Four days before old man Joe Biden dropped out of the race last summer, I argued that the endless discussion of Joe Biden Old was swamping three far more important stories, starting with whether Donald Trump was a partner, agent, or employee of Saudi Arabia.

[W]e are two days into Trump’s nomination party, and no one has asked — much less answered — whether Donald Trump is a business partner, paid foreign agent, or merely an employee of Saudi Arabia.

This is not a frivolous question. Since Trump left office, his family has received millions in four known deals from the Saudis:

• A deal to host LIV golf tournaments. Forbes recently reported that Trump Organization made less than $800K for about half the tournaments it has hosted. But Trump’s role in the scheme has given credibility to an influence-peddling scheme that aims to supplant the PGA’s influence. When Vivek Ramaswamy learned that two consultants to his campaign were simultaneously working for LIV, he forced them to resign to avoid the worries of influence-peddling. Yet Trump has continued to host the Saudis at his properties.
• A $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, in spite of the fact that analysts raised many concerns about the investment, including that he was charging too much and had no experience.
• A deal to brand a property in Oman slated to open in 2028, which has already brought Trump Organization $5 million. The government of Oman is a key partner in the deal, signed with a huge Saudi construction firm.
• A newly-announced deal with the same construction firm involved in the Oman deal, this time to brand a Trump Tower in Jeddah.

These Saudi deals come on top of Trump’s testimony that Turnberry golf course and his Bedford property couldn’t be overvalued because some Saudi would be willing to overpay for them.

But I believe I could sell that LIV Golf for a fortune, Saudi Arabia. I believe I could sell that to a lot of people for numbers that would be astronomical because it is like — very much like owning a great painting.

[snip]

I just felt when I saw that, I thought it was high. But I could see it — as a whole, I could see it if this were s0ld to one buyer from Saudi Arabia — I believe it’s the best house in the State of New York.

And while Eric Trump, not his dad, is running the company, Eric also has a role in the campaign and his spouse Lara has taken over the entire GOP.

Trump never fulfilled the promises to distance himself from his companies in the first term. A very partial review of Trump Organization financial records show the company received over $600K from the Saudis during his first term. As far as I’m aware, no one has even asked this time around.

Which means as things stand, Trump would be the sole beneficiary of payments from key Saudi investors if he became President again. Trump would be, at the very least, the beneficiary of a business deal with the Saudis, as president.

Admittedly, under the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on gratuities, it might be legal for Trump to get a bunch of swank branding deals as appreciation for launder Saudi Arabia’s reputation (one of the things for which Menendez was just convicted).

But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored, politically. It doesn’t mean American voters shouldn’t know these details. It doesn’t mean journalists (besides NYT’s Eric Lipton, whose most recent story on this was buried on page A7) shouldn’t demand answers.

It was, frankly, dizzying when I reread that post (and this one from election day, which added several more questions, including who was bribing Trump via Truth Social and his other online businesses) this morning. As we watch Trump (and Elon Musk) cash in in Saudi Arabia before Trump heads to Qatar to collect a $400 million flying bribe, self-imagined journalists are still obsessing about Joe Biden Old.

It may help to explain why this clear evidence of corruption was buried during the election that Eric Lipton, whose reporting was buried beneath all the Joe Biden Old stories, claimed the other day that “corruption requires explicit quid quo pro,” inverting the relationship between corruption (which includes a broad range of activities, much of it legal, of which the common understanding of bribery is a subset, of which John Roberts’ far narrower definition of bribery is a smaller subset of that subset) and bribery.

Just as alarming, though, Lipton pitched what is at least the fourth major story about the corruption of Trump’s memecoin (Molly White was onto this three weeks ago, and remains on it) with a purported contrast. Trump’s memecoin is no “Russian Hoax,” Lipton claimed, repeating Trump’s propaganda term unquestioningly.

I guess if you believe pardoning four of the five people adjudged to have lied about Russia — about the terms of the impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal negotiated during the election, about the foreknowledge of Russia’s help in the election, about whether Trump’s campaign manager shared campaign strategy in exchange for a commitment to carve up Ukraine, about the terms via which Trump’s rat-fucker got early access to stolen Podesta files, and about whether Trump was involved in his National Security Adviser’s attempt to undercut punitive sanctions on Russia — is a hoax, then you’re bound to have a very constrained understanding of corruption.

This is NYT’s primary journalist covering Trump’s corrupt foreign entanglements, and he confesses he not only can’t explain the import of anything short of bribery, but doesn’t consider it corruption.

No wonder it got buried. No wonder Trump’s corruption continues to get buried under Joe Biden Old mania.

Joe Biden Old is easy enough even beltway scribes can claim to understand it, the purported scandal being that Biden’s aides didn’t publicly announce that they considered that Joe Biden Old might have to use a wheelchair in the future, in a second term, especially if he had a fall, but had not used one yet. That’s the kind of purported scandal the guardians of democracy infesting DC will chase like toddlers.

Remarkably, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters appear to better understand what Lipton claims he does not, how Trump’s overt corruption can harm America.

After ABC advanced the story of the $400 million flying castle Trump is set to take from Qatar, I tried to make some trouble on Xitter, describing Trump’s corruption in ways that might bother even MAGAts.

Just hours later, Laura Loomer posted a racist tweet objecting to the deal.

Loomer did attempt to walk back her statement, disclaiming corruption on Trump’s part, but she did get the import of appearances right.

Ben Shapiro got even closer to my prompt (while matching Loomer’s racism), arguing that accepting this plane was inconsistent with Trump’s claimed ideology of America First.

Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jazeera, all the rest, that’s not America first. Like, please define America first in a way that says you should take sacks of cash from the Qatari royals who are behind al-Jazeera. It just isn’t America first in any conceivable way. So back to the original question — is this good for President Trump? Is it good for his agenda? Is it good for draining the swamp and getting things done? The answer is, no. It isn’t. It isn’t. If you want President Trump to succeed, this kind of skeezy stuff needs to stop. And here’s the thing, it’s already having an impact. It’s already having an impact.

Even in Congress, people are expressing their opposition on various grounds. Rand Paul complained about the look of it. Ted Cruz invoked the same concerns about Qatar’s ties to Hamas as Loomer and Shapiro.

NYT’s story on the plane, “Trump’s Plan to Take Jet From Qatar Heightens Corruption Concerns,” by Charlie Savage, situated it within all the other corrupt things Trump has done (and it’s a good catalog). But it mostly presents the risk of corruption in terms of benefit to Trump, not the corruption of US policy choices. Lipton’s piece on a Chinese firm with no revenue but with ties to TikTok and the Chinese government, dumping $300 million into Trump’s memecoin, discusses an ethical conflict, but doesn’t ever get around to considering the possibility that Trump will put China’s interests above the interests of any Americans, interests that go well beyond TikTok.

The purchase would create clear ethical conflicts, enriching Mr. Trump’s family at the same time that the president tries to reach a deal that would allow TikTok to keep operating in the United States rather than face a congressionally approved ban.

You want deception of far graver import than the non-disclosure of future, hypothetical wheelchair use? Donald Trump sold himself promising that he would deliver on the interests of American white working class people (or at least American white working class Christian men). But the more important sales deal was happening behind the scenes (or at least, in business deals reported in stories buried beneath dozens of stories on Joe Biden Old), where Trump was selling autocrats overseas and fraudsters around the world on a promise that dismantles not just the spirit of democracy, but even the very commitment to it.

And all that’s before the stuff we don’t yet know, whether all the things that Trump has done that helped China, like dismantling America’s soft power and chipping away at the dollar, were done because Trump is stupid or because he’s corrupt.

I’ve obviously been struggling for a long time about our failure to convey Trump’s corruption in terms that really resonate to the people he’s defrauding (and yes, my suspicions that appealing to racism might do the trick were not disappointed; it’s an insight Peter Pomerantsev develops in his How to Win an Information War). Everything Trump does is corrupt. And that corruption — whether it involves Elon Musk or Qatar or Putin — has a very detrimental effect even on the most committed MAGAt. But they’re not going to care that Trump, their liege, gets an unfair benefit. They’re going to care if the targets of their bigotry benefit or something is unfairly taken away from them.

