If you needed proof that Trump’s “war on drugs” is pure theatrical bullshit designed to justify geopolitical adventurism and the transactional nature of how he views absolutely everything, look no further than the past two months of his foreign policy.
Two months ago, Donald Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras who was convicted in a Manhattan federal court of facilitating the importation of at least 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. The conviction wasn’t based on hearsay or shaky evidence—it came after a three-week trial featuring multiple cooperating witnesses, business ledgers documenting drug transactions, undercover video recordings, and testimony detailing how Hernandez turned Honduras’ entire government apparatus into a cocaine superhighway.
As Bloomberg’s detailed investigation lays out, the evidence was quite strong. Hernandez’s brother, Tony (who was also an elected official), had been convicted earlier of basically running a massive drug smuggling campaign, and there were clear ties between Tony’s operation and his brother. And there’s this colorful story:
In 2021, during the trial of another trafficker Sandy Gonzalez had arrested, a former accountant for a Honduran agricultural company testified that he attended meetings with Hernández, who accepted bribes from the accountant’s boss and spoke openly of his connections to traffickers. Hernández, he said, bragged about fooling his American counterparts into thinking he was on their side in the drug war. “He then took a sip of drink,” the accountant said of Hernández, “and he said: ‘We are going to stuff drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.’” At that same trial, witnesses said that in return for protection, the trafficker paid bribes to Hernández to ensure his business enjoyed military protection. Data scraped from the trafficker’s phone—which included the president’s cellphone number in the contact list—showed that on two separate days when news broke about the president’s alleged involvement in Tony’s drug-smuggling activities, the trafficker downloaded driving directions to the presidential palace.
A judge sentenced him to 45 years in prison. Trump pardoned him anyway, claiming he’d been “treated very harshly and unfairly.”
So with that conviction and evidence in mind, let’s look at what Trump claims justifies launching an illegal war. Trump (without the required permission of Congress) ordered military strikes on Venezuela this weekend, and captured President Nicolas Maduro, claiming the operation was justified by… drug trafficking charges.
The charges against Maduro appear less direct and less clear than those against Hernandez.
It also details specific actions that Maduro allegedly took as part of the conspiracy. It says, for example, that between 2006 and 2008 when he served as foreign minister that Maduro sold Venezuelan diplomatic passports to known drug traffickers “in order to assist traffickers seeking to move drug proceeds form Mexico to Venezuela under diplomatic cover.”
He also allegedly facilitated the flights of private planes under diplomatic cover to bring drug proceeds back from Mexico to Venezuela.
Prosecutors allege that Maduro and Flores worked together for years to traffic cocaine that had previously been seized by Venezuelan law enforcement. They say the Maduros had their own state-sponsored gangs to protect their operation, and that they ordered “kidnappings, beating and murders against those who owed them drug money or otherwise undermined their drug trafficking operation.”
Notice what’s missing there: actual convictions, actual evidence of tons of cocaine moved, actual documentation like the ledgers and recordings that convicted Hernandez. And indeed, as The Guardian notes, many experts are deeply skeptical that Maduro is actually the drug kingpin Trump claims:
“It just shows that the entire counter-drug effort of Donald Trump is a charade – it’s based on lies, it’s based on hypocrisy,” said Mike Vigil, the former DEA chief for international operations. “He is giving a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández and then going afterNicolás Maduro… It’s all hypocritical.”
Contrary to Trump’s claim that Hernández, 57, had been the victim of a “Biden set up”, Vigil said there was overwhelming evidence that the Central American politician was “a big fish in the narco world”. Not only had Hernández helped turn Honduras into a major transit point for South American cocaine heading to the US, but Vigil said he had also transformed it intoa cocaine-producing hubwhich was nowhome to coca plantations and makeshift labs for processing coca leaves.
[….]
Meanwhile, despite Trump’s claims that Maduro is the leader of a narco organization called the “Cartel of the Suns”, many experts doubt such a group even exists.
“Maduro is not a saint,” said Vigil, noting how he and several allies were indicted for trafficking cocaine in the US in 2020. “[But] they’re not a cartel, they don’t have an infrastructure,” he added, calling such allegations “nonsense”.
So to recap: Trump pardoned a president who was actually convicted in US court of moving 400 tons of cocaine, with overwhelming evidence including recordings, ledgers, and multiple witness testimony. Then, two months later, he launched military strikes—without Congressional authorization, in violation of both US and international law—and captured a different president based on an indictment that experts say lacks solid evidence that he’s running an actual drug cartel.
The main difference? Hernandez sucked up to Trump from the start. From Bloomberg:
President Hernández had enjoyed good relationships with President Obama and Vice President Biden, but he harbored a special affinity for President Trump, whose transactional style suited him well. Hernández had adopted the slogan “Honduras is open for Business.” During Trump’s first term, Hernández established Próspera, an economic development zone on the Honduran island of Roatán. Próspera offered investors a self-governed haven where they could set their own regulations and pay next to nothing in taxes. Libertarian-inclined Trump supporters invested in it.
Hernández had met with Trump in New York just before his brother’s trial, when they signed a series of bilateral agreements intended to encourage a Honduran crackdown on northbound migrants. “You’re doing a fantastic job,” Trump told Hernández. “My people work with you so well.”
He continued to court Trump’s favor even after his brother’s guilty verdict. The following spring, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Food & Drug Administration publicly rebuked Trump’sclaim that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial medicine, could effectively treat the virus. Hernández seized an opportunity.
“Well, I never spoke to a scientist,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “but I will tell you this: I did speak with the president of Honduras, just a little while ago. I didn’t bring it up—he brought it up. He said they use the hydroxychloroquine, and he said the results are just so incredible, with the hydroxychloroquine. Check with him. Call him. The president of Honduras. A really nice guy.”
For the rest of Trump’s term, even as his Justice Department was compiling more evidence of his ties to trafficking, members of the administration repeatedly praised Hernández for his commitment to battling migration and organized crime.
What’s really going on doesn’t take a very deep analysis: Hernandez was a right-wing ally who supported Trump’s policies and had publicly supported Trump. Maduro is a left-wing adversary. One gets pardoned despite a conviction based on overwhelming evidence. The other gets military strikes based on flimsier charges.
Even more absurd: Trump has been conducting all these “kinetic strikes” we’ve written about on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, killing approximately 80 people and destroying about 20 boats—most of which likely contained far less cocaine than Hernandez was convicted of moving, and many of which may have just been impoverished fishermen. Meanwhile, he’s letting the guy actually convicted of industrialized drug trafficking walk free.
Once again, this is all about political alignment and personal loyalty. Hernandez worked with the Trump administration, endorsed Trump’s preferred candidate in Honduras’ recent election, and had allies like Roger Stone lobbying for his pardon. Maduro is a geopolitical adversary Trump wants removed.
To everyone who can keep more than one thought in their head at the same time, the hypocrisy is clear: you can’t credibly claim your military action is justified by the need to combat drug trafficking when you just pardoned someone convicted of far more extensive drug trafficking. You can’t bomb boats supposedly carrying cocaine while freeing a man who moved 400 tons of it. You can’t invoke “law enforcement” as justification when you’re simultaneously undermining the very legal proceedings that proved another leader’s guilt.
This is nothing more than naked illegal geopolitical maneuvering dressed up in drug war rhetoric. And the fact that the administration thinks this narrative will fly shows how little they think of the public’s ability to notice the contradiction sitting right in front of us.
As one expert put it to The Guardian:
Orlando Pérez, a Latin America expert from the University of North Texas at Dallas, said Trump’s double standards on which drug-smuggling presidents to pursue revealed there was no consistent strategy to fight the region’s drug traffickers. “It’s all ad hoc and based on political considerations,” he said.
“One [Hernández] is a rightwing supporter of the US – and the other [Maduro] is not,” Pérez added. “It is ideological. It is political. It is self-interested in terms of advancing an ideological agenda – and it has nothing to do with effective anti-drug policies.”
When your “drug war” pardons the convicted trafficker and invades over the unproven allegation, you’ve pretty much admitted it was never about the drugs at all.
This is about way more than the hypocrisy, though the hypocrisy is staggering. We should be aghast at the complete erosion of any pretense that US foreign policy is guided by law, evidence, or principle rather than personal loyalty and political convenience. When the same action (drug trafficking) earns you a pardon or an invasion based solely on whether you’re useful to Trump, you’ve turned “law enforcement” into a pure protection racket. And when you can’t even maintain the fiction for two months, you’ve stopped pretending the rules matter at all.
America continues to be made great again. Or so says the collective of fascist buffoons currently holding federal positions of power.
The Trump administration has made a lot of noise about bringing the “rule of law” back to America — something that supposedly went missing during Biden’s term. The alleged lawlessness covers everything from rational immigration policies to whatever the fuck the word “woke” means to whatever White House mook is currently using that term in a disparaging way.
