We discussed the rumor of this on Friday, but it’s now real: Donald Trump has handed himself a $1.776 billion fund of taxpayer money — unappropriated by Congress — to dole out to friends in the MAGA movement who claim they were mistreated by the Biden administration, but with no judicial review over such claims.
The Fund will have the power to issue formal apologies and monetary relief owed to claimants. Submission of a claim is voluntary. There are no partisan requirements to file a claim. Any money left when the Fund ceases operations will revert to the Federal Government.
The Fund will receive $1.776 billion and will come from the judgment fund, which is a perpetual appropriation allowing DOJ to settle and pay cases. On a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.
What will the fund be used for? To pay anyone on Team MAGA — including, in theory, January 6th insurrectionists — who claim the Biden administration “weaponized” the government to target them. Many of these claims are simply not true. January 6th insurrectionists were arrested and convicted for actually breaking the law. But now they get to ask Trump for money, and the evidentiary standard appears to be “trust me, bro” and a red MAGA hat.
Let’s first dispense with the most obvious bit of the charade: the idea that this is actually related to the “settlement” of Trump’s already corrupt bullshit lawsuit against the IRS. That’s how this is being presented, but this is entirely separate. Trump needed to drop that lawsuit in order to end it before a judge called bullshit on the fact that he was negotiating with himself to take $10 billion from American taxpayers.
As for the actual “fund” everything about it is about as corrupt as you can imagine. This is impeachment-worthy — and not in a partisan way. Republicans should be as offended by this as anyone else, if they actually (I know… I know…) believe in things like rule of law and fiscal responsibility.
The actual details here should raise so many red flags. First, as part of this illegal attempt to route around Congress’ power of the purse, they’re taking the money out of the Treasury Department’s “Judgment Fund.” But that fund is clearly designed to pay out the results of duly litigated court cases against the government — not a board of Trump’s friends deciding who gets a check. But here, it’s just a group of MAGA insiders who get to choose:
The Fund will consist of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership. The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.
So, the fund is clearly in service of Donald Trump’s whims, not anyone else’s. We already have his personal lawyer (who has shown a long history of obeying Trump’s orders) as the acting Attorney General, and the fact that Congress only gets to “consult” on one member of the committee, and anyone can be removed by Trump at any moment makes it abundantly clear that this fund is solely around to pay off Trump’s loyal fans, who have a long history of claiming imagined grievances against the Biden administration, which they will now seek to cash in on.
The fund also, notably, will be put into a private account that (according to the settlement) the US government has no control over and no liability for.
Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.
This appears to be setting things up so that a future government (or a court) cannot claw back the money once it is delivered from the Treasury into this slush fund, let alone after it is then handed out to anyone on Team MAGA who makes a claim from the fund.
Also, the fund is set up to “close” before the next administration comes into office. How convenient.
The Fund shall cease processing claims no later than December 1, 2028.
The DOJ is claiming that this fund is no different than the Keepseagle fund under the Obama administration:
There is legal precedent for such a Fund, most notably the “Keepseagle” case where the Obama Administration created a $760 million fund to redress various claims alleging racism against the federal government over a period of decades.
In Keepseagle, hundreds of millions of dollars remaining in the fund were distributed to non-profits and NGOs that never made claims, whereas any money remaining in The Anti-Weaponization Fund will revert to the federal government. The Obama DOJ settled by putting $680 million from the judgment fund into a bank account for a single claims administrator to dole out. In Keepseagle the remaining money—which ended up being over $300 million—was distributed to the entities that had not even submitted claims.
This is blatantly revisionist history. The Keepseagle settlement was approved by a court in response to a class action lawsuit. Here, this fund, is being created in a manner deliberately to avoid having the court review it. It also paid people out for a specific, and verifiable harm: Native American farmers who were denied a farm loan from the USDA during a specific period of time who were eligible for that loan. The lawsuit was because the USDA had deliberately denied those loans to Native American farmers, while giving them to white farmers.
In that case, there was a clear harm, a clear way to delineate who was harmed, and court oversight of the process. In this case, there is literally none of that. Anyone arguing that Keepseagle is the same thing as this slush fund is either being deliberately dishonest or hasn’t read the basic facts. Even well known conservative lawyers like Ed Whelan (a former Scalia clerk) is calling out that this fund is highly questionable:
The fund itself is an abuse of power and clearly unconstitutional. As constitutional lawyer (and now Representative) Jamie Raskin noted last week in an interview with the New Republic, if the fund is used to pay off January 6 insurrectionists, it also likely violates the Fourteenth Amendment, which has a prohibition on the US government paying for those who engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the US:
There’s still more. Raskin notes that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Raskin said that if this fund hands money to the January 6 rioters, Trump will be “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”
The “imagine if Biden did this” test is almost beside the point here (though, seriously, just imagine how people, including Democrats, would react). We’re past the moment where consistency of principle was the relevant standard. What matters is that $1.776 billion in unappropriated taxpayer money is being routed through a board of Trump loyalists, into an account the government has explicitly disclaimed responsibility for, on a clock that runs out before the next administration takes office.
The “settlement” framing is just the bow on top. The $1.776 billion slush fund for MAGA’s worst is the point.
White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday he’s “sure” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have detained U.S. citizens, “but we don’t deport them.”
Homan told reporters outside the White House that U.S. citizens have “nothing to fear.”
“We deport people that are going to be deportable,” he continued. “We arrest people that will be deportable based on suspicion. Have U.S. citizens ever been shortly detained based on suspicion? I’m sure. I’m sure.”
This is demonstrably false. For the moment, children born in the United States are considered to be US citizens. The Trump administration wants to end birthright citizenship, but it hasn’t managed to accomplish that yet. But that isn’t stopping it from deporting US citizens just because they’re too young to be capable of invoking their rights, like the two-year-old US born child the administration deported to Honduras in direct violation of a federal court order.
Pretending it’s no big deal for US citizens to have their rights violated intermittently as the government goes after non-white people, that’s even more obnoxious. That the administration hasn’t deported large numbers of US citizens is a miracle, rather than an indicator of ICE competence.
