FENIX 701

It took chipping away at it by the The Guardian, the New York Times, and others before the Washington Post blew the story wide open yesterday: “The mysterious strikes targeting multiple Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands this year were carried out as part of a covert CIA program.”

According to the WaPo, citing a source with knowledge, “the strikes were part of a ‘covert action’ program, a type of secret operation overseas that is approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged.”

With the Pentagon denying any knowledge of or involvement with the strikes on three Ecuadorian fishing boats — one of which remains missing, with its crew presumed lost at sea — suspicion had focused on covert ops, private military contractors, or other Latin American governments as the likely culprits. The WaPo notes that the CIA involvement doesn’t rule out the other potential culprits: “It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.”

The crews of the two boats that survived the mystery attacks ended up in El Salvador before being repatriated to Ecuador, the WaPo reports. Both crews reported being “rescued” by a blue boat that may have been involved in the attacks. Most of the men aboard the blue boat spoke English, and wore uniforms with American flag patches, the NYT previously reported.

The program of covert strikes is separate and apart from the Pentagon’s lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats: “It is unclear why, as the Trump administration touts its military attacks against alleged drug boats, it would engage in a separate clandestine effort targeting vessels, said former U.S. officials who previously worked in the region.”

The WaPo covers similar ground as the NYT piece earlier this week, but adds additional details about the strikes on the Ecuadorian fishing boats and about a mystery aircraft flying out of El Salvador that it identifies as a Cessna Citation Longitude using the call sign “FENIX 701.” (Given its sordid history, the CIA’s use of “Phoenix” in a covert op today is either tone deaf or a deliberate middle finger.)

The plane flew from Tennessee to El Salvador in November, was photographed from the ground and via satellite at El Salvador’s Ilopango International Airport, was tracked in the vicinity of the Ecuadorian fishing boat strikes, and was last detected landing in San Antonio, Texas, in April.

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

The revelation that the CIA is behind the mystery boat strikes reminds of the conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his podcast The Daily Blast:

I am really cognizant that we only know what we know, and that this administration has done myriad things to reduce transparency and accountability and ready access into what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

I’m thinking about things like the high-seas strikes on [alleged] drug smuggling boats. … I’m thinking special operations activities around the globe. I’m thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I’m not suggesting some dark, hidden conspiracy, I just mean we don’t know. … I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades unearthing things that happened during this period that we just didn’t know about.

COINTELPRO II?

It’s going to take some time to expose the full scope and scale of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation into protesters of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. But we got the first glimpse yesterday in a court filing that included internal DHS documents among some of the discovery provided by the government to a group of protesters facing criminal charges.

As TPM’s Josh Kovensky details, the invasiveness of the investigation is striking. In addition to making extensive use of undercover informants, it targeted labor unions and left-leaning groups, including using administrative summons and/or subpoenas to access records of financial transactions by labor unions, in some instances stretching back years before the protests.

As the NYT put it: “As part of their inquiry, the documents show, homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.”

Mass Deportation Watch

• Houston: U.S. attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed that FBI tests didn’t find meth in the van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was fatally shot by ICE last month. The Trump DOJ made public its suspicion that the substance was meth before running any tests in what appeared to be a smear job to come up with an ex post facto political justification for the wrongful shooting.
• Tacoma: U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright awarded $5,498 in compensatory sanctions and $11,455 in attorney’s fees to an undocumented immigrant who was wrongfully transferred by ICE outside of her jurisdiction without notice twice, in what she found to be two willful violations of her court orders.
• Alien Enemies Act: The full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the leading challenge to President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act after the administration deported the three Venezuelan men who originally filed the lawsuit using a different law. That left the case without plaintiffs, and the appeals court refused the request to substitute new plaintiffs who had been targeted under the AEA.

Good Read

TPM’s Emine Yücel: The new OLC memo purporting to expand executive privilege to private advisers to the president is a “devious tactic” to cover up Trump administration corruption ahead of a potential midterm victory for congressional Democrats.

What Happened in the Wisconsin Gov Race?