Trump’s return to office set in motion a whole lot of recklessness and lawlessness, starting with the wholesale dismissal of migrants’ constitutional rights and running all the way through several DOGE-gutted agencies until this regime reached its current nadir: straight up murdering people just because they happen to be in boats off the coast of Venezuela.
Anyone who actually respects the rule of law has either quit or been fired. They’ve been replaced by people Trump prefers, like former personal lawyers, Fox News commentators, and far-right podcasters.
We’ve already witnessed a lot of failure from the Trump DOJ, which can’t manage to secure indictments during revenge prosecutions ranging from anti-ICE protesters to high-profile names from Trump’s official enemies list, like NY Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. Everyone that failed upward due to their MAGA loyalty has made a mockery of half of the DOJ’s name: justice.
Fortunately, courts — for the most part — aren’t just rolling over for half-baked “unitary executive power” legal theories. As Reuters reports, the DOJ is in the midst of a historic losing streak that’s the direct result of Trump’s preference for loyalists.
As President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown got underway in Washington, D.C., in August, federal agents and police spotted a man named Torez Riley tugging at his backpack inside a Trader Joe’s store, searched it and recovered two firearms.
But federal prosecutors were forced to dismiss the charges after video surveillance revealed the search lacked probable cause and was unlawful.
In a subsequent legal opinion, a federal magistrate judge said the errors were part of a broader pattern of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps, resulting in a 21% dismissal rate of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office’s criminal complaints over eight weeks, compared to a mere 0.5% dismissal rate over the prior 10 years.
It used to mean that getting prosecuted meant getting fucked. Judges tended to side with prosecutors and rogue cops, rejecting only a small amount of cases that contained violations too egregious to be granted a “good faith” mulligan.
At this point, the DOJ is struggling to secure grand jury indictments, which is a little like struggling to lift a feather over your head. Most indictments are considered slam dunks because they’re entirely one-sided presentations made by prosecutors to people who are just there to pencil-whip their way through the day’s prosecutorial offerings.
But with Trump running the DOJ (and handpicking people like his former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan to handle politically motivated prosecutions), the government’s fridge is now overstocked with unindicted ham sandwiches.
This is ontop of literally hundreds of court rulings declaring the administration’s deportation efforts are illegal — specifically, the jailing and indefinite detainment of alleged immigration law violators who don’t pose a threat to public safety or a flight risk.
The blustering continues, however, with no sign of respite in sight. The administration apparently feels that if it goes hard enough for long enough, everything will eventually work out in its favor. Meanwhile, its band of bigots and incompetents continues to undercut its ability to perform well in court, much less convince judges that the government is acting in good faith.
The errors have sometimes undermined the department on civil and criminal matters it cares about, from the prosecutions of Trump’s political foes, to cases about immigration, violent crime, gender-affirming care and voting rights. At times, they came about after senior officials made public statements about pending cases on social media or television that strayed from the allegations made in sworn court filings, violating department rules designed to ensure a fair trial.
These mistakes are causing department attorneys to lose credibility with federal courts, with some judges quashing subpoenas, threatening criminal contempt and issuing opinions that raise questions about their conduct.
Reuters calls these “errors,” but they’re actually “failures.” The administration is very deliberate when it comes to its efforts to allow (and encourage!) Trump to rule like a king, bypassing the legislative process entirely with daily executive orders and Truth Social posts that are meant to be treated as executive orders.
Meanwhile, the DOJ is bragging that none of this — from the failure to secure indictments to the hundreds of adverse rulings it has generated since the beginning of the year — matters. Its statement to Reuters gives away the game: the administration believes (and not unreasonably!) that it has the Supreme Court in its pocket:
“This Department of Justice is winning in court on behalf of the Trump Administration and the American People with 24 successful rulings at the Supreme Court emergency docket so far and multiple prominent indictments of transnational terrorists, violent criminals, and even politicians who have allegedly engaged in corruption.”
That the Supreme Court has decided to handle most of its stuff completely off the record with its reliance on its shadow docket, it is aiding and abetting the administration’s autocracy speed run. But the DOJ can’t pretend it’s “winning.” To get “24 successful rulings” (which overstates things a bit), it first had to lose far more cases at lower levels just to get the MAGA majority of the Supreme Court to reject (or ignore) rulings against the DOJ and the administration’s routinely unlawful behavior.
We can hope that sooner or later the administration’s complete disregard for the rule of law and the US Constitution will catch up to it. But hope is only going to get us so far if the nation’s top court keeps ignoring cases that might generate precedent that works against the bigoted efforts of the administration. Maybe it will finally reach a tipping point and return the nation back to the stuff that actually made it great. Until it does, we can at least take solace in the fact that the rest of the federal court system isn’t just rolling over for Trump. It’s generating precedent almost daily.
More importantly, most federal judges no longer consider Trump’s DOJ to be a credible party in criminal cases or civil litigation. That means the government’s omnipresent threat (“your word against ours”) to people it’s trying to punish becomes less useful with each passing day. The lower courts know this government can’t be trusted. And as all of this continues, the Trump administration gives the courts more reasons to treat it as the most unreliable of narrators.
The same nonsense is playing out again with the Trump FCC’s ban of Chinese drones, which quietly went into effect during the Christmas holiday, intentionally ensuring that a lot of people missed it.
In short, the Trump administration added Chinese drones to its Covered List, which it says are communications equipment and services “deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons.” Soon Americans will no longer be able to buy new drones from some of the most successful and popular companies in the space, like DJI.
“UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and UAS critical components, including data transmission devices, communications systems, flight controllers, ground control stations, controllers, navigation systems, batteries, smart batteries, and motors produced in a foreign country could enable persistent surveillance, data exfiltration, and destructive operations over US territory, including over World Cup and Olympic venues and other mass gathering events.”
To be clear, you can continue to use DJI drones you already own. And you can buy DJI drones currently approved by the FCC already for sale. But you soon won’t be able to buy new versions of these drones as they’re released. Which is a shame because DJI generally leads the drone field with a 70 percent market share and their drones are very good, very popular, and less expensive than U.S. alternatives.
The ban was imposed with zero transparency after “an Executive Branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise that was convened by the White House.” Which is gibberish when you consider the Trump administration is stacked to the rafters with odd zealots and unqualified weirdos who are basically just propping up a wide assortment of shady grifts.
You’re supposed to believe this is about protecting Americans from nefarious Chinese drone surveillance. In reality, this is about protecting U.S. drone manufacturers from having to compete with better, more popular technology. But because it’s so easy to get xenophobic lawmakers and our lazy press so ginned up about China, that truth gets buried in news reports and the policy weeds.
I’ll just randomly note here that Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., coincidentally owns stock in and advises several aspiring drone startups that have received billions in loans and subsidies from the Pentagon. That’s before you get to the countless other MAGA orbit folks and tech companies with personal investment in military drone and surveillance hardware.
I think in their heads guys like Junior probably think they’re cleverly building functional, domestic alternatives to Chinese tech, but their corruption and incompetence generally blinds them from reality and our broader failures on privacy and national security.
Truly shoring up national security and U.S. privacy requires standing up to domestic corporations first and foremost (with say, data broker regulation and a privacy law that holds execs personally accountable for lax security), which none of them want to actually do. Because in their heads, government should only exist to make them personally richer at other peoples’ expense.
Superficially the Trump administration loves putting on a veneer that it’s protecting U.S. interests and national security, but as we’ve seen elsewhere this is hollow cack. Trumpism is just pay-to-play kakistocracy and a bottomless well of assorted lazy hustles and grifts. These are not serious people.
Some U.S. drone makers asked daddy to protect them from global market competition and he did. Now U.S. consumers have to pay twice as much money for much shittier technology, and instead of translating the proceeds into new jobs, better tech, or lower prices, the executives at the companies responsible will simply pocket the proceeds. All while the New York Times and large corporate media blows smoke up your ass about this being good for national security and American labor.
Donald Trump has an enemies list. Not a secret one, either. It’s actually been published at the official White House website. But he has plenty of enemies beyond that. And ever since his return to office, he’s been engaged in acts of vengeance. Federal agencies have been purged of anyone who isn’t a MAGA loyalist. Journalistic entities have been threatened, sued, and — most recently — been placed under the “leadership” of people who serve Donald Trump, rather than their actual employers or the journalistic standards they’re supposed to uphold.
He’s also gone after a number of law firms who’ve represented people suing Trump and the administration. He’s also targeted lawyers who represent people he personally doesn’t care for, like the FBI agents who investigated the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt by his supporters.
Mark Zaid has represented a number of clients, including national security whistleblowers during the Obama years. In contrast to Trump’s opportunistic thuggery, Zaid doesn’t have a political ax to grind when he chooses to represent someone in court. All Trump has is political axes in need of grinding. Since he can’t fire Zaid directly, he’s doing what he can to make it more difficult for him (and others on the president’s neverending shitlist) to represent current and former government employees.