If you keep arresting the same person over and over, sooner or later what’s left of the safety net will fail and that citizen will be expelled from the country. That’s what one US citizen is hoping to prevent with his lawsuit against the government, which is being handled by the Institute for Justice. On multiple occasions, federal officers have decided this US citizen is deserving of deportation, as Isabela Dias reports for Mother Jones:
In a declaration submitted as part of a civil lawsuit, Garcia Venegas said the agents pulled him out of the car and onto the ground, and shackled his arms and legs. Garcia Venegas estimates seven or eight law enforcement personnel, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police—most of whom wore plain clothes and tactical vests—surrounded him. They asked him no questions.
Garcia Venegas, a 26-year-old Florida-born US citizen, said he tried to show his Alabama STAR ID as proof of status, but the agents ignored him. They put him in the back seat of one of their vehicles, questioned him about his place of birth, and searched his wallet. He offered to provide his American passport, which was inside the house, but the agents refused. Several minutes later, they released him, but not before having dogs sniff the truck for drugs, according to the declaration. Garcia Venegas said the officers told him he had been stopped because the car he was driving was registered in the name of his brother, who is undocumented.
One time might be an aberration. Repeated occurrences are something else entirely.
This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship.
On one hand, repetition indicates that anti-migrant efforts under Trump are extremely sloppy, overseen by people who value quantity over quality. That’s almost certainly true, especially now that the DHS has lowered hiring and training standards for ICE. On top of that, there’s the casual racism of the policies, which — thanks to the Supreme Court — are pretty much legal because officers are allowed to infer from darker skin tones that someone might be in the country illegally.
On the other hand, there’s a chance Venegas is being targeted repeatedly for vindictive reasons. That seems less likely, at least in terms of what’s been detailed in his court filings. If it continues now that his lawsuit has been filed, that might suggest his arrests and detentions are no longer accidental.
Whatever the case, there’s going to be more of this happening, no matter what half-assed niceties Tom Homan might state during press conferences. The Trump administration is fighting to end birthright citizenship in this nation. If it does make this happen, it won’t be retroactive. But that’s hardly going to matter to the DHS and its underling agencies, which have repeatedly violated the letter and spirit of existing laws, when not violating direct orders from federal courts.
The Trump administration on Friday announced a major expansion of its denaturalization campaign targeting foreign-born American citizens accused of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship.
The Justice Department unveiled denaturalization cases in federal courts across the country against roughly a dozen U.S. citizens born overseas. Officials said they had committed serious crimes or immigration fraud, or had ties to terrorism.
At first glance, this might look like the sort of thing the US government should be doing. This takes serious criminals off our books (so to speak) and sends problematic naturalized citizens back to their home countries to be their problem.
But we already know how this is going to work. The “worst of the worst” lie has been uttered repeatedly to defend the administration’s aggressive/transgressive tactics. But the facts have repeatedly shown the administration just wants non-whites gone. It doesn’t really care about any relevant criminal activity.
The same thing is happening here. The administration is making it clear this is just more bigotry, rather than an actual effort to root out the “worst of the worst” for the safety of the nation.
The group of naturalized U.S. citizens whose citizenship the Justice Department is now seeking to revoke includes immigrants from Bolivia, China, Colombia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia and Uzbekistan.
While this group does include some accused of molesting a child and a supposed terrorist sympathizer, it also includes these people:
The group also includes individuals who allegedly used false identities to apply for immigration benefits and a man who allegedly entered into sham marriages to commit immigration fraud.
These are far less serious crimes, which don’t lend themselves to the “worst of the worst” narrative the administration deploys when its actions are questioned.
The lack of diversity (in other words, no white people or those with ties to Western European countries) in those selected to be first up for denaturalization is a leading indicator of further unlawful detentions of US citizens. As the government goes after more non-white US citizens under this pretense, DHS agencies will respond by rounding up more non-white US citizens, turning Homan’s false assurances into the lie it was always meant to be.
The administration actually wants to deport certain US citizens. That these agencies are far too willing to oblige, even without the necessary facts in hand, will definitely increase the number of citizens being held by ICE and correspondingly increase the number of those deported despite still being citizens of this nation.
One recurring theme during the Trump era is that because he fundamentally doesn’t know how anything actually works, his beliefs and policies are broadly shaped by whatever terrible rich person was in his ear last. Even when it comes to stuff like streaming video. It’s all transactional cronyism, and by and large the public interest is routinely a distant afterthought. The press then normalizes it as serious adult policy.
We saw that recently when Trump decided to protect the supposed “sanctity” of the Army Navy college football game with an illegal executive order. While this was framed by many press outlets as Trump “protecting a longstanding American tradition,” it was really because Paramount (CBS and Larry Ellison) was upset that they were losing viewership to college game streaming alternatives on ESPN.
The same phenomenon popped up recently with Trump’s sudden criticism of the NFL. The NFL has been airing games on a more diverse array of streaming partners (including Amazon, Netflix, and its own NFL+ service), meaning slightly fewer games are shown over traditional broadcast TV. Last month, the Trump DOJ launched an “antitrust investigation” into the NFL’s business practices.
The press framed the inquiry as a good faith antitrust inquiry by the Trump administration. But while having to subscribe to multiple services to watch a full array of NFL games certainly is annoying to people, the NFL counters that 87 percent of all games are televised by broadcast TV. And among America’s broad monopolistic dysfunction (telecom, energy, airlines, banking), the NFL is small potatoes.
A follow up report from the (ironically) Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal (see non-paywalled NBC synopsis) now indicates that the whole thing started because Rupert Murdoch whined to Trump about losing NFL game TV audience share at a dinner last February:
“Via the Wall Street Journal, Fox owner Rupert Murdoch told President Donald Trump during a February dinner that, if the NFL sells more games to streaming companies, “it would kill broadcast networks.”
Since then, the NFL has endured increased scrutiny from multiple prongs of the federal government. From Congress to the FCC to the Department of Justice, the league has found itself on the wrong end of unprecedented heat.”