Until we learn how to describe that, we’ll be missing a key element of the fight to get people, from all parties, to fight for democracy.

I meant to write this post last week; I meant to argue that a Stephen Miller-related effort to FOIA the US Courts could be more significant development than Trump’s refusal to tell Kristen Welker he would adhere to the Constitution because he will instead do what “the lawyers” — probably including non-lawyer Stephen Miller among them — tell him to do.

KRISTEN WELKER:

But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP:

I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.

It didn’t happen. I didn’t write the post.

But the delay proved useful, because the firings of the Librarian of Congress and the Register of Copyrights reflect yet another step in the same process that — I suspect — the lawsuit could one day join.

For all the chaos of the Trump term, after some initial missteps, Trump has preceded relentlessly to use presidential firings to remap government agencies over which the Executive is supposed to have limited or no influence. There has been a certain logical progression. Trump started with agencies entirely within the Executive (like USAID), then proceeded to boards and agencies designed to be independent (starting with the Special Counsel and Merit Systems Protection Board, effectively stripping federal employees of key protections, then moving onto the Federal Elections Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and the Federal Trade Commission, and more recently the Consumer Product Safety Commission). DOGE then started swallowing up independent agencies, like the US African Development Foundation and the Institute for Peace, before moving onto Radio Free Europe and the Postal Service.

Those efforts are all stuck in various stages of legal challenges. Their takeover may not succeed.

But after moving through independent agencies, Trump has turned to an agency of Congress, the Library of Congress, all without even telling Republicans he was coming.

Trump’s firing of the librarian, in particular, was so sudden that the move caught several of his Republican allies on Capitol Hill off guard, according to the two sources, with some GOP lawmakers who help conduct oversight of the Library of Congress unaware that the White House was going to do it; they learned about the firings in the media and elsewhere.

We’re just days into the latest escalation and thus far at least, Congress has prevented replacement staffers from taking over the Copyright Office.

Two men claiming to be newly appointed Trump administration officials tried to enter the US Copyright Office in Washington, DC on Monday, but left before gaining access to the building, sources tell WIRED. Their appearance comes days after the White House fired the director of the copyright office, Shira Perlmutter, who had held the job since 2020. Perlmutter was removed from her post on Saturday, one day after the agency released a report that raised concerns about the legality in certain cases of using copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence.

[snip]

The US Copyright Office is a government agency within the Library of Congress that administers the nation’s copyright laws. It processes applications to copyright creative works and maintains a searchable database of existing registrations. Last week, the Trump administration also fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, who was the first woman and the first Black person to hold the position.

The document the two men cited also stated that deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who previously served as a personal defense lawyer for Trump, was now the acting Librarian of Congress. The Department of Justice announced Monday that Blanche would be replacing Hayden, who had been in the job for nearly a decade. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Hayden’s firing stemmed from “quite concerning things she had done at the Library of Congress in pursuit of DEI.”

Ranking House Committee on Administration Member Joe Morelle has asked the Inspector General to investigate whether this breached Congress’ independence. Politico claims Republicans might object to this — but that’s based off a feckless comment from John Thune (and none from Mike Johnson).

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in a brief interview that congressional leaders “want to make sure we’re following precedent and procedure” in naming a replacement for Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress whom Trump dismissed Thursday.

Thus far, no one has sued, but it often takes a few days to do so.

We’re still just at Day One on Trump’s attempt to take over two entities of Congress, with still more entities — like the Congressional Budget Office or Government Accountability Office, the latter of which is two months into a review of DOGE — Trump might want to undercut next.

In the past such an approach has succeeded in persuading even sympathetic judges that the President can use such firings to remake government. And the assault on Congressional entities matches the model used before: the White House fires someone appointed by the President (in this case, Congressional Librarian Carla Hayden), and then proceeds to claim authority to totally remap the agency, in significant part because it acts like an agency and courts, including SCOTUS, have said the President has unitary authority over agencies.

If that logic were to continue, it would be unsurprising to see Trump attempt a similar method with the Administrative Office of the US Courts. Indeed, DOGE has already probed the limits of Article III authority by including the Courts in the weekly DOGE email, the firing of GSA staffers who maintain Phoenix’s courthouse, and the attempted exclusion of law firms from federal properties, which would include courts.

TPM’s Josh Kovensky, who first reported this aspect of the lawsuit [docket], included some of these examples to demonstrate what he describes (with justification) as an escalating campaign to erode the independence of the judiciary.

The executive branch has tried to encroach on the power of the judiciary in other ways too, prompting a degree of consternation and alarm unusual for the normally-staid Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. As TPM has documented, DOGE has already caused disorder at the courts and sent out mass emails to judges and other judiciary employees demanding a list of their recent accomplishments. Per one recent report in the New York Times, federal judges have expressed concern that Trump could direct the U.S. Marshals Service — an executive branch agency tasked with protecting judges and carrying out court orders — to withdraw protection.

These are all facets of an escalating campaign to erode the independence of the judiciary, experts told TPM. The lawsuit demonstrates another prong of it: close allies of the president are effectively asking the courts to rule that they should be managed by the White House.

It’s on the basis that experts Kovensky quotes dismiss the seriousness of this challenge, again, with good justification.

“It’s like using an invalid legal claim to taunt the judiciary,” Anne Joseph O’Connell, a professor at Stanford University Law School, told TPM.

“To the extent this lawsuit has any value other than clickbait, maybe the underlying message is, we will let our imaginations run wild,” Peter M. Shane, a constitutional law scholar at NYU Law School, told TPM. “The Trump administration and the MAGA community will let our imaginations run wild in our attempts to figure out ways to make the life of the judiciary miserable, to the extent you push back against Trump.”

But against the background of the relentless assault on agencies of government, independent or not, the argument looks very familiar. America First Legal Foundation — Stephen Miller’s NGO, his affiliation with which unserious people sometimes mistake Miller for a lawyer — situates its argument in Sheldon Whitehouse’s efforts to crack down on Clarence Thomas and Sammy Alito’s open corruption. Because the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office of the Courts responded to oversight requests from Whitehouse, along with Hank Johnson, AFLF argues, it makes them Executive Agencies.

5. The Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office are central levers for Senator Whitehouse and Representative Johnson’s lawfare enterprise. The Conference and the Administrative Office have actively accommodated oversight requests from these congressmen concerning their allegations against Justices Thomas and Alito. Under our constitutional tradition, accommodations with Congress are the province of the executive branch. The Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office are therefore executive agencies. Such agencies must be overseen by the President, not the courts. Judicial relief here not only preserves the separation of powers but also keeps the courts out of politics.

The Judicial Conference is doing agency stuff, and therefore must be supervised by the Executive Branch, the lawsuit contends.

7. The federal judiciary is the system of courts. These courts are made up of judges who preside over cases and controversies. The executive branch, on the other hand, is responsible for taking care that the laws are faithfully executed and ensuring the proper functioning of the government. Federal courts rely on the executive branch for facility management and security. Federal judges, as officers of the courts, need resources to fulfill their constitutional obligations.

8. Courts definitively do not create agencies to exercise functions beyond resolving cases or controversies or administratively supporting those functions. But the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts does exactly that. The Administrative Office is controlled by the Judicial Conference, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts. The Administrative Office is run by an officer appointed by—and subject to removal by—Chief Justice Roberts. 28 U.S.C. § 601.

9. Congress cannot constitutionally delegate to an officer improperly appointed pursuant to Article II powers exceeding those that are informative and investigative in nature. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 137–39 (1976).

10. The Judicial Conference’s duties are executive functions and must be supervised by executive officers who are appointed and accountable to other executive officers. United States v. Arthrex, Inc., 594 U.S. 1, 6 (2021) (Officers who engage in executive functions and are not nominated by the President “must be directed and supervised by an officer who has been.”).

11. Thus, the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office exercise executive functions and are accordingly subject to FOIA. Accordingly, their refusal to comply with AFL’s FOIA request is unlawful.

This is packaged up as a FOIA lawsuit. The entire argument — which should be that the Judicial Conference is an agency and therefore must respond to a FOIA — is presented in reverse, so that the outrageous claims about Article III are the primary argument. But it also lays out precisely the kind of argument we’ve seen used to rationalize the takeover of agencies Congress set up to be independent.

