Note: I’m obviously failing my effort to get off this website for a week. I haven’t left yet!! But hopefully I can wean myself off this thing for a week starting … now.

Twice yesterday, Alina Habba made claims about prosecutorial priorities that mandate she charge her boss, Donald Trump.

First, she RTed the NJ USAO announcement of charges against someone who threatened several judges.

The charges seem real, involving phoned threats to cut off judges’ fingers or shoot them, though the accused perpetrator left the country (possibly to India) in 2018, and there’s no announcement of an extradition request. Plus, Ricky Patel — the same guy who ginned up the arrest of Ras Baraka after Baraka obeyed Patel’s request to leave a property onto which he had been invited — is involved, which makes it suspect.

In both the Tweet and the press release, Alina Habba, who represented Donald Trump when he routinely attacked judges in that case and others, presumably Tweeting some of those threats from his property in New Jersey, whose attacks led to phoned-in threats to Judge Juan Merchan and his staffers, talked about how heinous it is threaten judges.

“The conduct alleged in the Indictment is as heinous as it is troubling: threats to a federal judge, two state superior court judges, an elected official, and a private New Jersey resident. The conduct is not just reckless — it is a direct attack on our justice system. Targeting those who uphold the rule of law is an attack on every community they serve. This egregious behavior is unacceptable. And, as the charges make clear, no matter where you are, we will find you and hold you responsible.”

Excuse me? If you believe this, Alina, you charge Donald Trump for what you call heinous behavior.

Maybe even consider whether you need to turn yourself in for some of your attacks on the judge?

But Habba wasn’t done.

After that, Habba RTed Kash Patel’s announcement of charges for a man in Florida who allegedly — and I emphasize allegedly — threatened Habba.

Kash claimed this was an instance of a “copycat” threat using “86,” a clear reference to Jim Comey’s Tweeting something he saw on a beach.

A dangerous copycat, fueled by reckless rhetoric from former officials, threatened those protecting our country. Political violence has no place here. Proud of our @FBITampa and thankful to our Florida partners for acting fast to deliver justice.

The indictment in question charges a guy named Salvatore Russotto with two counts — threatening an official and assault (18 USC 111) — for four kinds of statements:

• Calling Alina Habba the C-word, repeatedly
• Hoping she dies a painful death (but not threatening to cause that himself)
• Saying “86” her
• Calling for “death penalty for all traitors”

Kash already charged someone else for using the 86-term, though in that case, the threats were much more graphic and personalized.

But this? Hoping someone dies? Calling someone the C-word?

The only real threat is calling for the death penalty for traitors. Remember Trump’s threats against Liz Cheney? Against Peter Strzok?

How about the time when current FBI Director and then private citizen Kash Patel told a lie about something in a John Durham filing, which led Trump to claim that Michael Sussmann should be put to death?

Trump calls his adversaries traitors all the time, and he has repeatedly called for them to be killed. Speaking of copycat, so did hundreds of the Jan6ers Trump pardoned after they stormed the halls of Congress calling to “Hang Mike Pence.” Those people weren’t charged with assault for that, but then I guess DOJ could now charge them?

And again, some of these threats Trump made undoubtedly were issued from New Jersey, and many of them were less than five years ago.

Of course, Kash’s decision to charge someone for the kind of threat he has facilitated is about Comey, not rule of law, perhaps an attempt to make nothing into something. Kash wants to claim that this is a copycat, but that Jack Posobiec’s even more viral use of the very same term against Joe Biden, also fewer than five years ago, was not.

If I were the lawyer of the guy in Florida, I would raise all this in a selective prosecution bid. As I also would if I represented the Alabama woman charged with bringing home classified documents (also a seemingly legitimate case) after a search the likes of which Kash called “unlawful” when such a search targeted Mar-a-Lago.

Note: As I mentioned at the end of this … I’m going to be out of pocket next week. My goal is to do something I have not done for a decade: to take a week off posting.

Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

We are finally at the end of this torturous SCOTUS term with six decisions expected today.

The most important in my opinion is Trump v. CASA, regarding the reach of a lower court order with regard to Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship.

Today’s decisions follow below and will be added to this post as released; any shadow docket decisions released today will follow in an update at the bottom of this post.

~ ~ ~

Trump v. CASA Inc. — Justice Barrett wrote the 6-3 decision, with the court breaking along ideological lines. Justice Sotomayor wrote a dissent for her, Kagan, and Jackson; Jackson also wrote a dissent.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf

This case centered on district court decisions in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington blocking enforcement of Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship to persons born in the US depending on the status of their parents’ citizenship. SCOTUS in essence said district courts can only write orders narrowed to the case though birthright citizenship has been recognized since the passage of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.

Kennedy v. Braidwood Management — Justice Kavanaugh delivered this 6-3 decision; Thomas wrote the dissent which Alito and Gorsuch joined.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-316_869d.pdf

This case arose from right-wing Christianist attacks on preventative health care under ACA like PrEP intended to prevent HIV infection; they claimed it infringed on their religious rights “by making them complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage between one man and one woman.” (Never mind any first responders who might be on PrEP to protect themselves from incidental exposure.) The attack focused on the Appointment Clause attempting to sever the relationship between subordinate officers empaneled by HHS and policy execution; the case has had enormous repercussions affecting other preventative care under ACA.

Federal Communications Commission v. Consumers’ Research — Justice Kagan has the 6-3 decision; Gorsuch filed the dissent which Thomas and Alito joined.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-354_0861.pdf

summary TK

Mahmoud v. Taylor— Justice Alito wrote the 6-3 decision; Thomas wrote a concurring opinion. Justice Sotomayor filed the dissent, joined by Kagan and Jackson.

See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-297_4f14.pdf

summary TK

Free Speech Coalition Inc. v. Paxton — Justice Thomas has the 6-3 decision; Justice Kagan filed a dissent joined by Sotomayor and Jackson.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-1122_3e04.pdf

summary TK – though I must add RTFN:

Held: H. B. 1181 triggers, and survives, review under intermediate scrutiny because it only incidentally burdens the protected speech of
adults. Pp. 5–36.

Fuck any Free Speech rights minors may have, or the school district’s rights to determine PUBLIC SCHOOL curriculum because of right-wing Christianist freaks.

Louisiana v. Callais — This case was rescheduled for re-argument. Justice Thomas disagrees with this rescheduling and issued a dissent documenting his rationale.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-109_l53m.pdf

summary TK

Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic — This case appears to have been pushed out to next week.

summary TK

I assume we’ll get any shadow docket cases next week as well, but I could be wrong; the last decisions weren’t all released today after all and I thought incorrectly they would be.

Increasingly (possibly as an outgrowth of their willingness to serve as data mules for his Truth Social tweets), news outlets treat Donald Trump’s mere act of saying something as news.

There’s an interesting example in the NYT that shows how doing so wildly distorts the workings of what democracy America has left.

On the front page of the NYT digital page there’s a package of stories about the reconciliation bill, which Trump wants to push through by July 4, in part, to keep Stephen Miller’s dragnet running. The top “story” in that package bears the headline, “Trump rallies for signature policy bill as GOP rushes to save it; President Trump’s domestic policy bill faced another hurdle after the Senate parliamentarian said several of its major provisions could not be included.”

If you click on that story, it’s not a dedicated news story. Instead, it’s just the top newsletter page, with stubs for stories on the reconciliation bill, Iran strikes, and deportation. Nevertheless, that page itself also bears the headline, “Trump rallies for his policy bill as GOP works to save it.”

If you click though the reconciliation bill stub, it takes you to this story, in which the Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough — not Trump — is the primary actor.

It’s not until the fifth paragraph of the story that we get the promised “news” about Trump rallying for the bill — and the only newsworthy part of that 73-word passage is that Trump either misstated or lied about what was in the bill.

President Trump worked to rally support for the legislation on Thursday at an event at the White House, praising the “hundreds of things here” to like about the bill.