Amusingly, the two other major Rupert-owned outlets, the New York Post and Fox News, have been selling Trump’s obvious cronyism as a good faith antitrust intervention on behalf of consumers:
Countless other non-Murdoch-owned outlets propped up the claim that Trump was simply doing what was right for consumers, cares about antitrust, and was focused on “affordability.” The New York Times, for example, frames Trump’s complaints as genuine good faith concerns about consumer costs. There’s no indication that the sudden inquiry into the NFL’s business practices could have any other origins.
Republicans (especially Trump Republicans) endlessly coddle monopoly power (again: see telecom, energy, airlines) and work tirelessly to dismantle consumer protection regulations and corporate oversight, but you’ll notice they’re routinely given credit for consumer-focused initiatives and “antitrust reforms” that either have ulterior motives or never come to fruition. From the Times:
“Other politicians are also trying to take action on a scattered and costly sports TV landscape. In March, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, submitted a letter requesting that the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission review antitrust exceptions given to the NFL. In April, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said she plans to introduce legislation aimed at decreasing TV costs and blackouts for sports fans.”
Republicans, MAGA, and “free market Libertarians” love fiercely competitive “free markets” until they very suddenly don’t. At which point their cronyism, favoritism, bailouts, or other weird interventions are dressed up as good faith antitrust reform by a corporate press looking for its own access and favors.
This same normalization of Trump’s cronyism plays out in every sector, across the entirety of U.S. media, constantly. It helps prop up the bogus Trump administration claims of populist antitrust enforcement, when what we’re really talking about is a corrupt and purely transactional man who doesn’t understand how anything works and is easily swayed to action — if he thinks it’s of personal benefit to himself and his biggest donors.
The saga of Trump suing his own IRS for $10 billion just got weirder. What started as a brazenly corrupt attempt to personally pocket $10 billion in taxpayer money has now morphed into something arguably worse: a $1.7 billion patronage slush fund — unappropriated by Congress — that Trump could dole out to loyal MAGA allies who claim they were “victimized” by the Biden administration.
As you’ll recall, Trump sued his own IRS over something that a contractor (who has already been convicted and is currently serving in prison) did: leaking some tax returns Trump had promised to release, but never did. He asked for $10 billion, in a situation where he, himself, would decide if he got paid or not. When his own DOJ told the court that it was negotiating a settlement, the judge pointed out that she was concerned that it looked an awful lot like a single party negotiating with itself over how much of the Treasury it should receive.
The judge — Kathleen Williams — asked for further briefing from “both” parties on this, and the deadline is coming up quickly, which is why various purported “settlements” are leaking to the press. A few days ago it was going to be that Trump and all of his family and all of his related businesses would magically have all IRS audits dropped, which would be an astoundingly brazen level of corruption.
But now ABC is reporting about another potential “settlement” (again, “settlement” is the wrong word — it’s Trump’s legal team negotiating with Trump’s DOJ, which is run by his former legal team. It’s one team negotiating with itself) which is just as egregious and corrupt: Trump would apparently agree to drop his case against the IRS in exchange for… a $1.7 billion slush fund of taxpayer money that he could dole out to his friends who whine to the government that they were “targeted” for retribution by a “weaponized” Biden administration.
President Donald Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself.
So, yeah, a $1.7 billion slush fund for Trump supporters who (in some cases) literally engaged in insurrection to overturn the results of a free and fair election, or for various hangers-on who play the victim every chance they get and pretend the Biden administration “weaponized” the government against them.
It’s not worth getting into the possibility of using this slush fund to pay off the ~1,600 Trump supporters who were duly convicted in a court of law for various crimes, all of whom were later pardoned by Trump (even as dozens of them have been re-arrested for other crimes, which should put to rest any remaining notion that Trump is the “law and order” president — but of course it won’t).
But we can talk about the various claims of “weaponization” because we covered many of them. Remember, Jim Jordan got himself appointed as the anti-weaponization czar in Congress, and used that to actually weaponize the government to investigate and attack individuals and organizations who were not the government, but who Jordan felt unfairly pointed out disinformation and lies from those MAGA supported.
The supposed investigations into the “weaponization” of the government to suppress speech served only to suppress the First Amendment protected speech of academic researchers and organizations. And now all those who falsely insisted that the Biden administration “censored” them, even as all the evidence showed that social media companies removed content because they found that the content violated their own rules, will get to line up at the trough to get free money from American taxpayers.
This is Donald Trump handing out American taxpayer money that has never been appropriated by Congress for this purpose — shoveling it to anyone who claims victimhood under his banner, whether convicted insurrectionists, Trump allies who want their legal bills paid, or propagandists who got called out for spreading disinformation. We’re already seeing this play out. This week, Trump’s DOJ “settled” with the pandemic’s wrongest man, Alex Berenson, who got suspended from Twitter not because of any government action, but because Twitter felt that he violated their rules against spreading health misinformation.
Berenson has been suing over this for years (and mostly losing), but this week Trump agreed to pay him $150,000 and “admit” that the Biden administration tried to censor him. While some are trying to present this as some sort of big victory, getting Donald Trump to blame Joe Biden for something that didn’t happen — while shoveling taxpayer money to a man who publicly supports Trump — is not exactly a landmark legal victory. It’s almost expected in the Trump era.
The Berenson payout is a preview. Once the $1.7 billion fund is running, expect a line out the door of Trump’s groveling fans making false claims about Biden “weaponizing” the government — all of it paid for by taxpayers, none of it appropriated by Congress.
In a ruling that will clearly be remembered as one of the worst in the history of the Supreme Court, two years ago, the court gave Donald Trump a get out of jail free card, which he appears to be trying to take full advantage of with all the criming in his second term. But, as always with this guy, it’s never enough.
We’ve already covered in detail the ridiculous situation in which Donald Trump acting in his supposed personal capacity, while still being the president, sued his own IRS for $10 billion, because a contractor leaked his tax returns a while back (that contractor is currently in prison for doing so). Again, there is zero indication of any actual harm. Every president — and nearly all major candidates — for the past 50 years released their tax returns to the public. Except Trump.
A decade ago he claimed that it was because he was being audited, and promised to release them once the audit was over. But he’s never done anything. And, as many people have noted, when President Richard Nixon started this tradition of releasing the president’s tax returns, he was actually being audited by the IRS, and was able to release his returns without a problem.
