpoenas against them.
Last month, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, slammed the government’s actions and “spurious claims,” saying the presumption of regularity was being abused.
“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action — particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take — is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process,” the judge wrote.
“Breakdown” of a Presumption
The presumption of regularity creates a high bar for those suing the government or defending themselves against it in criminal cases. They often must provide evidence that the government willfully violated a policy or otherwise deviated from its charge — that is, did something irregular — to overcome the standard.
It’s a shield the government wields often, with little notice, and one that is almost always successful. But overcoming that presumption has become increasingly common under Trump’s second term, according to court watchers.
About half of the cases ProPublica identified as questioning the presumption come from districts, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where by proximity and jurisdiction many of Trump’s actions are challenged and often heard by Democratic-nominated judges. The Southern District of New York, which has issued repeated rebukes of Trump administration actions, and the Northern District of California, another Democratic stronghold, are other hotbeds of judicial scrutiny.
Last September, D.C. District Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui accused the administration of working around the federal grand jury process, getting an indictment from a state court after prosecutors had failed to get one in his court, which he called “unseemly,” if not “unlawful.” He fired off one of the earliest signs that the presumption itself could come into question.
“This only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors,” the judge wrote. “That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular.” While the case was largely managed by assistant U.S. attorney Caelainn Carney, according to court transcripts, Faruqui was aiming his frustration at her bosses, including senior prosecutor Jonathan R. Hornok, and the leadership at DOJ. Neither attorney responded to requests for comment.
Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told ProPublica that Faruqui “was wrong on the law” and noted that after the government appealed to the district’s chief judge, his order was overruled. “Judge Faruqui has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him,” Pels added.
But in recent months, skepticism about the presumption has also come from judges appointed by Republicans, such as McElroy, or in GOP strongholds.
In Indiana, Trump-appointed federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a lawful U.S. resident, from ICE custody in March. Sarsour’s lawyers argued the government had targeted him to suppress his First Amendment right to free speech. The DOJ invoked the presumption of regularity and argued his arrest was part of an anti-terrorism dragnet, which the judge threw out.
In the Southern District of Ohio, Judge Michael R. Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered ICE to release a detainee after concluding the presumption had been overcome because the government hadn’t presented a reasonable argument that the man was a flight risk.
News outlets, including CNN, have documented federal judges’ ire with Trump’s DOJ, and some of the cases under question have been well-publicized, such as the government’s illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, a President Barack Obama appointee, criticized the government, saying, “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you’ve destroyed it.”
Many of the rulings challenged one of Trump’s hallmark efforts: immigration enforcement and deportations.
“The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country,” O’Hearn wrote in February, noting that the federal government had repeatedly violated court orders in her district and others related to immigration operations.
In another immigration detention case, this one in Washington state, Biden-appointed Judge Lauren King said, “[t]he ‘presumption of regularity’ is dislodged here by the numerous factual errors in Respondents’ filings and by their conflicting representations.”
Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge from California, said what’s happening in the courts feels more like a “political conflict” than the normal ebb and flow of the justice system.
“It’s really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one,” Fogel said. “I think the judges are trying to stand up for the legitimacy of their branch.”
Just Security, an online law and policy journal, has been tracking cases in which federal judges have admonished Trump’s prosecutors, including those involving the presumption.
“We’re witnessing a breakdown in the ways in which any administration ordinarily carries out its responsibilities, through the Justice Department in particular,” said Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief.
Erosion of Trust, Ethics Inquiries
The erosion of trust from the federal bench comes as Trump has profoundly shifted priorities at the DOJ to align with his political platform: ending civil rights and diversity programs, deporting immigrants and stripping away environmental protections.
Those who deal with DOJ lawyers have noticed the difference in court.
Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, has faced off on environmental issues with the DOJ many times. Although they may disagree, he said, he always expected his opponents to be “fair and above board.”
That dynamic is gone, he said.
