Fines and court costs 'destabilize employment, finances and health'

 U.S. state and local governments impose court fines and fees and use what they collect to fund court operations, law enforcement, and other government services, reported Pew. Between 2018 and 2022, courts in 24 states assessed nearly $14 billion in fines and fees, with rural communities—home to roughly 46 million people—bearing a disproportionate burden compared with urban communities. 

At the same time, a growing body of evidence shows that fines and fees are an unstable and unreliable revenue source, yielding limited and declining net returns for courts. Analyses of New Mexico and Texas found that collected fines and fees averaged 59% of assessed amounts from 2012 to 2018. And in 19 states, median state collection rates fell by 33% from fiscal year 2018 to fiscal 2022, while imposing significant burdens on communities.

For many households, court debt becomes an added bill to pay on top of necessities like rent, transportation, utilities, and groceries. Just as missed rent or utility payments can trigger eviction or shut-offs, missed court payments often trigger cascading punitive sanctions—like driver’s license suspension, repeated court involvement, and arrest—that can destabilize employment, finances, and health. 

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Former U.S. Attorney sue DOJ and AG Blanche over his firing

Less than three hours after a right-wing influencer revealed a blog post critical of Donald Trump, the DOJ fired U.S. Attorney Will Rosenzweig. He received an emailed letter signed by Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, dismissing him from his position as the U.S. attorney for Miami, effective immediately. No reason was provided, reported The New York Times.

Mr. Rosenzweig has now sued the Justice Department along with Todd Blanche, who now runs the department, and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, asking for financial damages and his job back. In doing so, he joined a growing list of former prosecutors and federal agents who have gone to court in an effort to fight back against the widespread purge of law enforcement officials deemed to be disloyal to the president.

During Mr. Trump’s second term, agents and prosecutors have been fired for any number of reasons. Some were seasoned veterans who lost their jobs while trying to protect subordinates from being dismissed. Others were accused, sometimes incorrectly, of having worked on criminal cases involving the president. Many worked on cases stemming from the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Rosenzweig’s firing was one of several that shared a different twist: right-wing commentators claimed to be behind them. On the morning after he was terminated, Ms. Winters reposted a message from another far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, announcing the news. Ms. Winters’s message, punctuated by a smiley-face emoji, declared: “Got this guy fired.”

Many of Ms. Winters’s posts have since been deleted, but lawyers for Mr. Rosenzweig included screenshots of them in their lawsuit. In the posts, she said that Mr. Rosenzweig had “smeared” Mr. Trump in his writings by calling him “mentally unfit” and a “white supremacist.”

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Tennessee moving forward with death penalty after botched execution

The Tennessee Department of Correction is scheduled to execute Anthony “Darrell” Hines on August 13, 2026, reported WPLN News.

For weeks, more and more people have been calling for a death penalty moratorium. But yet again, Gov. Bill Lee says that’s not going to happen.

“We live in a broken world where people commit horrible and heinous crimes, and victims and their families are devastated,” he said in a media availability this week. “And it’s a very difficult — those are very difficult situations… The people have chosen the death penalty for those most heinous crimes. It’s my responsibility to make sure that law is carried out.”

His statement was noteworthy for two reasons: Several unrelated groups — defense attorneys, faith leaders, doctors and Republican lawmakers — have called for an investigation into a failed execution in May, and say the state shouldn’t put anyone to death until that’s done. Lee’s statements indicate he does not want to heed that call. And Lee has maintained that during that failed attempt, the Tennessee Department of Correction had followed the lethal injection protocol. That’s a widely disputed conclusion.

This all started three months ago, when the agency tried and failed to execute Tony Carruthers. The medical staff tried to place a typical IV and failed. Per the lethal injection protocol, a doctor then tried to place a central line in a deeper vein. He also failed. After an hour, Lee called into the prison and ordered them to stop.

That cast a spotlight on whether Tennessee is finding qualified medical professionals to serve on the IV team and as the on-site physician.

