And then the Russian Apologists Left, Complaining about TDS

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Ben Smith has a much-discussed story about what he admits is just one of innumerable online chat threads that create unseen but powerful nodes of opinion formation. The Signal chat Ben writes about is, he says,

the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed.

He says that, in part, based on the centrality of Marc Andreessen, even though the piece also describes Andreessen participating on multiple different chats at once (indeed, doing little else with his life).

there is no equivalent to the intellectual counterculture that grew up over the last five years on the tech right, and no figure remotely like Andreessen, the towering, enthusiastic 53-year old who co-founded a16z and, before that, invented the modern web browser.

[snip]

he flipped on his phone from group chat to group chat, responding and engaging with manic speed.

And while, especially as someone who wrote a dissertation on some of these historical practices, it is amusing to hear the various words — samizdat, Republic of Letters, salons — self-indulgent billionaires use to describe the very male public sphere in which they participate, the existence of networks of chats as a powerful influence on politics is not the breaking news Ben sells it as.

Crazier still, Ben dates the beginning of the group chat to 2018, when an entire criminal case was built around a series of such chats started in 2015 and professionalized by Daily Stormer webmaster Andrew Auernheimer, one which Donald Trump’s failson appears to have used to make stolen John Podesta files go viral. Ben seems to think the billionaires — the Silicon Valley ones, not the scions of Queens real estate and reality TV wealth — invented Signal chats, when one thing we know to have happened is that the white nationalists and other far right activists cultivated certain billionaires into them.

That omission is pretty important given the way Ben allows Rufo to serve as the triumphalist tour guide of this story.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”

As far as we know, the Silicon Valley billionaires were not in those earlier far right chats, but there have been plenty of public breadcrumbs showing the Nazis and the billionaires joining together.

So the existence of the chat, which Ben brags he has discovered, is useful information, but not earthshaking news. The mapping of the Chatham House chat he treats as his reporting subject (Ben is undoubtedly a participant in similar networks incorporating self-indulgent billionaires, but one does not treat those chats as a reporting subject) is useful, but a topic that other journalists also cover, and cover well.

It’s in that mapping, though, that provides the main newsworthy thing about this piece.

The split we’re seeing in public extends into these private chats.

Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape. You can see it on X, where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices, and where Srinivasan has been a leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.

“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,” said Rufo. “There’s a big split on the tech right.”

Billionaires, it turns out, react badly to innumerate destruction of the world economy. Who knew?

Ben ends the piece with this narrative, with no further comment.

By mid-April, Sacks had had enough with Chatham House: “This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,” he wrote, shorthanding “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Then he addressed Torenberg: “You should create a new one with just smart people.”

Signal soon showed that three men had left the group: The Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, the bitcoin billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, and Carlson.

Ben includes a screen cap — presumably an egregious violation of the rules of the chat — showing not just Maguire and Wink taking their toys and going home, but (as Ben noted) Tucker Carlson and David Sacks, whose influence on these networks merit at least as much focus as Andreessen’s.

David Sacks, who is probably not even a billionaire, does have tolerance for innumerate destruction of key economies, as he showed when he helped crash Silicon Valley Bank and subsequently begged for taxpayer help to reverse his work. But he is also, along with Carlson, one of the people in this network who most stupidly parrots Russian propaganda (though both men are being challenged on that front by Steve Witkoff).

Which is to say that one of the consequences for Trump’s decision to destroy the global economy is not just that one of Marc Andreessen’s chat groups is getting a divorce, but that in the divorce, two critically important Russian useful idiots are leaving.

In the weeks ahead, both those timelines — the destruction of the global economy and Trump’s attempts to capitulate to Vladimir Putin — will reach a head at the same time.

And it is genuinely useful to know that the Russian apologists have decided to start their own network of influence with “just the smart people” who applaud both destruction of the global economy and also obeisance to Russia.

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Some Thoughts on the Arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan

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On April 18, six law enforcement officers — one ICE officer, one CBP officer, two FBI agents, and two DEA agents; they were supported by an unknown number of surveillance personnel — showed up outside the courtroom of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz.

Flores-Ruiz was charged on March 18 with three counts of domestic battery, and was due to appear for a pre-trial hearing.

Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national, reportedly had been deported once before and one day earlier, “an authorized immigration official” had attested an administrative warrant — but not a judicial warrant — authorizing Flores-Ruiz’s arrest.

After Judge Dugan interacted with the arresting officers and, upon learning that they only had an administrative warrant and after telling them they needed a judicial warrant, she directed them to go meet with the Chief Judge (who wasn’t at the courthouse, but who spoke with the ICE officer on the phone). Then, Judge Dugan apparently adjourned Flores-Ruiz’ scheduled hearing and directed him and his attorney to leave via the jury door.

Defense counsel and Flores-Ruiz then walked toward each other and toward the public courtroom exit. The courtroom deputy then saw Judge DUGAN get up and heard Judge DUGAN say something like “Wait, come with me.”

Flores-Ruiz appears to have gone, via back hallways, to the same sixth floor public hallway via which he had entered the court room. According the complaint, both DEA officers saw Flores-Ruiz in the public hallway before he entered the elevator.

After leaving the Chief Judge’s vestibule and returning to the public hallway, DEA Agent A reported that Flores-Ruiz and his attorney were in the public hallway. DEA Agent B also observed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney in the hallway near Courtroom 615 and noted that FloresRuiz was looking around the hallway. From different vantage points, both agents observed Flores-Ruiz and his counsel walk briskly towards the elevator bank on the south end of the sixth floor.

Rather than arresting Flores-Ruiz, whom the officers knew was unarmed, there on the sixth floor, one of them rode down the elevator with him and his attorney and the other alerted the other officers. Four of them convened outside of the courthouse and chased him down the street and arrested him, just 22 minutes after he entered Judge Dugan’s courtroom at 8:43.

Having received the above-referenced information from DEA Agent A, other members of the arrest team scrambled to locate Flores-Ruiz and arrest him. DEA Agent B and FBI Agents A and B took another elevator down to one of the bottom floors of the courthouse and quickly exited the building onto 9th Street. After DEA Agent A notified the team that Flores-Ruiz was in the front of the courthouse near the flagpole, the agents ran towards the front of the courthouse. FBI Agent B and DEA Agent A approached Flores-Ruiz and identified themselves as law enforcement. Flores-Ruiz turned around and sprinted down the street. A foot chase ensued. The agents pursued Flores-Ruiz for the entire length of the courthouse and ultimately apprehended him near the intersection of W. State Street and 10th Street. Flores-Ruiz was handcuffed and detained. Around 9:05 a.m., or approximately 22 minutes after the arrest team first spotted FloresRuiz on the sixth floor of the courthouse, FBI Agent A communicated to the surveillance team that Flores-Ruiz had been arrested.

In a criminal complaint, the government charged Judge Dugan with 18 USC 1505, obstruction of a proceeding, and 18 USC 1071, concealing a person from arrest. [docket] The FBI arrested Judge Dugan at the courthouse on Friday amid a deliberate media frenzy, up to and including the FBI Director posting a picture of Judge Dugan’s arrest in violation of DOJ guidelines designed to prevent prejudice.

DOJ personnel should not encourage or assist news media in photographing or televising a person held in custody. DOJ personnel should not voluntarily disclose a photograph of a defendant unless it serves a law enforcement function or unless the photograph is already part of the public record in the case.

Both Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller also made comments that arguably violate rules prohibiting comments that prejudice a proceeding (remember that Judge Dale Ho already found that Pam Bondi’s public comments about the Eric Adams case likely violated local rules).

The arrest has rightly been viewed as an attempt, at a time when Trump and his minions are already making wildly inappropriate attacks on judges, to bully the judiciary.

The criminal charges

There has been a lot of blather about the strength or weakness of the criminal charges. Much of that is, in my opinion, premature, and premature precisely because FBI chose to arrest Dugan on a criminal complaint.

The elements of offense for 18 USC 1505 require the government prove:

  • Existence of an Investigative Proceeding: There is, or was, an ongoing proceeding, inquiry, or investigation before a federal department, agency, or any committee of Congress.
  • Defendant’s Knowledge: You were aware of the pending proceeding.
  • Obstructive Action: You engaged in one or more of the obstructive actions outlined in the statute, such as withholding or falsifying documents or using threats or force and
  • Corrupt Intent: You did so with corrupt intent, meaning the actions were taken with a wrongful purpose to disrupt, impede, or influence the proceeding. This ‘corrupt intent’ refers to a deliberate and dishonest motive to interfere with the investigation or proceeding rather than a legitimate or lawful purpose.