Eisen and Zaid, the lawyers representing the FBI agents, themselves became the target of a presidential memorandum in March that revoked their access to classified material. Both have aggravated Trump for years. Zaid represented a whistleblower who helped bring about Trump’s first impeachment.
Zaid sued to restore his security clearance in May, in a case that is ongoing. His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, is a high-profile defense attorney who left Winston this spring in order to form his own firm. Lowell said his goal is to represent those “unlawfully and inappropriately targeted.” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a fraud judgment against Trump and is now a target of his DOJ, was one of his first clients.
Fortunately for Zaid, he’s one step closer to getting his security clearance restored. DC federal court judge Amir Ali says [PDF] what’s immediately obvious: the president can’t just revoke security clearances simply because he doesn’t like a lawyer’s clientele. That’s a violation of First Amendment rights and that still doesn’t fly here in the US, despite Trump’s continuous efforts to make every right dependent on loyalty to the president.
It’s so obviously a violation of rights that even the government doesn’t try to rebut Zaid’s main argument. Instead, it tries to argue that the president is pretty much a king and can do whatever he wants when it comes to determining who gets to do what in this nation:
This case involves the government’s retribution against a lawyer because he represented whistleblowers and other clients who complained about the government, carried out by summarily canceling the attorney’s security clearance without any of the process that is afforded to others. In defending its actions, the government does not meaningfully rebut that the decision to deny this attorney the usual process was based on his prior legal work for clients adverse to the government.
The government instead asserts, emphasizes, and repeats that the executive branch has exclusive power to determine who meets the requirements for security clearance. […] That is well established, but does not answer the question in this case. It is equally well established that the executive branch’s exclusive power to determine who satisfies the eligibility criteria for security clearance does not mean it can conduct that determination however it wants and free from the Constitution’s limits.
If you need more evidence that this is nothing more than blatantly unconstitutional vindictiveness, you’ll find it in Judge Ali’s 39-page opinion. Zaid, who has held a security clearance for the last two decades, first angered Trump in 2019, bringing forward a whistleblower complaint that led to the House filing articles of impeachment. Here’s how Trump reacted to that:
When Zaid’s representation of the whistleblower became public, the President publicly rebuked him, including by showing Zaid’s photo at a 2019 rally and calling him a “sleazeball.” The President later said: “And [the whistleblower’s] lawyer, who said the worst things possibly two years ago, he should be sued and maybe for treason. Maybe for treason, but he should be sued. His lawyer is a disgrace.”
Here’s how things were going earlier this year, when Zaid again crossed Trump’s angry radar:
More recently, in February 2025, Zaid filed a lawsuit against the government on behalf of several Federal Bureau of Investigation employees to protect them from being targeted for work they did investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Four days later, a news source reported the President was planning to target Zaid, among others, by revoking his security clearance. The next month, the Director of National Intelligence announced on social media that she had revoked Zaid’s and others’ security clearances and access to classified information. And on March 22, 2025, the President issued a presidential memorandum to executive agency heads that included Zaid among a list of people for whom access to classified information was “no longer in the national interest.”
The government insisted the administration has the unilateral right to revoke clearances. The court agrees… to a point. But when clearances are revoked (or even denied), there’s a process involved that allows the person on the receiving end of this clearance stripping to appeal or challenge that decision. At the very least, they’re allowed to ask why. This summary stripping of security clearance from multiple lawyers at one time is obviously a rights violation (due process) that compounds the other alleged rights violation (free speech).
Based on the preliminary injunction record, the court finds the government has not conducted any individualized assessment of Zaid’s eligibility for security clearance. It instead denied Zaid the process and individualized assessment afforded to others because of his prior representation of whistleblowers and other clients in matters that were adverse to the government.
[…]
Because Zaid’s claims all challenge the legality of revoking his security clearance without meaningful process, they go only to the “methods used” to revoke his clearance.
The government pretends this is simply about denying access, which it can do. But it isn’t. It’s about selectively removing access, which isn’t really about the security clearance process, but whether or not the government can use the process to engage in retaliatory action against people it doesn’t care for.
So it tried this:
As mentioned, the government’s principal approach here has been to offer an expansive reading of the cases it likes (Egan and Lee) and to leave out the cases it doesn’t (Greenberg and Rattigan).
And ends up with this after Judge Ali parses the cited cases the government really wishes he wouldn’t have read so closely:
[E]ven the cases the government selectively quotes from recognize the line between “ends and means.
Furthermore, the court practically invites every other lawyer named in the White House memo to get busy suing over their stripped clearances:
The government, second, asks the court to just construe the presidential memorandum as an individualized national security assessment. But the court finds the memorandum was not based on any such assessment. It is undisputed that no government agency conducted an assessment of Zaid’s eligibility for clearance, and the memorandum itself does not purport to make any national security assessment—in fact, it does not mention national security at all. The memorandum instead directs agencies to summarily revoke Zaid’s clearance based on the “national interest,” which courts have consistently recognized as distinct from and more nebulous than a particular determination about national security.
Zaid wins, for now. The government has until December 30 to challenge the injunction. If it can’t raise a better argument than it has here (and there’s no reason to believe it can), Zaid’s clearance will be un-revoked on January 13, 2026. And the others who were targeted by the White House memo need to lawyer up and get their clearances back too. Certainly, the administration will try to get the Supreme Court to undo this, but for now, the clock is ticking.
At long last, El Salvador native Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been released from custody. Abrego Garcia was among the hundred-plus migrants rounded up by ICE and shipped to El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, CECOT. Months of litigation ensued. The Trump administration was ordered (multiple times) to bring him back from El Salvador, with the court finding Garcia’s due process rights (along with most of those sent to CECOT) had been violated.
The government has done everything since then to make Abrego Garcia miserable. Once Garcia was returned to the US, he was immediately jailed as the government dreamed up a bunch of serious crimes to charge him with. According to multiple statements (mainly tweets and such) made by DHS and the administration, Garcia is an MS-13 gang member and human trafficker. Those charges were somehow extracted from a years-old traffic stop where Garcia was released and never charged with anything, much less placed into the deportation pipeline.
Garcia has fought the government every step of the way. And, in return, the government has been vindictively combative. Costa Rica’s government has agreed to allow Garcia to be deported there. But the government wants a head on a spike to intimidate other migrants, so it has given Garcia the option of being prosecuted (while remaining in jail the entire time) or being booted out of an ICE plane in extremely dangerous places like Liberia or Uganda.
If this all looks like a petty group of administration officials trying to punish someone for fighting back, it also looks that way to the court handling the criminal case brought against Abrego Garcia. Not only has the court released Garcia pending his trial, it is now about halfway towards dismissing the case entirely if the government can’t come up with an explanation that doesn’t sound like revenge.
The federal judge overseeing the human smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia has canceled an upcoming January trial.
In lieu of that proceeding, the court will hold a one-day evidentiary hearing dedicated to ferreting out whether or not the Maryland man was vindictively and selectively prosecuted by the government.
This week, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, a Barack Obama appointee, slammed the brakes on the controversial prosecution in a relatively terse four-page order – a decided victory for the father of three and an equally stinging loss for the Trump administration.
In the ruling, the judge said the evidence provided by the defense had turned the case in Abrego Garcia’s favor long ago – at least on the due process issue of whether the prosecution is vindictive.
As the order notes, the court is doing the DOJ a favor here. There’s apparently already enough on the record that supports Abrego Garcia’s vindictive prosecution allegation. But the government will get one chance to rebut this early next year.
According to Abrego, the Government has already shown that it cannot [rebut his allegations], given what Abrego asserts to be troves of evidence in the record indicating that his prosecution is actually vindictive. (See Doc. No. 275 at 11–15). Based on this record, Abrego argues that the Court could rule on his Motion without an evidentiary hearing or the testimony of Blanche, McHenry, and Singh.
Nevertheless, the government asserts it can rebut the presumption, and that the evidence does not show actual vindictiveness. To rebut the presumption, the government intends to rely on the testimony of Supervisory Special Agent John VanWie (“SA VanWie”) of Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”) Baltimore and Special Agent Rana Saoud (“SA Saoud”) of HSI Nashville, and, perhaps, the testimony of Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire.
