“It’s no longer about you,” Marco Rubio declared in 2023, describing the transformative moment of becoming a father. “It’s the first time in my life that I have been responsible, entirely at that stage, for the life of another human being.” The Senator has repeatedly stressed the critical importance of fathers being present, going so far as to blame “fatherlessness” as the cause of “every major social problem.”
This week, those words ring particularly hollow. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States currently detained due to Rubio’s unprecedented campaign against student “thoughtcrime,” was denied the chance to witness the birth of his first child. While the formal denial came from ICE officials in the Department of Homeland Security, make no mistake — Khalil would never have been in this position if not for Rubio’s crusade.
After being shuttled between detention facilities in what was clearly a deliberate attempt to obstruct legal challenges, Khalil made a simple, human request: to be present for the birth of his first child. His lawyers proposed multiple security measures to accommodate the government’s concerns, including ankle monitoring and scheduled check-ins during a brief furlough.
Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was a prominent figure in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia University campus, has been detained in Louisiana for more than a month. On Sunday morning, shortly after Dr. Abdalla went into labor, Mr. Khalil’s lawyers requested a two-week furlough so that he could attend the birth.
The lawyers proposed several ways for Mr. Khalil, 30, to be monitored. They said he could wear an ankle monitor and make scheduled check-ins.
“A two week furlough in this civil detention matter would be both reasonable and humane so that both parents can be present for the birth of their first child,” the lawyers wrote.
Less than an hour after they made their request, Melissa Harper, the director of the New Orleans field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, denied it. She wrote that the decision had been made “after consideration of the submitted information and a review of your client’s case.”
While ICE officials formally denied the request, the responsibility lies squarely with Rubio. His assertion of unilateral authority to determine who belongs in America based on their “expected beliefs” created this Kafkaesque scenario. A legal permanent resident, married to a US citizen, was effectively kidnapped by the state – not for any crime, not even for anything he said, but for thoughts Rubio claims he might have.
This isn’t a hardened criminal. This is not a criminal at all. This is someone who is merely a political prisoner, locked up for his potential speech. A victim of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio’s new “thoughtcrime” regime.
Again, there’s no reason for Khalil to be locked up at all. Even if you agree with Rubio’s nonsensical assertion that Khalil is “a lunatic” who supports “terrorists,” he could have been notified of the process by which his green card was stripped and given a chance to fight it in court. Instead, he was grabbed by ICE officials and renditioned to Louisiana.
Just two years ago, Rubio appeared on a podcast all about fatherhood, where he talked about how precious fatherhood was and what an impact it made on him when he became a father for the first time (he now has four kids).
Well, I was 29 and it was in 2000 when my daughter was born in April, and you know it changes your life in a fundamental way. And that is it’s no longer about you.
I think it arises different feelings in in men and women and fathers and and mothers, but for me it was sort of like this sense of I now have… it’s the first time in my life that I have been responsible, entirely at that stage, for the life of another human being, for everything. From whether they’re going to have enough to eat, to whether they’re going to be able to make sure they get medical attention if they get sick. And that’s just the beginning, you know, from there.
And obviously with your first child, you know, I mean, I think back at that time, I mean, my daughter was two weeks old and I was in the state legislature and we just threw her in a car seat and drove up to Tallahassee, you know. And obviously the old, Cuban grandmother and Colombian grandmother were like, screaming at us, you can’t take a baby out of the house after the first two weeks, they can get infections, but we just sort of roll with it. And so, you know, it was a very special time in our life.
Later on in the podcast, he talks about his regrets being about how sometimes his job has meant he wasn’t able to be present for his children:
And I would say the biggest struggle has been this challenge between the guilt or in some cases the necessity of dedicating time to what it takes to raise a family and being not just around but present and the demands of a career and a job. And I I really wrestled with that for a very long time and kind of the balance I found is the following. Number one is it’s good for kids to see that dad has a job and that dad is working. It’s a good thing for kids to see that dad is busy, that dad has things to do.
But, even more importantly, he talks about how important it is for fathers “not to miss things that are never going to happen again.”
I would say this, there are things I’ve missed because of family, I’ve missed stuff at work if I can’t…If it’s something that’s never going to happen again, I don’t miss it.Unless it’s like the urgent end of the world thing, I try not to miss things that are never going to happen again. You know, you’re never going to play your last high school football game, you’re never going to you know, graduate. There are things you’re never going to get to do again.I don’t miss things that are never going to happen again.
Yeah, well, Mahmoud Khalil just missed the birth of his child entirely because Marco Rubio said he doesn’t like what Marco Rubio thinks Khalilmightbelieve. If Marco Rubio actually believed in fatherhood and being there, he wouldn’t have wiped that experience away from Khalil.
Incredibly, in that same podcast, he and the host bemoan “absentee” fathers. How about the fathers that Marco Rubio made disappear? The party of “family values?” No, Marco Rubio is breaking apart families for no damn reason at all. Marco Rubio has created an unwilling absentee father here.
What little was left of Rubio’s reputation as a “more reasonable” Republican should now be gone. The government could have easily and rightfully allowed Khalil to be with his wife during the birth of their child. This needlessly cruel denial of a basic human moment — one that Rubio himself describes as transformative — reveals the truth about both Rubio and the Trump administration’s broader campaign to terrorize anyone who dares criticize their policies. It’s not about security. It’s not about law. It’s about raw power and punishment.
The Trump administration has just claimed an astounding new power: the ability to deport lawful permanent residents based on their “expected beliefs” (including perfectly “lawful” expected beliefs). This isn’t speculation or hyperbole — it’s the explicit thought-police justification Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave in immigration court documents for trying to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and green card holder. This attempted expansion of government authority to police thought should alarm anyone who cares about civil liberties, due process, or the rule of law.
As a reminder, Khalil is a lawful permanent resident (green card holder) in the US and a student at Columbia University in New York. While he was involved in some pro-Palestinian demonstrations, MAGA world has falsely labeled him a “Hamas supporter.” I’ve yet to see any evidence that actually supports that claim, but MAGA isn’t exactly known for accuracy in their accusations. Even worse, when ICE showed up at his student housing to arrest him (in front of his pregnant, US citizen wife), they told him his “visa” was being revoked.
Except he doesn’t have a visa. He holds a green card, which makes him a completely lawful permanent resident in the US. ICE then told him his green card was also revoked, which isn’t something they could actually do. Since then, there’s been a lot of obnoxious game playing by Homeland Security playing “hide the guy we kidnapped,” before dumping him in Louisiana and seeking to deport him.
There are multiple legal proceedings going on with respect to Khalil’s future in the US, with the main one taking place in a federal court in New Jersey. But down in Louisiana there’s a separate legal process in front of an “immigration judge,” which is not an Article III judge or a part of the judiciary at all. Rather it’s someone who works for the DOJ reviewing immigration issues.