The elements of offense for 18 USC 1071 require the government prove:

  • a federal warrant had been issued for the person’s arrest;
  • the person concealing them knew that a warrant was issued;
  • the person actually concealed the fugitive from law enforcement;
  • the person acted with intent to prevent fugitive’s discovery or arrest.

For obstruction, it will be contested whether an immigration removal counts as an investigative proceeding. For concealment, it will be contested whether the administrative warrant qualifies, and whether directing Flores-Ruiz via a back hallway to the very same public hallway where the officers had planned to arrest him and had a chance to arrest him amounts to concealment.

Both charges will pivot on Judge Dugan’s intent: whether she had corrupt intent and the intent of helping him evade arrest entirely, or whether she wanted to protect the sanctity of her own courtroom.

Key to her intent is her belief, which she made clear to the officers, that they needed a judicial warrant.

Judge DUGAN asked if Deportation Officer A had a judicial warrant, and Deportation Officer A responded, “No, I have an administrative warrant.” Judge DUGAN stated that Deportation Officer A needed a judicial warrant. Deportation Officer A told Judge DUGAN that Deportation Officer A was in a public space and had a valid immigration warrant. Judge DUGAN asked to see the administrative warrant and Deportation Officer A offered to show it to her. Judge DUGAN then demanded that Deportation Officer A speak with the Chief Judge. Judge DUGAN then had a similar interaction with FBI Agent B and CBP Officer A. After finding out that they were not present for a court appearance and that they were with ICE, Judge DUGAN ordered them to report to the Chief Judge’s office.

Administrative warrants don’t mandate assistance.

It may also matter that, by description, she didn’t actually look at the administrative warrant, because it might matter if she knew whether Flores-Ruiz had been deported before. In a report published before the arrest, Dugan is quoted as stating that “a warrant was not presented in the hallway on the 6th floor,” and by description, she was not shown one.

Thus far, the complaint seems to want to suggest that Dugan had corrupt intent because she was angry.

DUGAN became visibly angry, commented that the situation was “absurd,” left the bench

Witnesses uniformly reported that Judge DUGAN was visibly upset and had a confrontational, angry demeanor.

Judge DUGAN appeared visibly angry and was walking quickly

But judges get angry for lots of reasons, including that someone showed up outside her courtroom to surprise someone with business in it.

The affidavit also makes much of the fact that, after exiting the non-public hallway, Flores-Ruiz and his attorney walked to the elevators furthest away from Judge Dugan’s courtroom.

I am familiar with the layout of the sixth floor of the courthouse and know that the south elevators are not the closest elevators to Courtroom 615, and therefore it appears that Flores-Ruiz and his counsel elected not to use the closest elevator bank to Courtroom 615.

It’s entirely unclear why this would be suspicious in any case, because the affidavit suggests that Dugan thought all the officers were in the Chief Judge’s chambers; walking to the further elevators increased the chance they’d encounter the officers in the hallway. But as the Chair of the WI Election Commission Ann Jacobs noted in a long thread, there’s a completely innocent explanation for this: that Flores-Ruiz and his attorney were headed to the street, not the parking garage.

Here’s why this is absurd – there are 2 banks of elevators in the courthouse: 1 goes to the ground floor, and 1 goes to the 9th street exit which is where the parking structure is. In fact, there are even SIGNS telling you which bank of elevator goes where.

So – yes – you sometimes walk past one set of elevators so you can get where you want to go. If you are not going to the parking structure (which most people are), you take the other set of elevators because they are less crowded.

Suspicious? No – literally something hundreds of people do daily in the courthouse. This attempt to make it into something is just dumb (especially since they claim to be familiar with the elevators – clearly not).

The biggest problem with these charges is that, by charging this via criminal complaint rather than grand jury, the government has not probed several issues relating to intent before charging Judge Dugan.

The witnesses cited in the complaint include the six officers, Dugan’s courtroom deputy, two other lawyers present in the courtroom that day (an Assistant DA and a different defendant’s attorney), a Victim Specialist working with Flores-Ruiz’ alleged victims, along with the FBI officer affiant.

The most incriminating thing in the affidavit comes from the deputy.

These events were also unusual for two reasons. First, the courtroom deputy had previously heard Judge DUGAN direct people not to sit in the jury box because it was exclusively for the jury’s use. Second, according to the courtroom deputy, only deputies, juries, court staff, and in-custody defendants being escorted by deputies used the back jury door. Defense attorneys and defendants who were not in custody never used the jury door.

The deputy was clearly quite concerned about being implicated and actually alerted the officers that Judge Dugan was “pushing” Flores-Ruiz’ case.

Judge DUGAN’s courtroom deputy then approached the remaining arrest team members and stated that the courtroom deputy was not the one who had notified Judge DUGAN about their arrest plans.  The courtroom deputy also made a comment about Judge DUGAN “pushing” Flores-Ruiz’s case through, which the arrest team interpreted to mean that Judge DUGAN was attempting to expedite Flores-Ruiz’s hearing.

The officers seem to have misinterpreted the comment; rather than expediting the hearing, it appears Judge Dugan instead adjourned the hearing.

But there are several key witnesses that have not been interviewed (or if they have, their testimony is not mentioned in the complaint): It appears the FBI didn’t ask Flores-Ruiz’ attorney and Flores-Ruiz himself about whether Judge Dugan alerted them that ICE was there to arrest him (and some of their behavior is inconsistent with having any warning). They don’t even know whether Flores-Ruiz’ attorney drove to the courthouse; if not, she would know well to take the elevator that went to street level.

Nor does the affidavit note any interview with the Chief Judge. His testimony would be critical for several reasons. First, the complaint describes that the Chief Judge told the ICE officer he was working on a policy about ICE presence in the courthouse but had not yet completed it.

During their conversation, the Chief Judge stated he was working on a policy which would dictate locations within the courthouse where ICE could safely conduct enforcement actions. The Chief Judge emphasized that such actions should not take place in courtrooms or other private locations within the building. Deportation Officer A asked about whether enforcement actions could take place in the hallway. The Chief Judge indicated that hallways are public areas. When the Chief Judge expressed interest in talking to ICE ERO management about this policy, Deportation Officer A provided him with contact information for ICE ERO’s Assistant Field Office Director.

If the Chief Judge had not yet crafted a policy, then the government can’t cite it regarding what Judge Dugan should have done, and indeed her instruction to go to his office may have been consistent with the unsettled policy. There’s another judge who interacted with the officers who may also attest to the uncertainty about what to do in this situation.

That the Chief Judge had not yet spoken to ICE is important because the affiant includes a limitation ICE had adopted on their own arrests: to target defendants but not witnesses.

the Milwaukee ICE ERO Task Force was focusing its resources on apprehending charged defendants making appearances in criminal cases – and not arresting victims, witnesses, or individuals appearing for matters in family or civil court.

But if the Chief Judge had not yet spoken to ICE, then neither he nor Dugan could be expected to know that. Judges have very well-founded concerns about the way ICE arrests at courthouses can chill access to justice for everyone (including defendants); but the concern about witnesses and victims is particularly acute.

And while the Chief Judge told the ICE officer that they could make arrests in hallways, there’s no evidence in the record that the Chief Judge had told Judge Dugan that. He certainly didn’t tell her that after the conversation as described. He couldn’t have! That’s because the ICE officer was still on the phone with the Chief Judge when the other officers arrested Flores-Ruiz.

Deportation Officer A and CBP Officer A were notified that Flores-Ruiz was in custody while they were still inside the courthouse speaking with the Chief Judge on the phone.

There are reasons why DOJ shouldn’t involve the other judges in this case. But both the Chief Judge and the other one involved that day may provide exculpatory evidence about Judge Dugan’s actions and intent.

Without more, Judge Dugan has a number of strong defenses to these charges. DOJ might one day get more incriminating evidence about Dugan’s intent, but they present zero real evidence of it here and her comment about the administrative warrant is exculpatory.