As of right now, Trevor McFadden, the Trumpiest DC District Judge (in my experience McFadden also fiercely guards judicial prerogaties), has been assigned the case. On Friday he invited calls from the parties to ask for his recusal.

[T]he undersigned is a member of the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Court Administration and Case Management (CACM). Any party wishing to submit a recusal motion on that basis must do so on or before the due date for Defendants’ Answer.

Like virtually all other legal challenges, it will take some time to see where this will go.

I’m not saying this lawsuit — a naked attempt to get a judge to say that judges’ own infrastructure must be relegated to the Executive Branch, susceptible to takeover just like the Institute of Peace or Radio Free Europe — will succeed.

I’m saying that it adopts the very same pattern that has been used to subsume independent agencies, the same pattern used in recent days in an assault on Congress’ prerogatives.

It’s possible the lawsuit, which named John Roberts as a defendant, will clue SCOTUS in to the use to which Stephen Miller’s minions plan to put Supreme Court precedent, including Roberts’ own fondness for the unitary executive. Notably, Roberts’ comments on the import of judicial independence came after this lawsuit was filed, after former subordinates of Trump’s top advisor argued that the Executive must takeover Article III’s bastions of independence.

Roberts, speaking at a public event in Buffalo, New York, said an independent judiciary is a key feature of the U.S. constitutional system that had not existed in other countries when it was founded.

“In our Constitution … the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government, separate from the others, with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,” he said.

“And that innovation doesn’t work if … the judiciary is not independent,” he added. “Its job is to, obviously, decide cases but, in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or the executive, and that does require a degree of independence.”

Roberts repeated his concern about the courts yesterday.

So maybe this purported FOIA challenge was a strategically stupid move by Miller’s crowd, showing their hands prematurely to the guy most able to swap cards. Or maybe they took it as a deniable first probe into whether they could use with the courts the same tactic used to dismantle the independence of much of the rest of federal government.

None of us know how this will work out. It might just happen that, by alerting Roberts that he’s next, after Trump finishes off the Institute of Peace and the Library of Congress, Roberts will look more critically at Trump’s arguments in those legal fights, knowing full well that rubber stamping Executive authority may rubber stamp the takeover of the courts, or at least the courthouses, the same way he might look differently at the commission firings knowing that Jerome Powell might be next.

But this is, in my opinion, more than just a troll, more than just an attempt to bully judges. This certainly looks like a test to see whether Miller’s minions can extend their thus far successful takeover plan to encompass the judiciary itself.

Update: In a piece on the Library of Congress firing, Daniel Schuman concludes,

Trump likely can fire the Librarian of Congress. Trump likely cannot appoint an interim replacement. Trump cannot hire or fire subordinates. Congress must provide Robert Newlen support as he protects the independence of the Library of Congress and its ability to serve all members of Congress.

In his own post on it, Chris Geidner reviews some of the precedents.

NYT has a story that purports to explain, “Why Trump Suddenly Declared Victory Over the Houthi Militia.” It’s a fantastic story, down to the detail that DOD never achieved air superiority over the Houthis.

But it is provably unreliable in at least two ways: the timeline, and the claimed involvement of Trump. Given that the story describes a clusterfuck, it does raise questions about whether there’s an even bigger clusterfuck (or Trump scandal) behind it.

Start with the timing. The entire story is premised on Trump approving a 30-day operation, and after that didn’t work, he pulled the plug.

When he approved a campaign to reopen shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthi militant group into submission, President Trump wanted to see results within 30 days of the initial strikes two months ago.

By Day 31, Mr. Trump, ever leery of drawn-out military entanglements in the Middle East, demanded a progress report, according to administration officials.

But the results were not there. The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.

The Houthis shot down several American MQ-9 Reaper drones and continued to fire at naval ships in the Red Sea, including an American aircraft carrier. And the U.S. strikes burned through weapons and munitions at a rate of about $1 billion in the first month alone.

It did not help that two $67 million F/A-18 Super Hornets from America’s flagship aircraft carrier tasked with conducting strikes against the Houthis accidentally tumbled off the carrier into the sea.

By then, Mr. Trump had had enough.

[snip]

At some point, General Kurilla’s eight- to 10-month campaign was given just 30 days to show results.

In those first 30 days, the Houthis shot down seven American MQ-9 drones (around $30 million each), hampering Central Command’s ability to track and strike the militant group. Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses, making real the possibility of American casualties, multiple U.S. officials said.

As the timeline below lays out, this decision didn’t happen at the 31-day mark. It happened at the 51-day mark.

And the loss of the two F/A-18s both happened after the 30-day mark; indeed, at least as currently reported, the second was lost on May 6, hours after Trump announced the halt (a decision that had been made “last night“).

Even the timing of the loss of the Reaper drones is wrong. One was shot down before the first strikes, six more were shot down between then and April 23, of which three appear to have been shot down after the 30-day mark. (The Houthis have successfully targeted Reapers for longer than that.)

And look at how those problems in the timeline intersect with the agency ascribed to Trump in the story (Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are bylined).

Word three of the story describes Trump approving the campaign.

When he approved a campaign to reopen shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthi militant group into submission, President Trump wanted to see results within 30 days of the initial strikes two months ago.

By Day 31, Mr. Trump, ever leery of drawn-out military entanglements in the Middle East, demanded a progress report, according to administration officials.

But that’s not what the Signal texts released by Jeffrey Goldberg show. They show that Trump ordered the reopening of shipping lanes, but his top advisors, including Stephen Miller, were still debating how and when to do that the day of the attack.

 

There’s good reason to believe that Miller’s interpretation of Trump’s views served as the approval for the timing of the attack.

While the NYT story describes the other top advisors involved in all this — Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine, Centcom Commander Michael Kurilla, Steve Witkoff, JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, and Susie Wiles, all skeptics, with the exception of Kurilla — Miller is not mentioned in the story.

Embedded between claims about Trump’s agency — Trump had had enough, Trump was ready to move on, Trump had signed off on an eight- to 10-month campaign to which he gave just 30 days to show results, Trump became the most important skeptic, Trump decided to declare the operation a success — there are actually two better substantiated explanations for the end of the campaign. First, that newly-confirmed CJCS Caine was “concerned that an extended campaign against the Houthis would drain military resources away from the Asia-Pacific region” (presumably including the USS Vinson, which Hegseth had moved from the seas off China, one of the stories for which he launched a witch hunt to ID its sources), and that Oman proposed “a perfect offramp.”

By then, Mr. Trump had had enough.

Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, who was already in Omani-mediated nuclear talks with Iran, reported that Omani officials had suggested what could be a perfect offramp for Mr. Trump on the separate issue of the Houthis, according to American and Arab officials. The United States would halt the bombing campaign and the militia would no longer target American ships in the Red Sea, but without any agreement to stop disrupting shipping that the group deemed helpful to Israel.

U.S. Central Command officials received a sudden order from the White House on May 5 to “pause” offensive operations.

[snip]

Mr. Trump has never bought into long-running military entanglements in the Middle East, and spent his first term trying to bring troops home from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

[snip]

By May 5, Mr. Trump was ready to move on, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials with knowledge of the discussions in the president’s national security circle.

[snip]

By early March, Mr. Trump had signed off on part of General Kurilla’s plan — airstrikes against Houthi air defense systems and strikes against the group’s leaders. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named the campaign Operation Rough Rider.

At some point, General Kurilla’s eight- to 10-month campaign was given just 30 days to show results.

[snip]

But Mr. Trump had become the most important skeptic.

[snip]

On Tuesday, two pilots aboard another Super Hornet, again on the Truman, were forced to eject after their fighter jet failed to catch the steel cable on the carrier deck, sending the plane into the Red Sea.

By then, Mr. Trump had decided to declare the operation a success. [my emphasis]

This casting of Trump by two Trump-whisperers as an agent that the Signal texts show he was not comes in a story that understates Trump’s first term belligerence (particularly as it pertains to ISIS) and the timing of his efforts to bring troops home.

Trump is the hero of this story, except much of that story conflicts with the timeline and known details.