For a brief moment last week, it looked like even this DOJ employee was perplexed as to why Khalil had been taken and why the US was trying to deport him. Immigration Judge Jamee Comans ordered DHS to give some reason for why Khalil was detained and why they were trying to deport him.
At a hearing, Judge Jamee Comans gave the federal government 24 hours to turn over its evidence against Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident and prominent pro-Palestinian activist, said Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil’s attorneys, who attended the hearing.
“The government has not produced a single shred of evidence to date to support any of its allegations or charges in this case including its outrageous position that Mahmoud’s mere presence and activities in this country have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” Van Der Hout said.
The next day, the government finally produced the “evidence” and to say it is underwhelming is quite the understatement. They released a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio with a bunch of vague claims, including that he could single-handedly kick green card holders out of the country based on their “expected beliefs” even if they are perfectly “lawful.”
If you can’t read that screenshot, it says:
Under INA section 237(a) (4) (C)(i), an alien is deportable from the United States if the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that the alien’s presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. Under INA section 237(a)(4)(C)(ii), for cases in which the basis for this determination is the alien’s past,current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful, the Secretary of State must personally determine that the alien’s presence or activities would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.
This document should forever define Marco Rubio’s legacy. As Secretary of State, he has personally put his name on a legal claim that the government can deport lawful residents based on beliefs they might hold in the future — even if those beliefs would be perfectly legal. This isn’t just standard immigration enforcement overreach — it’s an attempt to establish thought-police powers that would make Orwell blush. And Rubio didn’t just sign off on this theory — he’s actively championing it, apparently seeing no problem with claiming the power to exile people based on what he thinks they might someday believe.
For anyone keeping score at home: when MAGA supporters inevitably start ranting about Democrats wanting to police speech and thought, remember that Rubio’s the one who officially claimed the power to deport legal residents based on “expected beliefs.” That should be carved into his political tombstone.
Also: fuck that fascist bullshit.
The other part of the document claims that it was done based on the “policy” of the US to fight antisemitism and to protect Jews, but fuck that as well. It’s clearly bullshit. This is the same administration that has said the Naval Academy library had to remove books about the Holocaust, while leaving Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the shelves. This is the same administration that hired into a top position someone with a long history of blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theories popular in neo-Nazi circles. This administration’s claims of fighting antisemitism appear to be pretty antisemitic itself, using false claims of wanting to “protect” Jews to actually make Jews targets of more hatred.
This isn’t about “a compelling foreign policy interest” by the Secretary State. This is about a fucking insecure coward in the form of Marco Rubio, who has been given power by Donald Trump and is using the position to destroy lives because that’s what insecure fascists do.
Tragically, in this case, that was enough for DOJ employee Judge Jamee Comans, who said that was enough of a justification to bless Khalil’s deportation.
An immigration judge in Louisiana found on Friday that the Trump administration could deport Mahmoud Khalil, granting the government an early victory in its efforts to crack down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on U.S. college campuses.
Again, this is only the first stage in a multi-stage process involving separate federal court proceedings in New Jersey as well, and even in front of the immigration judge the situation isn’t over. Khalil’s lawyers can still argue that he shouldn’t be deported to this same judge (leaving aside the constitutional issues that will show up in the New Jersey case).
Here, Comans admitted during the hearing that she was unable to look the larger constitutional issues:
Immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, not the judiciary, and often approve the Homeland Security Department’s deportation efforts. It would be unusual for such a judge, serving the U.S. Attorney General, to grapple with the constitutional questions raised by Mr. Khalil’s case. She would also run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters.
“This court is without jurisdiction to entertain challenges to the validity of this law under the Constitution,” Judge Comans said as she delivered her ruling, apparently reading from a written statement.
She denied Mr. Khalil’s lawyers’ requests that they be allowed to cross-examine or depose Mr. Rubio so that he could elaborate on his claims. “This court is neither inclined or authorized” to compel such testimony, she said.
Khalil himself highlighted the fundamental absurdity of these proceedings in a powerful statement to the court:
“I would like to quote what you said last time, that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” he said. “Clearly, what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family.”
The contrast could not be starker: A student, dragged 1,000 miles from his family, calmly calling out the mockery of due process, while the Secretary of State claims the power to deport people based on what he thinks they might believe in the future.
This case is about far more than just Mahmoud Khalil. It’s about whether we’ll allow the government to claim the power to police thought itself. Marco Rubio has now officially attached his name to one of the most dangerously authoritarian theories of government power we’ve seen: that the state can exile legal residents based on their “expected beliefs.” That should follow him for the rest of his life. He should never live down this cowardly suck-up in pursuit of power.
We need more people in America like Khalil, willing to speak truth to power even at great personal cost, and fewer power-hungry officials ready to torch fundamental civil liberties just to score political points in pursuit of the fascist destruction of the American constitutional and democratic principles.
Every little thing the current administration does furthers the ultimate goals of Trump and his enablers: homogenization of the population and elevation of Trump to the position of a demigod. While a lot of that was on display during his first term, the massive acceleration of these efforts during the first few months of Trump 2.0 has turned the first sentence of this paragraph from “hyperbolic” to “inarguable.”
While ICE busies itself expelling thousands of people from this country (whether they’re actually subject to removal or not), other federal agencies are pitching in to ensure the country remains stocked to the brim with people who apparently love America so much that they’re willing to destroy it to placate their god-king.
That includes the people running federal agencies, like Marco Rubio, who was a frequent target of Trump’s scorn prior to his appointment to the head of the State Department, and who remains a target of Trump’s vitriol even in this new position. Trump has surrounded himself with a blend of loyalists and beaten dogs (to use one of his own favorite idioms) and Rubio is one of the latter.
Rubio continues to seek praise he’ll likely never receive, leveraging his new position to turn the State Department into just another DHS subsidiary. As Edward Wong reports for the New York Times, diplomats are being turned into CBP surrogates to keep the “wrong” people from entering the US.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomats overseas to scrutinize the social media content of some applicants for student and other types of visas, in an effort to bar those suspected of criticizing the United States and Israel from entering the country, U.S. officials say.
Mr. Rubio laid out the instructions in a long cable sent to diplomatic missions on March 25.
[…]
The cable also states that applicants can be denied a visa if their behavior or actions show they bear “a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”
This is, of course, an extension of Trump’s anti-Palestinian agitation (something he portrays as combating antisemitism, which it definitely isn’t) as well as his expansion of immigration expelling efforts to cover people who may have “hostile attitudes” towards the United States or, more importantly, the Trump administration.
While Trump continues to pretend pro-Palestinian statements are indistinguishable from antisemitism and criticism of Trump and his administration is the same thing as harboring a “hostile attitude” towards the nation itself, Rubio’s State Department directive is pretending filtering out anti-Trump or anti-Israel visa applicants is the same thing as filtering out potential criminals.
Mr. Rubio’s directive said that starting immediately, consular officers must refer certain student and exchange visitor visa applicants to the “fraud prevention unit” for a “mandatory social media check,” according to two American officials with knowledge of the cable.