Either way, a contractor (not an IRS employee) leaked some of Trump’s returns to ProPublica and the NY Times, which resulted in a few stories before the news cycle moved on within days. It certainly didn’t stop Trump from being elected in 2024. And even though the returns were leaked in 2019 and 2020, Trump waited until he was back in the White House (and, in charge of the IRS and the DOJ) to file this $10 billion lawsuit.
We’ve covered the ridiculous claim that the “two sides” (there aren’t two sides) were “negotiating a settlement” and how the judge in the case has tried to call timeout, noticing that since Trump is effectively negotiating with himself there’s no cause or controversy, and thus there may be no jurisdiction for the court to hear the case. There’s still briefing going on over that, but the NY Times reports that the supposed (not really) “negotiations” have continued, with Trump apparently proposing that the settlement include the IRS dropping audits of Trump, his businesses, and his family, which would just be a shocking level of corruption from an administration that has spent its first year and a half in office trying to be as blatantly corrupt as possible.
One of the settlement options the Justice Department and White House officials are reviewing is the possibility of the I.R.S. dropping any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or businesses, according to two of the people.
Again, even though the news cycle moved on quickly, perhaps it should return to exactly what those leaked tax returns showed: which is that at a time when Trump was publicly claiming to be rolling in cash, he basically paid effectively no income taxes and was racking up massive losses — figures that raise serious questions about his financial entanglements and what he stood to gain from his first term in office.
To have the audits of what happened during those years completely dropped — and not just for him, but for his entire family and related businesses — is another form of a get out of jail free card. Call it a “tax cheat for life” card.
To do this at a time when the public is struggling, due almost entirely to Donald Trump’s ridiculous policies — tariffs driving up inflation massively, an illegal war quagmire in Iran driving up energy prices — is even more insulting to the public that Donald Trump is supposed to be working for. The same day this story came out, Trump was asked about whether he was thinking about the impact of his out-of-control war on Americans’ financial situation, and he responded “not even a little bit” and that “I don’t think about Americans financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”
To the narcotics agents investigating drug smuggling in Puerto Rico prisons, it seemed at first like a typical scheme: associates of an inmate gang sneaking drugs into the prison, gang members distributing them inside and bank records showing the money flowing.
Then the agents discovered something unusual.
Leaders of the prison gang known as Los Tiburones, or the Sharks, were selling drugs to inmates not only for money, but for their votes. Specifically, votes for now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón, a longtime Republican and supporter of President Donald Trump, investigators found.
To make sure the inmates — many of whom were addicted — complied, the gang’s leaders threatened violence and to withhold drugs, the investigators learned. Corrections employees in on the plan looked the other way as the gang, formally known as Group 31, ran the enterprise.
What at first seemed like a routine drug case had turned into something bigger. Puerto Rico, along with just a couple of U.S. states, allows inmates to vote. Puerto Ricans living in the territory can vote in all contests except federal general elections. It is a felony to willfully offer money or gifts in exchange for support at the polls. A conviction carries fines of as much as $250,000 and imprisonment of up to two years.
Investigators had gathered solid evidence of election fraud implicating both inmates and staff, and they were working toward determining whether González-Colón or her campaign was involved, four people with knowledge of the case told ProPublica. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
But as federal prosecutors prepared an indictment against the inmates and staff in November 2024 — just days after Trump won the election and González-Colón clinched the governorship — they received a surprising directive. Their bosses in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico instructed them to exclude the voting-related counts against the inmates and all charges against the prison staff, an investigation by ProPublica found.
In December, they filed an indictment charging 34 inmates and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm. And while prosecutors described the drugs-for-votes scheme in the court filing, they did not include a single charge related to it.
Soon after Trump took office, the lead prosecutor, Jorge Matos, was told by a supervisor to take the investigation no further, according to four people familiar with the case.
“Before the election, it was definitely full steam ahead,” said one person familiar with the case. “After the election, that all changed.”
Matos, who left the Justice Department in June 2025, did not respond to phone calls or texts from ProPublica or attempts to reach him on social media.
For those working on the case, the decision to scrap the investigation was especially puzzling given the new president’s agenda; Trump issued executive orders in early 2025 aimed at eradicating drug traffickers and declaring election integrity “fundamental” to maintaining American democracy.
“We invested so much effort to make a difference,” said another person. “We’re frustrated, but there’s nothing we can do.”
People close to the case wondered if politics had played a bigger role than law and order. Trump congratulated González-Colón in a letter shared at her January 2025 inauguration saying, “I am so proud of your resounding victory.” That same month, she pushed to erect a statue of him at the Capitol building in San Juan alongside other presidents who’ve visited the island. “He deserves that,” she said, according to an official post from the Federal Affairs Administration of Puerto Rico on X.
W. Stephen Muldrow, the U.S. attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, was appointed by Trump in 2019 and has served continuously since then. His name appears on the indictment along with those of three assistant U.S. attorneys. Muldrow told ProPublica his office does not comment on open investigations other than in press releases or press conferences. While a couple of the inmates have accepted plea deals, most of the drug and money-laundering cases against the inmates and associates are still making their way through the court system.
In a follow-up email, a spokesperson for the office noted the indictment was filed during the Biden administration and under the previous governor of Puerto Rico.
Charging corrupt public officials “has always been and remains a top priority” of the office, wrote spokesperson Lymarie Llovet-Ayala.
“When sufficient admissible evidence exists to charge persons involved in public corruption, as required by the Justice Manual, the Puerto Rico U.S. Attorney’s Office will aggressively pursue such charges,” she wrote.
In court documents tied to a different case, in October 2025, a magistrate judge mentioned “an unrelated white-collar investigation involving the Governor of Puerto Rico.” Muldrow’s office responded in a filing, stating, “There is no white-collar investigation (or any other investigation) of Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González-Colón.”
González-Colón has not been charged with a crime. The governor declined ProPublica’s repeated requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions sent to her communications team.
Muldrow had a friendly working relationship with former Attorney General Pam Bondi when she was the state attorney general in Florida and he was an assistant U.S. attorney in the middle district of that state, according to people who know him.
A Department of Justice spokesperson said in an email, “Neither Attorney General Bondi nor Acting Attorney General Blanche was involved in any charging or investigative decision in this Biden administration prosecution.”