Caine’s concern about withdrawing resources from China — finally, someone prioritizing the Administration’s stated goal of taking on China!! — is notable. The story doesn’t acknowledge it, but the objective of the operation — opening the shipping lanes — changed over the course of the operation to stopping the targeting of US ships, but not targeting of Israelis, much less trade between the Europeans and China about which there was so much animus expressed on the Signal chat (though, as mentioned here, the Signal chatters never actually mentioned China). Strategically, leaving China and Europe to deal with the Houthis is consistent with the trade war Trump subsequently launched. But that public discussion doesn’t appear in this story, much less admission that Trump failed to fulfill his stated objective.

Meanwhile, there are two paragraphs that describe the journalists’ sources rebutting an entirely different story (or stories).

The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said the operation was always meant to be limited. “Every aspect of the campaign was coordinated at the highest levels of civilian and military leadership,” he said in an emailed statement.

A former senior official familiar with the conversations about Yemen defended Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, saying he took a coordinating role and was not pushing for any policy beyond wanting to see the president’s goal fulfilled.

One of those stories — the one Parnell, Hegseth’s propagandist, rebutted — is that the operation lacked coordination at the highest level of leadership. That story is consistent with Trump not approving the operation, which is consistent with many other details that appear in the story and also the discussion the day of the first attack about when to launch it.

The other story — from a former senior official (and so probably one of the people that either Laura Loomer, Pete Hegseth, or Trump himself has fired during this period) defending Mike Waltz — denies that Waltz was pushing a policy inconsistent with Trump’s goals. Given that Trump’s declared victory very pointedly doesn’t extend to Israel, and given the report that Trump distrusted Waltz because he coordinated with Bibi Netanyahu, and given the reports that Trump has not been coordinating with Bibi since Waltz’ departure, it’s possible that the story Waltz’ defender was trying to rebut is that he accounted for Israeli interests to an extent Trump didn’t care to.

It’s worth noting that American Oversight’s lawsuit keeps revealing additional parts to the Signal chat, so it’s possible we’ll learn more about these rebutted stories from pending FOIAs.

Anyway, it’s a nice story NYT has told and I have no doubt that the non-Trump whisperers have faithfully conveyed what their sources told them; likewise, I have no doubt that the expressed concerns of Parnell and the Waltz defender are real.

But given the clusterfuck described, it only raises questions about the real story underlying this one.

Timeline

March 15: First strikes

March 21: Redeployment of USS Vinson

April 14: 30 day mark; Dan Caine sworn in

Late April: Conference call with Hegseth, the Saudis, and Emiratis (no mention of Caine)

April 28 (day 44): Loss of first F/A-18

May 1: Trump fires Mike Waltz, in part because he coordinated closely with Bibi Netanyahu

May 5 (day 51): Order given to CentCom to “pause” offensive operations

May 6 (day 52), 12:09PM: Trump declares Houthi decision to halt attacks “last night”

May 6, 9PM local time; around 2PM DC time: Loss of second F/A-18

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

Hold this image in your mind for a few moments; I thought of it after listening to some right-wing propaganda about the tariffs and shipping. Marcy’s post this morning about the emergency-not-emergency trade deficit brought to mind again:

Way back in my salad days I worked in import/export. With the exception of a rather messy breakbulk import of niger seed from Ethiopia, I handled exports of agricultural commodities and manufactured goods.

It wasn’t the kind of work one learned in B-school. I learned it all on the job: which products needed phytosanitary certificates; how to handle letters of credit; what to do if customer wanted to charter a plane for a load of 20-foot pipe lengths; what the difference was between terms like EXW, FOB, and CIF. Not the textbook definitions, but the reality-smacks-you-with-a-container-overboard definition.

I also learned how to use intermodal shipping to ports overseas, to what used to be among the largest ports in the world. Felixstowe, Rotterdam, and Kaohsiung were the ports to which I shipped most often.

Trump’s tariffs and the ensuing change in ocean shipping volume triggered a lot of flashbacks over the last couple of weeks, though much has changed since I worked in exports. The current list of largest containerized shipment terminal ports is an indicator of the magnitude of change. Rotterdam no longer cracks the top ten largest ports by shipping volume, while most of the ports in the current top ten are now in China and were definitely not on the list +30 years ago.

Tracking vessels on maps in real time is something I wished I could have had back then. When our freight was loaded on a vessel we didn’t really have anything more than an estimated arrival date by which to plan our load’s arrival. For my first job in exports we didn’t even have email let alone fax to communicate about a shipment’s status.

I used one of these beasts:

It’s just a boat anchor now.

But some things haven’t changed in that period of time. Heck, they haven’t changed much since international shipping looked like the image I shared at the top of this post.

When a port is active, there are ships at the dock. Freight is unloaded. There are vehicles moving that freight about.

Here are two examples of an active port:

Compare the above to this very inactive port:

 

The dates on the images of the inactive port may be more than a week apart, but the level of activity has been consistently low over that time period.

Ships moored, being loaded or unloaded, moving to or from docks are all signs of an active port. While cranes hover above, tugboats and other service vessels move about between ships.

Even in low- to no-wake zones, the water shows activity.

There are people and vehicles scuttling about, moving freight once offloaded. Only in an inactive port are there expanses of pavement with no freight, no trucks, trailers, or other vehicles, no people.

Not like the activity visible in the live stream of the container port terminal at Jakarta, Indonesia shown above as an example.

This hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. Not in millennia.

When propagandists declare the drop in ocean shipments to ports in the US is a hoax, they’ve lost touch with a reality based in human history. When they say this is just a temporary hiccup they’re just as out of it.

They are unmoored, one might say.

I’m not going to link to one video in particular that uses ship schedules as an argument freight from China is still inbound to US west coast ports and at volume. It’s an ignorant argument based on a lack of knowledge about container vessels. Container lines still schedule arrivals at port because they may have a partial vessel on a long-arranged route and they don’t want to lose access to the slot in case of a brief disruption in shipping volume. The booking shows as an incoming ship on the schedule even though the container line may be scrambling to consolidate partial loads onto one vessel to reduce fuel.

In some cases ships will approach a port and skip it if they have freight for a different port – let’s say a container vessel from a Chinese port normally scheduled to make sequential drops at Vancouver BC, Long Beach, and Manzanillo MX moors at Vancouver then skips Long Beach and heads for Manzanillo.

It’s clumsily explained as “blank sailing” as CNN’s Erin Burnett explained clumsily on April 25:

That’s why container ship volume crossing the Pacific may continue to look busy on short-term schedules, but containers may not arrive at US west coast ports. Eventually the container line reorganizes and consolidates freight so that it can altogether drop some sailings. Just as in trucking, container lines don’t want the equivalent of deadhead hauls.

And yes, there are some container ships in the screenshot of a vessel tracking site shared widely last week. There are few container ships in that snap of Port of Seattle.

Compare the activity in Port of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, which is no longer in the top ten largest ports based on shipping volume, smaller than Port of Long Beach. It’s crowded with container vessels:

Let me point out that Port of Long Beach-Los Angeles is the 9th busiest container port; Rotterdam is 13th and Kaohsiung is 17th. Jakarta doesn’t even crack the top 50 busiest container ports.

The freight is not coming. It’s not sailing between China and the US west coast, it’s not in the west coast ports. We can literally see this from space, by way of GPS tracking. There are no container vessels waiting off west coast ports for a berth. There will not suddenly be ships off the west coast before the end of the month.

Why the right-wing insists on lying about this rather than bracing themselves and preparing the country for the reality check to come in mere days is beyond me. They can’t spew enough believable denials to hide the shelves as they empty in the days and weeks ahead. They can’t cover up the damage already done to the US economy, the worst of which has yet to arrive.

Conditions won’t change much based on the so-called 90-day pause and temporary tariff reduction announced overnight. It’s still going to take time for factories in China to ramp back up, rejigger containerized shipping – and all of this is at risk of being changed again in 90 days. The loss of faith by consumers and business purchasers here in the states may not be restored as quickly.

The reduction of tariffs on Chinese goods from 145% to 30% will not be enough to prevent some businesses from failing. Those operating on margins of less than 10% are at extreme risk during the next several months.

Or maybe less if Trump vacillates again.