Searching for specific content that isn’t related to anything remotely considered fraudulent is… you guessed it… a fraudulent use of government funds. Trump loves to claim everything is a witch hunt, but he’s pretty much the only one routinely engaging in activities that resemble his overused metaphor.
This is definitely a witch hunt, albeit one that targets anyone supportive of Palestinians. It’s explicitly spelled out in Rubio’s directive:
The cable specifies a type of applicant whose social media posts should be scrutinized: someone who is suspected of having terrorist ties or sympathies; who had a student or exchange visa between Oct. 7, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024; or who has had a visa terminated since that October date.
And there it is: the first date is the day Israel was attacked by Hamas. The second date appears to be arbitrary: something that might make the initial date seem a little less on the nose.
That’s not all Marco Rubio’s been busy with. As Wong reports, plenty of retroactive reviews of visa holders’ social media accounts and other information are being performed. Rubio seems proud of his work, telling reporters he had been “revoking visas” on a “daily basis” since becoming Secretary of State.
Clearly none of this is being done to keep regular Americans safe from international terrorists. It’s being done to keep Trump and his acolytes safe from dissenting opinions, criticism, and public protest. And that’s all on top of Trump/ICE’s combined enthusiasm for ejecting pretty much every brown-ish person they happen to come across. It’s evil. And only the monotonous grinding of government machinery gears gives it any whiff of banality. This is open fascism that’s fooling nobody no matter how many American flags it chooses to wrap itself in.
For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes.
This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in.
But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.
The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana.
The video of her kidnapping (because that’s what it was) is terrifying enough:
If you listen, you hear her quite understandably surprised reaction with a scream, and then she asks to call the police, only to be told “we’re the police.” None of them are in uniforms. Most of them are masked.
Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.
The government has attempted to justify similar renditions (and there is a growing list of victims) by falsely painting targets as “terrorist supporters” — a dangerous conflation of political speech supporting Palestinian rights with support for terrorism. But even those cases typically involved people involved in public protests, which are themselves constitutionally protected activities. This case goes even further: disappearing someone over an innocuous piece of student journalism published a year ago.
Everyone should be alarmed. Everyone should be demanding that she (and others) be released and that ICE and DHS stop this horrifying and unconscionable practice. Everyone should be demanding that Trump and Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem stop this Gestapo bullshit.
Even if — especially if — you disagree with her views on Israel and Palestine. This isn’t about that. This is about the very concept of freedom. The rights everyone — even visitors — are supposed to have in this country. The right to speak your mind, even if (especially if!) it is opposed to those in power. The right to walk down a street without being kidnapped. The right to due process.
If the government genuinely believed Ozturk had violated immigration law or her visa terms (she hadn’t), there are established legal procedures to address such issues. Instead, they chose to send masked goons to disappear her without warning or due process — a chilling message to every other international student that their supposed right to express political opinions comes with the risk of rendition.
And, of course, the implied threat is that this won’t stop at international students.
But the Trump administration believes not in fundamental rights. It only believes in the cowardly authoritarian displays of theatrical power. Because they are weak and insecure. They are so frightened by a random college student op-ed or a protest, they are taking to disappearing people with no due process for their speech.
This won’t stop unless everyone speaks up and demands that the government respect the rights of everyone. These are bullying and intimidation tactics of weak insecure bullies, who know they cannot win in the marketplace of ideas. They are scared and pathetic, knowing that their beliefs are bad, and that the public doesn’t support them. Thus, their only response is an impotent rage, an attempt to replace respect and fair treatment with authoritarian tactics in hopes of intimidating people into silence and capitulation.
These are scary times, but people need to stop cowering. They need to speak up. They need to show up. They need to say that this is not the America any of us were taught to believe in. This is not the America of freedom and rights.
This is a desecration of the high (and often unmet) ideals of what America is supposed to be striving for. This is spitting on the fundamental concepts of the American project.
And where are all those self-proclaimed defenders of campus free speech now? The same voices who treated student protesters as an existential threat to academic freedom are conspicuously silent as government agents literally kidnap students for their political expression. Their silence exposes their previous concerns as purely performative.
This isn’t just about free speech anymore — it’s about whether we’ll allow the government to normalize disappearing people for their political views. Everyone who claims to care about constitutional rights and academic freedom needs to speak up now. Because those who remain silent in the face of such clear authoritarian overreach are complicit.
If you’re going to plan military operations over Signal, you probably shouldn’t accidentally add a journalist to the chat. And if you’re going to do government business over Signal specifically to avoid federal record-keeping laws, you definitely shouldn’t get caught doing it. Yet here we are: A day after we learned that top Trump administration officials — including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, VP JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — were coordinating Yemen bombing plans over an unsecured Signal group chat (with bonus journalist Jeffrey Goldberg accidentally included), the first lawsuit has arrived.
The watchdog group American Oversight’s filing makes the obvious point: Using Signal to dodge the Federal Records Act’s requirements is, well, illegal. The law is quite clear about this:
To comply with the statute, the agency head “shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities.”
Each agency head is further required to establish a records management program providing “effective controls over the creation and over the maintenance and use of records,” id. § 3102(1), and to “establish safeguards against the removal or loss of records the head of [the] agency determines to be necessary and required by regulations of the Archivist,”
When records are handled in a manner that contravenes the FRA, or a parallel agency record-keeping policy, the FRA obligates the agency head to “notify the Archivist of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records in the custody of the agency . . . .”
While there are multiple layers of problems here — from the careless handling of national security information to the sloppy inclusion of an outside journalist to the fundamental question of bombing people halfway across the world — the lawsuit zeros in on what appears to be a deliberate attempt to dodge accountability. Rather than using secure government systems that properly preserve records as required by law, this administration chose to conduct war planning over Signal — a choice that seems designed specifically to keep these discussions hidden from legally mandated record-keeping requirements.
Signal is not an authorized system for preserving federal records and does not comply with recordkeeping requirements under the FRA or NARA guidance
Messages in the Signal chat about official government actions, including, but not limited to, national security deliberations, are federal records and must be preserved in accordance with federal statutes, and agency directives, rules, and regulations.
This incident didn’t come as a complete surprise to American Oversight. The watchdog group has been trying to get access to administration Signal messages since January, having filed multiple FOIA requests specifically seeking both email and Signal discussions between various agencies and the White House. Those requests remain pending, but this accidental revelation suggests they were right to be concerned.
On January 28, 2025, American Oversight submitted a FOIA request to DoD (bearing American Oversight internal tracking number DOD-25-0183) seeking all records reflecting communications, expressly including Signal messages, between DoD officials, including Pete Hegseth, and anyone in the White House Office, containing one or more specified key terms, from January 20, 2025, through January 27, 2025. On January 28, 2025, DoD acknowledged the request and assigned it tacking number 25-F-2084. Upon information and belief, American Oversight’s request remains pending
And then there’s this simple fact: this Signal group chat only came to light through sheer incompetence. How many other potentially illegal chat groups exist where officials remembered to double-check their participant lists? As the filing notes:
Defendants’ use of Signal, as demonstrated by this particular example, presents a substantial risk that they have used and continue to use Signal in other contexts, thereby creating records that are subject to the FRA and/or the FOIA, but are not being preserved as required by those statutes.