Trump picks up where he left off

This is not, as many people claimed, unprecedented. In fact, there’s a very clear precedent: MA state judge Shelly Joseph, who was indicted, along with her Deputy, in 2019 for allegedly helping a defendant escape ICE arrest by conspiring with her Deputy and the migrant’s defense attorney to let him out the back of the courthouse via a holding cell. [docket] Adam Klasfeld also wrote about this precedent at his new site.

There are number of key differences though, at least thus far.

The most important differences are that Judge Joseph allegedly helped the migrant before her to leave the courthouse, via non-public doorway, entirely; she allegedly turned off the courtroom recording during which the defense attorney asked for help (which was presented as evidence of corrupt intent) and her deputy allegedly lied to the grand jury; the defendant evaded arrest entirely. That was charged as a conspiracy after getting the defense attorney to testify, with immunity, against the judge.

Update: I should add a big difference between Joseph and Dugan. In the former case, the government investigated for a year — from April 2018 to April 2019 — before they charged Joseph and her deputy (during which time they flipped the defense attorney whose idea this was). In this case, FBI investigated for a week.

That is, while Judge Joseph had a number of strong defenses (and contested some of the claims laid out in the indictment), the case against her included allegations that got to corrupt intent that do not — yet, anyway — exist in the case against Judge Dugan.

The precedent matters for legal reasons. A number of the issues that would be argued here — such as any immunity due to Judge Joseph, or the applicability of 18 USC 1505 to an immigration arrest — were not resolved and likely would not be here, before trial and appeal.

But the most important precedent is the way in which the first Trump Administration — including then Acting ICE Director Tom Homan and current Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons — wanted to use Joseph’s case to intimidate judges and foster a big media frenzy. Joseph’s case was dismissed in 2022 after she used some FOIAed documents to show the media frenzy the White House deliberated stoked and asked (for the third time) for full discovery on it, including on how Lyons’ incessant media appearances affected the ICE officers involved in the case.

But even before she got that FOIAed evidence, she argued that Lyons’ incessant attacks on judges biased ICE in this matter.

That is, the campaign against judges — Tom Homan’s campaign, Todd Lyons’ campaign (including his recent comment where he said he wanted to make deportations work like Amazon Prime), a White House occupied by Stephen Miller’s campaign — are already a matter of judicial record. And this time around, DOJ didn’t even bother convening a grand jury to find out whether there’s any evidence that Judge Dugan had corrupt intent before arresting her at the courthouse and ginning up an even bigger media storm about it.

Maybe they’ll find it as they move to indict her. Or maybe this case will blow up in spectacular fashion.

But until they actually look for evidence of corrupt intent, this is a media campaign against the judiciary, not a criminal prosecution.

Indeed, the media campaign — the comments from top Trump officials, some that don’t even reflect the official record — may have already tainted the prosecution. The media campaign is bound to be a central matter as Dugan mounts a defense.

The fight for rule of law

The fact that so few people know of the case against Judge Joseph is telling. Many just pointed to the arrest and proclaimed that Trump had achieved some new level of abuse.

Like so much else, including his use of the legal system to attack his adversaries, there’s little truly new here.

He did all this in the first term and yet neither the Biden or Harris campaigns nor millions of others opposing Trump made this or his past abuses a sustained focus of an anti-Trump campaign, not even in the context of his attacks on judges presiding over cases against him. As I’ve argued, Trump’s platform — the way he convinced a bunch of disaffected people to vote for him — was to claim he was a victim of an unfair legal system, rather than someone duly prosecuted under it, rather than the guy who weaponized it to get electoral advantage.

In the wake of Dugan’s arrest, by contrast, many people did far more than staring, stupefied, at Trump’s latest abuse. Many officials, both local and national Democrats, have issued statements condemning at least the manner of the arrest. Most contextualized this arrest with mention of Trump (and Stephen Miller’s) direct attacks on and defiance of judges, up to and including the Trump-packed Supreme Court. Hundreds of people protested outside the federal courthouse.

Something has happened, somewhat unmentioned, since Trump opponents have started to speak out against Trump’s abusive immigration policies. In the process of defending people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who as some noxious Democratic operative sniffed is not a “poster child” for due process, Trump’s opponents have more aggressively defended just that: due process, independent courts, and rule of law.

If Abrego Garcia can be sent to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp in error, anyone can. If a US citizen toddler can be deported even as one of the Trumpiest judges fights to give her due process, Trump’s deportation campaign has illustrated the import of independent judges testing his transparently false claims.

It may be that defending the import of rule of law has helped to reverse the popularity of Trump’s deportation campaign.

Whether it is or not though, the opposition to Trump has started defending rule of law as such, above and beyond the more charismatic targets of it. It has started defending the rule of law as an important protection for all citizens.

I hope to return to this, particularly as people entertain approaches — to think in terms of indictments for Trump — that failed over and over again in the past. I strongly believe that what needs to happen — what didn’t happen, when Trump was busy undermining the legitimacy of the cases against him during the Biden Administration — is to promote the import of rule of law as such.

As real mobilization happens in response to Trump’s attacks on rule of law, let’s keep in mind that that is something worth defending in its own right.

Update: Now ICE is threatening to charge two people who asked three officers in plainclothes (one wearing a balaclava) to show a warrant. The complaint against Judge Dugin makes much of the fact that the six officers were in plainclothes, as if that helps.

The agents were generally dressed in plain clothes and intended to effectuate the arrest in as low-key and safe of a manner as possible.

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Pam Bondi Reverses Media Protections to Cover Up Her Complicity in Unlawful Renditions

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There’s a great deal that is wrong not just with Pam Bondi’s reversal of Merrick Garland’s media policy, but the memo reversing it itself.

Bondi was in such a rush to splutter out unbridled sycophancy, she didn’t bother to spell check the document.

The very premise — that all leaking of “sensitive” information undermines law enforcement, the claim that leaking “sensitive” information is illegal — is wrong.

Safeguarding classified, privileged, and other sensitive information is essential to effective governance and law enforcement. Federal government employees intentionally leaking sensitive information to the media undermines the ability of the Department of Justice to uphold the rule of law, protect civil rights, and keep America safe.

Bondi ridiculously quotes Trump’s attack on Chris Krebs out of context and claims something that happened under Donald Trump instead happened under Biden.

However, under the Biden Administration, “elitist leaders in Government . . . weaponized their undeserved influence to silence perceived political opponents and advance their preferred, and often erroneous, narrative about significant matters of public debate.”2

2 Presidential Memorandum, Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship, __ Fed. Reg. __ (Apr. 9, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidentialactions/2025/04/addressing-risks-from-chris-krebs-and-government-censorship.

Worse still, Bondi parrots Trump’s attacks on Miles Taylor, including Trump’s legally erroneous claim that criticizing Trump anonymously is “treasonous.”

This Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people. “Where a Government employee improperly discloses sensitive information for the purposes of personal enrichment and undermining our foreign policy, national security, and Government effectiveness—all ultimately designed to sow chaos and distrust in Government—this conduct could properly be characterized as treasonous.”8

8 Presidential Memorandum, Addressing Risks Associated with an Egregious Leaker and Disseminator of Falsehoods, __ Fed. Reg. __ (Apr. 9, 2025), https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addressing-risks-associated-with-anegregious-leaker-and-disseminator-of-falsehoods.

Both Krebs and Taylor, I think, have cause to demand Bondi’s recusal from any matters affecting them.

Bondi not only falsely describes the scope of the gag order that Tanya Chutkan imposed on Donald Trump,  and defies the DC Circuit’s decision upholding it, but in so doing sanctions vicious attacks on witnesses in criminal cases (the scope of the Chutkan gag upheld by the DC Circuit) and slanderous attacks against the FBI (the intended scope of the Florida gag).

This weaponization included prosecutors trying to muzzle protected First Amendment speech criticizing the Biden Administration, including through gag orders targeting not only President Trump3

3 See ECF No. 105, United States v. Trump, No. 23-Cr.-257 (D.D.C.) (gag order); ECF No. 592, United States v. Trump, No. 23-Cr.-80101 (S.D. Fla.) (motion for gag order).

Every bit of this memo is an abuse of her position as Attorney General.

But I find the specific example of a purportedly classified leak she invokes even more problematic.

The leaks have not abated since President Trump’s second inauguration,6 including leaks of classified information.7

7 See, e.g., John Hudson & Warren P. Strobel, U.S. intelligence contradicts Trump’s justification for mass deportations, Washington Post (Apr. 17, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/17/us-intelligence-tren-de-araguadeportations-trump; Charlie Savage & Julian Barnes, Intelligence Assessment Said to Contradict Trump on Venezuelan Gang, New York Times (Mar. 22, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/intelligence-trump-venezuelan-gang-alienenemies.html.