Against the background of empty ports, stalled shipping traffic, and impending business failures, Trump has capitulated on his trade embargo with China. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will announce an even bigger rollback of tariffs than the 80 or 50% tariffs Trump floated last week, to 30% (which is the 10% tariffs imposed worldwide, plus the 20% that purports to be a punishment for China’s role in providing precursors for fentanyl).

The U.S. and China agreed to slash punishingly high tariffs on each other’s goods, a major thaw in trade relations that resets the tone between the world’s two largest economies from outright conflict to constructive engagement.

After weekend talks in Geneva:

• President Trump’s “reciprocal” tariff on China will fall to 10% from 125%.
• A separate 20% tariff the president imposed over what he described as China’s role in the fentanyl trade will remain.
• Beijing will cut its retaliatory levies on U.S. goods to 10% from 125%.
• The U.S. said the reductions would last for 90 days while the two sides begin further talks.

The agreement lowered tariffs levels more than Wall Street expected and came after just two days of talks.

In announcing this “deal,” Greer offered up thin excuses for capitulating within hours.

It’s important to understand how quickly we were able to come to an agreement, which reflects that perhaps the differences were not so large as maybe thought. That said, there was a lot of groundwork that went into these these two days.

Just remember why we’re here in the first place is the United States has a massive $1.2 trillion trade deficit. So the President declared a national emergency, and imposed tariffs. We’re confident that the deal we struck with our Chinese partners will help us to resolve — work toward resolving that national emergency.

“Perhaps the differences were not so large as maybe thought” — thought by whom, Greer doesn’t say. But Greer does note that the President was the guy who declared those differences that were not so large as maybe thought to be an emergency.

Trump thought it was an emergency. Now Greer says it wasn’t, as it turns out.

Once it became clear that Trump had caused a far bigger emergency by declaring one, it took just hours to rethink the claimed emergency.

The focus on the emergency may cause the Administration headaches going forward (which may be why Greer attempted to offer an excuse).

That claimed emergency is the basis via which Trump usurped Congress’ authority to set tariffs.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), section 604 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended (19 U.S.C. 2483), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, and U.S. trading partners’ economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, as indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States. That threat has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States in the domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system. I hereby declare a national emergency with respect to this threat.

A series of lawsuits challenging Trump’s tariffs — in this case, one brought by a wine importer, VOS Selections, and other small businesses, supported by right wing funders, in which Greer is a named defendant — have argued the trade deficit is not an emergency. [docket]

The President has no authority under IEEPA to issue the tariffs. IEEPA does not even mention tariffs. No other President has asserted this authority. IEEPA was passed to limit the President’s emergency powers. If Congress wanted to grant the President the authority to issue tariffs in IEEPA, it could have, as it has done so elsewhere. But when Congress does give the President tariff authority, it does so subject to strict statutory limits.

Legitimate use of IEEPA is limited to cases of emergencies where there is an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” But the national emergency the President has declared—the existence of bilateral trade deficits with some countries—is not an emergency, nor is it unusual or extraordinary. The United States has had some amount of trade deficit in goods for most of the last century, while having the most economic success of any country in history.

Moreover, the power claimed by the President here is extreme: he claims the power to unilaterally impose infinite tariffs of his choosing on any country he chooses—even countries with which we run a trade surplus. Any grant of such authority by Congress to the President should qualify as a major question subject to the strictest judicial scrutiny—which this claim of authority under IEEPA cannot survive.

The government, in response, has argued that it — like other Executive authorities — is not subject to court review.

More to the point, courts have consistently held that the President’s emergency declarations under the National Emergencies Act, and the adequacy of his policy choices addressing those emergencies under IEEPA, are unreviewable. “Although presidential declarations of emergencies . . . have been at issue in many cases, no court has ever reviewed the merits of such a declaration.” Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. Trump, 453 F. Supp. 3d 11, 31 (D.D.C. 2020) (emphasis in original). And the Federal Circuit has recognized that an inquiry to “examine the President’s motives and justifications for declaring a national emergency” under IEEPA “would likely present a nonjusticiable political question.” Chang v. United States, 859 F.2d 893, 896 n.3 (Fed. Cir. 1988); see, e.g., Yoshida, 526 F.2d at 579 (“courts will not normally review the essentially political questions surrounding the declaration or continuance of a national emergency”); United States v. Shih, 73 F.4th 1077, 1092 (9th Cir. 2023) (refusing to review declaration of emergency under IEEPA); In re 650 Fifth Ave. & Related Props., 777 F. Supp. 2d 529, 575 n.16 (S.D.N.Y. 2011) (concluding that whether the government of Iran’s actions and policies constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States” was an unreviewable judgment “reserved to the executive branch”); Beacon Products Corp. v. Reagan, 633 F. Supp. 1191, 1194-95 (D. Mass. 1986) (concluding that whether Nicaragua posed sufficient threat to trigger the President’s IEEPA power to impose an embargo on the country was a nonjusticiable political question).

Reviewing the legitimacy of the underlying emergency—a foreign-affairs and nationalsecurity matter constitutionally and statutorily committed to the President—would require “the court to assess the wisdom of the President’s judgment concerning the nature and extent of that threat, a matter not susceptible to judicially manageable standards.” Beacon Products, 63 F. Supp. at 1195. Thus, the President’s “motives, his reasoning, his finding of facts requiring the action, and his judgment, are immune from judicial scrutiny.” Florsheim, 744 F.2d at 796; see United States v. George S. Bush & Co., 310 U.S. 371, 380 (1940) (“For the judiciary to probe the reasoning which underlies this Proclamation would amount to a clear invasion of the legislative and executive domains.”).

Normally, such an argument would carry a lot of sway with courts.

But in a parallel invocation of Presidential authority, judges already are pointing to Trump’s fickleness as evidence that his justifications for exercising Executive authority are bullshit. In her opinion granting Perkins Coie summary judgement against Trump’s attack on the law firm, Beryl Howell noted that the only thing that happened between the time Trump claimed Paul, Weiss lawyers could not be trusted with security clearances and when he decided they could be was their agreement to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services. [docket]

Second, and tellingly, the Paul, Weiss EO contained a virtually identical security clearance review provision to the one at issue in this case. Compare EO 14230 § 2, 90 Fed. Reg. at 11781, with Paul, Weiss EO § 2, 90 Fed. Reg. at 13039. As discussed, see supra Part III.B.1(b), the Paul, Weiss EO was revoked only seven days after its issuance when President Trump reached a “deal” with that firm. See generally Paul, Weiss Revocation Order, 90 Fed. Reg. 13685. While the Paul, Weiss Revocation Order summarized that firm’s agreement to, inter alia, “adopt[] a policy of political neutrality with respect to client selection and attorney hiring; tak[e] on a wide range of pro bono matters representing the full political spectrum; commit[] to merit-based hiring, promotion, and retention . . .; dedicat[e] the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services during [President Trump’s] term in office . . .; and other similar initiatives,” none of these agreedupon policy or practice changes appear to explain or address how any national security concerns sufficient to warrant the Paul, Weiss EO could have changed so rapidly. Id. § 1, 90 Fed. Reg. at 13685. The speed of the reversal and the rationale provided in the Paul, Weiss Revocation Order, which focused only on agreements to advance policy initiatives of the Trump Administration, see id., further support the conclusion that national security considerations are not a plausible explanation for Section 2.

As Roger Parloff noted, Paul Clement made a similar point in arguing that the EO against Wilmer Hale must be overturned (I’m fairly certain he has made this more general observation about how the Paul, Weiss flipflop made the retaliatory EOs more vulnerable).

I think it’s crystal clear, he proceeds, that it’s all tied together. Section 1 explains what motivated all the sections.

What happened with the law firm of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison adds further support for viewing the order as a whole, he argues. Paul Weiss faced the same operative provisions in an executive order issued on March 14. But on March 21, a later executive order repealed the whole thing. It didn’t keep, say, the security clearances or restrictions on government buildings while rescinding other sections.

Clement thinks that’s particularly telling with respect to the security clearances, he says. When you look to the agreement Paul, Weiss made with the president, there wasn’t anything specific mentioned about national security or the national interest or anything else. It was mostly about providing $40 million in pro bono services that were more to the president’s liking.