“It’s so good,” he said, though one item he trumpeted, eliminating taxes on Social Security, was not actually in the bill.

When a reporter shouted out a question about whether Congress could pass the bill by July 4, Mr. Trump replied: “We hope so.”

You could make an entire news story about this: that Trump promised to eliminate taxes on Social Security, but it’s not in the Big Ugly he’s pushing through to codify the things that really matter to him. Instead, Trump will take food from children and medical care from working people so he can pay off the billionaires who got him reelected (something else that’s not in the story). Trump made a promise, and rather than keeping it, he is falsely claiming he’s keeping it.

NYT didn’t do that (though it did publish a story about Republicans who rely on the benefits right wingers are trying to kill), but they did cast him as the lead character in the one event in town where he’s a side player, what might be the only substantive legislation passed this year, if right wingers even can pass it, which is not yet clear (Jake Sherman says John Thune doesn’t have the votes to pass it, yet).

Incidentally, the only mention of a Democrat in the story comes from Bobby Kogan, who provided a price tag for the things right wingers had stuffed into a bill that broke the rules for reconciliation.

If Republicans are forced to remove all the provisions Ms. MacDonough has ruled against, it would eliminate more than $500 billion of the bill’s intended spending cuts, according to a rough analysis by Bobby Kogan, a former Democratic Senate Budget Committee staff member and White House budget official who is now the senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

What doesn’t make any of these stories is that the Parliamentarian’s serial rejection of one after another policy in the Big Ugly came as a result of a lot of work from Democratic staffers who successfully argued that the provisions were extraneous to the bill (see the sections on the Byrd Rule in this post for an explanation of what that means).

Ron Wyden is one of the few people who made this point: he and his staff had to work to make this happen.

This is what Democrats in the Senate have been working on (even giving little-noticed press conferences) during a period when many wailed they were doing nothing: trying, at a minimum, to remove the gratuitously bad things right wingers are trying to jam through on this bill. Among the things Democrats did via Byrd Rule challenges are:

• Preserving CFPB and Public Company Oversight Board
• Kept some Food Stamp funding and benefits
• Limited a rule trying to prevent states from regulating AI
• Eliminated an attack on the judiciary’s ability to enforce contempt
• Prevented DOJ from punishing sanctuary cities
• Thwarted Mike Lee’s bid to sell off public lands
• Combatted several attacks on renewable energy and defeated an effort to exempt offshore oil drilling from the NEPA process
• Preserved civil service protections for Federal employees
• Defeated an effort to attack unions
• Killed a plan to get rid of USPS’ electric vehicles
• Protected some ObamaCare provisions
• Exempted existing student loan borrowers from an effort to restrict access
• Defeated a bunch of attacks on Medicaid
• Protected Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care
• Eliminated vouchers for religious schools
• Killed a tax exemption written just for Hillsdale College
• Defeated an effort to decriminalize gun silencers

It’s not yet clear what will happen with the Big Ugly. Some House members are calling on Thune to fire the Parliamentarian, or to ignore her. There is a workaround that would blow up the filibuster.

For now, at least, Thune keeps insisting he won’t ignore MacDonough’s rulings (though as Politico notes, that could change if Trump demands it).

At the very least, the success in getting things excluded under the Byrd Rule has made a shitty bill less shitty. It has also created a delay, and any delay creates the outside possibility that the press will start to cover this bill as it should be, an effort to steal from the poor to pay off Trump’s debt to Elon Musk, and with the coverage spook enough Republicans to kill the bill in current form. As Cogan notes, these eliminated cuts also create a bigger financial hole in the bill, one of a few issues that risks killing it altogether.

Yes, the press is covering the drama created because Republicans may not have the votes. Yes, it’s likely Republicans will cave, again, once Trump directly threatens them.

But until that happens, Trump is not the story here.

If you want to tell a story about Trump, make it about the lies he and other right wingers are telling to try to reverse the overwhelming opposition to this bill. Absent that, treat Article I as if they still exist.

Update: Both David Dayen and I were once too optimistic that the Big Ugly wouldn’t get done in the House. But he lays out here, with Whitney Curry Wimbish, why these Byrd Rule rulings could doom the bill.

REPUBLICANS HAVE A BUNCH OF OPTIONS for dealing with this, but all of them have either been ruled out, would make the bill seemingly unpassable, or would need more time than they want to take.

First, Republicans can “cure” the Byrd rule problems by coming up with other language and negotiating with the parliamentarian to insert them back into the bill. The Senate Banking Committee already did this with new language on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Previously the committee completely zeroed out funding for the CFPB by setting an existing “cap” on how much the Federal Reserve can transfer to the agency at 0 percent of total Fed funds. That was thrown out by the parliamentarian. Now, in the new text, the committee has changed that to 6.5 percent.

Senators are reportedly trying to go back with new provider tax language as well.

Republicans would also likely try to squeeze more blood from cuts that have already been allowed to stay, Sanders said. “The big thing hanging over them is specifically the instruction to cut Medicaid,” she said. “Exactly where this could come out of, I feel like they’d probably try to get deeper savings from existing Medicaid savings that are allowed to stay in, which might end up making them more harmful.”

The problem here is that all new text would have to go back to the parliamentarian for more haggling. The parliamentarian did approve a change that would add state cost-sharing (along a slower timeline) to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but as a Hill source explained, the process for the full bill could take weeks, and with each passing day, the bill gets less popular. That is why the White House wants the bill done by July 4. That would be next to impossible under a constant rewrite scenario.

[snip]

The Senate appears eager to just stick a bill in the House’s lap and dare them to vote it down. But that assumes they can get a bill over to the House at all. The buildup of parliamentarian rulings really does threaten the outcome.

One huge problem for Republicans is the debt limit, where something needs to be done to raise the nation’s borrowing cap by as early as August. There is a $5 trillion debt limit increase in the Senate version of the bill. If the impasse on the bill continues, Congress may have to split that out and pass a standalone version, which would almost certainly need Democratic support, where Democrats could dictate terms.

Under the timeline needed to pass the megabill by July 4, votes would need to begin today. There’s almost no chance of that happening. A press officer for Thune did not respond to an email request for information to say whether the Senate is operating under a new timeline.

You don’t want to say that a bill cutting taxes and spending simply cannot pass a Republican Congress. It doesn’t make much sense to say that. But that threat has grown much more real by the day.

Our democracy is under attack, in a war planned and carried out by generations of filthy rich tight-wingers working primarily through the Republican Party. The war has come into the open under Trump, funded by the latest group of hideously rich dirtbags, the tech bros, and justified by a cadre of anti-intellectual grifters and yakkers like Curtis Yarvin.

We need to see the battlefield. Only then can we decide on how to act. As Marcy pointed out here, our role is explicitly political, as befits people who believe in democracy to our core.

The Battlefield

Introduction

The filthy rich have always held more power in this country than their numbers would support in a functioning democracy. Their control was somewhat restricted during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th C., but SCOTUS did it’s best to beat back progressive laws. The political power of the filthy rich was sharply decreased during the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said this out loud in a 1936 speech in Madison Square Garden:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

The filthy rich hated FDR, and have spent nearly 100 years trying to destroy his legacy and our way of life. Generations of oligarchs arise over time in different sectors of the economy, and the wealth they control has increased steadily since then. But regardless of background, a significant number have a attacked every institution we have relied on as part of our heritage.

At the same time they have ruthlessly pursued their own interests without regard to the national interest.We know some names, like H.L. Hunt and other Texas Oilmen, and the Koch Brothers, and groups like the John Birch Society. We generally know about other threats, like the Christian Dominionists and White Nationalists.

The Republicans took over congress in 1946. One of their first acts was to pass the Taft-Hartley Act which was intended to undercut the power of organized labor. They continued a long tradition of\ anti-communism and anti-socialism. The Democrats responded by kicking out the Communists, many of whom were active in unions, and with the Civil Rights movement. The Democratic Party tradition of punching left has deep roots.