Considering this landscape, and Abrego’s insistence that the current record alone warrants dismissal in his favor, whether the Court needs to hear testimony from Blanche, McHenry, and Singh, is questionable. Still, for the sake of thoroughness and to make sure that all parties are fully heard, the Court finds it prudent to proceed with an evidentiary hearing on Abrego’s Motion In doing so, it will limit the hearing to only the second step of the prosecutorial vindictiveness analysis: whether the government can produce objective, on-the-record explanations for Abrego’s prosecution that rebuts the presumption of vindictiveness. If the government can rebut that showing, the Court will revisit the government’s Motion to Quash…
Apparently the government thinks it can win this battle by bringing some mouths to a document fight. Abrego Garcia has already obtained plenty of damning information (which the Trump administration adds to on nearly a daily basis) that makes it clear this is all about punishing him for daring to object to his deportation to CECOT.
I’m sure everyone called to testify will say things about how this is all an extremely normal way to handle someone who asserted their due process rights. But maybe the government should just give up on this one. If the testimony manages to raise questions about the alleged vindictiveness, it doesn’t let the government off the hook. All it does is open it up to further discovery via Abrego Garcia’s pending subpoenas.
And I’m sure the judge will have something to say about the DHS’s actions over the weekend, where it took to social media to complain about a gag order while simultaneously violating it.
The Department of Homeland Security’s complaint about being under a gag order on Saturday in its case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who the Trump administration illegally deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador earlier this year, likely violated the court order.
Tricia McLaughlin, the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the DHS, said that Abrego Garcia being able to make viral TikTok posts was unfair in a rant on X: “American justice ceases to function when its arbiters silence law enforcement and give megaphones to those who oppose our legal system.”
If you can’t read/see what McLaughlin reposted, it’s an X post by MAGA grifter/podcaster Benny Johnson that reads:
MS-13 terrorist Kilmar Abrego Garcia was released by a rogue judge and is now making TikToks.
To be clear, the gag order doesn’t prevent Abrego Garcia from making videos of himself lip-synching to Christian songs. The gag order targets the Trump administration because it has spent the last several months attacking Abrego Garcia on social media and smearing him with unproven allegations. Since this obviously affects Garcia’s right to a fair trial, the judge reasonably ordered the government to knock it off.
And it has responded by reposting a smear and bitching about an “activist judge” — the same judge it will have to answer to late next month. Odds are the government is going to be called to court well ahead of this deadline to explain why it thinks it doesn’t need follow orders handed down by federal judges.
Here’s a fun game the Trump administration keeps playing: destroy a successful government program, wait a few months, then breathlessly announce you’ve “invented” the exact same thing but with obvious corruption mechanisms baked in.
Last week, the administration excitedly announced a new “Tech Force”—a program to bring tech talent into government for two-year stints to modernize federal technology. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s precisely what the US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F successfully did for over a decade. You know, until Elon Musk and DOGE gleefully fired the entire 18F team in March and gutted USDS into a husk of what it once was.
USDS and 18F were genuine success stories. Obama-era programs that brought engineers from Silicon Valley into government to help all Americans by modernizing creaking federal systems. Here’s how USDS described itself two years in:
In the early days, we worried if more than ten people would apply to join the team. Two years later, folks from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the likes have joined to put their skills towards helping Veterans, students, small businesses, and all Americans.
That institutional knowledge, that decade of learning what works and what doesn’t, that careful balance between public service and private sector expertise? All gone. Torched by Musk as part of his faux “efficiency” crusade earlier this year.
And now they’re reinventing it. Badly. I used to joke that the Elon Musk Twitter era was all about throwing out all of Twitter’s carefully thought out ideas and then bringing them back in a dumber, more dangerous way. This seems like that, but in the federal government.
The United States Tech Force, announced Monday, is meant to source the artificial intelligence talent the government needs to win the global AI race and modernize the government, the administration says. The goal is to recruit an initial cohort of around 1,000 technologists who will be placed in agencies for two-year stints, potentially as soon as March.
“We need you,” said Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management. “The U.S. Tech Force offers the chance to build and lead projects of national importance, while creating powerful career opportunities in both public service and the private sector.”
Welcome to Temu USDS, everyone.
Same basic concept—rotate tech talent through government—but stripped of all the institutional knowledge about what actually works, run by political operatives instead of civil servants, and riddled with conflicts of interest that the original programs were specifically designed to avoid.
The especially galling part? Watching the same tech bros who helped destroy USDS and 18F now celebrate “Tech Force” as some brilliant innovation:
These are the people who either stayed silent or actively cheered when Musk gutted the actual working programs. Now they’re acting like this is some breakthrough moment of government-tech collaboration. Looking through the boosters, it looks like every partner at A16Z felt the need to support this. None of them seem to mention how this only came after the destruction of the programs that were doing such great work over the past decade (including during the first Trump administration).
Again, conceptually, there is merit to the idea of bringing in techies to help make government work better for the public. But it seems pretty obnoxious for these tech bros to jump into this without acknowledging (1) this existed and worked really well for over a decade until (2) they and their tech bro buddy Elon went in and destroyed it all. Also, given how the Trump admin has acted towards the public for the past 11 months, pretty rich to assume anything done by this new “Tech Force” will be in the interest of the public.
The one actual “innovation” in Tech Force creates a corruption vector that should alarm anyone who cares about government integrity: companies are guaranteeing participants can return to their old jobs after their tour of duty.
USDS never needed this because it wasn’t a problem—people could always go back to industry if they wanted. What this guarantee does is fundamentally change the incentive structure. Now you have engineers building government systems who know exactly where they’ll be working in two years, and whose interests they’ll be serving. They won’t divest from their stock. They won’t sever ties with their employer. They’ll just be on “leave” while accessing sensitive government data and making technology decisions that could directly benefit their future (and current) employer.
As the NextGov piece notes, this should set off every alarm:
“My first question with any programs like this are, ‘What are the rules that are in place to guard against conflicts of interest?’” said Rob Shriver, former acting OPM director and current managing director of Civil Service Strong at Democracy Forward.
This is especially worthy of attention, he said, given DOGE’s approach to data — “coming in and taking over agency systems and accessing data without going through the regular procedures” — which has been at the center of several lawsuits.
Scott Kupor, who is running this is a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, who was there for 16 years (basically since A16Z started) before taking this job. And he insists that there are no conflicts, so don’t worry about that at all:
The setup may vary by company, but the managing engineers from private companies participating in the program will “effectively take a leave of absence” to become full time government employees during the program, Kupor told reporters Monday. They won’t be required to divest from their stocks.
“We feel like we’ve run down all the various conflict issues and don’t believe that that’s actually going to be an impediment to getting people here,” said Kupor. “The huge benefit to the government will be getting people who are very skilled in the private sector at managing engineering teams.”
The idea is that the participants can return to their old jobs with new skills and expertise after working for the government, he said.
“We’ve run down all the various conflict issues”—except for the part where participants will keep their stock, maintain their guaranteed employment at private companies, and have access to sensitive government systems and data. But sure, no conflicts.
The value of tech expertise in government is real. That’s why USDS and 18F existed and succeeded for over a decade. What made those programs work was their careful construction to minimize conflicts while maximizing the transfer of knowledge and expertise.
This isn’t that. This is a hastily rebuilt version of a program they deliberately destroyed, now run by political appointees from the very industries that will benefit, with explicit mechanisms that invite corruption. They gutted the institutional knowledge, fired the people who knew how to do this right, and replaced it with a system where people from private companies get guaranteed access to government data and decision-making through employees who are explicitly planning to return to those same companies.
That doesn’t seem like innovation. It seems much more like regulatory capture with better branding and a cool “force” name.
Once again, this administration is demonstrating it has zero interest in serving the public. The administration acts together to serve a single person: Donald Trump. Anything that looks like it might benefit the public more than it benefits Trump is unacceptable. The man at the top considers everything to be zero sum. And that means he must always win, because anything else is just losing.
No administration prior to this one would even dare to suggest it shouldn’t take all reasonable steps to accommodate people with disabilities. This administration, however, will go to court to prevent even the simplest of accommodations from being put in place.
The Trump administration is arguing that requiring real-time American Sign Language interpretation of events like White House press briefings “would severely intrude on the President’s prerogative to control the image he presents to the public,” part of a lawsuit seeking to require the White House to provide the services.
Department of Justice attorneys haven’t elaborated on how doing so might hamper the portrayal President Donald Trump seeks to present to the public. But overturning policies encompassing diversity, equity and inclusion have become a hallmark of his second administration, starting with his very first week back in the White House.
The National Association for the Deaf sued Donald Trump after he ditched the use of ASL (American Sign Language) interpreters during briefings and other semi-impromptu meetings with the press. The previous administration had generally tried to ensure a live ASL interpreter was on hand any time Joe Biden addressed the public. This administration has overturned decades of presidential precedent, choosing to force deaf citizens to rely on close-captioned recordings or, if attending any of these events in person, doing their best to read lips.
The DOJ’s filing [PDF] says some stupid and disturbing stuff about Trump and his “image.” In a filing that should have simply been a concession to the norm and the end of this litigation, the administration instead says this:
Most problematically, the preliminary injunction would severely intrude on the President’s prerogative to control the image he presents to the public.
