Trump attacks his appointees to the Supreme Court after vote by mail slap down

President Trump assailed the Supreme Court’s decision to block his administration’s efforts to change mail voting and issued a blistering criticism of the three justices he appointed during his first term, reported The New York Times.

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote on social media, referring to Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch. “They are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an executive order by Mr. Trump that would have drastically changed how Americans vote by mail ahead of the midterm elections. Mr. Trump has long railed against mail-in voting and suggested it is rife with cheating — even though he has voted by mail in recent elections.

In his post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump slammed the decision as “horrible, highly political.”

“It is a big loss for Republicans, and America itself, and makes cheating by the Radical Left ‘Dumocrats,’ on Mail-In Ballots, a much easier thing to do - And now they have an open field to do so!” he wrote.

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Trump Administration uses obscure customs statute to circumvent search warrant

The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight, reported The Guardian.

In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of the request for her information, nor was she given a chance to contest the government’s effort to obtain them, her lawyers said in court papers.

In February of this year, federal prosecutors twice sought search warrants for account information for the YouTube channel of Fort and the journalist Don Lemon, both of whom have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in connection to a protest at a Minneapolis church in January that they were covering. A judge twice rejected the request, writing that the government had failed to establish probable cause of a crime and that he wanted Lemon and Fort to be informed of the request so they could have a chance to challenge it. About a month after the judge’s ruling in late February, the government said it was withdrawing the request.

But officials hadn’t given up on getting the data.

Less than a month later, the DHS served Google with a different request for the YouTube information. This time, DHS utilized a different method that didn’t require approval from a judge, only a sign-off from a DHS official. It served Google an administrative summons citing an arcane provision of federal law – 19 USC 1509 – dealing with customs imports. The provision gives the DHS broad power to inspect records in order to determine whether duties and taxes are being correctly levied on imported items. It also instructed the recipients of the summons to keep it secret.

The DHS summons was issued under a statute that does give the agency broad power to demand records, but only in the limited circumstance of there being a need to investigate a customs issue, said Chris Duncan, a former lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security. “These laws have absolutely nothing to do with a domestic situation at a church, a social media post, even an immigration matter,” he said.

These laws have nothing to do with a domestic situation at a church, a social media post, even an immigration matter

Chris Duncan, former lawyer at the DHS

“It’s outrageous conduct on so many levels. It’s hard to know where to begin,” said John Roth, who served as the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security from 2014 to 2017. “This is an improper use of the subpoena under any circumstances. This is not a customs case; it is not a customs violation. They are not investigating a customs violation.”

The episode in Minnesota was particularly alarming because it appeared to be an end run around a judge who was skeptical of the government’s need for the information.

“There is no judge in the loop. You don’t have that independent authority to scrutinize the demand and to say whether or not it’s legitimate,” said Caitlin Vogus, a senior adviser at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The DHS also sought and obtained six months of phone records for Fort from T-Mobile, which included records for more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified the government was seeking the records until mid-July, when government lawyers produced them to her lawyers. Fort’s lawyers wrote in a filing this week they were “stunned” to see the government had unilaterally been able to obtain a log of her communications after a judge had warned them about obtaining records about a journalist.

“That’s very concerning because the information demanded can help the government uncover a journalist’s confidential sources,” Vogus said.

In a statement, T-Mobile did not address why it turned over the information.

“We take our responsibility to protect customers’ privacy and personal information very seriously. Our team carefully reviews government demands for customer information and responds in accordance with the law. We don’t comment on specific law enforcement demands,” the company said.

The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security both declined to comment on the use of the summons.

In addition to Fort and Lemon, the DHS also sought information on the YouTube accounts for the left-leaning outlet Democracy Now, conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and an independent journalist named Brendan Gutenschwager. Some of the videos they cited in the summons were livestreams of the protest, but not all of them. The video cited as part of the request for information on Democracy Now involved a news report on the protest and an interview with Nekima Levy Armstrong, who led the protest. The video cited on the request for Kelly’s show included an interview with Jonathan Parnell, the pastor at the church.

It’s unclear why exactly the DHS wanted the YouTube account information, which includes things like a user’s IP address, and information about when a user was logging in.

“It’s still concerning that the government sought subscriber information for Lemon and Fort because there’s no reason it would need this information for the criminal charges that it’s brought against them,” Vogus said. “It’s not a crime to post a YouTube video, and it’s not at all clear why the government is demanding this information about Lemon and Fort’s YouTube accounts.”