Defendants’ use of Signal, as demonstrated by this particular example, strongly suggests that they have used Signal to communicate about matters that may otherwise have been discussed via email, thereby avoiding creating records responsive to American Oversight’s FOIA requests for emails.
Beyond just preserving these specific Signal messages, the lawsuit aims to stop this administration’s apparent pattern of using non-secure messaging apps to dodge their record-keeping obligations. Though given their demonstrated technical expertise so far, perhaps we should be grateful they’re not trying to conduct military operations via ExTwitter DMs.
Though, if they were doing that, perhaps we would have had Elon Musk leaking the messages himself.
Oh, and this morning the case got assigned to Judge Boasberg, who is already dealing with this administration’s nonsense regarding the rendition flights to El Salvador. So that should be fun.
In Mike’s thorough post yesterday on the topic of the Trump administration’s naked contempt for judicial oversight, the main theme and takeaway from it was a simple one: this authoritarian regime would much rather waste everyone’s time trying to play procedural and semantic games with the courts than actually participate in honest deliberations with them. This is no small thing and it portends so much more about how this adminisration is going to behave across the government. Trump and his complicit cabinet, some members of which will inevitably be hung out to dry eventually when things go wrong enough, have no time for process. No time for rules. Or truth. Or honest dialogue. There is only the end goal that has been demanded by the mad king. Any norms or rules that get in the way of the goal are to be routed around in as contemptious a manner possible.
So it goes in the ongoing case before federal judge James Boasberg. This is the case in which the court ordered what the administration calls “deportations” — though since they are without any form of due process it’s more accurate to call them human trafficking — conducted as a result of Trump’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Boasberg issued verbal and written orders that the rendition flights be stopped and that any planes that hadn’t arrived at their destination, including those in the air, be returned until Boasberg could evaluate the legitimacy of the use of the centuries old law.
But some of the planes didn’t stop, and not all in the air were ordered to turn around. With no due process, there is no assurance that the government’s claim as to who the people on these planes are is accurate. Even as the judge demanded information on the timelines at play to determine if his orders were violated or ignored, administration officials as high up as the Secretary of State Marco Rubio jeered gleefully on social media sites with retweets and the like. Boasberg, a decidedly conservative judge, was falsely mocked as a “radical left lunatic.”
US District Judge James Boasberg vowed on Friday to find out whether officials in the Trump administration violated his orders temporarily blocking the use of an 1798 law for deportations by refusing to turn two flights around last weekend.
“I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order – who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” Boasberg said near the end of an hourlong hearing over whether he should lift the pair of orders he issued last Saturday.
Rather than participate with a coequal branch of government, however, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi have instead decided to play more childish games. Transparently childish, too, by any honest reading of their response. As had been speculated in previous news on the case, the government has decided to attempt to invoke state secrets privilege over the information the court has demanded. Which, again, is solely information about the timing of the order for the takeoff and the eventual landing of deportation flights that the court had temporarily ordered to be ceased. And because this administration can’t help itself, it did so with the vocabulary of a teenager refusing to go to bed on time.
The Court has all of the facts it needs to address the compliance issues before it,” Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top DOJ officials wrote in a filing to US District Judge James Boasberg. “Further intrusions on the Executive Branch would present dangerous and wholly unwarranted separation-of-powers harms with respect to diplomatic and national security concerns that the Court lacks competence to address.”
“The information sought by the Court is subject to the state secrets privilege because disclosure would pose reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs,” the officials wrote in the 10-page filing.
Among the questions Boasberg wanted the Justice Department to answer are ones concerning the exact timing of when the two planes took off from US soil and left US airspace that day, as well as the specific times individuals deported under Trump’s proclamation were transferred out of US custody that day.
Since the CNN post couldn’t be bothered to be so direct, allow me to: the Trump administration is full of shit. They know they’re full of shit. They know we know they’re full of shit. But they also are more than happy to wield what they think is a power card, believing they’ve found some procedural loophole. We just make this claim, they seem to think, and it lets us do whatever we want!
But that isn’t how asserting this privilege works at all. The judge will now have the opportunity to review whether the government’s assertion is warranted.
He told the government last week that it could submit the information under seal or invoke the privilege, though he said if DOJ decides to shield the information, he “is obligated to ‘determine whether the circumstances are appropriate for the claim of privilege.’”
The Trump administration appears to want it both ways. It wants to claim it has not violated any court order while also blocking the information to validate that it had not. There is nothing about what the government previously falsely called routine deportations that should have any play in state secrets. When did the planes take off, when did they land, and who did they contain? If those are state secrets, then anything can be a state secret.
And that’s the danger here. It’s the reason the administration must lose this game. If any judicial oversight can be routed around simply by putting a few complicit signatures on a piece of paper that says “state secrets,” then there simply is no judicial oversight.
And, in that negation of a coequal branch of government, you have the end of our Republic.
Look, I know you’ve probably already seen yesterday’s absolutely stunning story from Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic. The one where Trump administration officials somehow managed to add a journalist to their Signal group chat while planning out their bombing of the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The one that reads like a plot point rejected from VEEP for being too unrealistic.
But having spent 24 hours watching various hot takes and attempts to minimize just how catastrophically bad this security breach was, we need to talk about why this is even worse than most people realize.
First, just look at the casual way these officials discuss highly classified military operations. This isn’t just a quick “oops wrong number” text – this is an extended conversation about bombing plans happening on an unauthorized platform. And the deeper you read, the worse it gets:
At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”
At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”
The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent) wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”
Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.
At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”
The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”
100% OPSEC indeed. Remember, this is the Secretary of Defense (who we all knew was unqualified for the job) literally promising perfect operational security while inadvertently sharing war plans with a journalist over a non-governmental communications system.
And remember — this is just what Goldberg was comfortable sharing publicly. He notes that some messages were too sensitive to publish, containing operational details that “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel.” Think about that for a moment: these top officials were casually texting information so sensitive that even after the fact, a journalist felt publishing it would endanger lives.
This isn’t just incompetence — though it certainly demonstrates how the rank amateurs Trump put into power are catastrophically unqualified for their jobs. This is criminal negligence with national security implications.
Under 18 USC 793, “gross negligence” in handling defense information carries up to ten years in prison. And this case goes way beyond mere negligence — they deliberately chose to conduct classified military planning on an unauthorized platform, then accidentally broadcast it to a journalist. That’s before we even get to the numerous other laws likely violated here.
While some members of Congress, including a few Republicans, are appropriately alarmed by this breach, the GOP leadership is desperately trying to minimize it. Take Rep. Don Bacon, an Armed Services Committee member and former Air Force brigadier general, who actually told Axios: “I’ve accidentally sent the wrong person a text. We all have.”