Trump and his henchmen are the culmination of this campaign. They are openly engaged in a war on every institution that wields power in our society and in or through our government. The success of a decades-long assault reveals the effect of that long-term guerrilla war by the Republicans.

Congress

Republican congressionals are weaklings. This has been a fixture of that party since the mid-90s. Newt Gingrich preached lock-step Republican voting, and Denny Hastert created the Hastert Rule, under which no legislation gets to the floor unless it can pass with only Republican votes.

Mitch McConnell made it his job to make sure that Obama couldn’t pass any legislation. He whipped Republican Senators so viciously they did his bidding. In his first term Trump violently assaulted Republicans who defied his orders. The party internalized fear so completely that it attacked its own members who voted to impeach Trump.

Now Trump simply ignores laws he doesn’t like, including spending laws, and arrests Democratic lawmakers on groundless charges.

The Administrative State

Under FDR, Congress began to empower agencies to carry out specific tasks necessary for a modern government. This gave rise to the administrative state. Republicans hate it. Ever since its inception, they and corporate Democrats have worked to hamstring  agencies.

Conservative legal academics expanded the use of originalism, and created a bullshit  originalist rationale explaining why our 250 year old Constitution doesn’t allow any significant power to agencies. This resulted in SCOTUS decisions on purely partisan grounds over the last few decades that protect the filthy rich and harm normal people. The number of delay and choke points is so great that our nation is drenched in chemicals known to be toxic, and thousands of others whose toxicity, especially in combinations, is unknown.

Trump attacked the entire structure with his firings, closures, and illegal withholding of funds. District Courts tried to stop it, but the SCOTUS anti-democracy majority has dithered or rejected their decisions. Republicans refuse to push back, even to support cancer research, surely a non-partisan issue.

Trump put incompetent people in charge of all agencies and departments. They were confirmed by the Senate, often with (unnecessary) Democratic support. RFK, Jr? Whiskey Pete Hegseth? Linda McMahon? Republicans allowed Elon Musk and a small flock of ignorant coders to terminate critical programs. Without agencies, our ability to govern ourselves is wrecked.

The Judiciary

The attacks on the judiciary began after Brown v. Board. Impeach Earl Warren, screamed billboards all over the South. But it took off under Ronald Reagan, who appointed a host of ideologues to the bench, leading to his failed effort to put the loathsome Robert Bork on SCOTUS.

Republicans responded to the rejection of Bork by pushing even harder to put right-wing ideologues on the bench. George Bush the worst stopped listening to the centrist ABA on judicial nominations. Trump handed judicial nominations to the Federalist Society and to Leo Leonard. McConnell made sure Democrats couldn’t appoint people to SCOTUS. Then Trump appointed a crank, a frat boy, and an dithering academic, none of whom have evidenced any core principles other than obeisance to Trump’s dictates.

The Fifth Circuit is full of nutcases and fools, among whom I single out the odious Matthew Kacsmaryk. The Fifth Circuit refused to rid itself of single-judge districts, and ignores judge-shopping, making this lawless nutcase the most powerful judge in the country.

Then in Trump v. US . John Roberts  crowned Trump king of the nation, and implicitly approved everything Trump and his henchmen have done. See, for example, the ridiculous order allowing Stephen Miller to export human beings to terrorist nations, issued without explanation, and without a full hearing. Roberts can only be compared to Roger Taney.

States

The federal system gives states a central role in assuring the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. Historically Republicans used what they called states rights to stop federal efforts to enforce the 14th Amendment. They were generally unwilling to attack state action in significant ways. Trump has started this assault on his own.

He hit states whose policies he doesn’t like by cancelling grants, by senseless litigation, and by sending in the National Guard, the Marines and ICE thugs. One of his earliest acts was to file a lawsuit against Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago, alleging that it’s unconstitutional for us to limit the cooperation of local law enforcement with ICE thugs. In other words, we have to use our own resources to fill Stephen Miller’s gulags.

Trump demanded the Republicans pass laws, including the Big Bill, that will harm Blue states. He helps Red States damaged by his tariffs. He attacks states who don’t force colleges and universities to follow his anti-DEI policies, meaning erasing not-White people from history and higher education.

Private Institutions

The Republican war on higher education began with Ronald Reagan’s attacks on California colleges and universities. The attack was two-pronged. He packed the boards of these institutions with Republican loyalists, a philistine group who demanded focus on job training at the expense of education. Public support was reduced dramatically, forcing the system to increase tuition. This led to a massive increase in student loans, and to debt servitude for millions of people.

This two-pronged attack was immediately followed by other states, partly out of spite (Republicans) and partly on financial grounds (centrist Democrats). Republicans, ever the victims, claimed that universities were liberal and quashed conservative viewpoints, whatever those might be. The screaming got louder, and Trump used it to attack higher education a bit in his first term. All this was fomented and paid for by filthy rich monsters and justified by liars.

In his second term Trump directly attacked Harvard and Columbia on utterly specious grounds. He has made life miserable for foreign students studying here on visas, a deranged policy with no benefits to our nation. He has cut off federal support for basic research, the foundation of US leadership in most sciences and most technologies.

The Republican attack on law firms was focused on trial lawyers, a group that fought to protect working people from the depredations of pig-rich corporations. For the rest, the damage was largely self-inflicted. Firms grew to gargantuan size, taking in tens of millions of dollars. To keep that flow of money they surrendered professionalism and became servants of the filthy rich. When I started practicing law, we were bound by the Model Code of Professional Responsibility. The current weakened version of that ethical code is called the Model Code of Professional Conduct. Lawyers relieved themselves of all responsibility to society and the rule of law.

When Trump attacked, many of these behemoths were unprepared to act responsibly, and cravenly kissed the ring.

The attacks on private enterprise are smaller in scope. Primarily Trump seeks to force corporations to dismantle DEI programs, terminate support for LGBT initiatives and outreach, and similar matters. The media have self-policed rather than confront the craziness, a task made easier by their financial weakness.

What is to be done

The battlefield is enormous. Sometimes it seems overwhelming. None of us can deal with all of it. But each of us can deal with some of it. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. When we mass up on any front, we will have an impact.

I go to #TeslaTakedown. Hurting Musk is an indirect attack on Trump, and serves as a warning to the other Tech Bros. We have to keep that going.

Many of us are alumni of colleges under attack. I don’t give money to Notre Dame, even though my education there was sterling. I should have written a letter explaining why I would never contribute again, and why I removed a bequest from my will.

We can’t avoid all collaborating corporations entirely, but my family stopped using Target and cancelled our New York Times subscription. We can all redirect our spending. And then we can write letters saying we did it because they hurt our fellow citizens. Or even something fiercer.

Given the economic chaos and uncertainty, cutting spending, and front-end loading our spending, seem like sensible plans. We can point this out to others in our families and among our friends. As an example, Trump plans to increase tariffs on computers, or does he? Buy now and prepare to live with it for a few years.

Harvard and other major research universities have enormous endowments. They could open branches in Berlin, Paris, Guangzhou, Mumbai, Accra and anywhere they can find brilliant grad students. They can send their own professors, their own lab teams, and their own know-how out of a nation suddenly devoted to stupidity.

Law firms can announce plans to provide pro bono representation to people kidnapped by ICE thugs. Corporations can browbeat the Republican pols they have put in place, demanding sane economic and immigration policies. We can demand that they do so.

Conclusion

Notes: I wrote this from memory with a minimum of fact-checking. Corrections and additions welcome.

Someone should write a book about this war. Is there one I don’t know about?

Finally: In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy says that Napoleon was successful because he and his subordinates were able to concentrate their forces against the weakest segment of the enemy battle line. He tried to hold a large reserve to send against that weak point. That seems like a good strategy. Trump and the Republicans have spread themselves out over a gigantic battlefield. Let’s try Napoleon’s strategy.
=========
Featured image is a map of the Battle of Austerlitz won by Napoleon.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This is the last week of the 2024-2025 term for the Supreme Court. SCOTUS is expected to release multiple decisions at least twice this week; what follows is the first batch.