The attorney general’s office noted in a statement that the indictment mentioned allegations of voting coercion, and said: “This office did not limit the underlying investigation in any way.”
In May 2025, in a move that federal prosecutors and political observers alike said was highly unusual, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence seized the voting machines from Puerto Rico over concerns about “vulnerabilities,” according to testimony in March by Director Tulsi Gabbard to Congress.
A spokesperson from the office told ProPublica the seizure was at the request of the U.S. attorney’s office in Puerto Rico and was “not about any election in particular.” The goal was to “assess risk to this critical infrastructure, given similar infrastructure is used throughout the United States,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Muldrow didn’t answer questions from ProPublica about the matter.
Lydia Lizarribar, an attorney for Juan Carlos Ortiz-Vazquez, a Group 31 member who prosecutors named as one of the leaders of the drug operation, declined to comment on the case.
A Party “Stronghold”
The Puerto Rican prison system has a long and well-documented history of overcrowding, inadequate medical care and other human rights violations so egregious that in the late 1970s they prompted federal oversight that continued for decades.
The grim conditions spurred inmates to form advocacy groups like Group 31, which was officially created as a nonprofit to lobby corrections officials and lawmakers to improve inmates’ quality of life. Over time, federal prosecutors say, several of these groups operating in the prisons evolved into violent criminal organizations such as Los Tiburones and Ñetas, with memberships in the thousands.
The poor conditions were also the backdrop for a push in 1980 by the New Progressive Party governor at the time, Carlos Romero Barceló, to codify voting rights for prisoners.
Inmates have been aligned with the party ever since, political analysts said. Political parties in Puerto Rico differ dramatically from those on the mainland. They don’t adhere to a straight divide among Democrats and Republicans. Instead, the two main parties center much of their focus on whether Puerto Rico should become a state and so have Republicans and Democrats within each.
It’s not unheard of for politicians of all parties to court the inmate vote, but the New Progressive Party has made it a “stronghold,” said Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a political scientist with expertise on Puerto Rico and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.
“It’s been a huge advantage for them particularly as elections in Puerto Rico have been decided by small margins,” Tormos-Aponte said of the New Progressive Party. In the 2024 general election for governor, the party won 83% of the inmate vote, according to a ProPublica tally of voter returns on the State Elections Commission’s website.
Inmate votes were especially key in the 2024 gubernatorial primary as González-Colón, a longtime New Progressive Party member, was challenging the incumbent governor of the same party.
She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide.
In her first months in office, González-Colón signed a law allowing people with criminal records to obtain professional licenses in Puerto Rico.
In July, she signed off on a law expanding inmates’ ability to hold jobs in the private sector, calling it “part of a vision of social justice,” adding “we believe in the second chance, in the value of work and in the capacity for transformation of the human being.”
In March, González-Colón signed a law requiring the parole review board increase the pace at which parole denials are reconsidered. She said in a press release the law is aimed at a “fairer, more transparent system focused on rehabilitation.”
Political analysts said rumors have swirled over the decades about coercive tactics being used to mobilize the prison vote, raising significant questions about the extent to which that support comes in exchange for favors from the ruling party.
This time was different, sources said. They had evidence. Prosecutors had “locked up” the voting-for-drugs scheme among the gang, inmates and staff, and were deep into investigating a potential political connection when Muldrow’s office pulled the plug.
“These are the type of questions you would think an administration that has publicly declared this war on drug trafficking would investigate further,” Tormos-Aponte said of the Trump administration. “You would think it would be a priority.”
For the people familiar with the prison election fraud investigation, it was clear politics were at play in the decision to abandon charges prosecutors were confident they could win. What wasn’t clear, they said, was who was pulling the strings and how. It was “like you’re watching a puppet show but you can’t see the strings,” one person said.
“You know what you’re seeing isn’t telling the whole story,” the person said. “There was some kind of invisible hand.”
Drugs for Votes
Although they excluded drugs-for-votes charges, prosecutors didn’t scrub the Dec. 12, 2024, indictment of how they believed the operation worked.
Outside associates of Los Tiburones, the indictment alleged, primarily used drones to drop drugs on prison grounds. Then staff participating in the scheme helped in the “introduction and distribution” of the drugs inside the prison or acted as lookouts. The employees also allowed the gang members to enforce their own discipline system against those who didn’t do as they asked, including when voting. Punishments included withholding food from inmates or forcing them to sit with their arms folded while they were beaten and kicked. In four cases, the drugs led to overdose deaths, the indictment says.
The indictment also alleged that Los Tiburones made connections with government officials “for the purpose of reducing prison sentences,” and the gang mandated both the prisoners’ political affiliations and “who to vote for in primary and general elections.”
A relative of one of the prisoners told ProPublica that inmates had to show their ballots to gang leaders when they voted to avoid punishment.
Puerto Rico’s Civil Rights Commission, which for decades has sent observers to polls across the territory, reported “serious difficulties” in gaining access to several prisons during the 2024 general election. After being denied entry at multiple locations, the commission successfully sought a court order, but much of the day had already passed by the time the observers were allowed in.
“We strongly condemn the lack of diligence and indifference shown by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in hindering the functions of this Commission on the day of early voting in correctional institutions,” the agency later wrote in a special report on the 2024 elections.
The report said observers witnessed prisoners voting in cramped quarters that didn’t allow for privacy and having to hand their ballots to others to put in the box.
Ever Padilla-Ruiz, the commission’s executive director, told ProPublica that inmates sent written complaints to the office detailing their experiences of being pressured to vote in the primary — some for González-Colón and others for her opponent, Pedro Pierluisi. They did not mention any gangs by name, Padilla-Ruiz said.
He said inmates reported that inmate group leaders were “always sending messages” up until election day, adding that they were too afraid to say much more.
Several people familiar with the case said investigators had evidence that González-Colón had spoken to a Group 31 member, but they had not determined whether she was involved in vote buying.
One of the imprisoned gang leaders had bragged on Facebook about his connection to González-Colón, posting a picture of him talking with her on WhatsApp while the primary campaign for governor was underway, two sources said.