This trade deficit emergency Trump declared remains the claimed basis for the 10% tariffs still levied against China and most other countries in the world (as a wine importer, tariffs on those other countries, not China — Austria, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Morocco, Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico, Argentina, Germany, Croatia, Hungary, and South Africa — are the ones that pose a problem for VOS Selections).

And now his Trade Representative has gone on TV to proclaim that maybe what was claimed to be an emergency was “not so large as maybe thought.”

I look forward to plaintiffs invoking Greer’s admission going forward.

You should know that the question to Stephen Miller about habeas corpus was a set up.

The male “journalist” who asked it after Miller called on him for the first question at a staged press event posed it in terms of “taking care of the illegal immigration problem.”

President Trump has talked about potentially suspending habeas corpus to take care of the illegal immigration problem. When could we see that happen?

So Miller’s misrepresentation of what the Constitution says about habeas corpus — similar to his misrepresentation of the 9-0 Supreme Court ruling that detainees get habeas corpus before they are rendered to El Salvador during the Nayib Bukele presser, Miller’s warning that, “it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” his grotesque claim that “radical rogue judges are at war with the legislative branch” — all of that appears to be a set up, a set up from one of the right wingers the White House has invited in as if they were journalists.

Miller’s “answer” was a response to a question premised on Stephen Miller’s propaganda being true: That undocumented immigration is and remains a problem, even after Trump’s draconian efforts and attacks on his own country have largely shut down border crossings, that suspending habeas corpus will “take care of” it. That the decision will be rolled out like some kind of new benefit, a benefit that doesn’t also risk destroying the rights of citizens.

The reporting on Miller’s comment was not totally negligent. Paragraph 11 of NYT’s story, for example, notes that three judges have already ruled there’s no invasion that might justify suspending habeas corpus, before treating the rulings of judges as something up for political debate.

In addition, three federal judges have in recent weeks issued rulings rejecting the argument that the wave of immigration constitutes an invasion, as Mr. Miller maintained.

Still, the administration has insisted that the courts cannot overrule the president’s decisions regarding how, where and when immigrants are deported.

ABC put the same detail in ¶9, sandwiched between “analysis” that suggests the Constitution is not cut and dry.

But two separate federal judges, including one appointed by Trump, said the use of the Alien Enemies act was unlawful because the Trump administration did not prove United States is being invaded by Tren de Aragua.

And while CNN invited Maggie Haberman on to call all this an “aggressive posture,” its written report sandwiched the legal rulings between 3 ¶¶ of Eli Honig debunking Miller’s claim and 4 ¶¶ of Ilya Somin doing so.

Miller’s comments pick up on ongoing efforts by the Trump administration to use the current state of illegal border crossings to claim that the US is under invasion – which the administration says allows the government to eschew due process protections afforded to migrants. The administration is making a similar argument in defending Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which would allow the government to quickly deport migrants without adherence to such due process procedures.

Multiple judges, including a Trump appointee, have rejected the invocation, saying in rulings that the administration hadn’t shown the United States is under invasion by a hostile foreign power, as laid out under the 18th century statute.

Of course, all three cast Trump and Stephen Miller as the actors here without describing this setup as a staged opportunity for Miller to threaten judges based on his transparently false claim that there was and remains, after Trump shut down border crossings, an invasion.

Of the reporting I’ve seen, just Kyle Cheney foregrounded the judges from both parties who’ve been warning about Trump’s assault on due process for all people, with Miller’s comment appearing in ¶10, after airing warnings from judges from both parties.

A fundamental promise by America’s founders — that no one should be punished by the state without a fair hearing — is under threat, a growing chorus of federal judges say.

That concept of “due process under law,” borrowed from the Magna Carta and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, is most clearly imperiled for the immigrants President Donald Trump intends to summarily deport, they say, but U.S. citizens should be wary, too.

Across the country, judges appointed by presidents of both parties — including Trump himself — are escalating warnings about what they see as an erosion of due process caused by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. What started with a focus on people Trump has deemed “terrorists” and “gang members” — despite their fierce denials — could easily expand to other groups, including Americans, these judges warn.

[snip]

Trump’s close adviser Stephen Miller has railed daily against what he’s called a “judicial coup” that has largely centered around rulings upholding due process rights of immigrants. Miller has scoffed at the notion that people Trump claims are terrorists — even if they deny it — must be allowed to contest their deportations, saying they only have the right to be deported. Miller suggested Friday that the White House was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the right of due process to challenge a person’s detention by the government.

Even Cheney didn’t point out something else: This assault on due process is all based on lies: years of propaganda about invading migrants, the takeover of suburban Colorado, diligent workers eating house pets; false claims about planeloads of terrorists; claims of invasion that even members of Congress unwittingly debunk every time they say Trump has solved the problem of border crossings.

Trump’s legal claims are bullshit (as Steve Vladeck lays out here). But they are bullshit piled on top of underlying bullshit claims and — as Vladeck also notes — the reason Miller is throwing this bullshit is because those judges have already ruled his claim of invasion is bullshit.

Miller gives away the game when he says “a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.” It’s not just the mafia-esque threat implicit in this statement (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”); it’s that he’s telling on himself: He’s suggesting that the administration would (unlawfully) suspend habeas corpus if (but apparently only if) it disagrees with how courts rule in these cases. In other words, it’s not the judicial review itself that’s imperiling national security; it’s the possibility that the government might lose. That’s not, and has never been, a viable argument for suspending habeas corpus. Were it otherwise, there’d be no point to having the writ in the first place—let alone to enshrining it in the Constitution.

Miller’s problem is that judges are not required to accept his blatantly false claims as true — indeed, are required to test them, as even the Trump judges have done.

Our problem, however, is that the journalists seem to believe it is their job to accept what Miller says as true.

Update: In a worthwhile post on this, Jack Goldsmith IDs two of the three propagandists who set up this discussion of habeas.

The machinations began in a White House press briefing on April 28. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gave the first question to MAGA influencer Rogan O’Handley. He stated that “[m]any are now calling for Trump to circumvent these radical judges [thwarting his deportation agenda] and consider suspending the writ of habeas corpus solely for these illegal aliens in accordance with the terms of Article I Section 9 of the United States Constitution.” He cited the “strong precedent for this action … by three of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Democrats’ favorite president of all time, FDR.”

[snip]

Ten days later, last Friday, Stephen Miller approached reporters outside the White House, stated that he only had time for a few questions, then pointed to the rear of the gathered reporters and said, “Hold on, I see there’s a question back there first.” The person chosen was Jordan Conradson, the controversial reporter for MAGA-friendly Gateway Pundit, who stated: “President Trump has talked about potentially suspending habeas corpus to take care of the illegal immigration problem. When could we see that happen, do you think?”

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

As a pastor, I and my clergy colleagues are shaped by a wide variety of forces, not the least of which is the situation in the world and the church at the time we attended seminary and were ordained for service in the church. As I look at all the news about the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, I can’t help but see how he was shaped by his early life in his tumultuous hometown of Chicago . . .

When the now-Pope Leo XIV was but Robert Prevost, a young Catholic boy, there were two major forces in his native Chicago. One was the legendary Richard J. Daley, the authoritarian Irish-Catholic mayor who ruled the city from the day Prevost was born until Daley’s death 21 years later. The other was Cardinal John Cody, the equally authoritarian ruler of the Archdiocese of Chicago from 1965 to 1982. When Cody was transferred from New Orleans to Chicago, stories were told that the local New Orleans priests sang the classic hymn Te Deum in celebration.

While the Second Vatican Council tried to push the Roman Catholic church into a more collegial mode of operation, Cody was among those who dug in their heels. It didn’t help matters that Cody was at the center of a double scandal – over a million dollars had disappeared from the church’s books, and his cousin/mistress/aunt’s step-daughter (the exact relationship varied depending on who you asked) Helen Dolan Wilson. She had followed him to his post in New Orleans, then to Chicago, receiving various small positions arranged by Cody and living in circumstances well beyond her seemingly meager financial resources. The Chicago Sun-Times published a blockbuster set of articles about Cody in late 1981, which included the revelation that the US attorney was investigating Cody and the Archdiocese. Cody fought it by delay and deflection, and succeeded insofar as he died the next year without having been formally indicted, and the investigation died with him.