This kind of false equivalence is both dangerous and stupid. This wasn’t a misdirected happy birthday text, you dipshit. This was classified military planning conducted over a third-party messaging app. Yes, Signal’s encryption is excellent — but that’s completely beside the point. There’s a reason the government has specific secured communications systems, SCIFs, and strict protocols for handling classified information.
Even more concerning than Bacon’s clueless response is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to downplay this massive security breach: “They’re gonna track that down and make sure that doesn’t happen again…. Clearly, I think the administration has acknowledged it was a mistake and they’ll tighten up.”
This wasn’t some minor technical slip-up that just needs a policy reminder. This was top officials deliberately choosing to conduct classified military planning on unauthorized systems. The fact that they accidentally included a journalist just exposed what they were doing — but the underlying violation was using Signal in the first place.
And here’s what should really keep you up at night: we only know about this because they happened to add a journalist who went public about this single chat. How many other sensitive conversations are happening on Signal or other unauthorized platforms? How many other “accidental” additions might have gone unnoticed? How many foreign intelligence services are already exploiting this administration’s casual approach to operational security?
Let’s put this in perspective: this is the same Trump team that turned “but her emails” into a movement over Hillary Clinton’s private email server. We were critical of Clinton’s server too — it was a legitimately bad security practice. But what we’re seeing here makes Clinton’s server look like amateur hour.
Clinton used a private server for mostly unclassified State Department business, with a handful of retroactively classified emails found in the mix. These guys are literally planning military strikes over Signal, complete with operational details so sensitive that journalists won’t even publish them. And they’re doing it specifically to dodge both security protocols and federal records laws.
The private server versus Signal distinction matters too. Clinton’s setup, while improper, was at least a dedicated system. These officials are just using a consumer app, making it virtually impossible to properly archive communications as required by law. They’re not just mishandling classified info — they’re deliberately choosing tools that help them hide their tracks.
And, yes, pretty much all of the officials in the chat are on record screaming about supposed security failures during Democratic administrations. CNN put together an incredible supercut of a bunch of these dipshits screaming about security breaches from Democrats:
CNN put together a collection of clips of various Trump officials who were on the signal chat criticizing Hillary Clinton’s email server
Though, my favorite may be this tweet from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (a member of the group chat) from just ten days ago saying “any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.”
Huh, maybe someone should get on responding to this lawbreaking that you were a part of then.
And then there’s Donald Trump’s telling response to this security nightmare. After first trying to dismiss the story by attacking The Atlantic (“a magazine that is going out of business”), Trump pivots to what he thinks is the only relevant point: “Well, it couldn’t have been very effective, because the attack was very effective.”
Think about that for a moment. The man who led “lock her up” chants over Clinton’s email server — who insisted the mere existence of a private server was disqualifying regardless of any actual harm — is now arguing that leaking classified military plans is fine as long as the operation still succeeded.
This is the same Trump who once claimed Clinton’s email practices were “bigger than Watergate.” The same Trump who said anyone mishandling classified information should be disqualified from public service. Now he’s shrugging off his own officials literally texting war plans to random journalists because hey, the bombing worked out okay in the end.
Some Trump defenders are trying to minimize this by claiming the published excerpts only show policy debate among senior officials. But Goldberg’s reporting makes clear just how dangerous this breach was:
At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts.The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that theHegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.
Let that sink in. These weren’t just policy discussions — these were detailed military plans so sensitive that publishing them could endanger American lives. And they were being casually shared on Signal, where any “accidental” addition could have accessed them.
Remember Benghazi? Republicans spent years investigating Obama administration officials over that attack. They held endless hearings, demanded countless documents, and threw around accusations of criminal negligence and security failures. Now imagine if they’d discovered Obama officials were planning military operations over WhatsApp and accidentally adding journalists to the chat.
In any functioning administration, this would be a career-ending scandal. Multiple officials would be fired. Security protocols would be completely overhauled. Criminal investigations would be launched. Instead, we’re watching Republicans try to wave this away as a simple mistake — just an errant text, no big deal since the bombing worked out fine.
This isn’t just covering up incompetence anymore. This is actively endangering national security by normalizing absolutely reckless handling of classified military operations. Anyone claiming otherwise is either lying or has completely abandoned any pretense of caring about operational security when their team is in charge.
I think lots of people know the kind of person who thinks they’re more clever than they really are. The kind of person who thinks that they can outwit the system by playing stupid games. The kind of person who thinks that this kind of beating the system is because they’re smart. This kind of person is usually viewed as a dipshit. Donald Trump’s DOJ seems to be, as a group, acting like just that kind of dipshit.
Like that overconfident student who thinks they’ve discovered one weird trick to beat the system, the DOJ keeps playing increasingly transparent games in court — making patently ridiculous arguments while acting shocked and offended when judges see right through their obvious nonsense.
It is a form of contempt. Not necessarily in the legal sense. But it is a kind of obvious contempt for the very systems and institutions of our judicial system that they are supposed to be protecting as a part of the constitutional order. And while judges are often willing to give great leeway to bad actors in their courtroom, at some point the outright contempt for the court can turn into something judges will start calling out.
I’m reminded of a college classmate who exemplified this mindset perfectly. He’d spend countless hours finding elaborate ways to game every assignment and test, devising increasingly convoluted schemes to avoid doing the actual work. The irony was that his schemes typically required far more effort than simply completing the assignments properly would have taken. But he sure was proud of the ways he believed he was beating the system.
That same misguided energy now permeates Trump’s DOJ (indeed, I just looked up on LinkedIn if that classmate might now work for the DOJ — thankfully he’s not there). These officials pour tremendous effort into crafting obviously laughable legal arguments, filing misleading declarations, and playing semantic games with court orders — all while seemingly convinced of their own clever brilliance. Just like my former classmate, they’re expending more energy trying to game the system than it would take to actually fulfill their constitutional duties and serve the American people. The result is a particularly toxic form of institutional contempt — not just disregard for the courts, but a sort of smirking certainty that they’re somehow outsmarting the entire judicial system.
It is nearly impossible to keep track of all of the various lawsuits that have been filed against the plethora of illegal actions taken by the Trump administration in the last two months since inauguration (though kudos to folks like Just Security who have been tracking them as best as they can).
The Boasberg case represents a critical escalation in this pattern of contempt. While legal scholars debate what precisely constitutes a constitutional crisis, Corbin Barthold makes a compelling case that we’ve now crossed that threshold. When a federal judge explicitly orders planes carrying deportees to return and the administration simply ignores that order, we’re witnessing something qualitatively different from their usual games.
THE LONG-AWAITED CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS has now arrived. It is time for a court to say so.
On Saturday night, James Boasberg, a federal judge in the District of Columbia, issued a pair of emergency orders. The government, he had just been told at a hastily convened hearing, was removing from the country, without due process, more than a hundred alleged gang members. The planes, he learned, were already in the air. To justify this stunning move, President Trump had issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
At around 6:45 p.m., Boasberg orally ordered the planes turned around. “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” he ruled from the bench. “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
At 7:26 p.m., he issued a briefwritten orderbarring the government from relying on the Alien Enemies Act to remove noncitizens from the country.