“I would call it a transformation of the role of the Justice Department,” he said. “There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”
The result, Bernard said, is that “the government will lose more cases as a result of the way the Justice Department is behaving.”
Meanwhile, groups such as his are benefitting from the government brain drain. “We hired 10 litigating attorneys last year,” he said. Of those, eight came from the DOJ.
Judges aren’t just losing faith in the DOJ. Some are pushing to sanction Justice Department lawyers.
This month, Miami federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-enrichment, citing the president’s lawyers for a series of misstatements in the case.
The Obama appointee referred the lawyer who brought the president’s case against the IRS, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She also forwarded her ruling to disciplinary officials in New York, who had earlier received an ethics complaint about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
A DOJ spokesperson called the Blanche case “nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration’s policies.” Brito did not respond to a request for comment.
In Rhode Island, McElroy referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for possible discipline for their handling of the hospital investigation.
“As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,” McElroy wrote. “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”
Donald Trump swore he could turn the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into something he could use to bask in his own reflected glory. Instead, it turned out to be everything we expect from Trump: braggadocio followed by abject failure.
Trump hired some guys he used to do some stuff to his personal pool(s) back in the day. It was a no-bid contract — one that was immediately extolled by Trump as Great Stuff. According to Trump, his personal cabana boys could get the job done right, on time, and under budget.
None of that happened. His boys took to the pool repair, doing their level best to behave like government contractors. Trump then did a Glory Roll across the unfinished sealant with his motorcade to show off for the boys back at the White House. A week or so later, the pool was refilled. For a brief moment, it showed off the “American flag blue” Trump thought was missing from the original fixture. Then it turned into a blend of algae and peeling sealant.
Instead of pulling out his receipts and asking his pool boys whether this reflecting pool refurb was still under warranty, Trump claimed the floating chunks of blue sealant bobbing around in the green muck was the work of vandals. And, of course, he had political appointees willing to press this point on his behalf. Jeanine Pirro — the US Attorney for the District of Columbia — got right on it, arresting former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on felony vandalism charges.
Pirro alleged Hearn had damaged “two square feet of sealant.” Well, it takes $1,000 to make vandalism charges a federal felony. While this damage estimate is subject to federal no-bid contract markup, taking someone down for doing two square feet of damage is insane, especially when Trump is still out there claiming vandals cut a 150-350 foot gash into the pool sealant.
Trump also promised there was proof of his wild allegations — something that would presumably show up as the DOJ attempted to turn vandalism arrests into federal indictments.
A key grand jury witness in a case against a former Olympic canoeist accused of tampering with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool testified that the area was already damaged and would have required repairs regardless, lawyers said in a court filing Monday.
[…]
The witness, who is not identified, was the only person who testified about damages, and said that the property had already been damaged before, authorities say, Hearn stuck his hands in the water, according to Hearn’s team.
Now, for those of you unaware of how grand jury proceedings work (and especially for those MAGA folks who like to show up and be deliberately ignorant), we’ll break this down quickly. A grand jury is not like a regular jury. Its sole purpose is to decide whether or not the government has enough evidence to support an indictment. The accused person is not there, nor are they represented by the lawyers. This is completely non-adversarial. And YET, the government’s witness testified to the grand jury that the pool was already damaged before the accused even arrived on the scene of the alleged crime.
What’s absolutely wild is that the DOJ still got its indictment despite this damning testimony from its own witness. Welcome to Trump Town, I guess. But we’ll see how long this indictment lasts. Hearn’s legal reps have filed a motion demanding copies of grand jury documents because it’s pretty fucking clear some bullshit must have been pulled to get Hearn indicted even though a government witness testified that the pool was already in shambles.
Lawyers for David Hearn, a 67-year-old who represented the United States at three Olympic Games, submitted a court filing seeking access to transcripts of the grand jury testimony as well as the instructions given to the panel that ultimately indicted Hearn, claiming that there were “irregularities” in the proceedings that led to the indictment.