As mentioned last week, the big decision we are waiting for with the end of this term is Trump v. CASA Inc. regarding nationwide injunctions blocking executive orders, in this particular case related to birthright citizenship.

Decisions released (these summaries from Marcy — Rayne is busy):

Hewitt v. US: 5-4 Jackson decision upholds First Step Act sentencing.

Medina v. Planned Parenthood: 6-3 Republican opinion rules that private plaintiffs can’t enforce Medicaid provision.

Guttierrez v. Saenz: 6-3 Sotomayor opinion, fascists in dissent, rules for death row inmate on DNA testing procedures.

Riley v. Bondi: 5-4 Alito ruling narrowing review in immigration case.

All remaining opinions will be released tomorrow.

Emil Bove presented the appearance of a calm collected guy in his confirmation hearing. And Republicans made especially clear they intend to push through Donald Trump’s defense attorney to be Donald Trump’s Circuit Court Judge in New Jersey, where Trump owns a property implicated in one case Bove defended him on.

For much of the hearing, Bove dodged questions successfully, claiming at times he couldn’t answer because something he did at DOJ was not public, claiming at other times that discussing things that are political — like who won the 2020 election!! — would violate the Judicial Canon.

But at the end, Adam Schiff cornered him. Schiff asked whether he said the “fuck you” comment reported in the Erez Reuveni allegation (which Todd Blanche denied happened).

Bove responded that he could not recall (just as he could not recall how many Jan6 prosecutors he had fired or how many Jan6 criminals had been pardoned). But he didn’t deny he said it. “I certainly emphasized the importance of the upcoming operation.”

Schiff asked that the Committee get the notes of that meeting.

Then Schiff turned to Danielle Sassoon’s allegations about Bove’s demand for a quid pro quo for Eric Adams.

Schiff: Let me ask about notes from another meeting which you’re contesting here, and that is the meeting over the decision to dismiss the case — the corruption case — in New York against the Mayor of New York.According to Ms. Sassoon, the US Attorney at the time, during the meeting with Adams’ attorneys, where, she described, um, Adams’ attorneys repeatedly what amounted to a quid pro quo, that you admonished one of the lawyers in the room to stop taking notes. Is that true?

Bove: I don’t believe I instructed that attorney to stop taking notes. I did remark on the fact that he was taking extensive notes. Yes.

Schiff: Why did it concern you that he was taking notes of the meeting?

Bove: Because at that point of the meeting, we were discussing who was responsible for media leaks and I was making the point that only prosecutors had created an extensive record that could support detailed leaks.

Schiff: And you were concerned, were you, that information about this, this, potential quid pro quo might become public? Was that the concern?

Bove: I’ve explained that there was no quid pro quo.

Schiff; Will you provide the notes of that meeting, which you, according to the US Attorney, instructed be collected a the end of the meeting?

Bove: I think a member of my staff may have given that instruction outside my presence. And I defer to the Committee and the Executive Branch on records requests and how they should be handled.

Pam Bondi had, by that point, joined Todd Blanche in overseeing the confirmation hearing for their hatchet man. So Schiff asked that the Committee (Ashley Moody was in the chair) request Bondi and Blanche to make those notes available.

Moody refused.

So Bove dodged that moment, sort of.

But in doing so, Bove confirmed something more substantive from the Reuveni complaint.

Reuveni describes that on March 29, as he was struggling to communicate the scope of an injunction to DHS in the DVD case (the one SCOTUS ruled on Monday), he was affirmatively instructed to stop putting guidance into writing.

Separately, Mr. Reuveni contacted Ensign by phone, who informed him that the head of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations had been given “verbal” notice of the injunction, but again, no written guidance had been disseminated to the agency. Sometime after this call, during the mid-to-late afternoon, Ensign informed Mr. Reuveni by phone that it would be advisable to stop sending emails with many recipients, including Percival, concerning the injunction compliance guidance.41

[snip]

Thereafter, Mr. Reuveni spoke twice with Ensign on the phone between approximately 11:00 a.m. and noon, during which time Ensign told Mr. Reuveni that “leadership” had concluded and directed that no injunction compliance guidance would be issued. Ensign also again told Mr. Reuveni that he should no longer contact DHS asking about guidance.42 Mr. Reuveni informed Ensign that plaintiffs’ counsel had notified OIL attorneys that their class member clients were being or had been prepared for removal, and without further information this appeared to be a violation ofthe injunction. Ensign made comments to the effect that he agreed with Mr. Reuveni, acknowledged the decisions were not ideal and would make it harder to win cases, and stated that he was not a decision maker in these circumstances.

41 The Department ofJustice’s implementation ofrestrictions on communications may be in violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(13).

42 The Department ofJustice’s implementation ofrestrictions on communications may be in violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(13). [my emphasis]

Two days later, he got the same instruction, this time explicitly on Bove’s orders.

On April 1, Mr. Reuveni was again told to stop asking questions. Mr. Reuveni received phone call from Acting AAG Roth in which Roth relayed that Bove was very unhappy that Mr. Reuveni had contacted counsel at various agencies to ascertain whether DOJ had violated court order Roth conveyed that Mr. Reuveni should stop emailing agency counsel on the matter to instead communicate by phone only where possible.46 Mr. Reuveni understood this instruction to be based on leadership’s aim to avoid generating written material subject to disclosure through FOIA.

46 The Department of Justice’s implementation of restrictions on communications may be in violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302 b 13). [my emphasis]

The same thing happened on following days in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case: He was specifically asked to stop putting things  — most notably, his questions about whether there was any basis for claims that KAG had ties to MS-13 — in writing.

DOJ leadership never did. Instead, on several occasions on April 2 and 3 through both phone calls and email, Mr. Reuveni was directed by McHenry, through Roth and Ensign, to cease making requests of DHS and DOS, to stop asking for facts supporting any possible defense ofthe case, that no “asks” of El Salvador of any sort should be made, and to rest on threshold jurisdictional arguments at the hearing.48

48 The Department ofJustice’s implementation ofrestrictions on communications may be in violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(13).

This refusal to send out an order about an injunction is also how DOJ dealt with the first injunctions on the attacks on law firms.

Sure: Absent the paper trail being in the hands of the Committee, Bove claims not to remember any of this.

But he confirmed something consistent with Reuveni’s complaint.

He doesn’t like paper trails of his criminal conspiracies.

A lifetime ago in the history of Stephen Miller’s dragnet (that is, Monday) I contemplated writing a post on how Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes’ opinion — finding that DOJ was not entitled even to a hearing at which to argue in favor of detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia pre-trial. but even if they were, that argument would fail — might influence his lawsuit in Maryland.

I got distracted with other things.

And now, it’ll be a dramatically different post.  A bunch of things have happened in the interim, including:

• SCOTUS wrote an unfathomable order that got Trump’s DOJ off the hook for blowing off a District Court order by, instead, permitting Miller to deport migrants to slavery and torture (read Steve Vladeck for more)
• NYT published a story about a complaint Erez Reuveni submitted to DOJ Inspector General, alleging (in part) that, at a meeting about what to do in the face of an at-that-point-hypothetical order not to deport planeloads of migrants based on an Alien Enemies Act declaration, Emil Bove said “D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order”
• Deputy Attorney General and sometime Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche went on a rant on Xitter, claiming newsworthy journalism (implicating him in alleged grave ethical violations) should not be “tolerated”

As it is, there are two key details from Holmes’ opinion that may have resonance both in KAG’s criminal case and the lawsuit.

Barbara Holmes: Is that your final answer?

She begins her opinion by noting that KAG is accused of human smuggling, not human trafficking.