The government ignored both orders.
This outright defiance marks a subtle, but notable, departure from the administration’s playbook the past few months. Until now, they’ve preferred more smirking forms of contempt — slow-walking court orders, playing word games with compliance, or burying judges in misleading declarations. But each of these smaller acts of contempt has apparently emboldened them toward more brazen defiance.
A second administration official said Trump was not defying the judge whose ruling came too late for the planes to change course: “Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders.”
This argument, that the order came too late, is nonsense. But it’s notable how the administration is trying to insist it’s actually obeying orders in court, while doing wink, wink, nod, nod stuff out of court.
The administration’s attempts to characterize this as a routine “deportation” matter represent perhaps their most cynical wordplay yet (and one the media should stop repeating, though that’s a different issue). Deportation is a legal process with established due process rights. What happened here was something far darker: the US government engaging in what amounts to human trafficking, shipping people to El Salvador as forced labor without any due process. The mask slipped entirely when El Salvador’s President tweeted “Oopsie… too late” in response to Judge Boasberg’s order — a tweet that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk both found amusing enough to amplify:
The full scope of what’s happening deserves to be called out directly. Start with the legal sleight-of-hand: The administration has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act, a widely disparaged authoritarian relic that only applies during “a declared war” or “invasion” — neither of which exists. They’re wielding this zombie legislation to deny basic due process rights to people on American soil, shipping them to El Salvador (not even their country of origin) to become literal slave labor — all funded by US taxpayers.
The contempt deepens with their public justification. Without due process requirements, they don’t actually have to prove their claims that these people are gang members. And they can’t — because the claims are false for many of those shipped out. Reports show that many of the deportees have no gang connections at all. Any competent law enforcement official would recognize these allegations as nonsense.
But the most chilling display comes in their response to judicial oversight: when a federal judge attempts to restore basic due process rights, the administration not only ignores his order, but the Secretary of State publicly mocks it while coordinating with their partner in human trafficking. This isn’t just contempt of court — it’s contempt for the entire concept of legal constraints on executive power.
The administration’s response to Judge Boasberg perfectly encapsulates their broader strategy: when the facts aren’t on your side, attack the judge. Their characterization of Boasberg as a “radical left lunatic partisan” would be merely laughable if it weren’t so deliberately misleading. This is the same conservative judge who repeatedly ruled in Trump’s favor in other cases — ordering Hillary Clinton’s emails released, blocking the release of Trump’s tax returns, and limiting disclosures from both the Mueller investigation and the classified documents grand jury.
The contempt here operates on multiple levels: there’s the surface-level dishonesty of painting a conservative judge as a radical leftist, but more insidiously, there’s the implicit message that any judge who dares enforce the law against Trump must be acting from partisan motives. This fits a broader pattern where the administration’s lawyers aren’t just playing games with legal arguments — they’re actively working to undermine the legitimacy of judicial oversight itself.
The Boasberg case may be the most brazen example, but it’s far from isolated. Across multiple courts, judges are increasingly witnessing this administration’s attempts to treat the judicial system like a game they can cleverly exploit. Their contempt generally takes three forms, each more concerning than the last:
First, there’s the malicious compliance playbook — taking court orders so literally they become absurd. The Social Security Administration exemplifies this approach. When Judge Ellen Hollander blocked DOGE from accessing records, interim SSA head Lee Dudek responded by threatening to shut down the entire Social Security system, claiming his entire IT staff were somehow “DOGE affiliates.” This led to an increasingly furious series of clarifications from the judge, culminating in her observation that either Dudek was lying or the DOJ lawyers were.
Second, there’s the strategy of procedural manipulation — exploiting court customs and courtesy to gain tactical advantages. Take the EPA case, where officials used procedural games to try to circumvent judicial oversight. They asked for a routine 24-hour extension on a hearing (which opposing counsel typically grant as a professional courtesy), then used that delay to sneak in actions that would have been prevented by the pending TRO:
Third, we’re seeing increasingly more open defiance of court orders, coupled with attempts to delegitimize any judge who rules against them. The Perkins Coie case perfectly demonstrates this escalation. When Judge Beryl Howell issued a TRO blocking an obviously unconstitutional executive order targeting the law firm for representing Democratic interests, Attorney General Pam Bondi and OMB Director Russell Vought responded with explicit defiance:
The Executive Branch’s position is that Executive Order 14230 is permissible, and that the Court’s order was erroneous. The government reserves the right to take all necessary and legal actions in response to the “dishonest and dangerous” conduct of Perkins Coie LLP, as set forth in Executive Order 14230.
At the same time, the DOJ is trying to disqualify Judge Howell for… “hostility” towards the President, again setting up the idea that any judicial action holding them to account is driven by bias, rather than an actual respect for the Constitution.
The pattern of contempt continues across other cases, each fitting into these three categories of increasingly brazen defiance:
More malicious compliance games appear in the DOGE leadership saga, where pretend DOGE boss Amy Gleason filed a declaration claiming to run the agency even as Trump himself said in his address to Congress that Elon Musk runs it. When called on this discrepancy, Gleason’s response dripped with technically-accurate-but-misleading wordplay: “Elon Musk does not work at USDS. I do not report to him, and he does not report to me. To my knowledge, he is a Senior Advisor to the White House.” The contempt deepened when it emerged that Gleason was simultaneously appointed as an HHS consultant a week after being named DOGE head.
The EPA case shows how procedural games escalate to outright dishonesty. EPA boss Lee Zeldin, fixated on a deceptively edited Project Veritas video, illegally froze a Citibank account, and attempted to launch a grand jury investigation. When challenged in court, DOJ lawyers told Judge Tanya Chutkan they couldn’t provide evidence of any criminal violation because “this Court is not in a position to rule upon whether or not this termination was consistent with the contracts.”
Perhaps most telling is the transgender military ban case, where the administration’s contempt for judicial oversight is laid bare. The DOJ keeps insisting to the judge that there is no ban on transgender service members, while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth openly declares exactly the opposite:
These examples paint a clear picture of an administration that, like my college classmate from years ago, believes it’s brilliantly outsmarting the system while actually just making itself look increasingly desperate to avoid any accountability. But unlike that student’s academic games, these legal shenanigans carry profound constitutional implications.
What started as wannabe-clever-but-obvious attempts to circumvent court orders has evolved into something far more dangerous: a systematic effort to delegitimize judicial oversight itself. Each time they respond to a court order with malicious compliance, procedural manipulation, or outright defiance, they’re not just showing contempt for individual judges — they’re undermining the very concept of judicial review.