[…]
In the filing, Hearn’s legal team suggests that the jury was not “properly instructed” on the crime Hearn stands accused of, noting specifically that felony destruction of property requires the perpetrator to have caused $1,000 or more of damage. The attorneys pointed to the testimony of the federal government’s own witness, an official from the National Park Service, who suggested that the pool was damaged long before Hearn interacted with the pool and that repairs were already being sought.
The full filing [PDF] by Hearn’s legal team is embedded below. It’s worth a read. And I certainly hope the judge grants this motion because if it contains the sort of stuff these accusations suggest it the documents might contain, this won’t be the first time the Trump administration has been caught cheating even though the process already allows the government to put its prosecutorial thumb on the scales.
The on-again, off-again, new forever war we’ve been cursed with because Donald Trump felt people just weren’t paying attention to him enough is going to be headache for years to come. Trump assumes that if he acts like a bully, everyone will just back down. But now he’s dealing with a regime just as willing to go to extremes, which makes this war look more like a knife fight in a jail yard than anything worth forcing other people to die for.
Since Trump doesn’t like to hear anything that might undermine his preconceptions, he’s been notoriously resistant to national security briefings since his first term in office. Trump always assumes he’s the smartest person in the room, even though he’s never the most alert person in the room.
Making sure he only hears what he wants to hear is a full-time job for everyone surrounding the president. And when a toady one step closer to the throne senses someone might say something that upsets the boss, they grab the deck chairs and move them around.
Consequently, the desire for unquestioning loyalty and the ability to be forgettable enough that no one will remember them when they’re gone has given us an insanely stupid succession of people chosen to be the Director of National Intelligence.
Tulsi Gabbard — his first pick — jumped straight to MAGA from the Democratic Party. This absurd abandonment of principles was repaid by Trump pressuring her out of the DNI position after it became clear she didn’t agree with all of Trump’s off-the-cuff assertions about the threat posed by Iran. Not that she hadn’t proven to be pretty much useless — if not actually dangerous — anywhere else in the federal government before then, but this exit meant she wouldn’t be doing anything else for as long as Trump still controls the White House.
As the Trump administration failed to sell MAGA GOP members on re-upping the surveillance program they were all suing about only months ago, the president elevated another one of his buddies to the DNI position.
That’s not relevant experience. But relevant experience no longer matters. What does matter is asking not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for Trump.
This is particularly concerning because of Pulte’s history of using private information held by the government as a political weapon. In his FHFA role, he has accused several of the President’s political foes and targets – including New York State Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook – of mortgage fraud based on private data held by his agency.
Pulte’s subservience wasn’t enough to keep him permanently employed, something I hope will eat away at him for the rest of his life. Trump already had an actual nominee lined up: Jay Clayton. Clayton is now perhaps best known for refusing to say who won the 2020 election, which makes it clear he’s here to serve Trump, rather than the country’s national security interests. But it didn’t stop him from being approved this week.
The president in early June tapped federal mortgage regulator Bill Pulte, a political ally with no prior national security experience, to be acting director of national intelligence. Trump said at the time that he wanted Pulte to “start the process” of eliminating some workers.
To be fair, this was hardly a process that needed to be “started.” Under Tulsi Gabbard, staffing at all intelligence agencies that report to the ODNI had shrunk from 2,000 to 1,300. But at the ODNI itself, jobs still seemed pretty safe. Until just recently.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has shrunk more than is publicly known in recent weeks, losing about 200 personnel to firings and reassignments since June 1, according to data the Trump administration shared with Congress this week.
The cuts are the latest to hit ODNI, which was created to oversee and coordinate all U.S. spy agencies but has been targeted by President Donald Trump and many Republicans in Congress.
That’s 200 firings/reassignments in just the last month. The war with Iran has been ongoing since February 28th, triggered by US air strikes on the nation. Despite the occasional Truth Social post declaring outright victory, the war drags on and it doesn’t appear the administration is capable of closing it out without caving to a long list of Iranian demands.