These are the WaPo story reporting that 17 of 18 agencies dispute the claims at the heart of Trump’s Alien Enemies Act invovcation and the earlier NYT report first debunking Trump’s claims.

Given Tulsi Gabbard’s boisterous referral, I don’t doubt that these are the alleged leaks under investigation and these will be the first journalists to be targeted by DOJ (while I have no hopes in Bezos’ rag, I hope NYT, especially, preempts this with a challenge to the terms of this order).

But that is the single example of purportedly classified information in the entire memo. Bondi is saying she has to start targeting journalists to protect Trump’s policies, but the single allegedly unlawful leaks she points to are leaks that prove DOJ is defending renditions based on an Executive Order that Trump’s own Intelligence Community knows to be false.

This is not about protecting classified information. This is about covering up her own complicity in unlawful renditions.

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Fridays with Nicole Sandler

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Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

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The ActBlue Targeting Is a Perfect Opportunity to Flip Trump’s EOs on His Head

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For some time, I’ve been saying that those opposing Trump need to take the stated goals laid out in his Executive Orders and turn that against him.

For example, Trump has ordered the entire Executive Branch to combat antisemitism. Yet Ed Martin is trying to get through confirmation to remain US Attorney for DC by blatantly lying about his knowledge of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli’s open support for Nazism. There should be a concerted campaign to use Trump’s stated opposition to using federal funds to support antisemites to target every one of the white nationalists he harbors in various agencies.

Similarly, his effort to combat anti-Christian discrimination could and should be used to combat some of his attacks on government. Among the USAID programs that DOGE destroyed, for example, were legal programs helping Christian minorities overseas. Why not use that as proof that Marco Rubio is violating Trump’s EO?

His Executive Order targeting ActBlue is perhaps the most promising such example. The EO itself, probably because Trump’s targeting of law firms and trans people are legally struggling because of the clear animus, does not name ActBlue specifically. Here’s the guts of the order.

Further, there is evidence to suggest that foreign nationals are seeking to misuse online fundraising platforms to improperly influence American elections. A recent House of Representatives investigation revealed that a platform named ActBlue had in recent years detected at least 22 “significant fraud campaigns”, nearly half of which had a foreign nexus. During a 30-day window during the 2024 campaign, the platform detected 237 donations from foreign IP addresses using prepaid cards, indicating that this activity remains a pressing concern.

These activities undermine the integrity of our electoral process. Therefore, I direct the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, to use all lawful authority, as necessary, to investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fundraising platforms to make “straw” or “dummy” contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees, and to take all appropriate actions to enforce the law.

The accompanying Fact Sheet, however, makes it quite clear that he is targeting critical infrastructure of Democrats’ fundraising, ActBlue, and only that.

  • Recently uncovered evidence suggests that online fundraising platforms are being used to launder excessive and prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees.
  • Bad actors have sought to evade Federal source and amount limitations by breaking down large contributions into smaller ones, often attributing them to numerous individuals without their consent or knowledge.
  • These “straw donations” are frequently made through “dummy” accounts, using methods such as gift cards or prepaid credit cards to avoid detection.
  • ActBlue has become notorious for its lax standards that enable unverified and fraudulent donations.
  • A recent House of Representatives investigation found that ActBlue detected at least 22 “significant fraud campaigns” in recent years—nearly half of which had a foreign nexus.
    • Over a 30-day window during the 2024 election cycle, ActBlue detected 237 donations from foreign IP addresses using prepaid cards.
  • The investigation revealed that ActBlue trained employees to “look for reasons to accept contributions,” even in the face of suspicious activity.
  • Until recently, ActBlue accepted political contributions without requiring a card verification value (CVV), making it easy to contribute without identity verification.
    • Before addressing this issue in response to a congressional investigation, ActBlue tested whether this would hurt its fundraising.
  • Numerous state attorneys general have opened investigations into ActBlue over suspicious donations made through obscured identities and untraceable means.

Never mind that there have been far more significant questions raised about WinRed, the right wing equivalent. Never mind that various kinds of campaign help from Russia, including from Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s trolls, were among the violations that Republicans on the FEC refused to investigate. Never mind that Pam Bondi seems to have made no headway in identifying the entities, purportedly located in Russia, that caused bomb threats during the election last year.

But the notion that Donald Trump — on the same day that he rolled out a transparent scheme to get big donations via cryptocurrency by selling access to the White House — gives a shit about foreign donations is farcical.

As Molly White noted, the second largest donation in the surge that resulted was made via Binance — meaning it was probably not a US donor.

It seems to be working: as of writing, the second entry on the leaderboard is a wallet that purchased 400,000 $TRUMP shortly after the announcement for around $5.3 million.1 Another later purchaser achieved the #3 spot by purchasing over 650,000 $TRUMP for a whopping $8 million — interestingly, funded by a Binance account, suggesting that the wallet holder is not based in the US.2b

$8 million in $TRUMP purchases, funded by a Binance transfer

The fourth-place spot is also occupied by a wallet that was funded by Binance, which purchased $3 million in $TRUMP. In first place is Justin Sun, who has used the TRUMP holdings belonging to his HTX cryptocurrency exchange, notionally priced at $14.6 million, to secure an invite.

b. Binance.com is not available to US-based traders. While the company’s Binance.US arm does allow Americans on the platform, it uses different hot wallets from the one used by this purchaser.

Those Binance donors are a clear example of someone hiding their (likely foreign) identity while donating huge amounts to the President, while he uses the trappings of office both to protect their secrecy and to add value to the donations.

Trump has ordered Pam Bondi to investigate foreign political donors, period. This creates a lever — at the very least a political one, but if done right, a legal one — to hold Bondi accountable for her clear bias.

On her first day on the job, Bondi said she wasn’t going to investigate foreign influence in elections anymore, a move that was undoubtedly done to shelter Trump’s own misconduct. But now Trump has ordered her to do just that.

Pam Bondi will obediently do as she bid, even as ActBlue has cause to sue about the selective targeting of ActBlue. But that provides ample opportunity to show all the foreign money Trump is gulping down that she refuses to examine.

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Whiskey Pete’s Dirty Desktop

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We continue to get more details of Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s abysmal operational security.

Today, NYT revisited the issue of Pete Hegseth’s shoddy operational security, tracking all the other accounts he had registered under the phone number with which he used Signal.

Mr. Hegseth had a significant social media presence, a WhatsApp profile and a Facebook page, which he still has.

On Aug. 15, 2024, he used his personal phone number to join Sleeper.com, a fantasy football and sports betting site, using the username “PeteHegseth.” Less than two weeks later, a phone number associated with his wife, Jennifer, also joined the site. She was included in one of the two Signal chats about the strikes.

Mr. Hegseth also left other digital breadcrumbs, using his phone to register for Airbnb and Microsoft Teams, a video and communications program.

Mr. Hegseth’s number is also linked to an email address that is in turn linked to a Google Maps profile. Mr. Hegseth’s reviews on Google Maps include endorsements of a dentist (“The staff is amazing”), a plumber (“Fast, honest, and quality work”), a mural painter (“Painted 2 beautiful flags for us — spot on”) and other businesses. (Google Maps street view blurs out Mr. Hegseth’s former home.)

What they don’t say is the accessibility of his personal phone number could have made it easier to ID the IP address for the computer that (per the AP) Hegseth set up in his office so he could access Signal.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had an internet connection that bypassed the Pentagon’s security protocols set up in his office to use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer, two people familiar with the line told The Associated Press.

The existence of the unsecured internet connection is the latest revelation about Hegseth’s use of the unclassified app and raises the possibility that sensitive defense information could have been put at risk of potential hacking or surveillance.

Known as a “dirty” internet line by the IT industry, it connects directly to the public internet where the user’s information and the websites accessed do not have the same security filters or protocols that the Pentagon’s secured connections maintain.

Other Pentagon offices have used them, particularly if there’s a need to monitor information or websites that would otherwise be blocked.

But the biggest advantage of using such a line is that the user would not show up as one of the many IP addresses assigned to the Defense Department — essentially the user is masked, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with military network security.