G. Elliott Morris goes under the hood on a poll that missed big on the results of the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor and concludes that it was the largely result of (i) assuming the electorate would be younger and more progressive than it turned out to be; and (ii) a late move by David Crowley that continued after the last polls were in the field.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

A state judge in Nevada threw out criminal charges over the 2020 fake electors scheme, ruling that Attorney General Aaron Ford “failed to present sufficient evidence from which a reasonable grand jury could infer the requisite intent to defraud.” Ford vowed to appeal.

The New Cold War

• WSJ: An Italian fighter jet under NATO auspices shot down a foreign drone that entered Latvian airspace early Friday. Latvia hadn’t determined the drone’s origin but suggested it may have been a Ukrainian drone deflected off course by Russian counter-drone measures.
• WaPo: Poland says it thwarted a Russian assassination attempt in Warsaw on an unidentified U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin.
• NYT: Inside Russia’s big push to destabilize the Western-leaning government of Moldova.

Just the Pettiest Shit Imaginable

The Trump-appointed board of the beleaguered Kennedy Center voted yesterday to sidestep a federal court order blocking it from renaming the performing arts institution for Donald Trump by:

• closing the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations and carving this inscription into the building’s white marble facade, just beneath the marquee with JFK Jr’s name: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump”;
• adding another line if an endowment fund named for Trump reaches $100 million: “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”
• renaming the physical site on which the center stands to “The President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

See Ya Monday

This is the last weekend of summer for a lot of folks. Make it memorable.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.

This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.

This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

In “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when Indiana Jones is asked how he intends to single-handedly stop a Nazi caravan he mutters, “I’m making this up as I go.” That improvisational approach by a signature Paramount hero appears to mirror that of the company’s current CEO David Ellison, as he stumbles through a conservative media takeover that feels more like the product of expediency than ideology.

The latest odd wrinkle in Ellison’s serialized pursuit of becoming one of media’s most influential figures — acquiring Paramount through Skydance Media, then engineering a pending $111 billion merger with a much larger studio, Warner Bros. Discovery — emerged this week. Frustrated by the thus-far effective efforts of state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, to delay or even derail the deal, Paramount officials privately floated the prospect of abandoning California if Ellison doesn’t get his way, administering a blow to the state’s economy.

Bonta quickly labeled the not-so-subtle threat “blackmail,” but like many of Ellison’s actions, there’s a sense nobody fully thought the logistics through in terms of relocating and how that would practically work. Since the Skydance deal closed a year ago, Paramount has been defined by chaos, potentially destroying traditional media outlets while cozying up to the Trump administration to secure its regulatory blessing.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) put out a new opinion earlier this week arguing that President Donald Trump can assert executive privilege over communications with advisors even if they do not work at the White House or within the government at all.

Experts tell TPM that the legal opinion is likely an effort from the Trump administration and his DOJ to preemptively interfere with congressional investigations that Democrats plan to launch if they manage to take control of one or both chambers after the 2026 midterms.

Here’s something to keep a close eye on. Mike Huckabee, who as part of Trump’s fun house diplomacy is now the U.S. ambassador to Israel, went on X yesterday and called the siege of a Palestinian family’s West Bank home by a group of Israeli settlers a “horrific act of terror.”

Now what’s happening there is that and worse. In many ways, what’s been happening in the West Bank for the last year and a half is worse than what is happening in Gaza, though the death toll is orders of magnitude less. But this doesn’t sound like Huckabee. He’s one of the biggest supporters of the settler movement and the most violent and nationalistic parts of it.

So what’s up here?

A Nebulous Strategy

I’ve been operating under the assumption that the Trump administration’s interest in cracking down on “fraud” in how states spend federal funding that is dispersed for programs like Medicaid, Medicare and the federal nutrition program SNAP was just another excuse to punish President Trump’s critics and perceived political foes.

Gambling on Some Light Election Denialism In Pennsylvania

Happy Thursday!

The Republican nominee in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race is engaged in a delicate balancing act as she attempts to appeal to President Trump and his base of supporters while also trying to win over undecided voters or those who elected the state’s Democratic incumbent. For a Republican in a swing state in 2026, that means finding your election denialism equilibrium. 