The episode was the most recent example of an alarming pattern in recent months in which the DHS avoided judicial scrutiny and deployed a summons related to customs enforcement to pressure companies into turning over information on Americans. The US constitution’s fourth amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and law enforcement generally must show a judge or a grand jury they have probable cause to believe the materials they want to search will produce evidence of a crime.

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Homeland Security conducts secret domestic spying operations violating the First Amendment

It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict, reported The New Republic.

We just learned about the broad outlines of this domestic surveillance from newly released court papers related to the ongoing prosecution of a handful of protesters. As The New York Times reported, the papers show that DHS began surveilling left-leaning groups—including a union, a climate change group, and others—after ICE killed Alex Pretti in January. This has entailed seeking financial records and infiltrating protest meetings that are protected by the First Amendment.

But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution and are available on Pacer—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.

It’s jarring, revealing stuff. The reports show that covert agents surreptitiously attended well over a dozen protest meetings organized by groups like the Sunrise Movement and various small socialist organizations. In some cases the agents secretly recorded the gatherings.

What’s more, in at least one case, an undercover agent may have tried to influence the conduct of meeting organizers. One report from an agent describes a meeting in late January of the Sunrise Movement at a Minneapolis public library. While spying on the proceedings, the agent seems to have learned that the organization’s intention was nonviolent: As the agent notes in his own investigative report, “it was made clear” at the meeting that the organization is “focused on peaceful protests.”

Yet after this discovery, the agent then approached a meeting organizer and made a surprising proposition. The agent told the organizer “he works in construction” and is willing to build things to assist “with more direct action protests,” the report reads, adding that the agent stressed “that going to jail did not bother him.”

That sounds like the agent may have signaled a willingness to engage in something illegal, to bait the group into moving in that direction, argues Kevin Riach, the lawyer for one of the protesters who is being prosecuted, Isaac Sant.

“This is an effort to entice someone who’s shown no inclination to commit a crime into committing one,” Riach told me. “What this tells us is that there wasn’t actual criminal activity to be investigated. They had to invent it. That’s not how this is supposed to work—not in this country, anyway.”

In other cases, undercover agents infiltrated these meetings only to find that the protesters turned out to be awfully innocuous. One agent covertly attended a meeting in February and found that it “was more of a panel discussion,” where there was “no discussion, or call for, violence toward law enforcement.”

Similarly, another agent’s report described infiltrating a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of organizers who said they sympathized with the Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance. (The papers show that DHS’s surveillance reached into other states beyond Minnesota.) This agent reported initiating a conversation with a married churchgoing couple, and the woman told the agent she’d traveled to Uganda to assist “in the construction of a hospital.”

In short, we’re not exactly talking about the Weather Underground bombers here.

Indeed, as Substacker Brian Kaylor notes, a number of these undercover operations were even conducted in churches where protesters had organized. Several of the pastors were kept entirely in the dark about law enforcement’s infiltration of their houses of worship.

The absurdity of all this is overwhelming. In some cases, the Keystone Kops vibe is strong: One agent attended a May meeting in Minneapolis, only to report that his “concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium.” The agent left without the device and had to return later to retrieve it.

Interestingly, the investigative reports also offer a glimpse of culture clashes between protesters and the agents who spied on them. One agent attended a Minneapolis meeting in February and reported, perhaps with distaste, on a female protester “with they/them pronouns” and “bright green short hair” and a “nose ring.”

As writer John Ganz has noted, Trump’s secret police force is made up of the MAGA “demimonde” and the “Trumpenproletarian mob.” And indeed, Trump’s political project has long been all about turning loose “his” people—law enforcement, biker gangs, coal miners, Ultimate Fighting enthusiasts—against the leftist enemy that inhabits blue America. The centrality of violence to all this is not disguised in the least. ICE recruitment targets MAGA-adjacent UFC fanbases and people who show an interest in paramilitary tactical equipment or military recruitment. ICE messaging openly glorifies military-style operations in urban areas—that is, in blue America’s diverse, cosmopolitan strongholds. Trump talks about Minneapolis as akin to an enemy country populated with undesirables who must be purged by MAGA patriots.

Now we’re learning that this war on blue America also includes extensive undercover surveillance. Many of these agents appear to have been drawn largely from Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that’s supposed to be focused on serious, complex, transnational crimes. They’ve now been reduced to standing around in parking lots writing down protesters’ license plate numbers and using sleazy deception tactics to spy on fellow Americans whose only crime is sympathy with immigrants.