[snip]

Hegseth initially was going to the back area of his office where he could access Wi-Fi to use his devices, one of the people familiar said, and then he requested a line at his desk where he could use his own computer.

That meant at times there were three computers around his desk — a personal computer; another for classified information; and a third for sensitive defense information, both people said.

Because electronic devices are vulnerable to spying, no one is supposed to have them inside the defense secretary’s office. Important offices at the Pentagon have a cabinet or drawer where staff or visitors are required to leave devices.

But there’s a detail that remains unexplained, one which makes this more interesting.

In addition to the texts themselves, Jeffrey Goldberg provided a number of useful details about the Houthi PC small group thread.

He included the list of the 19 people who belonged to it when he left.

We see the Principals add people (and Mike Waltz add someone believed to be Stephen Miller) along the way.

Goldberg also included metadata showing Mike Waltz setting the disappearing messages. In addition, we see Marco Rubio adding a second account for himself, “MAR added MAR.”

Rubio might have done that if he had a second device.

Given that that was all public by March 26 — which was, itself, nine days after Goldberg dropped off the list — it raises questions about why, on both March 26 and March 28 (per a CIA filing in the American Oversight lawsuit), people were fiddling with administrative settings.

I understand that the Director’s personal Signal account was reviewed and a screenshot of the Signal Chat at issue was captured from the Director’s account on 31 March 2025, and transferred to Agency records systems the same day. I understand that the screenshot reflects the information available at the time the screenshot was captured, which I characterized as “residual administrative content” in my initial declaration. I used that terminology because the screenshot does not include substantive messages from the Signal chat; rather, it captures the name of the chat, “Houthi PC small group”, and reflects administrative notifications from 26 March and 28 March relating to changes in participants’ administrative settings in this group chat, such as profile names and message settings.

That is, the only thing left on John Ratcliffe’s personal cell phone when they went to archive messages covered by the Federal Records Act was a version of the screen shot above — with the name of the chat, the dates March 26 and 28, changes in message settings (perhaps Mike Waltz trying to undo the damage of his disappearing timeline), and changes in profile names.

It’s the last bit that is most interesting. It might reflect people, in addition to the 19, who were added after Goldberg dropped off, people who were even more problematic to be included in the chat than Jeffrey Goldberg. It shouldn’t reflect people changing their own screen names; at that point, after Goldberg published, there would be no point.

But there’s also something that remains unexplained, given the new information we have.

We know from the second of three DOD declarations in the same American Oversight lawsuit that someone — the passive voice is used — did a search of Whiskey Pete’s “mobile device,” whence the “available Signal application messages that are at issue in this case have been preserved.” We know from the third declaration that a search — possibly the only one — that was conducted (the passive voice is used again) on March 27, between the day of the first admin changes reflected on Ratcliffe’s personal phone, March 26, and the day of the second administrative changes, March 28.

What we don’t have, however, is any indication how Hegseth accessed Signal via two different devices, the personal cell that was searched (passive voice) and the desktop in his office hooked up to the dirty old Internet — that is, whether he had a second account, maybe called WarFightersLoveWhiskey or just Pete, or whether he did in fact use his publicly identifiable phone number on the desktop hooked up to the dirty old Internet. That’s actually one possible explanation for the changes on March 26 and 28.

Perhaps we could answer that question by searching the device in Whiskey Pete’s office for Federal Records Act compliance?

Or maybe, as I said, there was someone added in the nine days after Goldberg left.

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16 House Dems Ask Law Firms that Capitulated to Trump If They’ve Thought about Their Bribery Exposure

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Back on April 15, I wrote a post highlighting an amicus brief submitted in the Perkins Coie case that raised concerns that the agreements law firms made with Trump might expose the firms to bribery prosecution.

Just as the President’s decision to issue executive orders that sanction certain law firms is an official act, so too is the President’s decision to withhold issuing executive orders that would sanction other law firms. See McDonnell v. United States, 579 U.S. 550, 574 (2016) (holding that for purposes of construing § 201, an “official act” essentially has two components: (1) “the public official must make a decision or take an action” on (2) “something specific and focused that is ‘pending’ or ‘may by law be brought’” before a public official). A law firm’s commitment to provide valuable pro bono services to the President’s preferred causes, made “with intent to influence” the decision whether to issue or withhold an executive order targeting those law firms, would appear to meet the quid pro quo requirement of federal bribery law.

[snip]

In the present circumstances, the Department of Justice likely would conclude that it is not in the public interest to prosecute law firms that offer pro bono services in exchange for avoiding the consequences of an executive order, even if that offer arguably constitutes a violation of § 201.3 Regardless, the President’s exertion of pressure on law firms to engage in conduct that could violate federal anti-bribery law further illustrates the ethical quandaries these executive orders create. Allowing Executive Order 14,230 to take effect would put more pressure on law firms to reach agreements with the President to avoid a similar fate, and in doing so compromise themselves to potential criminal liability.

3 Or perhaps not: the threat of criminal prosecution is a potent form of influence the federal government could exert to compel law firms to continue complying with the President’s demands. Cf. United States v. Adams, No. 24-CR-556, 2025 WL 978572, at *36 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 2, 2025) (stating that the government “extract[ing] a public official’s cooperation with the administration’s agenda in exchange for dropping a prosecution . . . would be ‘clearly contrary to the public interest’” because it “violate[s] norms against using prosecutorial power for political ends” (quoting United States v. Cowan, 524 F.2d 504, 513 (5th Cir. 1975))).

Today, a group of House Democrats led by Dave Min wrote the firms that capitulated to Trump, raising the same concern.

While we do not know all of the particular facts about the circumstances of the Skadden agreement with President Trump, this agreement on the surface appears to have been struck in order to appease President Trump so that he would not issue an Executive Order targeting Skadden. If this is the case, Skadden’s settlement raises a number of concerns, including potential violations of federal and state statutes, as well as several Rules of Professional Conduct, including the below:

Potential Federal Law Violations

1. 18 U.S.C. § 201(b)(1): The Skadden agreement could potentially implicate this federal anti-bribery statute, which prohibits anyone, under threat of both criminal and civil liability, from corruptly offering and promising something of value to public officials with the intent to influence their official acts.

2. 18 U.S.C. § 1951: The Hobbs Act prohibits obstruction, delay, or affecting commerce by extortion under color of official right. By participating in this arrangement, performance under the Skadden agreement may be argued to constitute the aiding, abetting, and/or conspiracy with officials in the commission of these offenses, as established in precedents such as United States v. Torcasio, 959 F.2d 503, 505-506 (4th Cir. 1992); United States v. Spitler, 800 F.2d 1267, 1276-79 (4th Cir. 1986); and United States v. Wright, 797 F.2d 245 (5th Cir. 1986).

3. 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341/1343, 1346, 1349: These statutes prohibit schemes to defraud the public of the honest services of public officials using mail and wire communications. The Skadden agreement may be argued to constitute such a scheme involving bribery, as defined by the Supreme Court in Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. 358 (2010).

4. 18 U.S.C. § 1962: The RICO statute prohibits participation in an enterprise engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity. It may be argued that the Skadden agreement, which involves Skadden, its partners, the President, and other executive officials may constitute an association-in-fact enterprise engaged in predicate offenses including bribery.

This effort follows a more timid previous effort from Richard Blumenthal and Jamie Raskin.

A lot of lefties complain that members of Congress aren’t standing up to oppose Trump’s authoritarianism.

Letters like this are an example of things that fit solidly within normal legislative effort that help with messaging in the short term but might serve as a powerful lever down the road.

And if they give firms an excuse to renege on the deals in the short term? All the better.

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Todd Blanche Fails Effort to Force SDNY AUSAs to Frame Themselves

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Most reports on the resignation letter from the last three AUSAs on the Eric Adams case focus, justifiably, on its substance. After stating that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche would only let them return from paid leave if they confessed wrong-doing they didn’t commit, Celia Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach, and Derek Wikstrom instead resigned.

The Department placed each of us on administrative leave ostensibly to review our, and the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney’s Office’s, handling of the Adams case. It is now clear that one of the preconditions you have placed on our returning to the Office is that we must express regret and admit some wrongdoing by the Office in connection with the refusal to move to dismiss the case. We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none.

[snip]

Serving in the Southern District of New York has been an honor. There is no greater privilege than to work for an institution whose mandate is to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. We will not abandon this principle to keep our jobs. We resign.