Do what now?
If there’s anything “problematic” about the complaint, it’s the faint suggestion that the White House would need to ignore logistics issues if, say, the president decides to address reporters while boarding Air Force One. Adding an ASL interpreter to the traveling staff may present difficulties that should not immediately be considered an active effort to keep deaf people out of the national conversation, but this statement from the DOJ says something else entirely. It says the president should be allowed to “control his image,” which is something that’s impossible even when not actively trying to prevent a certain percentage of the population from engaging in real-time dissemination of information by the White House.
The president can certainly try to “control his image,” but those efforts are not allowed to circumvent the First Amendment right of access. And the president’s “image” belongs to the public, because it’s naturally subjective. Trump may want to portray himself as the god-king tasked with saving the nation, but everyone else is allowed to bring their own opinion to the party.
What this absolutely looks like is Trump (and his obedient “handlers”) choosing to treat people with disabilities the same way Trump does: with disdain. We all know Trump considers anything from chronic conditions to being a prisoner of war [click through for additional hilarity] to be a sign of weakness. The only way to impress Trump is to be born into generational wealth and leverage that inability to fail into a career filled with slum-lording and strategic bankruptcies. This is a man who considers people who sign up for military service to be “losers” because they gave up their lives in exchange for the satisfaction of truly serving their country.
So, it’s completely understandable that the Trump administration wants to say “fuck you” to the deaf, albeit without being forced to display the internationally recognized non-ASL “fuck you” hand signal.
It’s also something even more pathetic than this lazy volley into the court — one that relies on rulings by Judge Boasberg to support its counterarguments. Lest we forget, the current Trump administration wants Boasberg removed (or impeached) because he’s called bullshit on the DHS’s illegal deportation efforts. But now that it wants to allow Trump to say to a female reporter, “Quiet, piggy” without it immediately being made available to deaf Americans, it needs Boasberg’s previous opinion on this issue that was delivered during Trump’s first term in office.
But we all know what this is really about, don’t we? Controlling an image only matters to someone so insecure he thinks ASL interpreters might be secretly making fun of him. Trump can’t have anyone else translating for him because there’s a slim chance they might not portray him exactly as he sees himself in his head.
All the administration really needed to do is bring back ASL interpreters whenever possible. Instead, it has gone on the record with an extended middle finger no deaf person — even in the back rows — will have any trouble interpreting. These are the acts of small, hateful people who have chosen to prostrate themselves in front of someone even smaller and more hateful. Fuck them all.
On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.
Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.
He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.
The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.
In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education,based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, revealsthe extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus.
According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.
The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening.
Nonetheless, investigators sketched out a convoluted legal strategy to justify a new civil rights complaint against UCLA that several former DOJ lawyers called problematic and ethically dubious. Multiple attorneys who worked on it told us they were relieved they’d left the DOJ before they could be asked to sign it.
UCLA seemingly had every reason to push back aggressively. Yet UC system leaders have resisted calls from faculty and labor groups to file suit, fearing the many ways the government could retaliate against not only UCLA, but the entire university system, which relies on federal funds for a full one-third of its revenue. The government has opened probes into all 10 UC campuses, including at least seven that target UC Berkeley alone. “Thankfully, they’ve only fucked with UCLA at this point,” said one UC insider privy to the system’s thinking.
To tell this story, ProPublica and the Chronicle reviewed public and internal records and interviewed more than 50people, including DOJ attorneys who worked on the California investigations, UC officials and faculty, former government officials, Jewish leaders and legal experts. Some asked not to be identified, for fear the administration would retaliate or because they hadn’t been authorized to discuss the conflict. The Justice Department and its top officials did not respond to detailed questions and interview requests.
Over three decades leading public colleges, Milliken, 68, a dapper onetime Wall Street lawyer who goes by “JB,” has built a reputation as a pragmatist able to work with politicians of all stripes and navigate the culture wars. In an interview, he called the challenges facing the entirety of UC, and UCLA in particular, unparalleled in his career. “There’s nothing like this time,” he said. “This is singular. It’s the toughest.”
On Nov. 14, UC received a temporary reprieve. In response to a complaint brought by the American Association of University Professors, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin issued a scathing opinion finding that the Trump administration’s actions against UCLA had “flouted” legal requirements and ordered it to cease all “coercive and retaliatory conduct” against the UC system. Lin had already ordered the release of UCLA’s $584 million in frozen grant funding.
But those orders are preliminary and subject to appeal, and many people at UC fear that more attacks are coming. “Even if this holds, there will simply be another move from this administration,” said Anna Markowitz, an associate professor of education at UCLA and a leader of the campus faculty association, which is among the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. “They have not made it a secret what they wish to do.”
In interviews, UCLA researchers described the damage the school has absorbed so far. Even Jewish faculty members who endured antisemitism said they are aghast at the way the government has weaponized their complaints to justify cutting critical scientific research.
One of them is Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education whose description of his treatment at the hands of pro-Palestinian protesters is a prominent part of the lawsuit President Donald Trump’s DOJ recommended against UCLA. But he is dismayed at the cuts to research funds. “These are things that save people’s lives. Why are we messing with that? It’s a tool that anyone who’s a scholar would abhor,” he told us. “It looks like we’re being used.”
For Trump’s Justice Department, the University of California was a juicy target from the start.
With its 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students, six medical centers and three national labs, UC is a crown jewel of a blue state — one whose governor, Gavin Newsom, has become one of Trump’s most prominent foes.
Its scientists have won 75 Nobel Prizes, including four this year alone. But as a high-powered science hub, it’s deeply dependent on federal funding, getting some $17.3 billion a year in research grants, student financial aid and reimbursements from government health programs. UC also has nothing like the endowment wealth of the Ivy League colleges, including Columbia and Brown, from which the Trump administration has extracted penalties in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Some of Trump’s DOJ appointees arrived with UC already in their crosshairs. Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, had sued UC officials in 2017 on behalf of two conservative student groups, alleging unfair treatment of conservative speakers they wanted to bring to the Berkeley campus. (UC settled the case a year later, agreeing to modify rules for speakers at Berkeley and pay $70,000 in legal costs.) And Trump had named Leo Terrell, the bombastic former Fox News commentator, to a top DOJ civil rights post where he heads the president’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. A UCLA School of Law graduate, Terrell had publicly declared in mid-2024 that his alma mater was “a national embarrassment” over its handling of “criminal antisemitic conduct.” Dhillon and Terrell didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In early February, just two weeks after Trump took office, his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a series of directives to the DOJ requiring “zealous advocacy” for Trump’s executive orders, attacks on all forms of “illegal DEI” and aggressive steps to combat antisemitism. Civil rights actions and investigations involving race and sex discrimination, historically the civil rights division’s chief focus, were largely abandoned.
On Feb. 28, Terrell’s task force announced plans to visit 10 U.S. campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, that were alleged to have illegally failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members, to assess “whether remedial action is warranted.”
But by then, the new Justice leadership had already decided to investigate UC schools and already concluded that they were guilty.
In early March, Terrell declared on Fox News that students and employees in “the entire UC system” were “being harassed because of antisemitism.” The administration planned to “sue,” “bankrupt,” and “take away every single federal dollar” from such schools, he said, and the DOJ would file hate crime charges.
A team of about a dozen career DOJ lawyers had been assembled only days earlier to investigate the allegations of antisemitism against UC employees. Under the employment discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act, the occurrence of ugly antisemitic incidents or violence involving professors or staff wasn’t, by itself, enough to merit federal intervention. The legal standard was whether the university had engaged in a “pattern or practice” of tolerating antisemitism.
Before Trump took office, the civil rights division typically took more than a year to complete such a probe, according to DOJ veterans. Investigators would conduct interviews on campus, review reams of documents for compliance with various statutes and assess such complex matters as when hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment. Once a complaint was authorized, the civil rights division would seek voluntary compliance in a process that was meant to find solutions, not punish colleges.
In this case, the Justice Department’s political appointees demanded that investigators wrap things up in far less time — initially, a single month.
Career supervisors say they told their new bosses that they couldn’t, in one month, produce a case that could stand up in court. Still, “North” and “South” teams of lawyers were dispatched for multiday trips to California to dig up facts and interview officials at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and UCLA.
“We were told what the outcome will be: ‘You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system,’” said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the civil rights division who worked on the investigation before leaving the Justice Department in May.
“The incredibly short timing of this investigation is just emblematic of the fact that the end goal was never to conduct a thorough, unbiased investigation,” Jen Swedish, who was the deputy chief of Justice’s employment litigation section until May, said in an interview. “The end goal was to file a damn complaint — or have something to threaten the university.”