She clearly benefited from the scheme, they said. “There was no doubt about that,” one said, noting that thousands of votes were likely at stake.
The indictment notes that gang members were provided preferential treatment such as relaxed visitation policies and the use of Sony PlayStations, big screen TVs and cellphones, but investigators had not connected the privileges to González-Colón or her campaign.
“Latinos Are Winning”
González-Colón has been a longtime advocate for Puerto Rico statehood and has been engaged in Republican politics for more than 20 years. She was elected chair of the Republican Party of Puerto Rico in 2015 and two years later became resident commissioner, a role similar to a U.S. representative but with limited voting power in Congress.
She’s been an active participant in Latinos for Trump, praising the president over the years as “wise” and in 2019 saying on social media, “Latinos are winning under his leadership.”
As she continues to lobby for Puerto Rico to become the 51st state, González-Colón has also leaned in to her relationships with other members of Trump’s Cabinet, posting well wishes on social media to Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and congratulating Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security director Trump picked to replace Kristi Noem, calling him “my good friend.”
“I know he will provide strong leadership as he works with President Donald J. Trump to strengthen our nation’s security,” she wrote in a March Facebook post.
Experts on Puerto Rican finance and politics say the relationship between González-Colón and the Trump administration is symbiotic though lopsided.
“I see it more as a situation of unrequited love,” said Alvin Velazquez, an associate law professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law and an expert on Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy in 2017.
The territorial island, whose residents were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, receives less federal funding than most states. Political leaders in Puerto Rico, González-Colón included, have perpetually lobbied for more support.
Republicans in turn have capitalized on González-Colón’s rise as she helped bolster GOP support among the Puerto Rican diaspora and other Latino voters on the mainland. Now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio endorsed González-Colón in her 2024 gubernatorial election.
Polls specifically isolating Puerto Rican voters show that Trump saw at least a 4 percentage point uptick in votes from Puerto Ricans living in states compared to the 2020 election, garnering 45% of the group’s vote in the 2024 election, according to the nonprofit research center Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University.
And perhaps most importantly, experts say, Trump has counted on González-Colón to support his strategic geopolitical initiatives in the region, including the controversial reopening of long-abandoned naval bases in Puerto Rico. González-Colón welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the island in September and thanked Trump on X for “recognizing the strategic value Puerto Rico has to the national security of the United States and the fight against drug cartels in our hemisphere.”
That’s despite the sentiment among many Puerto Ricans who were angered by Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria in 2017 and a comedian at one of Trump’s 2024 campaign rallies who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” And while Trump has said that González-Colón was “wonderful to deal with and a great representative of the people,” he later called Puerto Rico “one of the most corrupt places on earth.”
It took longer than I thought it would, but the Trump administration’s appeal of the court ruling and injunction that put a pause on RFK Jr.’s remaking of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and vaccine policy has come through.
If you need a reminder on how we got here, here you go. In June of ’25, Kennedy fired every single member of the CDC’s ACIP panel, a group of advisers that recommends vaccine schedules for the country. He then appointed what were eventually 13 new members to ACIP, nearly all of them virulent anti-vaxxers or otherwise aligned with Kennedy’s misinformed views on medicine and science. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued earlier this year, arguing that Kennedy had violated the American Procedures Act (APA) by his actions, specifically because he did not follow evidence, proper procedure, or factual science in the appointments. The court agreed, ruling against the administration and issuing a preliminary injunction on HHS for staffing ACIP with the new appointees and nixing any of the recommendations it had made thus far.
And so now the administration has appealed that ruling, though it’s any wonder as to what the administration’s arguments will be for the appeal.
A filing Wednesday evening in the District of Massachusetts indicates the administration is appealing Judge Brian Murphy’s order March 16. Murphy put any decisions made by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee on hold, ruling that Kennedy replaced the committee “unlawfully.”
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate signed the appeal.
The Justice Department could file a motion for emergency relief to get the court to act on its appeal immediately. That would require the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to act quickly in deciding whether to stay, or pause, the March 16 ruling.
Regardless, the court activity on this will likely eventually take months to work out. The AAP isn’t backing down, with its attorney vowing to respond to the appeal and taking the posture that it believes they will prevail. Reading the APA statute, I very much tend to agree, but this is Trump 101 stuff. Never back down, exhaust every legal avenue to get your way, and hope someone along the way fucks this up so you get your way. That the final leg on this journey might be a Supreme Court that often looks like another part of the Executive Branch, rather than an independent arm of government is certainly part of the calculus.
But in the meantime, two things remain true. The Trump administration, which has at times made noises about wanting to rein in Kennedy and his nonsense, is working hard to allow him to continue to make America sicker. And because of Kennedy’s refusal to follow basic protocol and science, the country is without a competent body to advise on vaccination schedules.
Meanwhile, the status of the advisory panel — a key group meant to be composed of vaccine experts independent of government influence — is in limbo.
A meeting that had been scheduled for March at which members were expected to discuss Covid shots has been postponed indefinitely. The committee is supposed to meet again in late June. There is no agenda yet.
Given the current makeup of the panel, that may indeed be the best possible outcome currently. But it’s not a long term plan, nor a long term positive. ACIP existed for a reason. The country needs intelligent, sincere, and sane people advising the country on how to combat infectious diseases with medicine and technology.
We are without that right now, purely because Trump thought putting Kennedy in charge of HHS was anything other than a form of national self-harm.
As you’ll recall, when Elon Musk first started buying up Twitter stock, before he officially decided to buy the whole company, he blew past the SEC-mandated deadline to reveal publicly that he had accumulated over 5% of the stock. Indeed, Musk waited until he held nearly 10% of the company’s stock before revealing his position at all. Many shareholders were rightly pissed off about this, because it likely diminished the value of their shares. There’s a reason the law says you need to disclose crossing that 5% line.
And, to be clear, this isn’t one of those gray areas of the law. This is a case where Elon pretty clearly violated the law in very obvious ways. But because the Biden admin was so terrified of looking even remotely biased against Elon, the SEC took nearly three years investigating the case (and yes, part of that was Elon trying to ignore investigatory demands) before finally suing him… in the last week of the Biden admin.