Please contribute today to get us over the finish line. Out of $500,000 we needed to raise this year for the TPM Journalism Fund, we have only $27,789 to go. Just 5% more to go. Amazing. We thank you so much. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to contribute this is it. Just click here. Thank you.

Update: Just $431 to go before we hit $475,000!

Federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security sent undercover agents to observe a climate group and into churches, and obtained financial records for labor unions, as they sought to crack down on mass protests in Minneapolis following the Trump administration’s surge of federal officers into the city, attorneys alleged in a new filing.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Earlier this week, Todd Blanche was sworn in as the newest attorney general of the United States. Administering the oath of office to Blanche, who previously served as President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, was another former member of Trump’s legal team: Judge Emil Bove, whom Trump nominated in 2025 to a life-tenured seat on the Third Circuit. 

For both Blanche and Bove, the reunion must have been a real treat. Three years ago, they were unknown New York City-area law firm partners taking a long-shot bet on a disgraced ex-president who stood accused of, among other things, sexually assaulting a magazine writer, storing classified government documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, making illegal hush money payments to kill an unflattering news story about his philandering, and trying to fraudulently overturn his loss in the 2020 election in Georgia. (That last list item should not be confused with separate federal charges stemming from Trump’s involvement in efforts to foment a violent insurrection and overthrow the government on January 6.)

Thanks in part to the work of Blanche and Bove, though, none of those cases resulted in meaningful consequences for Trump. And now that he is president again, their respective appointments are best understood as hard-earned rewards for their troubles. After Bove finished conducting Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony Monday, the two former colleagues got to hug it out in the Oval Office as their bored-looking benefactor clapped politely.

I noted a few days ago how many of the news stories of the day are knock-on effects of earlier episodes of Trump’s cupidity or grandiosity. Airport Food Truck-Gate goes back to the wildly corrupt and unconstitutional personal gift of a plane; the Reflecting Pool prosecutions go back to his whim and rushed decision to make the bottom of the Reflecting Pool blue and then the way in which he was embarrassed when his no-bid contractors messed it up. I want to return to one aspect of the plane story.

Yes, it’s corrupt, silly, stupid, etc. But Trump got the gift from the royal family of Qatar. Qatar isn’t any gulf state. It’s not UAE or Saudi or Kuwait. Qatar’s regional brand, their niche in the complex geopolitics of the Gulf, is that they’re close to both sides. They host a U.S. military base. They have decent relations with the U.S. They also have close relations with Iran. They were until recently the host of Hamas.

Trump DOJ Colludes on Trump Appeal

All of a sudden the Justice Department wants to be involved in President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS — and it’s gunning to get the judge who imposed sanctions on Trump’s attorneys removed from the case.

After sitting out the IRS case in any official way at the trial court, the Trump DOJ overnight jumped into the appeal of the case by Trump and his co-plaintiffs that challenges the sanctions imposed by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams as punishment for the collusive lawsuit.

The Trump DOJ’s failure to defend the lawsuit — unlike it had in other similar lawsuits for illegal IRS leaks of taxpayer information — was the centerpiece of Judge Williams’ concerns that there was no true adversity between the parties. It’s why she appointed distinguished outside counsel to serve as friends of the court so that she would be able to hear something approximating “the other side” in the case. It was a major factor in her ultimate conclusion that the Trump plaintiffs and Trump administration defendants were all on the same side.

The new DOJ filing at the 11th Circuit was signed only by Trent McCotter, a political appointee only just installed as acting deputy attorney general this week after Todd Blanche was confirmed as attorney general. It was McCotter who earlier this week was upbraided by a federal judge in Brooklyn for his conduct in dropping a criminal fraud prosecution of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani.

While it’s been perfectly clear all along whose side the Trump DOJ has been on in the IRS lawsuit, the Justice Department was careful to keep some distance from the case in court. No government lawyer entered an appearance in the case. No responsive pleading to the Trump complaint was ever filed. No defense to the Trump lawsuit was ever mounted.