Violence is precisely what spawned this undercover spying operation, but the real culprit was the violence of the government, not of the protesters. As Lisa Needham writes at Public Notice, we shouldn’t lose sight of how quickly ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis devolved into lethal state violence against Americans. It was just after ICE’s arrival in the city that an agent gunned down Renee Good in her car, with Pretti’s killing by federal agents following around two weeks later.

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Deployment of National Guard in DC through 2029 will cost taxpayers $1.4 million

The extension of the National Guard deployment in Washington, D.C. until January 2029 will cost roughly $1.4 billion, according to a Defense Department estimate provided to Congress, reported The Associated Press.

The figure offers a glimpse of how much taxpayer money will be spent on a deployment that has been criticized by local officials as an infringement of their city’s autonomy and by Democrats who say it has militarized the streets of nation’s capital at the public’s expense.

The cost estimate is for fiscal years 2027-2029 and came in response to questions from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and was provided to The Associated Press.

The deployment began last summer, when President Donald Trump issued an emergency order that launched a law enforcement surge in the city which the administration says was meant to fight crime. Hundreds of armed Guard troops have been deployed to city streets, supporting arrest operations but also helping with snow removal and carrying out beautification projects. This summer, as the city marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, their numbers surged to about 5,000.

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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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'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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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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Former special counsel Jack Smith is not a criminal

Whatever one might think of Jack Smith’s performance as a prosecutor — I’ve got criticisms, and reasonable minds can differ — the guy is no criminal, wrote Elie Honig in New York Magazine.

Sure, congressional Republicans have worked themselves into a retributive frenzy — We’ve got him now! — while Donald Trump shakes pom-poms behind them. “Justice at last???” the president mused on Truth Social, expectantly. But last week’s criminal referral of Smith to the Justice Department by House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan is pure sleight of hand. On close inspection, even Jordan doesn’t quite buy into his own carnival barkery on this one.

Jordan alleges that Smith lied when he testified behind closed doors to the Judiciary Committee in December 2025. Smith was asked whether, during his investigation of Trump for 2020 election subversion, he reviewed documents containing the content of text messages sent or received by members of Congress. The key to understanding Jordan’s gambit is that there are two separate batches of documents at issue. We’re going to get a bit technical here, but we need to be precise to see through the bullshit.

It almost goes without saying at this point because it’s become so common, but this is yet another act in Trump’s political payback tour. The list of names is now familiar and seemingly endless: Letitia James, James Comey, Jerome Powell, Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, E. Jean Carroll, and pretty much anyone else who has ever glanced sideways at the president. Unsurprisingly, all of these efforts at prosecution have failed thus far.

If the Justice Department does somehow ram a charge against Smith through a grand jury, that case will fail too. Before a trial jury can even consider the fact that Smith did not actually commit perjury, he will have a powerful motion to dismiss based on vindictive prosecution. It’s plain that Trump and his DoJ targeted Smith because of lingering political animus over his prior investigations of Trump. In October 2025, Trump claimed that Smith and others “should be prosecuted for their illegal and highly unethical behavior!” He reiterated his request in January 2026, citing Smith’s “large-scale perjury.” And Trump openly celebrated just moments after news broke of Jordan’s referral of Smith to the DoJ.

Trump’s Justice Department has made commonplace the (previously) rarely invoked doctrine of vindictive prosecution. One federal judge already dismissed the indictment of Kilmar Ábrego García on that basis. And the cases against James and Comey likely would have gone down the same way, had they not been thrown out first because of other constitutional infirmities.

But it seems neither Trump nor the leaders of his Justice Department care much about their string of losses. As long as they get the sugar high of the investigation and (sometimes) the indictment, they don’t seem at all bothered when these cases inevitably crash and burn.

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Federal Judge John E. Jones: 'I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this'

Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms, reported ProPublica.

From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.

Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.

“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”

In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.

“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”

Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.

In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.

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Acting AG Blanche meets with Epstein victims, they were not impressed

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche met  accusers of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein following a request to do so by Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whose support is crucial to advancing his nomination to lead the Justice Department, reported CBS News.

Epstein accuser Annie Farmer said in a statement following her meeting with Blanche that she feels "even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States' Attorney General."