I’m somewhat amazed it took this long, but earlier this week, the Trump SEC announced a settlement. Despite the blatant flouting of the rules — which likely cost Twitter shareholders millions of dollars — the settlement requires Elon to pay $1.5 million. That’s basically pocket change to the world’s richest man. It’s not even a slap on the wrist, which might sting a bit.
“I do think that it suggests if you’re wealthy or powerful enough then there aren’t going to be consequences,” said Fagel, who previously led the SEC’s San Francisco office. “The optics of this are terrible.”
Perhaps in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t much matter. No real fine was going to matter much to Elon Musk. He has enough money to be shielded from effectively any monetary punishment — they could fine him 99% of his wealth and he’d still be richer than basically anyone reading this.
But it’s this kind of thing, and the lack of real consequences for it, that undermine our trust in institutions and the rule of law. The message being sent is hard to miss: if you’re wealthy enough and loyal enough to Trump, the rules simply don’t apply to you.
Counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka is one of the most controversial figures in the Trump administration, a gate crasher in the buttoned-up world of national security.
In a field where quiet professionalism is revered, Gorka is loud and mercurial. With a booming, British-accented voice, he describes U.S. operations turning suspected terrorists into “red mist” and stacking bodies “like cordwood.” He wears a lanyard inscribed with “WWFY & WWKY,” referencing a line from President Donald Trump: “We will find you and we will kill you.”
It is a testament to the frenzy of Trump’s first year back in office that even the colorful Gorka had faded into the background as the nation reeled from a mass deportation campaign and sweeping cuts to federal agencies. That changed this February with the launch of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which heightened the risk of retaliatory attacks on American citizens and interests around the world. Overnight, there was renewed interest in who leads White House counterterrorism efforts.
My editors and I decided it was time to break out the Gorka files. For six months, I had monitored Gorka’s public remarks for clues about the status of his long-promised national counterterrorism strategy and updates on deadly U.S. strikes in Africa and the Middle East. It had started as old-fashioned beat reporting; I cover counterterrorism, and he’s the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
The trove of details I collected from months of Gorka’s public statements, along with interviews with more than two dozen current and former security officials, were woven into a ProPublica investigation published in April. It’s an in-depth look at Gorka and his role in the hollowed-out national security apparatus after a year of leadership turmoil and personnel loss as Trump shifted resources toward his immigration agenda.
ProPublica reached out to Gorka for comment in multiple ways. He never responded, instead lashing out at me via posts on X before the story published. He told his 1.8 million followers that I was anti-American and accused me of writing a “putrid piece of hackery.”
There went my hopes for a good-faith exchange. After discussion with my editors, ProPublica decided to note the insults in the story. It was another revealing layer to the combustible leader Trump had installed in a sensitive national security role. A former senior official noted the eruption was “Gorka being Gorka.”
Increasingly, journalists are pushing back against attacks on our credibility by “showing the work,” guiding readers through the reporting process to dispel myths and foster transparency. In that spirit, I wanted to take this opportunity to show how basic beat reporting — fact-checking the assertions of a powerful figure — led to a broader story about the state of the U.S. counterterrorism mission at a critical moment.
I’ve covered the post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus for more than two decades, so Gorka was a familiar presence, an academic known mainly for a well-documented hostility toward Islam, which he has portrayed as inherently violent. Gorka has dismissed criticism of this portrayal as “absurd,” saying his focus is “the war inside Islam” between radicals and Western-aligned Muslim leaders. He also served as an adviser under the first Trump administration but was ousted after just seven months amid White House infighting.
At the time, dozens of lawmakers had demanded his resignation, and investigative outlets detailed links — which Gorka denies — to the Hungarian far right. After the bruising exit, Gorka waited patiently as the Republican Party swung harder right in the Biden era and eventually returned Trump to office.
Gorka was appointed White House counterterrorism czar — he called it his dream job — in a new era without the “adults in the room,” as some officials referred to the more moderate advisers around Trump in the first term. Privately, national security personnel expressed alarm that intelligence about threats was in the hands of an official who reportedly struggled to get security clearance in the first Trump administration.
To me, Gorka was a weather vane for the administration’s national security thinking: Would his “war on terror” mindset clash with the more isolationist “America First” camp that wanted no more forever wars? How would a vast security apparatus built for the Islamist militant threat reorient toward a new focus on far-left “antifa” militants and Latin American drug cartels newly designated as terrorist organizations?
I was especially interested in the status of a national counterterrorism strategy Gorka had been promising since taking office; such documents typically lay out an administration’s approach to fighting the most urgent threats. Though Gorka had described his plan as “imminent” and “on the cusp” of release, months ticked by without any sign of it.
To glean clues about the strategy, I made it my mission to watch every news appearance, read every interview and listen to every podcast featuring Gorka since December 2024, the month before he entered the White House. It took some digging — he rails against the mainstream news media and prefers to appear (largely unchallenged) on niche pro-Trump news outlets and at conservative think tanks.
I developed a nightly ritual. After dinner with my family, I’d hole up to listen to Gorka, hunting for the scraps of news buried in his over-the-top vocabulary and graphic storytelling. Alongside my note categories for “Trump Anecdotes” and “Militant Death Tolls” was one for “Big Words.” For example, the president calls Joe Biden “sleepy”; Gorka prefers “somnambulant.”
Weeks into the reporting, in February 2026, I realized Gorka’s speech had burrowed into my brain when I watched a silly video and thought, in his voice, “Preposterous!” It was time for a break.
I reread my notes from hours of listening sessions. I interviewed counterterrorism analysts and national security watchdog groups about Gorka and his remit. Veteran national security personnel added context and analysis. Just as my editors and I were discussing how to turn the findings into a story, the Iran war began and the spotlight on Gorka grew brighter.
Much of the material on air strikes and the dismantling of guardrails was first incorporated into a story I reported about the Pentagon moving away from more robust civilian protections, a reversal highlighted by a deadly U.S. attack on a girls’ school in Iran. Other reporting ended up in the story about Gorka’s phoenixlike return to the White House and what it says about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine.