To be clear, the offenses of which Abrego is charged are human smuggling, not human trafficking. Although “smuggling” and “trafficking” were sometimes used interchangeably during the detention hearing, there is a distinct difference between the two under the law. They are not transposable. According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) Policy Manual:

Federal law distinguishes between the crimes of human smuggling and human trafficking. Trafficking is a crime committed against a person regardless of the person’s immigration status or the crossing of a transnational border, while smuggling is a crime committed against a country’s immigration laws and involves the willful movement of a person across a country’s border.

A person may voluntarily consent to be smuggled. In contrast, an act of trafficking must involve both a particular means, such as the use of force, fraud, or coercion, and a particular purpose, such as subjection to involuntary servitude or a commercial sex act.

USCIS POLICY MANUAL, Difference Between Trafficking and Smuggling, Vol. 3, Pt. B, Ch. 2, § B.7, https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-3-part-b-chapter-2. The Cornerstone Report,7 a quarterly bulletin highlighting key issues related to investigations by ICE Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”), also explains the difference between human trafficking and human smuggling:

Human trafficking and human smuggling are often confused. The two crimes are very different and it is critical to understand the difference between the two.

Human trafficking involves exploiting men, women, or children for the purposes of forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation.

Human smuggling involves the provision of a service—typically, transportation or fraudulent documents—to an individual who voluntarily seeks to gain illegal entry into a foreign country.

The Cornerstone Report, Human Trafficking vs Human Smuggling, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Summer 2017, p.1. As the report states: “Smuggling is transportation-based. Trafficking is exploitation-based.” Id. “These are not interchangeable terms.” Id. [emphasis original]

The distinction matters for a key issue in the opinion, that even if there were minors present in a van KAG drove, that doesn’t necessarily make them victims of the crime.

Nevertheless, Holmes only returns to the issue of trafficking once more in her opinion, when pointing out that if the government had evidence of human trafficking, she hopes that DOJ would charge it.

The Court supposes – or at least hopes – that if children are victimized as part of their undocumented entry into this country, the government would pursue appropriate human trafficking charges against the human traffickers.

She makes a similar aside in her discussion of MS-13. KAG’s alleged gang membership is not charged. The only reason it was pertinent to a detention decision is in how it might substantiate a risk of obstruction. As Holmes laid out, the evidence that KAG actually was a member of MS-13 was weak hearsay.

The government’s evidence that Abrego is a member of MS-13 consists of general statements, all double hearsay, from two cooperating witnesses: the second male cooperator and N.V. Those statements are, however, directly inconsistent with statements by the first cooperator.

[snip]

Contrary to the statements of the second cooperator and NV, the first male cooperator told Special Agent Joseph that, in ten years of acquaintance with Abrego, there were no signs or markings, including tattoos, indicating that Abrego is an MS-13 member. This statement specifically repudiates any outward indicia that Abrego belongs to MS-13, in stark contrast to the non-specific second cooperator’s and N.V.’s feelings that Abrego may belong to MS-13. Given these conflicting statements, the government’s evidence of Abrego’s alleged gang membership is simply insufficient.

But even if KAG were a member of MS-13, that would only be relevant to the detention determination if he were trying to intimidate people because of that gang membership. And the vague allegations don’t get there, she says at the end of that passage.

Here, the government’s evidence of hearsay testimony of a cooperating witness’s general feeling of intimidation without any description of specific language used or actions taken by Abrego is not enough to establish by a preponderance that Abrego poses a serious risk of obstructing justice within the meaning of § 3142(f)(2)(B). 25

25 Given the volume of resources committed to the government’s investigation of Abrego since April 2025, according to Special Agent Joseph, the Court supposes that if timely, more specific, concrete evidence exists of Abrego’s alleged MS-13 gang membership or a consistent pattern of intentional conduct designed to threaten or intimidate specific individuals, the government would have offered that evidence at the detention hearing.

Which elicits a similar footnote as she made regarding trafficking: “If you had evidence of these things that might implicate the detention determination,” she seems to be saying about both trafficking and KAG’s alleged MS-13 membership, “you surely would mention it.”

As noted, those asides did have a role in the opinion (if not as big a one as the page-long discussion about the smuggling/trafficking distinction would seem to suggest).

But they’re important for another reason.

Holmes is basically noting that the government presented no evidence of two claims that top Administration officials, including Trump himself along with Pam Bondi, made repeatedly. The government didn’t share the doctored photo claiming KAG’s knuckles came coded for MS-13. The government presented no evidence that KAG was the threat Pam Bondi claimed he was.

Accumulating evidence about Trump and his top aides lying about KAG

The discrepancy between what the government said publicly and what they actually charged will presumably be the subject of a selective prosecution motion, as well as a slew of other efforts to preserve KAG’s right to a fair trial.

But the disjunct between what top Trump officials said publicly and what they’re willing to say in response to KAG’s lawsuit are a central prong of his motion for discovery sanctions in the lawsuit, which argues that the government is simply not cooperating with his ability to discover what happened regarding his detention. An exhibit, described as “a non-exhaustive list” of the public things that government officials said about KAG, quotes 21 allegations that KAG engaged in human trafficking and 60 claiming he was MS-13. As one example, it cites this screed from Stephen Miller in a press conference on May 1, at least a week after the grand jury already started investigating KAG.

There has been even more evidence that has been made public about [Abrego Garcia’s] violient [sic], repeated threats and assaults against his spouse, someone who had repeated documented human trafficking and human smuggling offenses, somebody that has extensively documented membership in MS-13, a terrorist organization, and of course someone [who] had MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles. This is a person who is a clear and present danger to the safety of the American people and it is a sad reflection on the state of our media and many of the outlets represented in this room that you incessantly try to shill for this MS-13 terrorist.

The filing compares public officials’ refusal to cooperate in discovery, their bogus privilege invocations, and depositions designed to obfuscate with this NY story (included as an exhibit as well), which describes emailed conversations about what to do with KAG that should be subject to the discovery order.

They use the article — for example — to argue that one of the people who did sit for a deposition, DHS Acting General Counsel Joseph Mazzara, “may have given untruthful testimony.”

More recently, credible press reports suggest that Mazzara—DHS’s Acting General Counsel—may have given untruthful testimony. At the deposition, Mazzara was asked whether he knew by April 12 [redacted]. He ultimately answered: [redacted] ECF No. 129-9 Tr. 76:9–13. When pressed about whether anyone at DHS [redacted] Mazzara claimed he had [redacted] Id. Tr. 155:10–7. According to the New York Times, however, Mazzara “told his colleagues that [DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem . . . had taken steps to seek Mr. Abrego Garcia’s segregation from other inmates, including members of Barrio 18.” See Ex. C. The report cites specific emails from Mazzara on or around March 28 in which he noted, “We’re also trying to keep him where he is.” Id. On March 30, James Percival, another custodian from whom Plaintiffs have received no documents,12 admitted that Abrego Garcia’s removal was “an administrative error,” but added: “(Not that we should say [so] publicly).” Id.

Another heavily redacted passage suggests that, based on how and when he was charged, DOJ lied about what Pam Bondi knew when.

The filing also compares what Noem and Bondi testified to Congress versus what the timeline of the criminal investigation shows actually happened.

That NYT article describes several conversations, involving but not limited to Erez Reuveni, about ways to fix the error of deporting KAG without endangering the deportation of the 200 other men that day. Reuveni was actually trying to mitigate the risk that the KAG case would endanger the larger argument about the Alien Enemies Act; as described, at least, he was trying to protect the decision to send 200 people to torture under the AEA.

As Mr. Reuveni pointed out to the group, the case potentially “jeopardizes many far more important initiatives of the current administration.” If the government fought and lost, it could have legal repercussions, not least of which for the nearly 140 Venezuelans who were sent to the same facility under the authority of a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

That was where things stood two weeks ago, when KAG’s lawyers were asking for sanctions because of the secrets DOJ is hiding.