Farmer alleged that Blanche was "abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors," which she described as "a marked contrast" from his testimony at Wednesday's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Dani Bensky, whose name and personal information were mistakenly made public in documents related to the federal investigation into Epstein that were released by the Justice Department last year, testified before the committee earlier Thursday before taking part in the meeting with Blanche. 

Bensky said in a statement that Blanche treated the meeting "as a mere 'check-the-box' exercise intended to secure votes for his confirmation."

Bensky said that Blanche "danced around his wording, repeatedly interrupted us and could not commit to anything that would demonstrate good faith or begin to restore trust." She said she believes Blanche "is not qualified to serve as attorney general."

"He did not adequately account for the release of materials that exposed survivors' identifying information and images, and he offered no credible plan to investigate and pursue accountability beyond" Epstein and longtime Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, she said.

The political firestorm over Epstein has been a persistent headache for the Trump administration, which released millions of investigative documents over the last year about the disgraced financier's crimes and connections to high-profile people. 

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CREATORS: How Does The 25th Amendment Protect Democracy?

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
July 15, 2026

A 2016 article in Psychology Today explored whether having a mental illness would make it difficult for a candidate to get elected president. The author, Guy Winch, Ph.D., cited a study by Jonathan Davidson of Duke University Medical Center that found that of the first 37 U.S. presidents, "half of those men had been afflicted by mental illness — and 27% met those criteria while in office, something that could have clearly affected their ability to perform their jobs."

The study found that 24% of presidents met the diagnostic criteria for depression, including James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, and Calvin Coolidge.

Davidson and his team also found evidence of anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder and alcohol dependence among sitting presidents.

Although the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution can prevent an incompetent president from remaining in office, the amendment was not created specifically for that purpose.

The 25th Amendment addresses what happens to the presidency and vice presidency if the president and/or vice president dies, resigns or becomes incapacitated or disabled.

About two years after the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, Congress recommended a succession amendment. On Feb. 23, 1967, former President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy's successor, who, by the way, may have suffered from bipolar disorder, signed the 25th Amendment into law.

Imagine in 1867 or 1967 if the president made a profane-laced statement in reference to Iran that "a whole civilization will die tonight," or a president who frequently naps at meetings took on the Pope as "WEAK on crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy." Is an 80-year-old, at times rambling, president with — as noted by The Hill — dark, unexplained bruising spanning the back of both hands — appropriate for the 25th Amendment consideration?

Succession has been a problem since the infancy of America. The original Constitution allowed for the vice president to become acting president if the president died.

That wasn't good enough for John Tyler who became "Vice President Acting President" in 1841 when former President William Henry Harrison became the first president to die in office. Tyler moved into the White House and assumed full presidential powers, including giving an Inaugural Address.

The first few sections of the 25th Amendment are straightforward. First, if the president dies or resigns — think Richard Nixon — the vice president takes over. Second, if the vice president dies or resigns — think Spiro Agnew — the president appoints a replacement approved by Congress.

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is a little trickier.

Whenever the vice president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the vice president shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment has never been used, although officials considered invoking the section after the 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan.

However, like impeachment or indictment, the president has Due Process rights. The president can challenge the declaration of incapacity. If he or she does, the vice president and other administration officials must reassert the claims or the president resumes his authority.

If the claim is reasserted, Congress must decide the issue. Within 21 days of assembling, Congress must vote with a two-thirds majority of both houses that the president is unable to fulfill his constitutional responsibilities as president.

If the two-thirds super-majority is not met in both houses of Congress, "the president shall resume the powers and duties of his office."

For now, there is little chance of invoking the 25th Amendment. The President is Republican, the House is Republican, the Senate is Republican and the Vice-President is a sycophant. There are other options — the midterms are just months away ... a dramatic power shift is not out of the question.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Chicago FBI chief leaving: ' Anyone who is not on board with THIS FBI under the leadership of President Trump . . . is free to leave'

The head of the FBI’s Chicago field office is abruptly leaving his position, according to a resignation message he sent to colleagues and multiple people familiar with the situation who said he was told to retire, reported The Associated Press.

Douglas DePodesta has served as special agent in charge in Chicago, one of the FBI’s largest offices, for nearly two years and has been with the bureau since 2002.

He told colleagues that his last day would be Monday, according to a message seen by The Associated Press. Multiple people familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel move, said DePodesta had been pushed to retire.