So, of course, this is the time to be escalating the dismissal of national intelligence personnel. When the threat level is the highest, the administration continues its politically motivated purges, putting everyone in this nation (and the nations around the war zone) at increased risk of attack.
And this is political. The people getting purged aren’t people who call Trump “sir” and the Defense Department the “Department of War.” The people who actually serve a valuable purpose in protecting this nation from all threats are being removed because they might stumble across evidence that indicates this administration is bringing this country down from the inside.
Trump has often maintained a hostile posture toward professional intelligence personnel and their agencies, claiming they tried to undermine him in his first term, particularly with the compiling of reports on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election to aid his campaign. The president has dismissed intelligence analysis on a range of issues, from North Korea’s nuclear policy to Iran’s likely reaction to the attacks the U.S. and Israel launched in February.
Trump only wants people who nod, cower, and obey. The people around him who desperately want to keep their jobs are throwing anyone not sufficiently MAGA-cooked under the nearest bus and immediately letting Trump know they’ve disappeared the dissidents.
An entire nation could burn and the only thing these people would say is that the nation’s burning was necessary to save the Republic that’s being flipped by no-bid construction crews into a vainglorious edifice worthy only of a tyrant. This administration is incapable of managing crises. But it’s super-great at creating them. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to look back at this as a turning point in US history. If we’re not, we won’t get to look back at it at all.
For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries.
To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries.
This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica.
Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa.
This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.
That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.
“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”
A review of proposed grants shows several are being directed to more traditional human rights purposes, but even some of those have raised concerns in and outside the State Department.
Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. Generally, the State Department is allowed to offer awards directly to a single entity or to a small group of potential grantees in rare instances, such as when only one organization is capable of the work or an emergency necessitates providing money so quickly that open competition is impossible. It has also used such “sole-source” and “limited-source” awards, which are not publicly announced, in highly sensitive countries where openly working on human rights can be dangerous.
None of those justifications appear to apply here, according to contracting experts and former staffers consulted by ProPublica. The situation is all the more concerning, they said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts who evaluated applicants based on the organizations’ experience and qualifications.
“It’s not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons,” one former bureau staffer said.
Directing awards to organizations in high-income countries further complicates the funding. The practice is so unusual that an internal waiver justifying the choice is typically required.
The State Department did not answer when asked whether it had sought waivers for the grants to high-income countries.
During private briefings this month, members of Congress expressed concern over both the list of potential recipients and the plan to award no-bid or limited-bid grants, according to officials familiar with the closed-door meetings who weren’t authorized to publicly discuss them.
In response to a detailed list of questions about this story, the State Department sent a short written response, noting that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.” A State Department official who declined to be named stressed that the process for awarding grants was ongoing and that multiple offices provide input. They also said the administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed.
Asked about the potential grants, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said Congress expects the State Department “to invest resources to advance human rights, democratic institutions, civil society, freedom of expression and worker rights” and that the proposals are “an appalling departure from that practice and an affront to our democratic allies.”
“These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology,” Shaheen said, “not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security.”
Internal records and interviews show one of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government.
On the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Samson started work as a senior adviser to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, also known as DRL, the State Department unit that selects and distributes the human rights grants.
Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.” In recent weeks, Samson has defended the agency’s grantmaking plans during private meetings with lawmakers.
One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The group often steps in to defend people accused of being transphobic and has created a petition opposing the U.K.’s proposed ban on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. It’s unclear if the grant would go to the British-based organization or its international offshoot. The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. Trump officials met with the group during a European tour late last year, according to Politico.
Scholars said the U.S. government’s support for these groups could give them a layer of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have.
“We see them as intellectualizing or sanitizing radical-right ideas that are then taken up by the parties in power,” said Allchorn, the U.K. extremism expert.