Mounting concerns

First, defense attorneys for death row inmates asked for a moratorium, investigation and protocol rewrite. Then in early July, nearly a dozen Republican state senators made a similar call. Lee made his first “no moratorium” announcement then.

Last week, a group of about 40 doctors and nurses joined the call. They wrote a letter to Lee, arguing that medical ethics, including those laid out by the American Medical Association, bar participation in the death penalty.

“This means that the health care professionals who agree to take part in Tennessee’s executions are those willing to set aside their professional ethics,” the letter reads in part. “The problems that we have seen, such as in Mr. Carruthers’ case, are the predictable result of working with such unscrupulous actors.”

Then Tennessee’s Supreme Court announced it was taking up a different death row case. Next week, it will hold several days of hearings on whether the process will violate the rights of Christa Pike, who is scheduled to undergo the lethal injection on September 30. The court appointed a special master, which is a formal investigator. There’s a long list of constitutional concerns, most of them centering on Pike’s gender and extensive history of sexual trauma.

But the special master will also consider whether Pike is at risk of undergoing a cruel and unusual punishment because of her diagnosis with a blood disorder. The condition, thrombocytosis, means her high blood platelet count increases the risk of blood clotting, which can cause heart attacks and strokes. Pike’s attorneys argue this condition and her compromised veins could make delivering a lethal injection particularly difficult. Which would mean she’d likely need a central line placed, and would need a doctor on site capable of placing one.

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'Slush Fund' or not, Jan. 6 insurrectionists seeking payouts from the federal government

 The Treasury Department is illegally withholding information about who is receiving settlement money from its Judgment Fund, obscuring whether January 6th insurrectionists and Trump political allies are receiving massive payouts from the federal government, according to a lawsuit filed today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The suit seeks to require the government to promptly post required information about Judgment Fund payments, including all payments going back to the start of the current Trump administration, as well as correcting inaccurate descriptions of previous payments. 

In May 2026, President Trump entered into an unprecedented “settlement” with his own Justice Department, which established a $1.776 billion slush fund intended to pay out victims of “weaponization,” including January 6th defendants. The slush fund garnered significant backlash, and the Trump administration declared the fund dead, before formally rescinding the order establishing the fund this weekend under duress from Congress. It remains unclear whether the DOJ can unilaterally rescind the order without agreement from the other litigants involved in the underlying suit, including litigant Trump. With the slush fund in limbo, Trump’s allies, including January 6th defendants, have apparently turned to pursuing payouts through the Federal Tort Claims Act settlement process, seeking millions of dollars in “restitution” for alleged wrongdoings related to their prosecution. 

When the government settles with an individual under the FTCA, the Treasury Department pays that individual from its Judgment Fund. The Treasury Department is legally required to publicly disclose important settlement payment details, such as the names of claimants and their counsel, and a brief statement of facts giving rise to the claims being settled. Treasury, however, has for years adopted an across-the-board policy of noncompliance—omitting names and facts in every case and instead publishing opaque descriptors that are often inaccurate or misleading. The law requiring the disclosure of settlement payments was passed on a bipartisan basis, and was primarily sponsored by Republican Rep. Doug Collins. 

“Taxpayers deserve to know where their money is going and why, especially if it’s going to the president’s cronies,” said CREW President and CEO Donald K. Sherman. “The Trump administration seems hellbent on secretly paying out Trump’s allies, including the violent insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6th. There is a law in place to prevent this secrecy, and the Treasury Department needs to follow it.”

The Trump administration’s misuse of the FTCA claims settlement process is not mere conjecture. For months, the Justice Department has been led by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who approved and defended Trump’s initial collusive settlement. Under Blanche’s leadership as Deputy Attorney General and later Acting Attorney General, the DOJ has awarded generous settlements to January 6th participants and other political allies despite obvious defenses the government could have used to challenge the claims they asserted. In one especially egregious example, the Justice Department agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle an FTCA case brought by Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, for wrongful prosecution, despite the fact that Flynn had pleaded guilty to his crimes and a district court had already dismissed Flynn’s FTCA case. The Treasury Department has withheld payment information related to these suspect settlements.