Reuveni ties DOJ’s actions with White House lies

Yesterday — the day before Emil Bove’s confirmation hearing to become a Circuit Court Judge — Reuveni submitted a whistleblower declaration to DOJ’s Inspector General, the Acting Special Counsel (who happens to be Trade Rep Jamieson Greer), and the leaders of House and Senate Judiciary Committees, which NYT was the first to report. As part of the complaint, Reuveni claims the public explanation Todd Blanche gave for why he was put on leave — because he was not zealously advocating for his client — is not the real reason. He says he was fired because he refused to implement commands to ignore court orders.

Since April 2025 it has been widely reported that according to DOJ sources Mr. Reuveni was put on administrative leave by DOJ for allegations offailure to follow directive from his superiors failure to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States and for arguing against Homeland Security and the State Department” when he truthfully represented to the court that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s removal was in error.² These statements by Attorney General Pamela Bondi and her deputy Todd Blanche are false and misleading Indeed it has since been reported that prior to the April hearing Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security and Trump appointee James Percival conceded that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s removal was an administrative error (Not that we should say publicly.)

Nevertheless White House officials have publicly disparaged Mr. Reuveni to justify their refusal to comply with the Constitution and with court orders.4 White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller falsely stated, “The only mistake that was made is lawyer put an incorrect line in legal filing,” and labeled Mr. Reuveni “saboteur, a Democrat.” 5 Referring to Mr. Reuveni, President Trump stated, “Well the lawyer that said it was mistake was here long time was not appointed by us—should not have said that should not have said that.”6

He cites more than the quote that Emil Bove said that they might have to tell courts “fuck you.” Reuveni claimed he defied three illegal orders:

• Trump’s DOJ blew off Judge James Boasberg’s injunction on deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act
• After Judge Brian Murphy issued a nationwide TRO on deportations without notice to involve a Convention Against Torture challenge, Reuveni was repeatedly admonished for trying to implement that injunction, in writing
• After correctly saying on April 4 that DOJ made a mistake when they deported KAG, Reuveni repeatedly objected and ultimately refused to sign an appellate brief claiming KAG was a terrorist (based on the MS-13 claim)

Reuveni’s description of the third illegal order describes how Drew Ensign responded when press headlines misrepresented Reuveni’s mere adoption of ICE’s admission that KAG was deported in error. Ensign scolded Reuveni twice, the second time, in response to a prompt from the White House.

A few minutes after the hearing, Mr. Reuveni went from the courtroom to the U.S. Attorney’s office space in the court building. The press had been present at the hearing, and bythe time he was leaving the courtroom, Mr. Reuveni had already received multiple text messages sharing news headlines about his statements to the court. Mr. Reuveni also received an email from Ensign directing Mr. Reuveni to call him, which Mr. Reuveni did. On that call, Ensign asked Mr. Reuveni – for the first time – why Mr. Reuveni had not argued that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a terrorist and that therefore his withholding ofremoval order was invalid. Mr. Reuveni told Ensign words to the effect of, “I understand you’ve seen the headlines, but read the transcript, I did not say the things the headlines say that I said.”

Ensign asked Mr. Reuveni why he did not argue that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a member of a terrorist organization or that being a member of such organization meant Mr. Abrego Garcia’s protection from removal to El Salvador was nullified. Mr. Reuveni told Ensign he did not make those arguments because: 1 ) those were not arguments in the government’s briefs, which Ensign had reviewed; 2) there was no evidence in the record to support the arguments; and 3) the laws governing withholding of removal do not support a theory that declaring someone a member of a terrorist organization retroactively nullifies a grant of withholding relief. Ensign had little reaction but called again a few minutes later asking similar questions and informing Mr. Reuveni that these inquiries were prompted by the White House. Mr. Reuveni again repeated the same concerns he had on the first call. [my emphasis]

Reuveni describes his repeated objections to an appeal claiming that KAG was MS-13 and therefore a terrorist. Hours after he refused to claim he was, Blanche put him on administrative leave.

Flentje told Mr. Reuveni that he should sign the brief, and that he had signed up for the responsibility to do so when he accepted the Deputy position. Mr. Reuveni responded, “I didn’t sign up to lie. ” Ultimately, someone else signed that brief, making arguments contrary to law, which was filed at 1:41 a.m. on April 5.

Less than seven hours later, Mr. Reuveni was placed on administrative leave for alleged “failure to follow a directive from your superiors; failure to zealously advocate on behalf ofthe United States; and engaging in conduct prejudicial to your client.” The letter signed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche placing Mr. Reuveni on administrative leave was leaked to the press and reported that same day.51

Erez Reuveni claims that he was placed on leave (and ultimately fired) because he refused to lie and say there was evidence that KAG was an MS-13 member and therefore a terrorist.

Todd Blanche confesses he was in the thick of it all

The press focus on Reuveni’s complaint has been, justifiably given his confirmation schedule, on Emil Bove. Todd Blanche’s name appears just five times in the complaint, three times in association with a letter to him, the other two for his public claims about why Reuveni was fired. And Blanche’s name doesn’t appear at all in the appendix of public false claims top Trump officials have made about KAG.

But immediately after the NYT published its story, Blanche implicated himself personally, claiming to be at the meeting about the CECOT deportations and declaring taht public reporting of something newsworthy, “should not be tolerated.”

The New York Times article describes falsehoods purportedly made by a disgruntled former employee and then leaked to the press in violation of ethical obligations. The claims about Department of Justice leadership and the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General are utterly false which is likely why the author gave the Department of Justice 15 minutes this morning to respond (they wrote that we did not “immediately respond with a comment”) before releasing this garbage. Note that [1] not a single individual except the disgruntled former employee agrees with the statements cavalierly printed by this purported news outlet. [2] I was at the meeting described in the article and at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed. This is disgusting journalism. Planting a false hit piece the day before a confirmation hearing is something we have come to expect from the media, but it does not mean it should be tolerated.

Blanche’s claim that he was at that meeting conflicts with Reuveni’s; the whistleblower claims Bove was the senior DOJ official present.

That same day, following news reports that the President intended to sign a presidential proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), Mr. Reuveni was summoned to a meeting by Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG) of OIL, Drew Ensign. At the meeting were Principal Assistant Deputy Attorney General (PADAG) Emil Bove, Counselor to the Deputy Attorney General James McHenry, Associate Deputy Attorney General (ADAG) Paul Perkins, DAAG Ensign, Acting Director for OIL and Mr. Reuveni’s direct supervisor, August Flentje, and other OIL attorneys. [my emphasis]

That said, there’s a logical problem with Blanche’s claim. He clearly claims to have checked the story of the people who were in the meeting, marked with a [1] above. And then claims he was at the meeting, marked with a [2]. Those are the claims of a guy who has manufactured a cover story. Which — in light of the phone traffic documented by Reuveni that responded to his own emails — looks pretty suspect.

Remember: One of the very first public things Todd Blanche did as DAG was to launch a witch hunt into NYT’s source debunking Trump’s claims in the Alien Enemies Act. Then, when Pam Bondi reversed the media protections put into place by Merrick Garland, she cited that story as well. The seniormost officials at DOJ are using the Department to hunt down evidence of their own complicity in human rights violations. And Blanche’s intemperate response to Reuveni’s allegations looks to be more of the same.

It’s different with criminal prosecutions

Sadly, I don’t think the Reuveni allegations will have much impact on the Bove nomination. Right wingers in the Senate are all too happy to sanction Trump’s unprecedented corruption, as their confirmation of Blanche himself (to say nothing of Kash Patel) makes clear. I doubt that will change with Bove.

But it’s different for criminal defendants. By virtue of being criminally charged, rather than just suing for release, KAG can make a claim to need all of the conflicting stories about how top DOJ officials relayed demands and repeated false claims from people like Stephen Miller.

Perhaps that explains DOJ’s purported concern that if KAG is released pretrial, DHS might just deport him.