Judge Williams noted all of these irregularities in her order finding that the lawsuit was collusive and imposing sanctions on Trump’s personal lawyers, while referring top DOJ officials Blanche and Stanley Woodward for potential attorney discipline at the state level. It was one of her critical findings in her conclusion that the Trump lawsuit and the resulting “settlement” that created the “anti-weaponization” slush fund and unlawfully granted IRS immunity to the Trumps was bogus:

For the 109 days that this case was pending, no attorney representing the United States filed a notice of appearance or any document indicating the government’s position, interest, or awareness of this matter.

As recently as Aug. 1, Judge Williams threw another dart at the Trump DOJ for failing to defend the case. When Trump and his lawyers asked her to pause her sanctions order while they appealed, Williams asked the court-appointed amici to weigh in on the motion “in light of the fact that Defendants do not intend to appear or file a response.”

Now the Trump DOJ is actively colluding with Trump at the appeals court, but doing so even more openly and brazenly that it did in Judge Williams’ court.

McCotter has leaped in on the side of the Trump plaintiffs’ side in supporting their motion to pause the sanctions while their appeal proceeds. McCotter urges the appeals court to stay Judge Williams’ sanction order, argues that the Trump plaintiffs are “exceedingly likely” to win their appeal, and then rehashes many of the Trump team’s arguments for why Williams overreached.

But McCotter doesn’t stop there. He mounts a more aggressive attack on Judge Williams that the Trump plaintiffs did by seeking to have the appeals court reassign the case from Williams to a new judge, accusing her of “improper political motivation”; suggesting she timed her sanctions order to derail Blanche’s nomination as attorney general; and improbably accusing her of intentionally keeping Blanche and the DOJ from participating in the case (even though they had gone out of their way to avoid appearing in the case).

In arguing for Williams’ removal from the case, McCotter writes:

This Court need not conclude that the District Court’s actions were improperly motivated, but rather only that reasonable members of the public would view them that way. That standard has certainly been satisfied. This Court should order reassignment. To be sure, no remaining proceedings are needed or appropriate in the District Court: the Order should be stayed and ultimately vacated, and the District Court lost jurisdiction months ago. The District Court is the only one insistent on trying to keep the lower-court proceedings going, on the flimsiest of bases. But for precisely that reason, this Court should order reassignment.

Because of the way this case has proceeded, it’s not even clear that the government is a party to the appeal since it never participated in the case. The appeals court has styled the case as Donald Trump, et al v. Thirty-Five Former Federal Judges, with no mention of the original federal government defendants (the IRS and the Treasury Department). Reinforcing the weirdness, McCotter’s unusual filing is styled as “Defendants’ Response to Appellant’s Time-Sensitive Motion for a Stay,” but it’s docketed as an “Amicus Brief as of right or by consent of the parties filed by R. Trent McCotter for Internal Revenue Service and Department of Treasury.”

But the precise legal permutations aren’t the point here. It’s the No. 2 political appointee at DOJ, with no backing from career attorneys, aggressively jumping to President Trump’s defense in a case whose central dispute is the finding of collusion between the Justice Department and the president — and doing so after carefully sitting out the early rounds of the case at the trial court to make the travesty look slightly less obviously bad. Now the Trump DOJ has dropped any pretense.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Illinois: An ICE agent pleaded guilty to a state misdemeanor battery charge for throwing a protestor to the ground while off duty during Operation Midway Blitz. He was sentenced to a year of court supervision.
• Worldwide: Trump’s detention archipelago spans 35 countries, including far-flung places like Eswatini, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Ghana, Palau, Uzbekistan and Moldova

Ukraine Beats US in Military Exercise

Having mastered modern drone warfare, Ukraine has run circles around the U.S., U.K., and Sweden in recent military training exercises in Europe, the WSJ reports.

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The Brief will be off tomorrow and early next week for a family vacation. I’ll see you Thursday Aug. 20!

Trump Administration Tries to Set the Terms of Post-Midterms Congressional Oversight

With the prospect of a possible Democratic-controlled House and/or Senate drawing near, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice has provided the White House with an opinion declaring that a “private adviser” — defined as “anyone the President consults outside the Executive Branch” — may be covered by executive privilege if they play a role in “official presidential decisionmaking.” This, among other things, gives the White House the green light to attempt to flout congressional subpoenas for such individuals.