The progression is clear: first came the word games and barely-technically-accurate-but-misleading declarations, then the exploitation of court procedures and customs, and now increasingly open defiance coupled with attempts to paint any judge who enforces the law as politically biased. This is how institutional guardrails get dismantled — not through dramatic confrontation, but through a thousand small acts of contempt that gradually normalize the idea that court orders are merely suggestions to be cleverly evaded.
Trump has already effectively neutered congressional oversight. Now his DOJ appears determined to do the same to the judiciary, treating federal judges like frustrated professors whose rules are just obstacles to be gamed. But unlike my former classmate’s academic adventures, the stakes here aren’t just a passing grade — they’re the continued functioning of our constitutional system of checks and balances.
Judges are starting to catch on, calling out these games with increasing fury. But judicial anger alone won’t be enough. An administration that responds to court orders with winks, nods, and “technically accurate” lies isn’t demonstrating clever lawyering — it’s showing fundamental contempt for constitutional governance itself. Those who shrug this off as mere legal gamesmanship are missing the escalating danger: when government lawyers treat the judicial branch as a system to be cleverly gamed rather than an essential check on power, they’re not just failing their professional obligations. They’re actively participating in the dismantling of judicial review itself.
These officials seem convinced they can keep playing these games forever — or at least until there’s no independent judiciary left to play games with. At some point, judges need to stop writing angry opinions and start issuing contempt charges. And Congress needs to wake the fuck up before it’s too late.
Last week, we wrote about Senator Dick Durbin going on the floor of the Senate and spreading some absolute nonsense about Section 230 as he continued to push his STOP CSAM Act. His bill has some good ideas mixed in with some absolutely terrible ideas. In particular, the current language of the bill is a direct attack on encryption (though we’re told that there are other versions floating around). The methods by which it does so is in removing Section 230, enabling people to sue websites if they “intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently” host CSAM or “promote or facilitate” child sexual exploitation.
Now, sure, go after sites that intentionally and knowingly host CSAM. That seems easy enough (and is already illegal under federal law and not blocked by Section 230). But, the fear is that using encryption could be seen as “facilitating” exploitation, and thus the offering of encrypted communications absolutely will be used as plaintiffs to file vexatious lawsuits against websites.
If Congress doesn’t approve kids’ online safety legislation, then it should repeal Communications Decency Act Section 230, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told us last week.
Ranking member Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is seeking Durbin’s support for legislation… that would repeal Section 230, the tech industry’s shield against liability for hosting third-party content on platforms. Durbin told us he will see what happens with Judiciary-approved legislation on kids’ safety. “If we can’t make the changes with the bills we’ve already passed, 230 has to go,” Durbin said.
Durbin has already made it clear that he does not understand how Section 230 itself works. Last week, on the floor of the Senate, he ranted misleadingly about it while pushing for unanimous consent for STOP CSAM. He starts off with a tearjerker of a story about parents who lost children to terrible people online. But rather than blaming the terrible people, he seems to think that social media companies should wave a magic wand and magically stop bad people:
The emotion I witnessed during that hearing in the faces of survivors, parents, and family members were unforgettable. There were parents who lost their children to that little to the telephone that they were watching day in and day out.
They committed suicide at the instruction of some crazy person on the internet.
There were children there that had grown up into adults still haunted by the images that they shared with some stranger on that little telephone years and years ago.
So, first of all, as I’ve noted before, it is beyond cynical and beyond dangerous to blame someone’s death by suicide on any other person when no one knows for sure the real reason for taking that permanent, drastic step except the person who did it.
But, second, if someone is to blame, it is that “crazy person on the internet.” What Durbin leaves out is the most obvious question: was anything done to that “crazy person on the internet”?
And you think to yourself? Well, why didn’t they step up and say something? If those images are coming up on the Internet? Why don’t they do something about it? Why don’t they go to the social media site? And in many and most instances they did. And nothing happened and that’s a reason why we need this legislation.
So, a few things here: first off, his legislation is about STOP CSAM, yet he was talking about suicide. Those are… different things with different challenges? Second, the details absolutely matter here. If it is about CSAM, or even non-consensual intimate imagery (in most cases), every major platform already has a program to do so.
You can find the pages for Google, Meta, Microsoft and more to remove such content. And there are organizations like StopNCII that are very successful in removing such content as well.
If it’s actual CSAM, that’s already very illegal, and companies will remove it as soon as they find out about it. So Durbin’s claims don’t pass the sniff test, and suggest something else was going on in the situations he’s talking about, not evidence of the need for his legislation.
We say… STOP CSAM Act says, we’ll allow survivors to child online sexual exploitation to sue the tech companies that have knowingly and intentionally facilitated the exploitation.
Again, which platforms are not actually already doing that?
In other words one young woman told the story. She shared an image of herself an embarrassing image of herself that haunted her for decades afterwards. She went to the website. That was that was displaying this and told them this is something I want to take down. It is embarrassment to me. It happened when I was a little girl and still I’m living with it even today. They knew that it was on this website because this young woman and her family proved it, and yet they did nothing, nothing let him continue to play this exploitation over and over again.
Why how to get away with that they asked, and many people asked, I thought we had laws in this country protecting children what’s going on? Well, there’s a Section 230 which basically absolves these companies these media companies from responsibility for what is displayed on their websites on their social media pages. And that’s exactly what we change here.
Again, none of this makes any sense. If the imagery was actually CSAM, then that’s very much illegal and Section 230 has nothing to do with it. Durbin should then be asking why the DOJ isn’t taking action.
From the vague and non-specific description again, it sounds like this wasn’t actually CSAM, but rather simply “embarrassing” content. But “embarrassing” content is not against the law, and thus, this law still wouldn’t make any difference at all, because the content was legal.
So what situation does this law actually solve for? It’s not one involving Section 230 at all.
We say something basic and fundamental. If the social media site knowingly and intentionally continued to display these images, they’re subject to civil liability. They can be sued. Want to change this scene in a hurry? Turn the lawyers loose on them. Let them try to explain why they have no responsibility to that young woman who’s been exploited for decades. That’s what my bill works on. I’m happy to have co-sponsorship with Senator Graham and others. We believe that these bills this package of bill should come to the floor today.
Again, if it’s actually CSAM then it’s a criminal issue and the responsibility is on law enforcement. Why isn’t Durbin asking why law enforcement did nothing? Furthermore, all the major companies will report actual CSAM to NCMEC’s cybertip line, and most, if not all, of them will use some form of Microsoft’s PhotoDNA to identify repeats of the content.
So, if it’s true that this young woman had exploitative imagery being passed around, as Durbin claims, it sounds like either (1) it wasn’t actually illegal, in which case this bill would do nothing, or (2) there was a real failing of law enforcement and/or by NCMEC and PhotoDNA. It’s not at all clear how “turning the lawyers loose” for civil lawsuits fixes anything about that issue.
Again, Durbin seems to wholly misunderstand Section 230, issues related to CSAM, and how modern internet companies work. It’s not even clear from his speech that he understands the various issues. He switches at times from talk of suicide to embarrassing imagery to CSAM, without noting the fairly big differences between them all.