Trump’s appointee as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights was Michael Gates, formerly the city attorney in Huntington Beach, California, who assumed the DOJ post vowing to help “win this country back.” “You guys have found a hostile work environment, right?” lawyers on the UC team recall him asking, just three weeks into the investigation.
“He seemed upset we were spending so much time investigating,” Dena Robinson, a senior trial attorney, told us. “He didn’t know what the holdup was in getting back to them on which university could be sued.” In an email about six weeks in, Gates suggested there was easily enough in the public record to bring a complaint against at least one of the UC campuses — a notion that horrified the career lawyers. “Why did we even go out there if you’d already made up your mind?” another member of the UC team recalled thinking. Gates, who left the DOJ in November after just 11 months, declined an interview request and offered no comment on detailed questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle.
Lawyers on the team say it soon became apparent that there wasn’t nearly enough evidence to justify an employment discrimination case against UC Davis, UC Berkeley or UCSF, much less the entire UC system. Fearful for their jobs, they agreed on a strategy to “feed the beast,” as one attorney put it: to focus on UCLA, which had experienced the most troubling, and publicly explosive, episodes of antisemitism.
Like many colleges across the country, UCLA had seen a spike in antisemitism amid protests over Israel’s military response in Gaza following the brutal Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
The campus had experienced dozens of ugly incidents, including swastikas spray-painted on buildings and graffiti reading “Free Palestine, Fuck Jews.” Muslim and Arab students and faculty also complained of harassment and that any speech critical of Israel was being branded as antisemitic.
Starting in late April 2024, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters set up a barricaded encampment in the center of the campus. Reluctant to summon outside law enforcement, UCLA administrators allowed the encampment to remain for a week, disrupting classes and blocking access to certain buildings. Protesters berated and occasionally physically assaulted anyone who refused to disavow Zionism.
On the night of April 30, masked counterprotesters, armed with poles and pepper spray and shooting fireworks, stormed the encampment, triggering a three-hour melee before police were finally brought in. Dozens of people were injured. It took until 6 a.m. May 2 for Los Angeles police and sheriff’s deputies to empty the site.
Before Trump even took office, however, UCLA — and the federal government — had already taken action to combat antisemitism at the school.
Most significantly, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the UC system had reached a broad civil rights settlement with the Department of Education resolving investigations into student complaints that UC had tolerated both antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination at UCLA and on four other campuses.
The settlement required UC to conduct more thorough investigations of alleged harassment and to submit reports on each campus’ handling of discrimination complaints. Government monitoring was to continue until UC “demonstrated compliance” with “all the terms of this agreement.”
The Trump administration disregarded all that. Even as the employee investigation was underway, it launched a new investigation of the same student complaints in early May.
On May 27 on Fox News, Terrell, the head of the antisemitism task force, once again spoke publicly as if the DOJ’s antisemitism inquiries had already been concluded. “Expect massive lawsuits against the UC system,” he declared. “Expect hate crime charges filed by the federal government. …We are going to go after them where it hurts them financially.”
At the time, the lawyers working on the UC employment investigation were still racing to complete their recommendation. They were focused solely on UCLA, having determined there wasn’t adequate evidence to pursue cases at other campuses. Many had distinctly mixed feelings even about bringing that case. “This was not something we would usually litigate,” one lawyer on the team said in an interview. “But everyone understood the front office was demanding this.”
By then, most of the remaining members of the UC team, amid a mass exodus from the civil rights division, were set to leave DOJ at the end of May after accepting the Trump administration’s deferred-resignation offer. “It was comforting to know we were not going to be the ones signing any complaint,” the lawyer said.
In the 47-page recommendation memo the UC team sent on May 29 to Dhillon, the assistant AG for civil rights, the lawyers spelled out their concerns. “We simply do not have strong evidence that the types of harassing acts that happened through spring 2024 are ongoing” — typically a legal requirement for bringing a complaint, the memo acknowledged. Some of the harassment complaints also involved protected First Amendment speech. And because, “as has been frequently noted,” the investigation had been “truncated” to three months, there hadn’t even been time to review some of the documents UC produced, the memo said.
To shore up potential weaknesses in the case, the memo suggested an unusual “hybrid complaint” strategy that would rest partly on new allegations about the ineffectiveness of the university’s complaint process (which was ongoing) and partly on three older faculty grievances.
One of the grievances cited was that of Astor, the professor of social welfare, who describes himself as both a Zionist and a “pro-peace researcher.” His academic work, much of which takes place in Israel, involves studying ways to help students from different religious and ethnic backgrounds peacefully coexist. But after he signed an open letter from Jewish faculty criticizing some pro-Palestinian protesters’ calls for violence, they accused him, in a widely circulated letter of their own, of supporting genocide. When he tried to enter the encampment to talk to students, he told us, a masked protester asked whether he was a Zionist. After he said he believed in Israel’s right to exist, he was blocked from entering or crossing through the central campus.
Astor was targeted again last November, he said, when he and an Arab-Israeli researcher he’d flown in from Hebrew University of Jerusalem tried to discuss their research on preventing school violence in class. “A bunch of students got up and showed pictures of dead babies and chanted and didn’t let us talk,” he recalled. Later heckled on his way to his car, he said he felt threatened and depressed. He lost more than 60 pounds and was granted permission to work from home, but his repeated discrimination complaints to administrators went nowhere.
Astor’s complaints, the employment-section attorneys believed, would support their proposal for a lawsuit against UCLA. Even so, they warned that their case might not hold up in court. In the memo, they recommended seeking a settlement before filing a complaint.
With that message delivered, most of the lawyers who had investigated the University of California departed the Justice Department.
On the morning of July 29, two days before Milliken’s interrupted golf game, the University of California resolved what it surely hoped was among the last of the headaches from the 2024 encampment debacle: It announced a $6.45 million settlement of an antisemitism lawsuit brought by three Jewish students and a faculty member who said protesters blocked them from accessing the library and other campus buildings, creating a “Jew exclusion zone,” and that the university did nothing to help them. UC agreed to an extensive list of new actions, and a chunk of the money went to eight organizations that combat antisemitism and support the UCLA Jewish community. The steps the university had taken, a joint statement declared, “demonstrate real progress in the fight against antisemitism.”
The Trump administration had a different view. That afternoon, it announced that it had sent UC a notice letter saying the Justice Department had found UCLA’s response to the encampment had been “deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students,” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Bondi warned in a press release that UCLA would “pay a heavy price” for “this disgusting breach of civil rights.” The antisemitism finding had been reached less than three months after the investigation had begun.
The letter, which acknowledged that it relied significantly on “publicly available reports and information,” ignored all the previous actions meant to put the events of 2024 to rest.
“The violations they described all predate the December agreement,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who oversaw the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department under the Obama and Biden administrations. “They’ve made no showing for why the agreement was defective or why anything else was needed to ensure compliance going forward.”
The July 29 letter ended with an invitation to negotiate a settlement but warned that the department was prepared to file a lawsuit if there was no “reasonable certainty” of reaching an agreement.
Instead, the next day, the Trump administration began freezing UCLA’s research money from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Defense Department. The agencies cited the campus’ handling of antisemitism as well as “illegal affirmative action” and allowing transgender women in women’s sports and bathrooms.
UCLA was one of at least nine universities to be hit with grant suspensions, but the first public institution.
David Shackelford, whose medical school lab develops personalized treatments for lung cancer, said his phone “blew up” when colleagues began receiving stop-spending orders. Three NIH grants, totaling $8 million over five years, had supported the lab’s work. “These are experiments and animal models that take years to develop,” Shackelford said. “It’s not like you can go to your computer and click save and walk away.” He scrounged together stopgap university funding and outside donations to keep the operation running “on fumes,” vowing “to go down swinging.”
Elle Rathbun is not sure she’s up for the fight. A 29-year-old sixth-year doctoral student in neuroscience, Rathbun was halfway through a three-year NIH grant to study how brains recover from strokes when she got the news: Her $160,000 award was on the long list of suspended UCLA grants.
She found substitute funding for some of her work but now has doubts about whether a career in academic science is worth the stress. Like hundreds of her colleagues, she’d gone through a monthslong competitive process to win the grant, only to have the Trump administration halt the taxpayer-funded research midstream, a move she called “incredibly disappointing and wildly wasteful.”
A group of UCLA researchers filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the cuts and won two court orders largely restoring them. But even after those victories, the flow of new science grants had slowed to a trickle. In a July 30 email later introduced in court, the National Science Foundation’s acting chief science officer wrote that, in addition to freezing existing grants, he had been ordered to not make any further awards to UCLA.
In nearly 500 pages of personal statements to the court, some faculty members said they’re censoring their speech and changing their courses to avoid topics that might trigger even more cuts to the university. Amander Clark, a professor who heads a reproductive sciences center, no longer talks about the ways her research on infertility and the effects of hormones on human bodies could help gay and transgender people. “I am afraid that because UC is in the spotlight, 20 years of work could be dismantled at the stroke of a pen,” she wrote.