The Free Speech Union’s website says it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds. In response to questions from ProPublica about the potential grant, the organization’s founder, Toby Young, said, “We have neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government.” He did not respond to criticisms about the award or his organization.
The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The foundation’s goal is to memorialize those killed by communist regimes and pursue freedom for people still living under totalitarian rule.
The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget. Victims of Communism has received a handful of government grants in the past, but for much smaller sums. Its most recent publicly available tax forms, from 2024, show its total assets come to about $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation’s previous U.S.-funded work questioned its ability to manage such a large award.
Samson has a personal connection to the organization. The foundation’s board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at a graduate school branch of Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; Samson was enrolled in the same small graduate program of the Christian conservative college as recently as this year, according to his LinkedIn profile (which is no longer publicly available). Spalding’s husband, Matthew, is that graduate school’s dean, and Samson has taken classes with one or both of them, according to a State Department official.
The State Department official who declined to be named said Samson’s relationship with the Spaldings had nothing to do with the grant.
The foundation’s proposed award is to “amplify the voices of dissidents and political prisoners while educating global audiences about the dangers of communist and authoritarian regimes,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica.
In response to questions from ProPublica about the award and concerns about its ability to manage it, the foundation said it was not aware of the proposed funding, but “if true, the 100 million victims murdered by communism in the past, and another 1.5 billion men, women, and children still enduring communism today will rejoice.”
The State Department declined to comment on awards in process but noted that Victims of Communism has long worked with the State Department. “As President Trump has said, communism is a mortal threat to American liberty — and as Secretary Rubio has repeatedly emphasized, America will not allow radical extremists to undermine our sovereignty and national security,” the agency said in a statement. “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities.”
Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, DRL staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. The group, which claims that white South African farmers are victims of racial discrimination and violence, is fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers.
The proposed award to fund the South African crime research was later widened to allow other invited groups to apply for a $1 million grant, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, saying the grant is still under deliberation.
Extensiveresearch shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. But Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and is using claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off South Africa’s funding for HIV treatment and research.
Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering elsewhere in the region. “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official told ProPublica.
Lex Libertas did not respond to questions.
One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped, the State Department official told ProPublica. The decision came after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week about the months-old organization and its agenda. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation,” according to its website. The sole-source $7 million grant aimed to advance “Anglo-American values” in the U.K., Europe and “allied partner countries,” according to a document ProPublica reviewed.
Since at least 2011, as anti-LGBTQ+ laws and violence spread globally, the bureau added a specific focus on people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Throughout most of its existence, DRL has enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats applauded its championing of international labor standards and marginalized communities, while Republicans favored its defense of democratic freedoms in China, North Korea, Cuba and other communist countries. As a senator, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the bureau and human rights broadly, once arguing from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men who were persecuted in Chechnya — and all people — was in the national interest. In 2018, he urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary to oversee DRL, a post Trump had left vacant for over a year.
But after Rubio became secretary of state in January 2025, the fate of DRL dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office. Within months, cuts by Trump’s newly installed Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, and Rubio closed most of its offices. In April 2025, Rubio published a Substack post smearing the bureau he once championed as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.”
Samson also sent shock waves through the bureau. In March, he traveled to the U.K., meeting an anti-abortion protester and the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In his own essay on the State Department’s Substack, Samson lashed out at the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion protesters and at Germany for labeling its hard-right Alternative for Germany party “extremist,” likening the countries’ actions to the “censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization” used against Trump.
Meanwhile, DRL’s remaining skeleton crew was tasked with removing trigger words from documents. “We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck,” said one former bureau employee, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution.
“We went from having a real, dynamic appreciation for individuals and their human rights and fundamental freedoms to erasing that, especially if individuals were part of an underrepresented group or marginalized community,” the former employee said.
The bureau is working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024. Now the administration is preparing to put money behind its new priorities.
“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” the State Department official told ProPublica.