Cody’s successor as Archbishop was Joseph Bernardin, who could not have been more unlike Cody. Where Cody was aloof, Bernardin was personable. Where Cody was autocratic, Bernardin was collegial. Where Cody pronounced, Bernardin discussed. Where Cody’s world was centered on the Catholic church, Bernardin was anxious to engage his ecumenical colleagues, as seen in 1989, when Lutherans and Roman Catholics in Chicago signed a groundbreaking covenant.

On May 13, 1989, the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Archdiocese of Chicago entered a historic covenant, the nation’s first such accord. The churches were brought together by their respective bishops at the time – Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and Bishop Sherman G. Hicks – to cooperate in ministry, to promote dialogue and collaboration on issues of faith and mutual concern, both theological and pastoral, and to deepen the unity existing between the two churches.

As a child, any Prevost family discussions about the church would have been filled with stories of Cardinal Cody. As a newly-ordained priest and member of the Augustinian order, Bernardin would have been equally prominent in family conversations. Even though Prevost would by this time have begun his ministry elsewhere, moving between Peru, Rome, and Chicago, it is hard to imagine that the epic contrast between Cody and Bernardin would not be part of his own self-understanding of what it means to be a priest.

Looking at the biography of the new pope posted by the Vatican News Service, it’s easy to see which model of ministry young Father Prevost chose to embody for himself. Four and a half years ago, Steven Millies, the head of the Bernardin Center, wrote an opinion piece in the National Catholic Reporter on the 25th anniversary of Bernardin’s death. Reading it today, it certainly appears to me that Bernardin was one to whom Prevost looked at with admiration:

In Bernardin, Catholics had a leader who anticipated the style and ministry of Pope Francis in his openness to dialogue and his efforts to engage the world in constructive conversations. But Bernardin’s final years also anticipated the sort of opposition Francis has faced, especially among American Catholics.

The seeds of our divisions, as Catholics and Americans, were being watered in 1996. As those seeds have blossomed and propagated in 2021, we can look back on Bernardin to understand what has happened and how things might be different.

Bernardin was the Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death, but his importance stretched far beyond Chicago. No bishop in the U.S. could be associated more with the church’s efforts after Vatican II to engage and embrace the modern world as St. John XXIII had hoped when he called the council.

The title of Millies’ piece was “If we’d listened to Cardinal Bernardin, the Catholic Church would not be where it is today.” If the church at large had not listened to Bernardin, it is clear that the young boy, then young priest, and now Pope Leo listened to him.

And as the saying goes, a new pope may have to take the church as it is, but he doesn’t have to leave it that way — which may have been why Francis chose Prevost to head the Vatican office charged with recommending who should be named a bishop and which bishops should serve in which places. Francis had more than a few run-ins with bishops like Cody during his tenure (the name Raymond Burke comes quickly to mind), and had no desire to elevate folks who would follow Cody’s example. Francis chose Prevost to be the church’s servant in helping select its leadership for precisely this reason.

And when the cardinals in the conclave were looking for someone to lead the Roman Catholic church at its highest level, they appear to have confirmed Francis’ judgement. The church, they seemed to have said, needs more servant-leaders like Bernardin and Francis, and fewer autocrats like Cody and Burke.

As Francis might have put it, in Prevost, the cardinals selected a shepherd who smells like the sheep.

After describing in a post that “a budget is a moral document,” Don Moynihan argued that the skinny budget Trump released last week wasn’t even that. It was, instead, propaganda, infested with the same nasty slogans all Trump’s other White House policy documents are. Those slogans, Moynihan argues, serve to convince us to take actions — here, to destroy science and foreign aid  — “that would normally run against our interests or violate our moral code.” The nasty slogans convince us, or at least convince Trump’s loyal rubes, to let children die.

[P]eople can debate the lab leak hypothesis, but the idea that you would stop providing foreign aid or cut cancer research for this reason is odd. Both USAID and NIH cuts will result in a massive numbers of unnecessary deaths. An analysis in the journal Nature, estimated that 25 million people will die if the USAID money disappears. Around 7 million people died due to COVID.

The purpose of propaganda is to divorce us from reality, to push us to actions that would normally run against our interests or violate our moral code. In an administration that formed an anti-Christian bias taskforce, it is hard to think of anything less Christian than condemning millions of the most vulnerable people in the world to die. Of course, mercy and empathy are not just Christian values, but for a certain type of Christian nationalist they are values to be avoided. Propaganda makes such hypocrisies more palatable.

When countries engage in a massive dismantling of their scientific infrastructure, they cannot do it quietly. It is so obviously counterproductive that it can only occur via a broader mobilization, where higher education or experts are treated as part of an evil corrupting the nation. [emphasis original]

But the numbers described in the budget do make the morality of it quite plain. Trump is transferring the money saved by cutting AIDS prevention and cancer cures and using it to massively expand the budget for Stephen Miller’s deportation regime.

As described, Trump cuts $163 billion from what OMB calls discretionary spending and uses the “savings” to increasing funding for DHS by 65%.

The Budget, which reduces non-defense discretionary by $163 billion or 23 percent from the 2025 enacted level, guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security. The Budget also provides support for air and rail safety as well as key infrastructure and our Nation’s veterans and law enforcement.

This is the lowest non-defense spending level since 2017. Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory programs, Green New Scam funding, large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people, and moving programs that are better suited for States and localities to provide.

Defense spending would increase by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security would increase by nearly 65 percent, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources they need to complete the mission. [emphasis original]

It’s not just that Russ Vought and Stephen Miller are cutting AIDS prevention and cancer research. They’re doing so to pay for Miller’s gulag. Miller is cutting your access to health care and cancer cures to pay to deport your nurse assistant and cancer researchers (and, given the unnecessary bump in DOD spending, to invade Canada to take their health care away too).

Miller and Vought have targeted cancer cures via many vectors: deportations, cuts to grant funding, and personnel cuts.

Deportations of two of US citizen children with their parents, for example, disrupted their cancer treatment, first with a ten year old brain cancer patient turned away at the border.

Immigration authorities removed the girl and four of her American siblings from Texas on Feb. 4, when they deported their undocumented parents.

The family’s ordeal began last month, when they were rushing from Rio Grande City, where they lived, to Houston, where their daughter’s specialist doctors are based, for an emergency medical checkup.

The parents had done the trip at least five other times in the past, passing through an immigration checkpoint every time without any issues, according to attorney Danny Woodward from the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal advocacy and litigation organization representing the family. In previous occasions, the parents showed letters from their doctors and lawyers to the officers at the checkpoint to get through.

But in early February, the letters weren’t enough. When they stopped at the checkpoint, they were arrested after the parents were unable to show legal immigration documentation. The mother, who spoke exclusively to NBC News, said she tried explaining her daughter’s circumstances to the officers, but “they weren’t interested in hearing that.”

More recently a four year old boy with stage 4 cancer was sent to Honduras without his cancer medication.

Another mother wasn’t allowed to speak with attorneys or family members before she was deported, accompanied by her U.S.-born children, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement knew one of them had Stage 4 cancer.

Attorneys for the mothers and their children who were sent to Honduras are blasting Trump administration officials, saying the deportations of three U.S. citizen children over the weekend, including the 4-year-old boy who left without access to his cancer medicines, are illegal.

It’s not just cancer patients getting caught up in Miller’s dragnet. Cancer researcher Kseniia Petrova has been in detention for almost two months after CBP accused her of trying to smuggle research materials — frog embryos — into the country.

A groundbreaking microscope at Harvard Medical School could lead to breakthroughs in cancer detection and research into longevity. But the scientist who developed computer scripts to read its images and unlock its full potential has been in an immigration detention center for two months — putting crucial scientific advancements at risk.

The scientist, the 30-year-old Russian-born Kseniia Petrova, worked at Harvard’s renowned Kirschner Lab until her arrest at a Boston airport in mid-February. She is now being held at ICE’s Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, and fighting possible deportation to Russia, where she said she fears persecution and jail time over her protests against the war in Ukraine.

Broad cuts to NIH, NCI, and NIOSH have stalled research into cures and prevention progress.