Gorka didn’t respond to requests for comment beyond the hostile posts on X. When I asked the White House for comment, spokesperson Anna Kelly praised Gorka’s “incredible job” but sidestepped questions about his approach. “Anyone attempting to smear him and the President’s national security team is only revealing that they haven’t been paying attention for the past year,” Kelly wrote, “as anyone with eyes can see that our homeland is more secure than ever.”
As of writing, exactly two months into the Iran war, Gorka’s counterterrorism strategy has yet to appear.
Not this again. For many years now there have been a series of ongoing lawsuits between E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump, involving a variety of issues, but mainly whether or not he sexually assaulted her back in the 1990s and, separately, whether he defamed her in claiming he’d never met her after she accused him of sexual assault. As I’ve explained previously, I think the defamation claim part of it is pretty weak, but back during the first Trump administration, he had sought to have the DOJ substitute in and take over for him in the defamation case, which would have immediately ended the case, as you can’t sue the government for defamation. Having the DOJ substitute in for a government employee is allowed under the Westfall Act, and is designed to allow the US government to become the party when a government employee is sued for doing something in the course of their job (the normal example is if a government driver hits someone with a vehicle).
Eventually the various cases made it to trial and the two juries that heard the cases awarded Carroll nearly $88.3 million across two verdicts. Since then Trump has continued to try to avoid ever having to pay.
The case has bounced around a bunch, and Trump had asked for a do-over in the Second Circuit in the latest round. In rejecting that, one of the judges, who had been a part of the panel for an earlier ruling, described how freaking exhausting all this is:
These are the third and fourth times our Court has voted to deny en banc rehearing of rulings in this case, which concerns defamation and sexual assault claims brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump. The two per curiam decisions at issue in this round of en banc voting — the fifth and sixth opinions by our Court in this case — arise from two related suits. The first (“Carroll I”) asserted defamation claims based on statements made by Trump in June 2019 while he was President, and the second (“Carroll II”) asserted a sexual assault claim as well as defamation claims based on statements made by Trump in October 2022 after he left office. Although Carroll I was filed first, Carroll II was tried first; in May 2023, the jury in Carroll II found, following a nine-day trial, that Trump sexually abused Carroll at Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 by digitally penetrating her and that he defamed her with comments he made in 2022 after he left office. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages, and this Court affirmed, Carroll v. Trump, 124 F.4th 140 (2d Cir. 2024) (per curiam) (“Carroll 4”), and denied rehearing en banc, 141 F.4th 366 (2d Cir. 2025).
Carroll I was tried in January 2024. The jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages. On appeal of the judgment, the panel issued two decisions. First, in April 2025, while the appeal was pending and after it had been fully briefed, Trump moved before us to substitute the United States as the defendant under the Westfall Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2679. The panel denied the motion by order last June, and issued an opinion explaining our reasoning in August. Carroll v. Trump, 148 F.4th 110 (2d Cir. 2025) (per curiam) (“Carroll 5”). Second, in September, the panel rejected Trump’s attempt to reassert a defense based on presidential immunity, and affirmed the district court’s rulings and the jury’s damages award. Carroll v. Trump, 151 F.4th 50 (2d Cir. 2025) (per curiam) (“Carroll 6”). It is these two panel rulings — Carroll 5 and Carroll 6 — that are the subject of these en banc petitions.
Trump and the United States have petitioned for rehearing of Carroll 5, and Trump has petitioned for rehearing of Carroll 6. Neither petition identifies how our decisions conflict with precedent of this Circuit, another Circuit, or the Supreme Court, or pose a question of “exceptional importance” justifying en banc review.
Having lost yet again, Trump has now appealed to the Supreme Court — where he’s presumably hoping the Court that handed him sweeping presidential immunity will ride to the rescue again. After all the only two notable exceptions to the Court backing him were specifically economy-related: blocking the firing of Fed members and striking down the illegal tariffs. Protecting Donald from sexual assault and defamation claims doesn’t fit into that bucket.
And, on Tuesday, the DOJ filed a motion with the Supreme Court saying that it is planning to ask to (once again) substitute itself in for Trump as the party under the Westfall Act. If I’m reading all this correctly, in the same case the DOJ is asking to appeal the earlier failure to be able to substitute itself in under the Westfall Act, it’s also still asserting its intent to actually substitute itself in.
Either way, this is a stunningly egregious move by Trump’s DOJ — once again acting as his personal legal fixer rather than a defender of the Constitution and the rule of law. The appeals court has made clear multiple times that he can’t use the Westfall Act to effectively force the case into a position where it must be dismissed, in part because the government waived the argument years ago and it’s too late to try to bring it back. In its ruling last week it explained:
The typicality ended there, as the Westfall issues were then litigated in three courts over the course of four years. … The critical juncture for present purposes was when the Westfall Act issue was presented on remand before the district court in June and July 2023. At that time, the Attorney General expressly declined to issue a Westfall certification or to otherwise seek substitution, and Trump did not take any action with respect to certification or substitution. … see 28 U.S.C. § 2679(d)(3) (allowing the employee to petition for certification where the Attorney General has declined to certify). The Westfall issue lay settled until April 2025, when the Government and Trump revived their efforts to have the United States substituted as the defendant in the case by moving for that relief in this Court….
The Carroll 5 panel denied the Government’s post-trial motion to substitute for three separate reasons: (1) the Government and Trump had waived substitution by failing to request it before the district court prior to trial; (2) the 2025 request was untimely under the Westfall Act; and (3) as a matter of equity in light of the procedural posture of the case. … These rulings were correct as a matter of law and did not warrant en banc review.
Basically: the Attorney General explicitly declined to seek Westfall certification back in 2023, Trump didn’t push back at the time, and the case went to trial and verdict. The Trump DOJ’s obvious counterargument — that a different administration gets a fresh shot at this — isn’t how it works. The waiver belongs to the United States as a party, not to whoever happens to be sitting in the AG’s chair at any given moment. The courts have said so, repeatedly and clearly.
There’s so much craziness going on right now that this barely registers as a blip. A jury found the President of the United States liable for sexual assault and defaming his victim. He’s been trying to make that verdict disappear for years. Now he’s got the Justice Department helping him. And it’s not even among the five most alarming things involving Donald Trump that day.