The events leading up to his departure were not immediately clear, but DePodesta alluded in his farewell note to a conflict that he suggested had precipitated it.

“I’ve never backed down from a fight, as long as it meant our personnel could continue serving the FBI’s mission,” DePodesta wrote in the message. “Unfortunately, that has proved unpopular over time and my departure is a consequence of that.”

The move is part of a broader upheaval in the FBI’s workforce as Director Kash Patel has sought to force out line agents and supervisors alike who are perceived as not supporting the Trump administration agenda. It also comes amid prolonged tumult in the law enforcement community in Chicago, whose top federal prosecutor, Andrew Boutros, described this week a sweeping review of more than 1,000 grand jury presentations made by Illinois prosecutors following the dismissal of a high-profile case over misconduct.

The FBI declined to comment, but the bureau’s “rapid response” social media account on X responded to a separate post about DePodesta’s departure by saying: “It’s simple: Anyone who is not on board with THIS FBI under the leadership of President Trump — which has achieved the lowest murder rate ever — is free to leave.”

DePodesta also quoted in his note from a farewell message from Patel’s predecessor, former Director Chris Wray, who reminded the workforce that “you have been who the American people have turned to in their darkest moments” and praised them for having “stayed true to the values that define who we are, and to the qualities for which we stand: Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity.”

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What? Trump makes $2.2 billion since taking office!!!

Since returning to office in 2024, President Donald Trump has brought in an estimated $2.2 billion, according to The New York Times.

In 2025, the president made over $1 billion from crypto-related endeavors, a federal report showed. Of this, $600 million was made by his crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, that sold “meme” coins with images of his face, reported Deseret News.

Speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Wednesday, Trump said, “I don’t get involved in my personal ... We have funds that run my money.”

President Trump has repeatedly missed legal deadlines and omitted business deals required under federal ethics laws designed to expose conflicts of interest, his latest financial disclosure reveals—lapses that fall to his own appointees to police, reported JURISTnews.

The 927-page annual report, filed with the US Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and released Tuesday, states that Trump paid late-filing fees for transactions that had not previously been disclosed. It also acknowledges that licensing agreements involving Trump-branded watches, sneakers and fragrances were “inadvertently omitted” from his prior report.

The periodic transaction reports, required under the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (STOCK Act), must be filed within 30 days of the filer receiving notification of a covered securities transaction exceeding $1,000, and no later than 45 days after the transaction itself, giving the public near-real-time visibility into a federal official’s financial dealings.

The 2025 filing discloses thousands of transactions, including large blocks of exchange-traded fund purchases executed in September 2025. Trump’s 2024 disclosure, by contrast, listed the transactions section as “N/A.”

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Journalism under attack

 When the Justice Department charged Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, and the reporter Georgia Fort and photographer Junn Bollmann with a pair of crimes that carry, in total, the possibility of 10 years or more in prison, something shifted in President Trump’s legal campaign against journalists.

While Mr. Trump has tried for decades to keep the press in line using civil lawsuits, federal criminal law is a sharper weapon. This time the law may also be on the president’s side, reported The New York Times.

The prosecution of Mr. Lemon and the others arose amid the turmoil in Minnesota following the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti this year. On Jan. 18, a group of demonstrators entered and disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, where a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement official served as a pastor. In addition to the three journalists, dozens of protesters are charged with conspiring to violate the rights of the parishioners to religious freedom.

Mr. Lemon has a show on YouTube, and Ms. Fort and Mr. Bollmann are independent journalists. Their defense is clear. “I was there as a journalist, not a protester,” Mr. Lemon told me. “I was interviewing people from all sides. We were livestreaming. It’s all right there on tape.”

The product of journalism, for decades, has enjoyed substantial protection under the First Amendment. The courts almost never uphold prior restraints on publication or distribution of news. Thanks to Supreme Court decisions like New York Times v. Sullivan, it’s difficult for public figures who feel wronged by journalists to recover damages for libel. The courts protect journalistic outlets from potentially ruinous judgments because, in the words of that famous case from 1964, of the “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

But federal law, including the crimes for which Mr. Lemon and the other two are charged, offers no similar protections for the process of journalism. In 1972, the Supreme Court rejected a claim that the First Amendment entitled a journalist to refuse to comply with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury and be asked to identify confidential sources. In that case, Branzburg v. Hayes, the justices upheld the “obligation of reporters to respond to grand jury subpoenas as other citizens do and to answer questions relevant to an investigation into the commission of crime.”