In selecting Milliken as their new system president, the UC regents had picked a veteran at managing large public university systems with vastly different political climates, ranging from the City University of New York, which he ran from 2014 to early 2018, to the University of Texas system, which he led from late 2018 until May 2025.
At UT, Milliken had championed some progressive steps, including expanding free tuition and safeguarding tenure, but he had also quickly shut down the system’s 21 offices related to diversity, equity and inclusion in response to a new Texas law. “He knows what is a winning hand and what is not,” said Richard Benson, who worked with Milliken as president of UT Dallas.
On Aug. 1, his first day on the job at UC’s system office in Oakland, Milliken issued a measured public statement that addressed the “deeply troubling” UCLA grant cuts and affirmed the critical importance of UC’s “life-saving and life-changing research.”
That same week, the Justice Department, days after Bondi’s declaration blasting UCLA for antisemitism against students, delivered a second notice letter, declaring that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism against its employees and threatening to bring the “hybrid” lawsuit that the DOJ’s UC team had recommended in May.
Eager to turn up the pressure on UC, political appointees at the Justice Department had planned to issue another press release assailing UCLA for the employee-related antisemitism findings, according to former agency officials. But Kacie Candela, a well-regarded employment-section lawyer and the last survivor from the dozen who had worked on the administration’s UC investigations, warned that under federal law, it would be a criminal misdemeanor to publicly disclose details involving Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges before filing a lawsuit. After a heated dispute, her argument prevailed and the UCLA letter went unannounced. She was terminated days later. (Candela, who is pursuing legal action to challenge her firing, declined to discuss the matter for this story. DOJ officials didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle about the episode.)
After receiving the two DOJ antisemitism notice letters, Milliken quickly affirmed UC’s willingness to “engage in dialogue” with the administration. But that did nothing to forestall the next blow two days later: the Justice Department’s $1.2 billion settlement demand, which also asked for policy changes in areas where there’d been no findings of wrongdoing, including admissions practices, screening of foreign students and transgender students’ access to bathrooms. Within hours of UC’s receipt of the 27-page demand letter on Aug. 8 — which the DOJ had marked “confidential” — CNN, The New York Times and Politico had all posted stories saying they’d obtained a copy from undisclosed sources. (A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on whether the administration had leaked the letter, which UC spent weeks battling in court to keep private.)
All this was without precedent, due process or clear legal justification, civil rights experts noted. Agreeing to the DOJ’s demands, the Aug. 8 letter said, would release UC from claims that it had violated laws banning discrimination against students, employees and women, and that its civil rights violations constituted fraud. “They were trying to overwhelm,” said Swedish, the former civil rights deputy section chief. “They were spraying the fire hose at the university.”
Strangely, Justice demanded another $172 million for employees who’d complained of antisemitism discrimination, even though only a handful had filed such grievances with the EEOC and such awards are capped at $300,000.
Former U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Cunha said a possible rationale for such unprecedented financial demands is that, under Trump, the DOJ is experimenting with using the False Claims Act in civil rights cases. This would permit triple damages and encourage complaints from whistleblowers, who would share in any financial recovery. “It’s hard to know where these large and somewhat arbitrary numbers are coming from,” Cunha said of the administration’s settlement demands. But “if there’s a pattern that’s emerged thus far, it’s that every tool in the toolbox is on the table.”
Kenneth L. Marcus, an antisemitism watchdog and a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights under Trump, acknowledged that the government has pursued “eye-catching” penalties “with a speed that suggested” normal civil rights enforcement and due-process procedures “have not been utilized.” But Marcus insisted the response was appropriate because of the “national crisis” of antisemitism. “When a situation is extraordinary and unprecedented,” he said, “the response needs to be as well.”
In media interviews, officials in the Trump administration acknowledge that its “whole-of-government” attacks on universities seek to bypass normal, slow-moving civil rights procedures by instead treating alleged discriminatory practices as contract disputes where the government is free to summarily cut off funding and demand headline-grabbing, seemingly arbitrary fines. “Having that dollar figure, it actually brings attention to the deals in ways people might not otherwise pay attention,” former White House deputy May Mailman, a key architect of the administration’s higher education strategy, told The New York Times.
This approach is “flagrantly unlawful” and “incredibly dangerous,” said Lhamon, the former assistant education secretary, who is now executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the UC Berkeley law school. “There’s a long set of steps that are written into statute that must occur first before funds can be terminated.”
Lhamon said the Trump administration was operating “like a mob boss.”
“That is not the federal government doing civil rights work,” she said.
Milliken has found himself caught between the Trump administration’s demands and those of his new constituency in California, which vocally opposes any hint of capitulation.
Newsom, who serves on the UC Board of Regents, has threatened to sue the federal government, calling its demands “extortion” and vowing to “fight like hell” against any deal.
The advocates of direct legal combat include Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school. “The university should have immediately gone to court to challenge this because what was done was so blatantly illegal and unconstitutional,” he told ProPublica and the Chronicle. “I wanted the University of California to be Harvard in fighting back and filing suit. I didn’t want them to be Columbia and Brown in capitulating.”
But Milliken, backed by the UC regents, resisted calls for confrontation, wary of provoking retaliation against the nine other system campuses also under investigation. The damage to date at UCLA is “minor in comparison to the threat that looms,” Milliken noted in a mid-September statement. “We are in uncharted waters.”
So UC has pursued settlement discussions with the government. According to a person familiar with the matter, it has retained William Levi, who served in Trump’s first administration as a special assistant to the president, counselor to the attorney general and chief of staff at the Justice Department, to lead the talks.
If UC’s leaders have preached restraint, its faculty has opted for open defiance. In addition to the suit that prompted the federal judge, Lin, to restore UCLA’s frozen research grants, a complaint filed in September by the American Association of University Professors and other faculty groups challenged the legality of the Trump administration’s entire assault on UC. At a hearing on Nov. 6, the government’s lawyer acknowledged that the administration’s “hodgepodge” of actions against the system hadn’t followed established civil rights procedures but said the administration had the right to direct funding based on the Trump administration’s “policy priorities.”
Lin didn’t buy it. A week later, in an unusually sweeping preliminary injunction, she barred all of the Trump administration’s actual and threatened moves to punish UC, including the $1.2 billion payment demand. The Trump administration’s “playbook,” she wrote, citing comments by Terrell and others, illegally used civil rights investigations and funding cuts as a way of “bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”
Although Lin ordered the Trump administration to lift the ban on new research grants to UC, approvals were slow to resume. In public remarks before the Board of Regents on Nov. 19, Milliken said that more than 400 grants across the system remained suspended or terminated, representing “more than $230 million in research activity on hold.” He and others at UC have expressed concerns that the system’s pathway to new grants will be blocked.
In our interview, Milliken defended how UC has responded to the Trump administration, saying the university has held its ground on its governance, mission and academic freedom.
“We recognize the differing opinions on how UC should engage with the federal government,” he said. “Our efforts remain focused on solutions that keep UC strong for Californians and Americans.”
Fourteen years ago, right after the FCC issued its order on net neutrality, Marsha Blackburn flipped out and released a video talking (misleadingly!) about how wonderful Facebook and Twitter were and how they would be destroyed if the big evil government interfered in any way with the internet. As she says “there has never been a time when a consumer needed a federal bureaucrat to intervene…”
The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry Act (TRUMP AMERICA AI) Act
The acronym doesn’t work. You’ve got “The” included and “by” ignored, an “I” from “Intelligence” skipped, and “Act” appearing twice. It’s actually TRUMP AMIBERICA AIA Act if you follow the words. Clearly some staffer was told “make this spell TRUMP AMERICA AI Act” and fed it into Grok, got this “republic unifying meritocratic” nonsense, and no one checked because slapping Trump’s name on things is the whole point.
Which matters, because given that Blackburn named it after Trump, if it somehow catches Trump’s fancy, this thing might actually move. And the bill itself is a disaster—an omnibus massively destructive internet policy overhaul masquerading as AI legislation.
First off, the part that the bill’s name references is an attempt to have Congress pass the law that Trump asked Congress for in his recent AI executive order that pretended to ban states from passing AI laws. As we noted at the time, you need Congress to do that. An executive order doesn’t cut it. And even Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Utah’s Spencer Cox have both said “fuck no” when asked about this.
But, loyal Trumpist Blackburn is trying to have Congress block states from regulating AI. From her section-by-section explanation of the bill:
Preempt state laws and regulations related to the regulation of frontier AI developers related to the management of catastrophic risk.
But it would also do a lot of other stuff, including introducing a problematic “duty of care” on AI developers to “prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users.” This is one of those things that I’m sure sounds good to folks, but as we’ve explained over and over again this kind of “duty of care” is basically an anti-230 that would do real damage. It’s basically just an invitation for lawyers to sue any time anything bad happens and someone involved in the bad thing that happened somehow used an AI tool at some point.