But I’m just as interested in the date: Tuesday’s date, April 22.

The same day that Jay Clayton was apparently installed at SDNY, over Chuck Schumer’s attempt to hold his nomination.

Trump has, in general, conducted his purges before bringing in new leaders, even if (as with Kash Patel) the incoming leader was secretly part of the purge. In any case, the attack on the Adams

prosecutors has been going on for months. Emil Bove first put Wikstrom on paid leave, along with Hagan Scotten, on February 13, over two months ago. He first attempted to smear prosecutors with quotations stripped of context on March 7, by which point he had already rifled through their communications.

In between, Judge Dale Ho pushed back on DOJ’s claims any of these prosecutors engaged in misconduct.

Finally, the parties raise related issues in their briefs that do not appear in DOJ’s Rule 48(a) Motion. For reasons explained below, a court cannot properly grant a Rule 48(a) motion on the basis of rationales that were not raised in the motion. But even considering these additional points on the merits, the Court finds them either inapposite or unsupported by the record. For example, DOJ attaches various exhibits to its brief consisting of communications involving the former prosecution team and asserts that they show “troubling conduct” at USAO-SDNY. DOJ Br. at 1. But these communications were not public until DOJ sought to rely on them; as a matter of logic, they could not have affected “appearances” in this case. Moreover, the notion that DOJ sought dismissal because of improper conduct by the USAO-SDNY prosecution team is belied by the February 10 Decisional Memo itself, which makes clear that DOJ, in reaching its decision, “in no way call[ed] into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutors responsible for the case.” February 10 Decisional Memo at 1. At any rate, the Court has reviewed these communications carefully and finds that they do not show any improper motives or violations of ethics canons or the Justice Manual by the USAO-SDNY prosecution team or by former U.S. Attorney Sassoon.49

49 The Justice Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution state, in relevant part, that “the attorney for the government should commence or recommend federal prosecution if he/she believes that the person’s conduct constitutes a federal offense, and that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction, unless (1) the prosecution would serve no substantial federal interest; (2) the person is subject to effective prosecution in another jurisdiction; or (3) there exists an adequate non-criminal alternative to prosecution.” U.S. Dep’t of Just., Just. Manual § 9-27.220 (2023). There is nothing in the USAO-SDNY communications indicating a violation of these principles. For example, one communication indicates that a friend of AUSA Scotten believed that he would make a good federal judge. See ECF No. 175-4. The Court has reviewed this communication and finds that it shows nothing noteworthy, only that AUSA Scotten was focused on his current job “first,” rather than on any possible future opportunities. Id. Another communication—an email circulating a draft letter to the Court—refers to the Williams op-ed as a “scandal,” ECF No. 175-3, but the use of that informal shorthand in an email does not suggest that any of the individual AUSAs on the case, or the U.S. Attorney at the time, had any inappropriate motives or otherwise violated Justice Department policy or guidelines. [my emphasis]

Ho thus foiled DOJ’s effort to conduct a Twitter Files attack on these prosecutors, to invent scandal among private messages.

And, apparently, Todd Blanche was left demanding that the prosecutors implicate themselves.

There’s nothing good about a dozen prosecutors ousted from DOJ over Bove’s effort to cover up his own quid pro quo with ginned up claims of wrong-doing. There’s nothing good about Blanche’s overt effort to weaponize DOJ in the name of fighting it.

But amid silence about other prosecutors ousted on similar terms, this seems to mark a clear failure. Thus far, the ethics of the prosecutors have thwarted Bove and Blanche’s efforts to recruit them in their own corruption.

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Tulsi Gabbard’s NIE Lies Make Dick Cheney Look Honest by Comparison

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Yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard posted this tweet.

The last sentence of the tweet, referencing an “assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime,” makes clear it pertains to a National Intelligence Estimate described last week by WaPo (and that Tulsi’s bossy claims about leak investigations pertains to the story itself, which I’ll return to).

As WaPo described it, 17 of 18 intelligence agencies say Tulsi is lying.

According to WaPo, the NIE says that,

although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader.

[snip]

The finding was nearly unanimous among the U.S. intelligence agencies with the exception of the FBI, which assessed a moderate level of cooperation between the gang and the Venezuelan government, two people familiar with the matter said.

At least as WaPo describes, Tulsi may even be overstating the FBI conclusion that TdA had a moderate level of cooperation with the government, instead spinning that as, “Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime.”

If WaPo’s reporting is accurate — and we can be virtually certain it is — Tulsi is trying to rewrite the NIE to support Trump’s view, all the while screaming about weaponization.

WaPo describes the stakes of this dispute, but not very clearly. Whether TdA operates at the direction of Venezuela is one key prong on which Trump’s bid to deport Venezuelan makeup artists and soccer players with no due process to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp in El Salvador.

Trump’s manic bid to deport hundreds of migrants to Nayob Bukele’s concentration camp rests on a series of tactics. Many of the tactics were evident in the mad rush last Friday, in the face of a legal injunction prohibiting deportation under the Alien Enemies Act in Southern District of Texas, to instead load a bunch of Venezuelans on planes in Northern District of Texas, from the Bluebonnet Detention Center.

Most of this (the bottom four entries describing how Trump is trying to use AEA deportations) is a bid to use the Alien Enemies Act in a particular way: to bypass deportation proceedings, providing last minute notice (reportedly in English) that guards demand detainees sign, rather than information about the availability of habeas corpus petitions, loading them onto flights where there is not yet an injunction, with demands that men sign documents affirming they are TdA members along the way. Those tactics are what we’re seeing in one frantic legal fight after another.

The Administration seems to want to get the AEA interpreted in this instance to allow virtually no due process — nothing more than Stephen Miller screeching on Fox News that you are TdA, without proof — to deport people who presented in the US, often making asylum claims.

But the larger scheme will only work if courts uphold the AEA in this context, for use in peacetime against a population from one particular home country. Here’s how Trump pitched TdA in the declaration itself.

Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.

TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus. TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017. In 2017, El Aissami was appointed as Vice President of Venezuela. Soon thereafter, the United States Department of the Treasury designated El Aissami as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, 21 U.S.C. 1901 et seq. El Aissami is currently a United States fugitive facing charges arising from his violations of United States sanctions triggered by his Department of the Treasury designation.

Like El Aissami, Nicolas Maduro, who claims to act as Venezuela’s President and asserts control over the security forces and other authorities in Venezuela, also maintains close ties to regime-sponsored narco-terrorists. Maduro leads the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA and other organizations to carry out its objective of using illegal narcotics as a weapon to “flood” the United States. In 2020, Maduro and other regime members were charged with narcoterrorism and other crimes in connection with this plot against America.

Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States. Indeed, in December 2024, INTERPOL Washington confirmed: “Tren de Aragua has emerged as a significant threat to the United States as it infiltrates migration flows from Venezuela.” Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens. [my emphasis]

Some of this (we’re not at war no matter how inflammatory Trump claims migration is) is not legally apt to the statute. Some of this (the specific ties between Maduro and the gang, including his intent to use the gang as a weapon) is not true.

Which is why Tulsi is attempting to claim it is. Thus the stakes on the NIE. Thus Tulsi’s need to claim the NIE concluded something other than it concluded.

As ACLU is arguing in cases challenging the use of the AEA around the country (in this case, men in NDTX saved from deportation by SCOTUS’ intervention on Saturday), the Trump Administration shouldn’t be able to use the AEA at all in this context, because the US is not at war, and the convoluted assertions Trump made to claim we are — that the US is being invaded by a gang backed by Venezuela — does not hold up.

In a Proclamation signed on March 14 but not made public until March 15 (after the government had already attempted to use it), the President invoked a war power, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (“AEA”), to summarily remove noncitizens from the U.S. and bypass the immigration laws Congress has enacted. See Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (Mar. 15, 2025) (“Proclamation”).1 The AEA permits the President to invoke the AEA only where the United States is in a “declared war” with a “foreign government or nation” or a ‘foreign government or nation” is threatening to, or has engaged in, an “invasion or predatory incursion” against the “territory of the United States.” The Proclamation targets Venezuelan noncitizens accused of being part of Tren de Aragua (“TdA”), a criminal gang, and claims that the gang is engaged in an “invasion and predatory incursion” within the meaning of the AEA.