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AG Blanche faces complaint with New York State Bar

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s principal focus in recent weeks has been lining up support on Capitol Hill ahead of his upcoming Senate confirmation hearings, with a specific focus on winning over GOP skeptics. But Donald Trump’s controversial former defense attorney has more troubles than lining up 51 votes, reported MS Now.

As this week got underway, Democracy Defenders Fund, Lawyers Defending American Democracy and a group of 101 former federal and state judges filed a complaint against Blanche with the New York State Bar, which included a formal request for an ethics investigation.

The 73-page complaint specifically focused on three areas of alleged misconduct:

Blanche’s role in orchestrating the creation of a $1.776 billion compensation fund, widely panned as a “slush fund,” and an IRS audit shield for the president and his family.

Blanche’s role in “abusing the investigative and prosecutorial powers” of the Justice Department to target the president’s perceived political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey.

Blanche supervising the DOJ’s “flawed response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, including the disclosure of thousands of records containing sensitive victim information.”

Time will tell what, if anything, comes of the complaint, but as the process moves forward, it’s worth pausing to note just how frequently former judges have become prominent and influential critics of the president and his team.

In early November, for example, Judge Mark L. Wolf, a Reagan-appointed jurist, resigned from the federal bench in order to give himself the freedom to warn the public about the threats posed by Trump.

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CREATORS: Trump Administration Continues Onslaught On Diversity

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
June 16, 2026

The United States of America is facing a full-throttle assault on the underpinnings of democracy. Since Jan. 20, 2025, freedom and diversity have been under attack.

On the Trump administration's first day, they went after diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). A White House directive dated Jan. 20, 2025, announced, "The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name 'diversity, equity, and inclusion,' into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government."

The so-called "immoral" conduct of the Biden administration consisted of promoting opportunities for all people to have a seat at the table.

According to The Hill, "The attacks on DEI threaten a wide range of policies that seek to realize the promise of civil rights law: to advance equal opportunity for all Americans. These benefit not only women, people of color and gay and transgender individuals, but also military veterans, people from impoverished or rural areas, religious minorities and first-generation professionals. DEI policies combat harassment and retaliation. They open the workplace to pregnant and caregiving employees and to persons with disabilities."

The administration has terminated DEI programs at government offices, with government contractors and grantees of federal funding. The Department of Education went so far as to require school districts to sign "oaths" that they will comply with the federal government's effort to cancel diversity.

The U.S. Supreme Court got things rolling before President Donald Trump was elected for a second time. On June 29, 2023, the Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful under federal law. The Court found that Harvard and North Carolina's affirmative action programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This past March, Trump signed an Executive Order eliminating "diversity, equity and inclusion" practices by Federal contractors and their subcontractors, ensuring merit-based and efficient contracting and employment.

A lawsuit was filed in federal court by the attorneys general of 19 states and Washington, D.C., alleging that more than two dozen federal agencies are adding new terms to federal contracts that bar "any racially discriminatory DEI activities" without notice or explanation of exactly what is prohibited.

The suit claims that the executive order violates contractors' free speech rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell told Reuters, "This is yet another example of haphazard actions designed to confuse and intimidate rather than provide clear guidance to people and businesses — in this case federal contractors."

The administration has filed lawsuits and cut or threatened to limit billions of dollars in funding to coerce colleges and universities to capitulate on issues regarding diversity, equality and inclusion.

The Trump administration has threatened many elite institutions with "potential enforcement actions" for violations of Title VI, the federal statute prohibiting discrimination, relating to antisemitic discrimination and harassment.

The administration cut $400 million in funding to Columbia University, a focal point of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses across the country. According to U.S. News and World Report, federal officials in April 2025 froze $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard University after warning the school that it was in violation of federal civil rights law.

Cornell University, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University were among the schools that saw billions of dollars cut, frozen or suspended.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the apparent point man in the effort to crush diversity, equity and inclusion, said some of the nation's top universities are "woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination." According to Inside Higher Ed, Hegseth canceled, through a War Department order, opportunities for service members to participate in fellowships at schools like Princeton, Columbia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown and Yale.