And then you have to go through a big expensive legal process to explain “no, this thing was not because of AI” or whatever. It’s just a massive invitation to sue everyone, meaning that in the end you have just a few giant companies providing AI because they’ll be the only ones who can afford the lawsuits.
But there’s a whole lot more in the bill that has nothing to do with AI at all. It effectively repeals Section 230 by “reforming it” in a manner that flips the way 230 works. Rather than the “Good Samaritan” section that’s in there now, it will have a “Bad Samaritan” section, that would make providers potentially liable for “facilitating or soliciting third-party content that violates federal criminal law.” And, of course, some people will say that that’s fine, because you don’t want platforms doing that.
Two quick problems: one, Section 230 already exempts federal criminal law. It’s right there in section (e)(1). So to the extent this is supposedly about dealing with criminal behavior by platforms, you don’t need this change.
But the real problem is what this “Bad Samaritan” carve-out does to Section 230’s core function. Right now, 230 lets platforms get frivolous lawsuits dismissed quickly at the motion to dismiss stage. This change would force every platform to go through lengthy, expensive litigation to prove they weren’t “facilitating” (an incredibly vague term) or “soliciting” third-party content that violates federal criminal law.
That’s gutting the main reason Section 230 exists. Instead of quick dismissals, you get discovery, depositions, and trials, all while someone argues that because your algorithm showed someone a post, you were “facilitating” whatever criminal content they claim to find.
Next up; the bill effectively shoves KOSA into the bill. Blackburn’s been pushing KOSA forever. Remember, she wants KOSA to stop “the transgender in our culture.” KOSA keeps stalling out in Congress because it’s a really bad bill that would encourage tremendous online censorship, and sooner or later enough elected officials on both sides of the aisle realize “shit, this would be bad if the other side were in power.”
It also throws in the “NO FAKES Act” for funsies. If you don’t recall, the “NO FAKES” Act would mandate filters and scanning across the internet, destroy anonymous speech, and block a wide variety of useful innovations. For all the complaining MAGA has done about EU internet regulations, NO FAKES goes way beyond anything that the EU requires in terms of blatant censorship.
You know, the kind that Marsha Blackburn warned about, claiming Obama was coming for your internet and was going to suppress speech?
And that’s not all. The bill also has some nonsense requiring AI to undergo “audits” to make sure they’re not biased against conservatives. I only wish I were kidding.
Oh, and it completely upends copyright law in multiple concerning ways, effectively wiping out fair use, creating a new form of copyright infringement specifically for AI-generated works, giving the FTC a role in enforcing copyright law, and revamping how collective licensing works. This is, of course, a gift to the recording industry which has a large presence in her state of Tennessee.
Basically, this is an omnibus bill that would change nearly every US government policy regarding how the internet works, tackling AI, Section 230, copyright, and a bunch of other nonsense all in one bill. And Blackburn has cynically named it after Donald Trump hoping he’ll get on board and hound the MAGA folks in Congress to pass it.
So to recap: the Marsha Blackburn who said 14 years ago that “there has never been a time when a consumer needed a federal bureaucrat to intervene” has introduced a bill that would have federal bureaucrats intervene in basically every aspect of how the internet works: content moderation decisions, mandate bias audits, preempt state laws, require speech scanning across the internet, and fundamentally reshape how platforms, AI developers, and copyright holders operate online.
All (literally) in the name of Donald Trump. Because apparently when you need federal bureaucrats to intervene, what really matters is whose name is on the bill.
Imagine having all the power but none of the brains. That’s the current administration, the one that behaves like a blind, enraged bull set loose in its own china shop. “We can always get more china,” says the administration, shortly before realizing it really can’t, thanks to tariff efforts that ensure China won’t be buying from the US any time soon, much less selling replacement china at the expected price point.
This is worse than the inmates running the asylum. This is more akin to a bunch of Nurse Ratchets running the asylum. The asylum becomes more cruel and less competent with each passing day. Cruelty isn’t generally associated with intelligence. And that truism remains unbothered during Trump’s second ascendance to the Oval Office.
Trump and his fans spent years stoking conspiracy theories about Democratic party members and the wholesale sexual abuse of children. These conspiracy theories led to actual violence that those participating in these conspiracy theories refuse to take responsibility for.
New York financier/pimp Jeffrey Epstein was apparently a friend to everyone rich or powerful. And he gave them what they couldn’t get elsewhere: sexual access to minors. Some of this remains alleged. But some of it was the supporting evidence for Epstein’s conviction. Epstein is dead and I can imagine lots of his friends and acquaintances breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported he had (allegedly) died by suicide in jail.
A resurgence of interest in Epstein’s files posed a unique problem for Donald Trump. On one hand, Trump had spent years stoking interest in these files, claiming they would expose a vast Democratic party cabal solely interested in sexually exploiting minors. But he also knew these files would reveal things about his own relationship with Epstein and, very likely, contain implications about Trump’s interest in much younger women.
After a period of proclaiming the Epstein files to be something no one was interested in (blatantly false, no matter which side of the MAGA you fall on), Trump and his DOJ decided to move forward with a staggered release of these documents. Congress actually managed to get in on the governance game (something lately completely subsumed by Trump’s desire to rule solely from the confines of the Oval Office via executive orders) and passed a bill that required a full release by December 19.
This didn’t happen. GOP leaders made sure it wouldn’t happen by declaring a Congressional holiday recess well in advance of the holidays to ensure GOP reps would be safely back in their home states before the release of additional Epstein files.
We got whatever the DOJ chose to release. And that release was a combination of stuff we’ve mostly already seen, some (heavily-redacted) stuff we hadn’t seen yet, and more than 200 pages of fully-redacted documents. We already knew we were in for a whole lot of opacity. What we possibly didn’t expect was the DOJ attempting to hide stuff after the fact.
At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing President Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.
The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump’s DOJ is either too dumb to know or too stupid to care about the Streisand Effect. The quickest way to draw attention to something you don’t want people paying attention to is to perform a hasty deletion.
Anyone who was paying attention to this release had already saved the documents to a bunch of cloud services and static storage devices. Those who were paying attention past the initial release would know if the government decided to bury something after the fact.
Of course, the government did try to do that. The people with the most power and money seem to think they’re the smartest people walking the earth because they’ve fully bought into the meritocracy illusion. And they’re always wrong. Being rich or powerful doesn’t make you smarter. It just makes it easier to shrug off your losses.
The DOJ tried to do that after people outside of the imaginary “meritocracy” pointed out this post facto deletion.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche early Sunday said the image was removed from the website after learning there were concerns about women in the photo, “so we pulled that photo down.”
“It has nothing to do with President Trump,” said Blanche on NBC’s “Meet the Press.
That’s impossible to believe because everything this particular federal government does has everything to do with Donald Trump. It’s a system of supposed checks and balances manned entirely by people who demand that the moment Poochie isn’t on screen, everyone should be asking “Where’s Poochie?”
Here’s the most high profile image the DOJ deleted (albeit temporarily) just in case it tries to do it again. Take a look in the drawer to find a photo of the current president next to someone the DOJ now implies was “a victim.”
After everyone noticed this premature burial, the DOJ restored the files, pretending this was all about protecting victims of crimes committed by Epstein and his associates (Donald Trump among them), rather than a misguided attempt to rewrite history while this particular history was still being published.
The Department of Justice on Sunday restored online a photo from the Jeffrey Epstein files that contained images showing President Donald Trump after backlash over its removal.
[…]
“The Southern District of New York flagged an image of President Trump for potential further action to protect victims,” the DOJ said in a post on the social media site X.
“Out of an abundance of caution, the Department of Justice temporarily removed the image for further review. After the review, it was determined there is no evidence that any Epstein victims are depicted in the photograph, and it has been reposted without any alteration or redaction.”
I’d love to be able to take the DOJ at its word. But it has steadily destroyed that option ever since [gestures at the long history of the DOJ, but emphasizing its recent actions with much more demonstrative hand gestures] it has been the (alleged) Department of Justice. But it gets even less of a benefit of a doubt here because we are absolutely right to assume this DOJ considers Donald Trump to be the victim of any criminal acts he may have actually perpetrated while getting cozy with Mr. Epstein.
At some point, the Trump DOJ is going to insist that if Trump ever participated in the rape of underage women, he was forced to do by Antifa protesters backed by billions in George Soros funding. He will have been the victim of a “woke” cabal that recognized him for the sexual predator he is and then used his predilections against him.
This move by the DOJ to temporarily bury a photo of Trump makes it clear it will always do whatever it thinks might please Trump even when it’s immediately obvious it cares more about fluffing Trump than serving the nation.