[snip]

Petitioners contend that the Proclamation is invalid under the AEA for several reasons. First, the Proclamation fails to the AEA’s statutory predicates because TdA is not a “foreign nation or government,” nor is TdA is engaged in an “invasion” or “predatory incursions” within the meaning of the AEA. Thus, the government’s attempt to summarily remove Venezuelan noncitizens exceeds the wartime authority that Congress delegated in the AEA. Second, the Proclamation violates both the Act and due process by failing to provide notice and a meaningful opportunity for individuals to challenge their designation as alien enemies. Third, the Proclamation violates the process and protections that Congress has prescribed for the removal of noncitizens in the immigration laws, including protection against being sent to a country where they will be tortured.

If ACLU successfully argues that there’s an NIE that shows even the Intelligence Community knows the basis on which Trump declared AEA is false, then it will undermine the entire effort to use AEA to achieve due process-free deportations.

As I said above, we can be pretty sure that Tulsi is lying on Xitter. That’s not just because her Global Threat Assessment, released a week after Trump invoked the AEA, makes no mention of such invasion or even Tren de Agua (which I noted here). But also because because when Joaquin Castro asked her about such assessment, she confessed that there were competing assessments.

Castro: I want to ask about the Alien Enemies Act, real quick, while I have time. The President has used the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used to detain German and Japanese nationals during World War II, to summarily deport people accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. To invoke this law, the President must demonstrate the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government. They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government. The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans. The unclassified version of the Annual Threat Assessment the Intelligence Community just released makes no mention of any invasion or war that we are fighting with the nation of Venezuela. You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in this Threat Assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the Intelligence Community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?

Ratcliffe: We have no assessment that says that.

Castro: In invoking the law the President alleged that Venezuela is taking hostile actions at the direction — clandestine or otherwise — of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Director Gabbard: Does the Intelligence Community assess the Venezuelan government is directing Tred de Aragua’s hostile actions against the United States.

Gabbard: There are varied assessments that came from different Intelligence Community elements. I’ll defer to Director Patel to speak specifically to the FBI assessment.

[Kash moves to speak.]

Castro: But let me ask you. So you’re saying there are conflicting assessments that have come from the IC?

Gabbard: That’s correct.

Castro: Thank you. We’ll take it up in closed session.

For his part, John Ratcliffe admitted that “we” (possibly meaning the CIA) has no assessment that backs Trump’s claim of invasion. The CIA would be one of the 17 agencies that debunked Trump’s claim.

So now that WaPo confirmed what was evident just from this exchange (the WaPo story notes that both Castro and Jim Himes raised the AEA during the hearing) Tulsi is trying to lie about the assessment by claiming this is an illegal leak, precisely the weaponization against which Trump ran.

The weaponization of intelligence to undermine the President’s agenda is an assault on democracy. Those behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence, twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite finding, will be held accountable under the full force of the law. Rooting out this politicization of intelligence is exactly what President Trump campaigned on and what Americans overwhelmingly voted for.

Blah blah blah.

Unless Tulsi wants to start going after her former House colleagues, it’s likely there was no classified leak. It goes little beyond what Tulsi herself said in this exchange with Castro, and otherwise relies on named expert sources.

“The idea that Maduro is directing Tren de Aragua members and sending criminals to infiltrate the United States is ludicrous,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

The group, which started as a prison gang in the Venezuelan state of Aragua in 2014, has expanded into a transnational gang that has carried out brazen crimes from Santiago, Chile, to New York City. But it does not operate with a clearly defined hierarchical structure, Ramsey said.

“Tren de Aragua has become more like a brand that any group of carjackers from Miami down to Argentina can invoke to further their criminal activity, but there’s really no clear sense of hierarchy,” he said. “And the reality is that Tren de Aragua has not always gotten along with the Maduro government: We saw just a few years ago, the military in 2023, stormed a prison that Tren de Aragua controlled and allegedly carried out extrajudicial executions.”

And Tulsi is trying to silence experts with unbridled Orwellian claims that up is down — that the single FBI assessment, assessing moderate contacts — says that TdA is acting with Venezuelan support, a claim that even still falls well short of what Trump claimed in his declaration.

Tulsi built her entire career around opposing the wars that Dick Cheney ginned up two decades ago. Now, in Cheneyesque fashion, she’s grotesquely inventing a war that doesn’t exist so she can help Trump destroy the Constitution.

Update: In a CO case granting two detainees a Temporary Restraining Order forbidding their deportation under the AEA, Judge Charlotte Sweeny said this about the AEA:

According to Petitioners, the Proclamation exceeds the President’s “statutory authority in three critical respects.” ECF No. 2 at 11. First, there is no “invasion or predatory incursion.” Id. Second, any purported invasion is not perpetuated by a “foreign government or nation.” Id. And third, there is “no process to contest whether an individual falls within the Proclamation.” Id. Skepticism of the Proclamation’s contrary findings is required, Petitioners urge, to the point of satisfying their first TRO burden. Id.; see also M.G., 117 F.4th at 1238. The Court agrees.

That said, Sweeny’s analysis did not focus on the relationship between Tren de Aragua and the Maduro regime.

Petitioners contend, as with its failures to identify an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” the Proclamation likewise fails to assert a “foreign nation or government” is “invading the United States.” ECF No. 2 at 14. The Court agrees with Petitioners. The Court discerns little reason to linger on this point, especially where, as Petitioners observe, the Proclamation finds TdA is “closely aligned with [and] infiltrated[] the Maduro regime.” Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, 90 FR 13033. The Proclamation does not find TdA itself is a foreign nation, country, or government. At bottom, the Proclamation fails to adequately find or assert TdA is a “foreign nation or government,” § 21, sufficient to justify the Act’s invocation. Indeed, if TdA was such a “foreign nation or government,” id., there would be no need for it to “undertak[e] hostile actions . . . at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, 90 FR 13033 (emphasis added).

Rather, in lengthier analysis, she focused on the absence of military invasion. She did not rely on Ratcliffe’s comment, but she could have.

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Self-Reportation: Pete Hegseth’s Witch Hunt Ensnared Himself

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As I wrote here, three top Pete Hegseth aides were ousted (most reports continue to use the passive voice) last week, purportedly in the witch hunt he started to look for the sources of various suspected leaks. Longtime Trump press aide John Ullyot also resigned or was asked to, depending on whom you believe.

That seems to have precipitated the exposure — first by NYT — that Whiskey Pete Hegseth had a second Signal chat, one he himself curated. Although the list, which dates back to before Hegseth’s confirmation, purports to convey administrative and scheduling details, Hegseth included roughly the same Houthi attack information that he shared on the Signal thread that included Jeffrey Goldberg.

That means he shared it with people who didn’t have a need to know — his brother and his lawyer, Tim Parlatore — and his spouse, who is not a DOD employee at all (even though she babysits him in important meetings).

[T]he information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.

Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.

[snip]

Mr. Hegseth created the separate Signal group initially as a forum for discussing routine administrative or scheduling information, two of the people familiar with the chat said. The people said Mr. Hegseth typically did not use the chat to discuss sensitive military operations and said it did not include other cabinet-level officials.

Mr. Hegseth shared information about the Yemen strikes in the “Defense | Team Huddle” chat at roughly the same time he was putting the same details in the other Signal chat group that included senior U.S. officials and The Atlantic, the people familiar with Mr. Hegseth’s chat group said.

Sharing the attack details with his spouse put him at far greater exposure of willful violation of 18 USC 793, sharing National Defense Information with someone not authorized to receive it.

Of the 13 people that AP reports were in the thread, NYT identifies the following:

  1. Hegseth
  2. His wife Jennifer
  3. His brother Phil
  4. His lawyer turned DOD employee Tim Parlatore
  5. DOD spox Sean Parnell
  6. Chief of Staff Joe Kasper (who reportedly is moving elsewhere)
  7.  Dan Caldwell (who was also on the Goldberg list)  …
  8. And Darin Selnick, the latter two of whom were ousted in Kasper’s witch hunt last week

NYT does not say that either Colin Carroll — also fired last week — or Ullyot participated in the chat, though Ullyot was a booster during his confirmation and so by definition could have.

But everyone who participated in the chat would be witness to Hegseth sharing data he insists is not classified, but which a jury could easily find to be National Defense Information because its sharing could obviously put service members at risk. In Espionage Act cases, a jury decides whether something is NDI.