Firings at the NIH Clinical Center, the country’s biggest research hospital, have already devastated highly promising research work that aims to use the body’s own immune cells to combat gastrointestinal cancers. Patients’ experimental treatments have already been delayed because of limited staff capacity to make these personalized cell therapies and purchasing stalls. These therapies represent potential lifelines for those with advanced cancers that have not responded to standard drugs. And many of these individuals, who are now increasingly younger in age, cannot afford to wait.

Elsewhere, hiring freezes at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health have scuppered work studying elevated cancer rates in firefighters and paused a clinical trial of a new drug for advanced head and neck cancers. Research grants for Columbia University’s cancer center have been canceled because of student-led Gaza protests. Concerns around “wokeness” have ended funding for studies examining cancers in sexual and gender minority individuals — an understudied group with poor cancer outcomes — at various academic institutions such as Emory University and the Mayo Clinic.

And cuts at the VA have disrupted clinical trials helping veterans.

Earlier this year, doctors at Veterans Affairs hospitals in Pennsylvania sounded an alarm. Sweeping cuts imposed by the Trump administration, they told higher-ups in an email, were causing “severe and immediate impacts,” including to “life-saving cancer trials.”

The email said more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.

“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” the email warned, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.”

The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some trials to continue for now. Still, other research, including the trials for treating head and neck cancer, has been stalled.

As entities like Harvard face the effects of these draconian cuts, this is a story that needs to be told. The Trump Administration is deporting and defunding cancer cures so that it can dramatically increase funding for a gulag system that voters don’t want.

The right wing has boasted for months already that Trump has shut down migration across the border, and they’re not wrong.

Yet Stephen Miller is still taking money that had been used to cure cancer and pursue scientific discovery in order to hunt down cancer researchers and, in the name of hunting down cancer researchers, to eliminate the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.

This is a moral story. And especially when described as a transfer, money taken from cancer cures and dumped into an expanding gulag, the moral imperative becomes even more clear.

On April 14, declarants from DOD, ODNI, CIA, and State submitted filings in American Oversight’s lawsuit regarding the Houthi Signal text that confirmed that the Signal chat had not been preserved on John Ratcliffe’s phone. As CIA’s Chief Data Officer Hurley Blankenship revealed in a declaration dated April 11,

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 led American Oversight to file an amended complaint on April 21, which included both Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth’s additional known Signal use, and also complained that Marco Rubio was failing to take remedial action in his role as Acting Archivist.

Their motion for a Preliminary Injunction filed the next day used the CIA declaration to substantiate their claim that some records had been destroyed.

Some of Defendants’ Signal messages have already been lost or destroyed, see, e.g., Suppl. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-3, and others will be imminently destroyed in violation of the FRA without further judicial intervention. Under the FRA, “[n]o records may be ‘alienated or destroyed’” without authorization of the Archivist and unless the records “do not have ‘sufficient administrative, legal, research, or other value to warrant their continued preservation by the Government[.]’” Armstrong v. Bush, 924 F.2d 282, 285 (D.C. Cir. 1991) (quoting 44 U.S.C. § 3314). Autodelete settings are plainly inconsistent with this standard.

In a response submitted today, the government claims that American Oversight is “nit-pick[ing].”

To respond to the proof that some of the messages had been destroyed, the response reveals that the White House Counsel provided “a consolidated version of the Signal group chat.”

Plaintiff nit-picked at the adequacy of Defendants’ declarations, and after a second hearing, Defendants agreed to file supplemental declarations providing a few additional facts for certain Defendants, specified by the Court on the record, such as when searches were conducted. Defendants timely filed those supplemental declarations on April 14, ECF No. 15. Plaintiff complained about the CIA’s declaration, ECF No. 16, and Defendants filed a reply, ECF No. 20.

In addition to their own preservation efforts about which the Court ordered declarations, the defendant agencies received an email from the White House Counsel’s Office containing a consolidated version of the Signal group chat. The consolidated version was created from publicly available information and information saved from participants to the chat’s phones. The document includes content that has not been published by The Atlantic. This document is now saved in the agencies’ recordkeeping systems. See Decl. of David P. Bennett ¶ 2, Exhibit 3; Decl. of Christopher Pilkerton ¶ 8, Exhibit 4; Decl. of Robert A. Newton ¶ 3, Exhibit 5; Decl. of Mary C. Williams ¶ 5, Exhibit 6; Decl. of Mallory D. Rogoff ¶ 3, Exhibit 7.

What the response doesn’t admit is that there may be more than one consolidated chat. While Treasury, ODNI, CIA, and State all submitted declarations describing receiving a consolidated chat on April 8 — which was before the April declarations submitted by all but Treasury!! …

The U.S. Department of State received an email from the White House Counsel Office on April 8 containing a consolidated version of the Signal group chat referenced in the March 24 and 26, 2025 articles in The Atlantic, which was created for federal records purposes. The document was created based on publicly available information and information saved from participants’ phones. The document includes content that has not been published by The Atlantic. This document is now saved in FRA-compliant systems of the Department.

… DOD described receiving a consolidated chat on May 7, almost a month later.

The Department of Defense received an email from the White House Counsel’s Office on May 7, 2025, containing a consolidated version of the Signal group chat referenced in the March 24 and 26, 2025, articles in The Atlantic, which was created for federal records purposes. The document was created based on publicly available information and information saved from participants’ phones. The document includes content that has not been published by The Atlantic. This document is now saved in FRA-compliant systems within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

That is, even for CIA, where there were clearly messages destroyed, Hurley Blankenship could have but did not claim that the consolidated set received from the White House Counsel amounted to FRA compliance. Blankenship did not write the declaration filed today; only Treasury’s Christopher Pilkerton filed all the declarations from that agency.

That kind of compartmentation suggests they’re still hiding things — like maybe how much of the chat they were unable to preserve.

And DOJ’s response stops well short of claiming that the entirety of the chat has been preserved.

Plaintiff’s irreparable harm argument is that as a FOIA requester, it faces irreparable harm as a result of the Signal chats that allegedly have been destroyed and that Plaintiff speculates will be destroyed in the future. The argument is based on Plaintiff’s assumption that significant portions of the Signal group chat have been deleted because then National Security Advisor and chat participant Michael Waltz enabled the autodelete function, and on Plaintiff’s speculation that Waltz would do so on future Signal chats initiated by his team. Mem. of Law in Supp. Pl.’s Mot. for a Prelim. Inj. at 24, ECF No. 19-1 (“Pl.’s Mem.”). But as the declarations Defendants have already submitted establish, the agencies have in fact preserved parts of the Signal group chat from Defendants’ and other participants in the Signal group chat’s phones. As the declarations submitted with this brief show, the agencies have also preserved a consolidated version of the chat that they received from the White House Counsel’s Office, which was created from publicly available information and information saved from participants to the chat’s phones. And as these declarations further attest, the document is saved in the agencies’ recordkeeping systems. [my emphasis]

The passage admits that the agencies were only able to preserve “parts of” the chat, and that they needed to rely on public information to reconstruct the “consolidated version.” They describe the consolidated version includes stuff that’s not public. But nowhere do they say the White House Counsel was able to preserve everything that was sent.

The silence on that point strongly implies they were not able to preserve everything.

Indeed, the response seems to confess that participants on the Houthi chat destroyed at least some of what Jeffrey Goldberg published, perhaps in an attempt to hide the classified information they exchanged.

Bizarrely, days after Mike Waltz was photographed sending Signal texts to (among others) Tulsi Gabbard and Marco Rubio, the response claims that firing Mike Waltz, but not Whiskey Pete and his multiple Signal threads, mitigates any harm.

Michael Waltz is no longer in the role of National Security Advisor, which further undermines any claim to irreparable harm in the future.

But it only adds to the problems. Acting Archivist Marco Rubio has been passive throughout this scandal, and assuming the “consolidated” chat received from WHCO lacks messages, it would mean Rubio, too, destroyed parts of the chat.

With each new filing, these bozos dig their hole deeper.

Treasury

Pilkerton, March 27

Pilkerton, May 7

State

Rogoff, March 29

Kootz, April 14

Rogoff, May 7

CIA

Blankenship March 31

Blankenship, April 11

Williams, May 6

ODNI

Koch, March 31

Newton, April 14

Newton, May 7

DOD

Dziechichewicz, March 27

Bennett, March 31

Bennett, April 14

Bennett, May 7