With the absence of diversity comes a loss of diverse perspectives, a reduction in creativity, decrease in innovation and a shocking reduction in critical thinking — creating in society, and maybe more specifically on college and university campuses, military bases and corporate boardrooms, silos of thought, values and beliefs.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Autocracy Watch: USPS ordered not to deliver mail-in ballots in Democrat states

State election officials could soon face a stark choice: Hand over voter lists to the Trump administration or risk losing Postal Service delivery for mail-in ballots, reported CNN.

That dilemma stems from newly proposed USPS rules that seek to comply with an executive order President Donald Trump signed this spring to crack down on mail-in voting. If courts let the order stand, it would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections — and could put even more voter data in the hands of Trump officials searching for supposed election fraud.

The proposed rules lay out new conditions that states would have to meet to send ballots through the mail, including giving the agency lists of all voters set to receive mail ballots.

So far, 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia are suing, as are Democratic Party leaders and non-partisan voter advocacy groups, setting up a potentially active summer of high-stakes judicial rulings.

The Trump administration cleared an initial legal hurdle last month, when a federal judge in Washington, DC, who is overseeing one set of the cases, declined to block Trump’s executive order, allowing the Postal Service to begin implementing it.

The Democratic Party groups are asking an appeals court to speed up its review of that decision, warning that voters around the country could be disenfranchised in this year’s midterm elections if the proposal is not blocked.

In an interview with CNN, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat whose state is part of the coalition that filed a legal challenge in Boston, said that if courts rule for the Trump administration, “Then you will see a virtual elimination of mail-in voting, unless the states supply voter lists to the federal government.”

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Federal judge bars $1.8 billion Trump administration slush fund

A federal judge on Friday barred the Trump administration until further notice from setting up a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people claiming to have been unfairly prosecuted by the government, saying that her order was needed because of mixed messages about the scheme from President Trump, reported The New York Times.

The ruling by the judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, was the strongest effort to date by anyone in government to hold the administration to its word that the proposal to create the fund had actually been set aside. While Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, told Congress last week that the fund would not move forward, Mr. Trump has been much more circumspect, insisting that he still loves the idea and believes that people who suffered in court at the hands of the government should get financial compensation.

Judge Brinkema seized on the president’s statements during a hearing in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., suggesting they left open the possibility that the fund could be brought back to life despite Mr. Blanche’s promises and assertions made in court papers that the fund was no longer moving forward.

“We just don’t have the absolute certainty that this fund won’t rear its head in another form,” she said.

Judge Brinkema did, however, give the administration a way out. She said she would consider rescinding her order if, within a week, the Justice Department sent her a declaration, filed under penalty of perjury, that the fund was dead once and for all. She told Andrew Block, a department lawyer who appeared in court for the government, that the declaration needed to be signed by Mr. Blanche and Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary.

Judge Brinkema’s ruling extended a temporary pause on the fund that she had put in place at the end of May. And it came two days after a federal judge in Washington, Richard J. Leon, refused to issue his own order putting the fund on hold.

Judge Leon took the Justice Department at its word that the plan had been shelved, but still warned the administration not to play games with him by pretending it was dead, if it was not.

“Don’t play possum with this court,” he said.

The fund has created a political headache for the White House almost from the moment it was first announced on May 18 — in no small measure because of concerns that it could be used to funnel taxpayer money to hundreds of rioters prosecuted for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Judge Brinkema underscored those concerns by reading aloud a passage about payments being made to the rioters that appeared in a brief criticizing the fund that was submitted to her last week by two senators, Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, and Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana.

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FBI fires analyst tied to warning of violent Catholic 'extremist'

Several FBI analysts tied to the creation of a 2023 memo warning of a potential threat from Catholic “violent extremists” were fired, according to their lawyer, the latest wave of terminations under the leadership of its director Kash Patel, reported The Associated Press.

The fired employees included four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst. The FBI declined to comment.

“This action is manifestly unjust, completely unsupported by the facts, and subverts standard FBI policy and procedure,” their lawyer, David Laufman, said in a statement. “These individuals deserved far better for the exceptional and faithful public service they rendered to protect our country.”

The January 2023 intelligence product produced by analysts in the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office emerged as a political flashpoint after it was issued, with Republicans in Congress repeatedly citing it as part of their broader contention that the FBI during the Biden administration was targeting conservatives.

The firings are part of a broader personnel purge under Patel, a Trump loyalist who over the last year, has pushed out dozens of employees who either contributed to investigations of the president or who were perceived as not in alignment with the administration’s agenda. The Justice Department has engaged in similarly sweeping firings of prosecutors since Trump took office last year.

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