“Even if President Trump’s slush fund is nominally dead—something that still remains in doubt despite Acting Attorney General Blanche’s rescission of the DOJ’s order—his administration is apparently ok with using the Judgment Fund in its place,” said Sherman. “The law does not allow the government to spend taxpayer dollars in secret. If the president is paying his cronies, the public is entitled to know.”

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Danner: 'Trumps Constitutional Dictatorship'

 Mark Danner writes in The New York Review:

Amid the tumult and the bluster and the noise, what exactly makes our singular president tick? After revisiting in minute detail the innumerable outrages and atrocities of Donald Trump’s second term we come upon, in the epilogue to Regime Change, the purported answer. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, having mostly completed their epic chronicle, arrive at the now-gilded Oval Office for their “fact-checking” interview. The president, in an expansive mood, greets them and guides them to their seats in front of the Resolute Desk. “No other president,” he had recently declared with his customary eloquence, “could do some of the shit I’m doing.”

Exactly what shit might he have had in mind? Sending masked ICE agents to seize and deport hundreds of thousands of largely law-abiding people and imprison 60,000 more? Overturning the eighty-year-old world trade system by imposing arbitrary tariffs? Launching a war of choice against Iran with nary a word to Congress or the American people? Firing hundreds of thousands of government workers and gutting USAID, PBS, and the Kennedy Center? Attacking law firms and universities and television networks?

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Blanche grovels for votes from GOP Senate Judiciary Committee holdouts

After a weekslong standoff between senators and the Trump administration, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the parties had reached a deal and that he had issued an order “officially” rescinding a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, reported NBC News.

“My team and I have met with committee members and Senators over the past several weeks and addressed any concerns or outstanding questions,” Blanche wrote on X. “We have enjoyed good faith discussions, and as a result issue the following order and update with regard to the May IRS settlement. The Department always welcomes and appreciates productive engagement with all members of Congress.”

Attached to his post was a signed order that said, “The Attorney General’s May 18, 2026 Order establishing the Anti-Weaponization Fund (‘Fund’) is rescinded and shall have nor force or effect.”

“This order establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no fund,” the order read.

Blanche’s announcement comes two days before the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote on his nomination to be attorney general in a permanent capacity.

The fund was part of a settlement that stemmed from a lawsuit President Donald Trump filed against the IRS, a deal which also shielded the Trump family from tax audits. The fund has been criticized in part because the payouts could extend to participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Blanche faced pushback from key GOP Sens. John Cornyn, of Texas, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, who said their support for him hinged on the administration rescinding its plans for the fund.

Cornyn spokesperson Natalie Yezbick confirmed in a statement that the senator “has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice.”

The department “will be issuing a formal order permanently terminating the anti-weaponization fund and making clear in a binding written document that the scope of the audit settlement is limited to only the plaintiffs, including the President, and the IRS,” Yezbick said.

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Trump threatens Congress: "Todd Blanche was a voice of reason!'

Here is a great idea. President Trump said that he would revive a proposal for a $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund that would compensate his supporters if the Senate does not confirm Todd Blanche his nominee for attorney general, reported The New York Times. 

Someone should tell the President that the reason Blanche doesn't have support among GOP senators is because of his willingness to scratch all facets of the so-called "anti-weaponization" proposal. 

The administration had backed off plans to establish such a fund in June as it was criticized as a scheme to reward political allies with taxpayers’ dollars.

But in a social media post, Mr. Trump reacted to skepticism about his nomination of Todd Blanche, his former defense lawyer, to be attorney general, saying that he would keep Mr. Blanche as the acting attorney general if the Senate failed to confirm him, and added that he would “push hard” to pass legislation creating the fund.

“Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

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