NYT implies that this thread differs from the Mike Waltz one because Hegseth used his personal device, but I’m not sure there’s any confirmation that he used a DOD device for the Waltz chat, either. (John Ratcliffe used his personal device, and Tulsi implied she had in congressional testimony; Marco Rubio had two versions of the thread and so probably two different devices).

In either case, Hegseth’s thread includes a stupid mixture of public and private, and the administrative details on the thread alone, to say nothing of the Houthi attack details, would mean the Federal Records Act covers the thread. By law Hegseth has to make copies of the thread and archive it on DOD servers.

There’s increasing reason to believe that the witch hunt Hegseth initiated on March 21 led to this place — has created and is creating more risk going forward. That is, it increasingly looks like the paranoid witch hunt that Hegseth started in March may now ensnare him personally, if no other way than making those targeted willing to share secrets they were otherwise keeping about Hegseth but now have incentive to share to exonerate themselves.

Hegseth himself tied the story directly to the firings last week at an appearance at the White House today.

You know, what a big surprise that a bunch of — a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax, won’t give back their Pulitzers…

[snip]

This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try and slash and burn people and ruin their reputation.

But the witch hunt also intersects with the legal response to the disclosure of the original thread in important ways.

As a reminder, Kasper ordered the investigation on March 21, between the time, on March 15, that Jeffrey Goldberg concluded Mike Waltz’ Signal chat was real and so dropped off the chat, and the time, on March 24, Goldberg first disclosed it. As I laid out here, one of the stories identified among the suspected leaks — on the deployment of the USS Vinson carrier group from the East China Sea to the Red Sea — overlaps with the original Houthi thread (and so could be among the texts exchanged after Goldberg dropped off).

In any case — as this timeline makes clear — the witch hunt was in process even as two separate legal responses to the Atlantic story, an American Oversight lawsuit and an Inspector General investigation requested by both Roger Wicker and Jack Reed — kicked off.

A CIA declaration submitted in the American Oversight lawsuit, which the government has construed to apply only to the Signal chat disclosed by Goldberg, confirmed that Ratcliffe’s copy of the text thread includes none of the substantive messages but did include metadata showing there were changes to the original Signal text thread made after the first disclosures of it, on March 26 and 28. Whoever made those changes is at risk not just of violating the FRA, but also obstructing the legal processes that started after Goldberg revealed the texts.

The declarations submitted by DOD (the first, reflecting a request that Hegseth forward a copy of the chat to DOD, a second, by a more senior lawyer, noting that a search of Hegseth’s mobile device was conducted and “available Signal messages … have been preserved,” and a third, noting that the screen shots of the Signal texts were taken on March 27) have been more ambiguous. As American Oversight noted in its most recent filing,

For example, rather than specifying which messages were preserved, the Supplemental DoD Declaration vaguely references the preservation of “existing Signal application messages,” which, as shown by the Supplemental Blankenship Declaration, could be none. Suppl. Bennett Decl. ¶ 2, ECF No. 15-1.

But in any case, DOD took those screen shots on a day between changes made to the list (and the day Wicker and Reed asked DODIG to investigate), and so might reflect the first set of alterations.

CNN describes that the three men ousted last week — Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll — will be interviewed in the IG investigation, an investigation about which (CNN reports) Hegseth is increasingly concerned.

Hegseth has also grown increasingly concerned about the inspector general investigation, the sources said. Caldwell, Selnick and Carroll expect to be interviewed as part of that probe, the sources added.

That all three will be interviewed is of some interest: only Caldwell was known to be on the Waltz Signal list. If DOD’s IG has reason to interview the other two, it suggests they may already have more reason to be interested in Hegseth’s other use of Signal. But as the NYT noted, “Mr. Hegseth’s aides” (a term not necessarily limited to those on the Signal chats) advised him not to discuss operational details on that chat.

One person familiar with the chat said Mr. Hegseth’s aides had warned him a day or two before the Yemen strikes not to discuss such sensitive operational details in his Signal group chat, which, while encrypted, is not considered as secure as government channels typically used for discussing highly sensitive war planning and combat operations.

[snip]

Several of these staff members encouraged Mr. Hegseth to move the work-related matters in the “Defense | Team Huddle” chat to his government phone. But Mr. Hegseth never made the transition, according to some of the people familiar with the chat who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

I don’t rule out the possibility that Hegseth fired them all to make it impossible for Acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins to subpoena the men (rather than because of the witch hunt he attributed it to). But it sounds like they’re willing to submit to voluntary interviews at this point, if for no other reason then to vindicate their innocence.

Which brings me to a point I’ve obsessed about since the beginning. The witch hunt, as laid out by Joe Kasper, was never designed to be a normal leak investigation. For those, you make a referral right away to the FBI, describing the suspected leak and providing a list of all the people known to have access to the leaked material.

Instead, this leak investigation envisioned a report for Whiskey Pete, and referrals by Kasper if he discovered leakers he wanted to face further investigation.

This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense. The report will include a complete record of unauthorized disclosures within the Department of Defense and recommendations to improve such efforts. I expect to be informed immediately if this effort results in information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorized disclosure, and that such information will be referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution

A paragraph added to CNN’s story (along with an April 4 story about which Hegseth was worried, one which could show up in Hegseth’s personal Signal list) describes that Hegseth “demanded” the FBI get involved but some of his aides dissuaded him because of the IG investigation.

Following the press reports — including one in The New York Times about the questionable success of a massive military campaign against the Houthis — Hegseth began to lash out and grew suspicious that senior military officials, as well as some of his closest advisers, were leaking to undermine him, the sources added.

At one point, Hegseth even demanded an FBI probe into the leaks — which some of his aides advised against, sources said. There was already an active inspector general investigation focusing on Hegseth, and bringing in the FBI might only invite more scrutiny, those aides advised. [my emphasis]

But this conversation should have happened before March 21, almost a week before DOD IG considered investigating. And the only reason aides would recommend against FBI involvement is if they were protecting people — perhaps themselves, perhaps those close to Hegseth, perhaps Hegseth himself — from criminal exposure.

That is, at least some of Hegseth’s aides worried that if the FBI got involved, they would discover a crime.

That’s not surprising. At least four of them witnessed Hegseth providing his wife information that a jury might decide was NDI.

Anyway, this probably is not done.

In a blockbuster op-ed claiming to support Hegseth but calling on Trump to fire him, Ullyot described things in (which decried the “horrible crisis-communications advice” offered by Parnell without naming him), “key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately” that, “more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week.”

With the original thread, in which Hegseth unwittingly shared information on a pending attack with someone not authorized to receive it, there are already questions about whether Hegseth destroyed communications covered by the Federal Records Act. Now, he has fired at least three people, two of whom witnessed Hegseth wittingly share the same information with, at least, his spouse, and some of whom likely told him not to do so before he did.

Having fired them under cover of a leak investigation, he may make it much clearer to American Oversight, to DOD’s Inspector General, and to Congress, that he was the leaker he was looking for from the start.

Update: American Oversight amended their complaint today, incorporating Whiskey Pete’s family Signal list.

Update: NBC seems to confirm something that appeared obvious to me: Whiskey Pete used his personal device for both the Friends and Family thread and the Waltz one.

The material Kurilla sent included details about when U.S. fighters would take off and when they would hit their targets — details that could, if they fell into the wrong hands, put the pilots of those fighters in grave danger. But he was doing exactly what he was supposed to: providing Hegseth, his superior, with information he needed to know and using a system specifically designed to safely transmit sensitive and classified information.

But then Hegseth used his personal phone to send some of the same information Kurilla had given him to at least two group text chats on the Signal messaging app, three U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges told NBC News.

The sequence of events, which has not been previously reported, could raise new questions about Hegseth’s handling of the information, which he and the government have denied was classified. In all, according to the two sources, less than 10 minutes elapsed between Kurilla’s giving Hegseth the information and Hegseth’s sending it to the two group chats, one of which included other Cabinet-level officials and their designees — and, inadvertently, the editor of The Atlantic magazine. The other group included Hegseth’s wife, his brother, his attorney and some of his aides.

Hegseth shared the information on Signal even though, NBC News has reported, an aide warned him in the days beforehand to be careful not to share sensitive information on an unsecure communications system before the Yemen strikes, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.

That raises the stakes on that second DOD declaration which describes that someone (the declaration uses the passive voice) searched the device Hegseth used for the Waltz chat.

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