And now he wants to get rid of Section 230 entirely? Why?
The Communications Daily story about Durbin’s plans also has some ridiculous commentary from other senators, including Richard Blumenthal, who never misses an opportunity to be the wrongest senator about the internet.
Passing kids’ online safety legislation is more realistic than obtaining a Section 230 repeal, Senate Privacy Subcommittee Chairman Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told us in response to Graham’s plans. Blumenthal introduced the Kids Online Safety Act with Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., …“Passing a repeal of Section 230, which I strongly favor, is far more problematic than passing the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which has almost two-thirds of the Senate sponsoring,” said Blumenthal. “I will support repealing Section 230, but I think the more viable path to protecting children, as a first step, is to pass the Kids Online Safety Act.”
Of course Blumenthal hates 230 and wants it repealed. He’s never understood the internet. This goes all the way back to when he was Attorney General of Connecticut. He thought that he should be able to sue Craigslist for prostitution and blamed Section 230 for not letting him do so.
There are other dumb 230 quotes from others, including Chuck Grassley and Ben Ray Lujan (who is usually better than that), but the dumbest of all goes to Senator Marco Rubio:
Section 230 immunity hinges on the question of how much tech platforms are controlling editorial discretion, Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told us. “Are these people forums or are they exercising editorial controls that would make them publishers?” he said. “I think there are very strong arguments that they’re exercising editorial control.”
I know that a bunch of very silly people are convinced this is how Section 230 works, but it’s the opposite of this. The entire point of Section 230 is that it protects websites from liability for their editorial decision making. That’s it. That’s why 230 was passed. There is no “exercising editorial control” loophole that makes Section 230 not apply because the entire point of the law was to enable websites to feel free to exercise editorial control to create communities they wanted to support.
Rubio should know this, but so should the reporter for Communications Daily, Karl Herchenroeder, who wrote the above paragraph as if it was accurate, rather than completely backwards. Section 230 does not “hinge” on “how much tech platforms are controlling editorial discretion.” It hinges on “is this an interactive computer service or a user of such a service” and “is the content created by someone else.” That’s it. That’s the analysis. Editorial discretion has fuck all to do with it. And we’ve known this for decades. Anyone saying otherwise is ignorant or lying.
In the year 2024, it is beyond ridiculous that so many senators do not understand Section 230 and just keep misrepresenting it, to the point of wishing to repeal it (and with it, the open internet).
For several years we’ve noted how most of the calls to ban TikTok are bad faith bullshit made by a rotating crop of characters that not only couldn’t care less about consumer privacy, but are directly responsible for the privacy oversight vacuum TikTok (and everybody else) exploits.
The Act (pdf), according to the two lawmakers, vaguely attempts to “block and prohibit all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern.” It comes on the heels of numerous state bills attempting to ban state government employees from using TikTok on their personal devices.
Rubio’s new federal bill attempts to leverage the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEA) to ban TikTok from operating domestically here in the States, despite the fact that judges have ruled several times now that the IEAA doesn’t include such authority. Violating the act would result in criminal penalties of up to a $1 million fine and 20 years in prison.
Rubio trots out the now familiar argument that we simply must ban the hugely popular social media app because the Chinese could use it to propagandize children or spy on Americans:
“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok. This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day. We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”
So there are always two underlying claims when it comes to justifying a ban on TikTok. One, that the Chinese could use the app to propagandize children, of which there’s been zero meaningful evidence of at any coordinated scale. The other, more valid but overstated concern, is that TikTok-owner ByteDance will simply funnel U.S. consumer data to the Chinese government for ambiguous surveillance purposes.
Here’s the thing though: for decades the GOP (and more than a few Democrats) have worked tirelessly to erode FTC privacy enforcement authority and funding, while fighting tooth and nail against absolutely any meaningful privacy legislation for the Internet era. That opened the door for countless app makers, data brokers, telecoms, and bad actors from all over the world (including TikTok) to repeatedly abuse this accountability and oversight free for all.
For years, all you had to do to dodge any scrutiny was claim that the data you’re collecting is “anonymized,” a gibberish term with absolutely no meaning. Most anonymized users can be easily identified with just a smattering of additional datasets, allowing companies all around the globe to build detailed profiles of nearly every aspect of consumer behavior, from shopping and browsing habits to real-world movement and behavior patterns. Not even your health or mental health data is safe, really.
Bluntly, it’s because we spent two decades prioritizing making money over consumer safety or market health. The check is long overdue, and you see the impact every time you turn around in the form of another hack, breach, or privacy scandal.
Of course, this free for all was abused by foreign governments. It was never a question that corruption and a lack of market oversight would be exploited by foreign governments. If you actually care about national security, holding all companies and data brokers accountable for privacy abuses should be your priority. A basic, helpful, well-written privacy law should be your priority. A working, staffed, properly funded FTC should be your priority.
The GOP (and several Democrats) aren’t doing that because U.S. companies might lose some money. Instead, they’re pretending that banning a single app somehow fixes the entirety of a much bigger problem. A problem they genuinely helped create by opposing pretty much any meaningful oversight for any data-hoovering operation, provided they pinky swore they weren’t doing anything dodgy with it.
As we’ve noted several times now, you could ban TikTok immediately and the Chinese government could simply buy this (and more) data from a rotating crop of dodgy data brokers and assorted middlemen. As such, banning TikTok doesn’t actually fix any of the problems here, no matter how many times FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr claims otherwise on the TV.
You can also ban TikTok if you genuinely think it helps, but if you’re not doing the other stuff, you’re not actually doing anything. Another TikTok will simply spring up in its place because you haven’t done anything about the underlying conditions that opened the door to U.S. consumer data abuse by foreign governments. In any way. You’ve just put on a dumb play.
If you’re genuinely concerned about national security and privacy, you’d take the time to actually study the bigger problem. Vaguely pretending you’re standing up to the dastardly Chinese helps agitate and excite an often xenophobic GOP base, but what you’re actually doing is comprised of little more than some hand waving and a few farts unless you take meaningful, broader action.
I tend to think the real motivation here is actually just the usual: money. The GOP wants to force ByteDance to offload TikTok to an American billionaire of its choice. If you recall, Trump’s big “solution” for the “TikTok problem” was to sell the entire app to his buddies over at Walmart and Oracle, the latter with a long track record of its own various privacy abuses.
I’d wager this entire performance about TikTok is the lobbying off-gassing of some company that either doesn’t want to compete with TikTok directly (Facebook lobbyists can often be found trying to cause DC moral panics around TikTok), or some company or companies that hope to leverage phony privacy concerns to force ByteDance to sell them one of the most popular apps in tech history.
This is context you’ll find largely omitted from most press coverage of the story. Instead, you can watch as most press outlets unquestioningly frame politicians with an abysmal track record on consumer privacy (Brendan Carr or Marsha Blackburn quickly come to mind) as good faith champions of consumer privacy, despite the documented fact they’re directly responsible for the problem they’re pretending to fix.