Nevertheless, a release of the Defendant into ICE custody poses potentially irreparable problems for the prosecution in this case and, therefore, for the public at large whose interests the Government serves. Should this Court not order a stay, and the Defendant is moved to ICE custody and deported from the United States, the prosecution would lose the meaningful opportunity to try its case. This would be irreparable harm to the public. How fast the Defendant could or would be deported remains to be seen. In candor with the Court, such a potential deportation of the Defendant would not be instantaneous. How fast such proceedings could move are difficult to predict. Yet, these immigration proceedings exist as real, potential, substantial and irreparable harm to the United States.

DOJ has made its problems so much worse by refusing to do the right thing with KAG and the CECOT deportees.

And because they’ve charged KAG, that may actually finally backfire.

Update: In the DVD case (the one in which SCOTUS ruled on Monday), plaintiffs are asking to file a surreply describing Reuveni’s allegations.

Just yesterday, a former high-level official with the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation filed a protected whistleblower claim alleging that in this very case, highlevel Department of Justice officials conspired to violate the district court’s temporary restraining order (TRO). The disclosure describes, in painstaking detail, efforts to feign ambiguity in an unambiguous order, failing to disseminate the fact and terms of the injunction, and purposefully failing to respond to Plaintiffs’ inquiries. See Protected Whistleblower Disclosure of Erez Reuveni Regarding Violation of Laws, Rules & Regulations, Abuse of Authority, and Substantial and Specific Danger to Health and Safety at the Department of Justice at 16-21, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25982155/file-5344.pdf.1

Proteins, Factories, and Wicked Solutions

Part 3- But What is AI Good For?

(Go to Part Two)

There are many frames and metaphors to help us understand our AI age. But one comes up especially often, because it is useful, and perhaps even a bit true: the Golem of Jewish lore. The most famous golem is the Golem of Prague, a magical defender of Jews in the hostile world of European gentiles. But that was far from the only golem in Jewish legends.

The golem was often a trustworthy and powerful servant in traditional Jewish stories — but only when in the hands of a wise rabbi. To create a golem proved a rabbi’s mastery over Kabbalah, a mystical interpretation of Jewish tradition. It was esoteric and complex to create this magical servant of mud and stone. It was brought to life with sacred words on a scroll pressed into the mud of its forehead. With that, the inanimate mud became person-like and powerful. That it echoed life being granted to the clay Adam was no coincidence. These were deep and even dangerous powers to call on, even for a wise rabbi.

You’re probably seeing where this is going.

Mostly a golem was created to do difficult or dangerous tasks, the kind of things we fleshy humans aren’t good at. This is because we are too weak, too slow, or inconveniently too mortal for the work at hand.

The rabbi activated the golem to protect the Jewish community in times of danger, or use it when a task was simply too onerous for people to do. The golem could solve problems that were not, per se, impossible to solve without supernatural help, but were a lot easier with a giant clay dude who could do the literal and figurative heavy lifting. They could redirect rivers, move great stones with ease. They were both more and less than the humans who created and controlled them, able to do amazing things, but also tricky to manage.

When a golem wasn’t needed, the rabbi put it to rest, which was the fate of the Golem of Prague. The rabbi switched off his creation by removing the magic scroll he had pressed into the forehead of the clay man.

Our Servants, Ourselves

The parallels with our AIs are not subtle.

If the golem was not well managed, it could become a violent horror, ripping up anything in its path mindlessly. The metaphors for technology aside, what makes the golem itself such a useful idea for talking about AI is how human shaped it is. Both literally, and in its design as the ultimate desirable servant. The people of Prague mistook the golem for a man, and we mistake AI for a human-like mind.

Eventually, the rabbis put the golems away forever, but they had managed to do useful things that made life easier for the community. At least, sometimes. Sometimes, the golems got out of hand.

It is unlikely that we’re going to put our new AI golem away any time soon, but it seems possible that after this historical moment of collective madness, we will find a good niche for it. Because our AI golems are very good at doing some important things humans are naturally bad at, and don’t enjoy doing anyway.

Folding Proteins for Fun and Profit

Alphafold 3 logo

Perhaps the originally famous example of our AI golem surpassing our human abilities is Alphafold, Google’s protein folding AI. After throwing many technological tools at the problem of predicting how proteins would shape themselves in many circumstances, Google’s specialist AI was able to predict folding patterns in roughly 2/3rds of cases. Alphafold is very cool, and could be an amazing tool for technology and health one day. Understanding protein folding has implications in understanding disease processes and drug discovery, among other things.

If this seems like a hand-wavy explanation of Alphafold, it’s because I’m waving my hands wildly. I don’t understand that much about Alphafold — which is also my point. Good and useful AI tends to be specialized to do things humans are bad at. We are not good golems, either in terms of being able to do very difficult and heavy tasks, or paying complete attention to complex (and boringly repetitive) systems. That’s just not how human attention works.

One of our best Golem-shaped jobs is dealing with turbulence. If you’ve dealt with physics in a practical application, anything from weather prediction to precision manufacturing, you know that turbulence is a terrible and crafty enemy. It can become impossible to calculate or predict. Often by the time turbulent problems are perceivable by humans or even normal control systems, you’re already in trouble. But an application-specific AI, in, for instance, a factory, can detect the beginning of a component failure below both human and even normal programatic detection.

A well-trained bespoke AI can catch the whine of trouble before the human-detectable turbulence starts. This is because it has essentially “listened” to how the system works so deeply over time. That’s its whole existence. It’s a golem doing the one or two tasks for which it has been “brought to life” to do. It thrives with the huge data sets that defeat human attention. Instead of a man shaped magical mud being, it’s a listener, shaped by data, tirelessly listening for the whine of trouble in the system that is its whole universe.

Similarly, the giant datasets of NOAA and NASA could take a thousand human life years to comb through to find everything you need to accurately predict a hurricane season, or the transit of the distant exoplanet in front of its sun.

The trajectories and interactions of the space junk enveloping Earth are dangerously out of reach of human calculation – but maybe not with AI. The thousands of cycles of an Amazon cloud server hosting a learning model that gets just close enough to modeling how the stochastic processes of weather and space are likely to work will never be human readable.

That third-of-the-time-wrong quality of Alphafold is kind of emblematic of how AI is mostly, statistically right, in specific applications with a lot of data. But it’s no divine oracle, fated to always tell the truth. If you know that, it’s often close enough for engineering, or figuring out what part of a system to concentrate human resources next. AI is not smart or creative (in human terms), but it also doesn’t quit until it gets turned off.

Skynet, But for Outsourcing

AI can help us a lot with doing things that humans aren’t good at. At times a person can pair up with an AI application and fill in each other’s weaknesses – the AI can deliver options, the human can pick the good one. Sometimes an AI will offer you something no person could have thought of, sometimes that solution or data is a perfect fit; the intractable, unexplainable, wicked solution. But the AI doesn’t know it has done that, because an AI doesn’t know in the way we think of as knowing.

There’s a form of chess that emerged out of computers becoming better than humans at this cerebral hobby, like IBM’s Deep Blue. It’s called cyborg, or centaur, chess, in which both players are using a chess AI as well as their own brains to play. The contention of this part of the chess world is that if a chess computer is good, a chess computer plus human player is even better. The computer can compute the board, the human can face off with the other player.

This isn’t a bad way of looking at how AI can be good for us; doing the bits of a task we’re not good at, and handing back control for the parts we are good at, like forming goals in a specific context. Context is still and will likely always be the realm of humans; the best chess computer there is still won’t know when it’s a good idea to just lose a game to your nephew at Christmas.

Faced with complex and even wicked problems, humans and machines working together closely have a chance to solve problems that are intractable now. We see this in the study and prediction of natural systems, like climate interacting with our human systems, creating Climate Change.

Working with big datasets lets us predict, and sometimes even ameliorate, the effects of climate on both human built systems and natural systems. That can be anything from predicting weather, to predicting effective locations to build artificial reefs where they are most likely to revitalize ocean life.

It’s worthwhile to note that few, or maybe even none, of the powerful goods that can come from AI are consumer facing. None of them are the LLMs (Large Language Models) and image generators that we’ve come to know as AI. The benefits come from technical datasets paired with specialized AIs. Bespoke AIs can be good for a certain class of wicked problems- problems that are connected to large systems, where data is abundant and hard to understand, with dependancies that are even harder.