Asked about the OLC opinion by TPM yesterday, Democrats in Congress scorned it, and insisted it would not hamper their efforts. “This Mafia State Code of Silence has nothing to do with the American Constitution and it won’t stop Judiciary Dems from investigating this Administration’s rank corruption,” the Democrats on that committee said in a joint statement.

The OLC opinion is non-binding and is, merely, the administration’s position. Judges may, and likely will, disagree if executive privilege fights make contact with courts. Still, it may slow down accountability for a historically corrupt administration: Democrats had been planning to get individuals outside the administration to engage swiftly with their investigations, given Trump’s tendency to assert privilege over everything and anything involving White House aides in his first term.

The opinion is not solely aimed at blunting congressional oversight, however. As Lisa Rubin notes at MS NOW, the American Bar Association is seeking documents from Trumpworld figure Boris Epshtehyn to find out more about his role in the early Trump II effort to pressure law firms into cutting deals with the administration; ABA has challenged that pressure campaign, arguing it impinged on law firms’ First Amendment rights. The DOJ has argued those communications are covered by executive privilege. If reports about Epshtehyn’s role in the deals are correct, he fits the DOJ’s extremely broad description of a “private adviser,” as does anyone else who speaks with the president.

The OLC has laid the groundwork for various administration attacks on the law throughout this second term. In April, it released an opinion finding that the White House did not need to comply with a law requiring it to turn certain records over to the National Archives. (A judge said the opposite, and ordered the administration to do so.)

“OLC has lost all credibility and should be abolished,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told us.

Hard-core Election Denialists Want an ‘Emergency’ Ahead of 2026

With right-wing activists beginning to abandon hope and acknowledge the SAVE Act’s poor chances of passing the Senate, various influencers have begun to consolidate around another big idea: Trump should declare a national emergency, allowing him to do … something.

• This possibility surfaced this week when radio host Wayne Allyn Root urged Trump to do so, and Trump, in classic form, declined to rule anything out. “Stranger things have happened,” he said. “I’ll leave it at that.”
• Trump’s dud of a speech in July about supposed issues with the 2020 election also stoked these fears, with his former lawyer Ty Cobb telling PBS that all Trump’s claims were intended as the “predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections.”
• A draft executive order claiming to do just that surfaced earlier this year, obtained by TPM and other outlets.
• As with all schemes by Trump and his allies to use the executive branch to screw with elections, this one runs up against the reality that the executive branch has no authority over elections. Various emergency orders could allow Trump to stoke a lot of chaos. But they do not empower him to seize election administration from the states.
• Those who are rattled by this talk are not off base, however. Trump often says in public what he intends to do, the villain at the end of a spy thriller unnecessarily explaining his entire evil plan. Even if this specific scheme is half-baked, that Trump is entertaining it — and that he has entertained similar schemes before — should have us all ready for something.
• “The nearer danger was never the proclamation,” writes James Sample, a professor of law at Hofstra University, as he picks apart Root’s understanding of the law. “It is counting and certifying, in a handful of counties, if control of a chamber comes down to a margin thin enough to litigate.”

Tabs

• Mike Lindell has not yet conceded his bid for governor. On election night he was insisting the numbers were fishy.
• The Trump DOJ has added a longtime critic of hate groups to its SPLC indictment.

People of the Hour

It’s White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, “human printer” Natalie Harp, and director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta, who got to come with Trump in the catering-crate-to-plane scheme, and were not left on the decoy with all the other White House officials and the press.

Are We at War?

We have, apparently, won? “Iran is all talk and no action, the Bully of the Middle East No Longer,” the president writes.

Alabama federal prosecutors on Wednesday unveiled charges against Heidi Beirich, a prominent critic of violent far-right extremist groups like the KKK, Proud Boys, and others.

WSJ Reports White House Wants DOJ to Try Again

You may have seen the news by now that the Trump White House has asked the Justice Department to consider bringing a new prosecution against the same man that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. just moved to dismiss felony charges against over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool saga.

Over the last few days as we’ve been discussing Francesca Hong’s campaign, Thanksgiving abolition and “defunding the police,” I’ve made the same argument a number of times — most recently with TPM Reader AB whose email dispatch you can read below. I wanted to share it with you because it informs my way of understanding these things.