But Can Your God Count Fish All Day

Bespoke AIs are good for Gordian knots where the rope might as well be steel cord. In fact, undoing a complex knot is a lot like guessing how protein folding will work. Even if you enjoyed that kind of puzzle solving, you simply aren’t as good at it as an AI is. These are the good tasks for a golem, and it’s an exciting time to have these golems emerging, with the possibility of detecting faults in bridges, or factories, or any of our many bits of strong-then-suddenly-fragile infrastructure.

Students in Hawaii worked on AI projects during the pandemic, and all of them were pretty cool

Industrial and large data AI has the chance to change society for the better. They are systems that detect fish and let them swim upstream to spawn. They are NOAA storm predictions, and agricultural data that models a field of wheat down to the scale of centimeters. These are AI projects that could help us handle climate change, fresh water resources, farm to table logistics, or the chemical research we need to do to learn how get the poisons we already dumped into our environment back out.

AI, well used, could help us preserve and rehabilitate nature, improve medicine, and even make economies work better for people without wasting scarce resources. But those are all hard problems, harder  to build than just letting an LLM lose to train on Reddit. They are also not as legible for most funders, because the best uses of AI, the uses that will survive this most venal of ages, are infrastructural, technical, specialized, and boring.

The AIs we will build to help humanity won’t be fun or interesting to most people. They will be part of the under-appreciated work of infrastructure, not the flashy consumer facing chatbots most people think is all that AI is. Cleaning up waterways, predicting drug forms, and making factories more efficient is never going to get the trillion dollars of VC money AI chatbots are supposed to somehow 10x their investments on. And so, most people seeing mainly LLMs, we ask if AI is good or bad, without knowing to ask what kind of artificial intelligence we’re talking about.

(Go to Part Two)

Amid all the warmongering last week, there was an interesting head fake in the Senate.

On Tuesday, JD Vance went to a Senate lunch (rather than the Situation Room meeting on Iran) at which he told them the deadline for passing was the August recess — starting August 4.

On Wednesday, Susie Wiles went for a very short visit to the Senate to order them to get the whole thing done by July 4.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is encouraging Congress to get the “big, beautiful bill” to President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4.

Wiles told GOP senators at a closed-door lunch that the Independence Day deadline still holds as far as Trump is concerned, according to a person granted anonymity to describe the private meeting.

I started to write a long post (piggybacking on this one) about how the various timelines — the legal responses to Trump’s abuses and the economic impact of his disastrous policy choices — might make it harder to codify key parts of his abuses in law with the Big Ugly reconciliation bill. I was going to lay out how recent developments (this was so long ago I surmised that Trump’s Iran warmongering might cause him some political headaches and now … here we are, Trump talking regime change in the wake of an inconclusive illegal strike) might exacerbate the way his legislative agenda might be Overtaken By Events.

That post got Overtaken By Events.

The punch line of my original post was going to be an argument that Wiles was pushing the Senate to hurry up not because impending financial doom might make passing the Big Ugly harder, nor because the debt ceiling is approaching.

Rather, Kristi Noem is burning through cash.

President Trump’s immigration crackdown is burning through cash so quickly that the agency charged with arresting, detaining and removing unauthorized immigrants could run out of money next month.

Why it matters: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already $1 billionover budget by one estimate, with more than three months left in the fiscal year. That’s alarmed lawmakers in both parties — and raised the possibility of Trump clawing funds from agencies to feed ICE.

• Lawmakers say ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is at risk of violating U.S. law if it continues to spend at its current pace.
• That’s added urgency to calls for Congress to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which could direct an extra $75 billion or so to ICE over the next five years.
• It’s also led some lawmakers to accuse DHS and ICE of wasting money. “Trump’s DHS is spending like drunken sailors,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the DHS appropriations subcommittee.

Zoom in: ICE’s funding crisis is being fueled by Trump’s team demanding that agents arrest 3,000 immigrants a day — an unprecedented pace ICE is still trying to reach.

This creates the possibility for a slew of legal challenges to Stephen Miller’s dragnet, both from those targeted in it challenging the legality of spending money to target them in the first place, but also from opponents who can start suing Trump for breaking the law by spending money that was not appropriated.

The dragnet is at somewhat-imminent risk of becoming an illegal use of funds.

And that comes as a few Republicans — most loudly, Rand Paul, who was bypassed as Chair for the Senate language on homeland security funding — start raising questions about why we need to blow so much money if Miller has already shut down the border.

Sen. Rand Paul is a frequent thorn in GOP leadership’s side. But his recent break over border security funding in President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” has top Republicans pushing the bounds of institutional norms to rein him in.

Senior Republicans have sidelined the Kentucky Republican, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in their talks with the White House over policies under the panel’s purview.

Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told POLITICO he has taken over as the lead negotiator around how to shepherd through tens of billions of dollars for border wall construction and related infrastructure in the GOP megabill. Meanwhile, a Senate Republican aide said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) — who heads the relevant Homeland Security subcommittee — will be the point person for negotiating the bill’s government affairs provisions.

With every other committee chair helping manage negotiations for their panels’ portions of the massive tax and spending package, cutting Paul out is unprecedented. But Paul proposed funding border security at a fraction of what the administration requested and the House passed in its bill.

I’ve long been tracking conflict among Republicans over the financial parts of the Big Ugly. But even as Trump’s polling turns south on Miller’s gulag, the huge funding package for it is creating some headaches for the must-pass reconciliation bill.

In an op-ed in Fox News today (accompanied by live Fox News pressure), John Thune gives up the game.

He argues that Republicans have to get the bill done by July 4 — Susie Wiles’ deadline, not JD’s. And his argument focuses primarily on the immigration funding (but also Golden Dome, which Mark Kelly recently exposed as an impossible boondoggle).

In large part, this bill is the culmination of President Trump’s campaign promises and the promises that Republican senators have made to our voters. Chief among them is keeping the American people safe through strong border security and a military strong enough to deter threats and conflicts around the world before they begin.

President Trump has achieved remarkable success in ending the Biden border crisis and removing the criminal illegal aliens that President Biden let walk into our country – but it hasn’t been cheap, and the administration has told us that resources are running out. This bill will fully fund the border wall and President Trump’s successful policies for the entirety of his presidency, removing any possibility that Democrats will hold those resources hostage to try to increase other government spending.

This same principle also applies to defense funding. Recent conflicts around the world should make clear the need to have a modern and lethal fighting force that can keep the American people safe. This means smart, generational investments like President Trump’s Golden Dome for America to defend against advanced drones, missiles, and hypersonics, as well as prioritizing building new ships and unmanned vehicles.

A nation cannot prosper unless it is secure, and with our borders and defense capabilities bolstered, the next key pillar of this bill is creating prosperity in America.

[snip]

Senators have worked to develop this bill for well over a year now. Now it is time to act. Border resources are drying up. National security needs have never been more apparent. And with each passing day, we move closer to reaching both our nation’s debt limit and the largest-ever tax increase on the American people.

Senators return to Washington today and we will remain here until this bill is passed. We know that Democrats will fearmonger and misrepresent our efforts, and we expect them to drag this debate long into the night with unrelated issues. However, I am confident we will get this bill across the finish line. [my emphasis]

It may not be just the burn rate of Noem’s spending spree.

That is, Noem is blowing through cash and the result of it is horrible images of American citizens being assaulted by masked goons. Noem is blowing through cash and businessmen in all sorts of industries are discovering that their businesses will suffer. Noem is blowing through cash and everyone is talking about how terrible the consequences of Miller’s demand for 3,000 bodies a day is.

Noem is blowing through cash and the issue of immigration is becoming a liability, not Trump’s biggest advantage.

And so Thune will attempt to do Susie Wiles’ bidding to get the dragnet funded before it’s too late.