After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary last year, there were so many powerful people eager to take him down and so many ways it would be easy to do it. It’s very, very challenging to navigation the transition from a lefty/social democratic/identity politics milieu to a broader society-wide electorate. Obviously New York City is a very blue city. It’s not Wisconsin or Michigan, let alone Texas or Ohio. But the same general point remains. It’s an incredibly challenging needle to thread, one that requires immense, innate political skill. Mamdani fielded all the standard attacks, some fair, some very unfair, and again and again he was able to finesse them. This, to me, was the biggest signal. He’s an immense political talent. Some have it; most don’t; he does.

Of course I have my own issues with him on Israel/Palestine. But even on that issue, perhaps especially on that issue, I saw how he was able to navigate a super challenging electoral thicket. Again and again.

Which brings me to Francesca Hong.

From TPM Reader AB …

I am but one anecdotal data point from Wisconsin, but as a politically engaged liberal in Madison, I’ve had plenty of conversations in the last week that align with your suppositions of how Crowley won.   

While I don’t really identify as a Socialist, I am highly motivated to support ‘socialist’ projects and see them implemented.  I put ‘socialist’ in quotes, because public education, fire dept, and public libraries are all socialist projects — but also pretty basic services. 

That said, for much of the primary, I was all in for Hong — she campaigned relentlessly and leveraged social media deftly, and she was meeting the moment with the piss and vinegar and fight that so many of us crave in this moment. She was also the first and only candidate on the Dem side to take a stand on Data Centers, calling for a 1 year moratorium (ironically, the only candidate in the gubernatorial race to support a 100% ban on data centers was Tom Tiffany’s opponent in the Republican Primary, Andrew Manske). 

Top congressional Democrats on Tuesday pushed back on a new memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) arguing that President Donald Trump can assert executive privilege over communications with advisors even if they do not work at the White House or within the government at all.

“Executive privilege can apply to presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking, involve or reflect communications with the President or his direct advisers, and are confidential,” the OLC opinion, published on Monday, reads.

Letters of Marque???

Back in June, The Guardian had a confounding story about drone attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats for which the Trump administration disclaimed any responsibility. Given the administration’s eagerness to distribute and promote snuff films of its strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, its denial can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Now comes the NYT with a follow-up story with quite a few tantalizing new details and the suggestion — though unproven — that private military contractors, perhaps operating under letters of marque from the administration, may be carrying out the strikes.

In its main advance of the Guardian story, the NYT tracks the movement of a maritime patrol plane based at a military base in El Salvador and registered to a company that lists its address as a private mailbox in a UPS store in Richmond, Virginia. Flight data reviewed by the newspaper showed the plane “flew in the direction of” three Ecuadorian fishing boats in the days before they were attacked . One boat was lost at sea in January, with eight crew still missing and presumed dead.

Air traffic control recordings captured the pilots speaking English with American accents. Fisherman who survived one of the two strikes in March recount being targeted by English-speaking “gringos” wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches who rescued (or captured, depending on your perspective) them and eventually turned them over to Salvadoran authorities.

Unlike the sophisticated drones used in the well-publicized strikes by the Pentagon, the weapons used to attack the Ecuadorian fishing boats have been crude drones fitted with explosives, according to survivors’ accounts.

The real eye-opener in the story is the NYT seriously entertaining the notion that the Trump administration may have issued letters of marque to modern-day privateers who are responsible for the strikes:

The letters, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, were circulated among various agencies for their input in May and were supposed to complement the Pentagon’s boat strike campaign in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Discussions around letters of marque seemed to stall around June, and the Pentagon would not say whether any have been issued. When asked about the attacks on the fishing boats, it said, “We have no knowledge of, nor were U.S. Southern Command forces involved in, the incidents described.”

On this basis, the NYT sought comment about the Ecuadorian strikes from Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame. “[N]either Erik Prince nor any entities affiliated with him have any relation to these events,” a Prince spokesperson said.

First at TPM: Abrego Garcia Wins a Point on Appeal

This is a small development, but it’s not been previously reported. Yesterday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss one aspect of the Trump DOJ’s appeal of his case.

The reason it’s worth noting is because of what the Trump DOJ had tried to do: impose its own deadline on U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis for her to rule on two of its pending motions in the case. If she didn’t rule by the DOJ’s own deadline, it would deem the motions constructively denied and appealed this. Xinis took umbrage at the Trump DOJ trying to set her court’s schedule, but DOJ appealed anyway on the basis her not ruling fast enough for its liking.

With minimal comment, the appeals court granted Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss this part of the DOJ appeal because it lacked jurisdiction since there was no final order from Xinis to be appealed.

In a period when appeals court judges have not always had the back of district judges confronting Trump administration lawlessness, this is one exception.

Mass Deportation Watch

• ICE plans to outfit officers with special gloves called Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (G.L.O.V.E.) that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals, the AP reports.
• Virginia: An ICE agent brandished a weapon at a U.S. citizen while falsely claiming she had tried to run over federal agents in her vehicle, the woman’s videos show. In response, DHS fell back on its usual refrain, claiming she “attempted to harm officers by weaponizing her vehicle against them—all in an attempt to help illegal aliens get away.”
• Texas: Bulldozing underway within Big Bend National Park for border wall construction.
• Illinois: A batch of 10 criminal complaints against federal agents stemming from Operation Midway Blitz were filed this week with Chicago police.

MUST READ: Trump’s New Census Scheme

TPM’s Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky: A New Draft Rule for the Census Seeks Sweeping Changes to How Political Power Is Allocated

TL;DR: John Light has the key takeaways from the TPM exclusive.

2026 Midterms: Generational Change

Rep. John Larson (D-CT), 78, who has served in the House since 1999, lost his re-election bid in the Democratic primary to former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, 47.

“Bronin’s win makes Larson the seventh Democratic House incumbent to lose reelection this year; six lost to younger challengers,” the WaPo notes.

Trump DOJ Watch: Jeanine Pirro Edition

• Reflecting Pool: The White House is pressing the Justice Department to bring a new misdemeanor case against David Hearn on bogus charges of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, the WSJ reports, even though D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro already dismissed the original case against Hearn and told a court that it wasn’t vandalism but a botched job by the pool-lining contractor.
• D.C. Special Grand Jury: In an unusual move, Pirro has empaneled a special grand jury to be overseen by one of her own loyalists, Steven Vandervelden, the WaPo reports. It is unclear what the new special grand jury will be investigating, but the ability of a special grand jury (unlike a regular grand jury) to issue a report at the conclusion of its investigation means it could be used as a tool to “name and shame” Trump foes, offering a way to placate the president in instances where there’s insufficient evidence to bring a criminal case.

Trump Contests Sanctions in IRS Case

President Trump, two of his sons, his business, and his lawyers have asked the 11th Circuit to block the sanctions imposed by the judge who oversaw his collusive lawsuit against the IRS, which spawned the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund and the unlawful grant of IRS immunity.

In a scathing overnight filing, the Trump-related parties savaged U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami for sloppiness, haste, legal error, and exceeding her sanctions power:

The Sanctions Order was riddled with multiple errors. It materially misquoted Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., misidentified both the court and dissenting judge in Keepseagle v. Perdue, used the wrong docket number for Jackson v. United States, gave the wrong citation for Trump v. Clinton, cited the syllabus rather than the majority opinion in Seila Law, misidentified a Wall Street Journal author and URL, and repeatedly mangled case names, government titles, and source attributions.

They are seeking to put the sanctions order on hold while their appeal proceeds.

$900 Million and Counting

WaPo:

The Trump administration plans to spend at least $900 million for construction projects on the White House grounds, a significantly larger price tag than has been previously reported and one that would be covered primarily by taxpayers, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.

Instead of securing money directly from Congress, the records show, the administration has pieced together funding from other agencies and private donors and directed it to a little-known account that typically holds a few million dollars for routine maintenance of the executive mansion.

Unpacking the Air Force One Debacle

Garrett Graff, the preeminent reporter on continuity of government, calls Trump’s secret flight out of Turkey “a Russian nesting doll of scandal, one that exposes at least five levels of scandal, ranging from foreign influence to corruption to national security compromises to inappropriate geopolitical gambles.”

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